Tilting the Void

Friday night saw an occurrence as rare as a solar eclipse--my husband and I went to the movies together. He almost never wants to go to the movies, and yet he specifically requested we have a date night and go see District 9 on its opening night--something else we never, ever do.

We bought tickets online and got to the theater early, which was well--within a few minutes after our arrival, nearly every seat was occupied. The movie itself was entertaining and--undoubtedly due to Peter Jackson's influence--quite interestingly visual, and managed to avoid certain cliches while colliding head-on with others. There were one or two plot holes that, if examined too closely, could be fatal, though due to the circumstances (our rare date night) I was willing to suspend disbelief in favor of having fun, if that makes any sense--but I don't really want to discuss the plot of the movie. The social commentary was about a subtle as a fist to the solar plexus, and on reexamination, not all that pithy, either; seen as a fun sci-fi film, it's less of a dead weight. Viewed as an exercise in ethics, or whatever, it becomes unnecessarily weighted and tedious--like much of science fiction--and more than that, I won't say.

What gave me the most pause were the trailers for upcoming movies--2012, most notably. According to the fringe theorists, 2012 marks the end of the Mayan calendar--and therefore time, or substance, or existence, or something. I realize there have always been such apocalyptic fantasies--back in the 70s we had The Late Great Planet Earth, et. al., and in the 60s there were a plethora of dire fictions ranging from Dr. Strangelove (which I still love) to On the Beach to The Planet of the Apes. Imagining the end of the world as we know it and the adventure and drama implied by such catastrophic change is, I suppose, fun, but for me it's just boring. I've written before how I grew up in a family convinced the end was nigh--and stockpiled food, and weapons, and moved to the country, and so on and so forth. To my thinking, this overkill of preparation goes far beyond being prepared for disaster--it's dull, paranoid, exclusionary, racist and stupid; if we're going to have a thermonuclear war, hoarding food in the root cellar isn't going to do much in the long run, and stockpiling AR-15s is only going to give you a brief edge over a zombie attack. Ahem, but I digress.

What interests me most about this persistent imagining is similar to my interest in the belief in ghosts, or UFO abduction, or cryptozoology (a fancy term for monster-hunting). Note I say "my interest in the BELIEF"--not my own belief, which doesn't extend to the supernatural or paranormal. I am interested in the human need to believe in these things, from an anthropological view--the persistence in modern times, in first world countries, of the belief in unsupportable claims. Nearly every movie trailer was concerned with either complete and total destruction (disaster-porn, I've heard it termed), or the revenge of victims, or just plain violence without much justification, often (thanks to CGI) executed in simply impossible ways.

It's as if we privileged denizens of the first world NEED something to worry about--we who have so much to eat and so much time on our hands that the worst we have to worry about is dying from obesity or boredom--we must invent theories of cataclysm and fantasize about mass death and destruction.

I was in a discussion online with a young person a while ago concerning just this thing--destruction porn, apocalyptic fantasies, and what that tendency implies in a culture fairly--though not entirely--free from most worries that concern other populations; we don't normally have to worry about large predators eating our children, for instance, and the hunt for food usually involves determining what frozen dinner to pop in the microwave. She said, "All major religions have a destruction myth" and then "Well, there's a lot wrong with this world." Implying that yes, we are ripe for destruction, even obliteration, by God, or gods or aliens, or maybe Santa Claus--she never really defined WHO would do the destroying, and to whose specifications the world would be rebuilt. The world is bad, we're bad, and we should be punished--but not me specifically, or the ones I love. Just all the rest of you perishers.

And that's what bothers me the most about destruction porn. It's a weird fantasy born of our comfortable age, a lingering guilt over having it relatively good, or a leftover from a more Calvinistic form of Christianity--or Christianity in general, which does have at its core the tenet you must die to this world to be reborn in the new. This world will be destroyed, eventually, when the Sun goes supernova--but I really doubt humanity will be around to see it and feel punished; we'll either have mastered interstellar travel by then, or evolved into something else entirely, or exterminated ourselves, or been supplanted by more intelligent creatures.

Or zombies. In the end, it's always zombies.