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Apocalypse Soon
Via the mysterious Will, io9 has a guest post this week from Chanda Phelan, a graduate of Pomona College who recently completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. Basically, she looked at 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse (full list here) in order to try and divine trends on just what the fictional causes of fictional apocalypses are. Fun!
Anyway, the result is a gigantic chart, partly excerpted below. And some discussion:
I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.
....The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.
My theory: most the explained apocalypses hightailed it to the movie theater, where practically the whole point of apocalyptic storytelling is to show you exactly how the planet is destroyed in loving IMAX/Technicolor/Dolby CGI detail. This wouldn't really be on my mind except that I've now seen the trailer for 2012 about a hundred times — it feels like a hundred times, anyway — and apparently the purpose of the movie is to make the entire genre obsolete by rolling up every disaster movie trope ever invented into one ultimate 2-hour extravaganza never to be surpassed. Everything will be destroyed. Every manner of destroying things will be used. Every cliche will be exploited. When you're done, you will never need to see another disaster movie ever again!
Which is fine with me. I'm just wondering if they'll even pretend to tell a story while all this mayhem is going on. Or is that too old school these days?
POSTSCRIPT: I also have a question about the chart: what happened in 2000? Not a single work of planet-ending fiction in the entire year? Really?
Apocalypse Soon?
One can hope. I certainly wouldn't mind if the monster/apocalypse genre disappeared from the earth.
I think it's just the
I think it's just the growing sense that we really ARE going to have an apocalypse, that the current status quo of humanity is unsustainable. But nobody wants to imagine that because it's all too likely to happen. Instead it's more fun and uplifting to focus on the plucky survivors After the End because they're survivors. Even if their life sucks they've still got it.
So basically we are just too afraid.
Story in 2012?
Come on, Kevin. You know what happens in disaster movies: someone who knows what's about to happen runs around and frantically warns everyone else. He is not believed. This hideously predictable "pre-story" will go on for about 1 hour and 30 minutes. There will then ensue about 25 minutes of spectacular FX (soon to be a thrill ride at an oversold movie theme park) in which Our Hero manages to save himself and perhaps a few loved ones, and then a 5 minute coda in which he surveys the damage and either: 1) pledges to rebuild or 2) despairs and looks grimly into a cold, lonely future.
"Why wouldn't they LISTEN????" [fade out]
I like the FX parts of these kinds of movies, in the way that I like good animation in children's cartoon films, but these everlasting preparatory stories, stuck in supposedly to heighten the anticipation, but mostly to fill out the time so people think they've gotten their $12 worth, always bore the bejingles out of me.
That is a different genre.
Disaster flicks, ones that focus on the disaster happening and efforts to prevent it are quite distinct from the post-apocalypse films where the disaster happens right at the beginning of the story or maybe happened at some point prior to the start of the story and where the focus is on how people cope.
Apocalypse Soon
One of the more interesting aspects of apocalyptic notions is that it has moved from the religious realm to the scientific realm.
Mainly climate scientists and environmentalists are waxing apocalyptic now days.
One reason for the pessimism is the corruption seen in governments which are the source for the needed change in direction.
Apocalypse for some, Singularity for others
I'd suggest the absence of explanation in current apocalypse fiction is a sense that we're actually starting to live through an actual apocalypse state.
Well, Apocalypse for some, Singularity for others.
I'm a bit surprised by 1999.
I'm a bit surprised by 1999. I would have thought the dominant end-of-world theme would have been technology, given the impending Year 2000 bug and all.
compound interest is exponential growth too.
As the climate changes, expect that the human carrying capacity of the Earth will diminish drastically. The human carrying capacity of the Earth can be determined only by experiment. We are the experiment.
Attempts at modeling will always run into 'the unknown that we don't know about'.
If only...
M. Night Shyamalan would make an apocalypse movie. That would kill off the genre for good.
I hate to say it, but he
I hate to say it, but he did. The Happening. Universally panned, but it was one of his better grossing movies.
And it obviously didn't kill off the genre. It's still going strong! (See: Knowing, 2012, etc...)
After 9/11...
...I predicted it would be a decade before anyone thought about making another disaster movie, now that we'd all seen a real-life disaster live on TV. Boy, was I wrong.
Where does that new cartoon
Where does that new cartoon about flying meatballs figure into it?
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
I'd take that as a "mad scientist" apocalypse. Heh.
I'm a bit surprised by 1999.
Didn't the Matrix come out in 1999? While that wasn't an apocalypse movie per se, it did take place in a post-apocalyptic world, and it was made clear that human technology was the cause of the eradication. However, I don't see any dark green in that year's total. Perhaps they didn't count it at all? How many others over the years did they miss?
The chart tracks literature,
The chart tracks literature, not movies.
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