Popcorn apocalypse?
The end times are being trivialized just for our entertainment. We have to be careful of how readily we consume these apocalyptic sagas because in today’s culture we are all too familiar with stories about the end of the world. Some of the most popular videogames right now centre entirely on radioactive wastelands and zombie pandemics.
According to an MSNC article “[f]ilmmakers are tapping into worries about humanity’s future with apocalyptic sagas”: a process which feeds this trivialization. From the bleak landscapes of Terminator: Salvation, to the panoramically absent city of I Am Legend, to even the more light-hearted, garbage-filled world of Wall•E, movies and books concerning what happens after most of humanity is wiped out continue to cram the cultural conscious.
So why are we so obsessed with the end of the world? While art often imitates life, these types of media reflect different perspectives on the world that hasn’t even happened yet, and for a lot of cases, never will. The fascination seems to come out of a type of romanticism; an adventurous and exciting world where only heroic, gun-wielding warriors are left. Despite the often grim and unpleasant atmospheres portrayed in post-apocalyptic stories, they are often glamourized.
But isn’t it just that: entertainment? What’s the harm in indulging in purely fictional scenarios? We’ve all enjoyed a good dystopian movie every once and a while, or played a game mutilating “undead” corpses in a desolated metropolis; however, the more of these types of entertainment are produced, the more desensitized we get to it.
While the violent nature of most post-apocalyptic media could be bad enough consciously, we can also get too accustomed to the idea of wiping out the majority of the world’s population just for an escapist fantasy.
Basically, the more adjusted we become to the idea of loss of human life, the less of an impact real human loss becomes. Once we get used to the idea of two thirds of the population being wiped out by nuclear holocaust or super-intelligent simian armies, real catastrophes seem less devastating. By obsessing about the end of humanity, we are dehumanizing ourselves.
There is nothing terribly wrong with speculating about end times through fiction, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko are great examples of end-of-the-world situations where humanity is strongly emphasized over pure fantasy. However, we must take great care in how much of
it we consume.
Christianity is a religion with a fairly strong focus on eschatology, no? One could argue that the Apostle Paul was obsessed with an apocalyptic scenario where large quantities of people were killed. Is there a difference between indulging in pop culture versions and biblical versions of the apocalypse? Was the end times obsessed Apostle Paul a dehumanizing force in the early church?