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The Disaster of Imagination: Critics Confront the Apocalypse

My previous post discussed apocalyptic themes in some recent films. I’m far from the only person to note the similarity between the Book of Revelations and the spectacles produced by Hollywood. Recently Adam Gopnik opened a review in the New Yorker of Elaine Pagels’ new book on Revelations by noting that the Bible “has a Hollywood ending” with “every element that Michael Bay could want.” Well, first of all, if literary critics such as D.H. Lawrence and Harold Bloom are to be believed, John of Patmos was the B-movie hack writer of Christianity, but next to Michael Bay he seems as glorious and profound as Dante. Second, don’t give Bay any ideas! If he films Revelations, I believe it actually could bring about the end of the world.

But enough glibness. The connections between film, scripture, and the catastrophes of history are deeper and more disturbing than we may want to admit.

In 1951, a prominent historian of American Puritanism, Perry Miller, wrote a very interesting essay called “The End of the World.” The greater part of it concerns how various theologians tried to interpret the cataclysms described by Revelations in light of Copernican and Newtonian cosmology. Miller believes that when these interpretations became too plausibly mechanistic, they destroyed the moral force of God’s judgment (and even the very idea of divine judgment becomes incoherent).  In the middle of the essay it becomes clear that what is really bothering Miller is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, which had taken place a little more than five years before his essay. He notes an uncanny biblical parallel.

             Events fall into the conventional sequence of light, blast, heat, whirlwind and conflagration:
            “An intense flash was observed first, as though a large amount of magnesium had been ignited, and the scene grew hazy with white smoke. At the same time at the center of the explosion, and a short while later in other areas, a tremendous roaring sound was heard and a crushing blast wave and intense heat were felt.”    

             The authors of the highly official United States Bombing Survey are not, I am persuaded, theologians or poets, and they probably did not know that they were falling into the pattern of a literary form more ancient, and more rigid, than the sonnet..[i]

Historical events fall into the pattern of a literary form (which originated in a historical disaster, or near-disaster, as I have written about). Art in turn absorbs the blast wave of history and reflects it in the manner of fun-house mirrors.

In 1965, cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote an essay called “The Imagination of Disaster” on the science fiction films of the 1950’s and early 60’s (the so-called “B-movies”), which had not hitherto received much critical attention. In the essay she observes:

One gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films, but not only there, that mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and in a way, attempt to exorcise it.[ii]

The “trauma” went beyond the bomb, however.

 Besides these new anxieties about physical disaster, the prospect of universal mutilation and even annihilation, the science fiction films reflect powerful anxieties about the condition of the individual psyche. [iii]

Sontag believed these films offered an “acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” to the traumatized psyche of the nuclear age by means of “extreme moral simplification.”[iv] In other words, we feel bad about nuking Japan, but not about nuking monsters from outer space. This is precisely the dynamic at work in Revelations. There is no sympathy for those devoured by God’s holy fire, for they are either beasts from hell or human collaborators with Satan. 

Other critics have also seen The Book of Revelations as an expression of “cruel” or “amoral” feelings. For English novelist and critic D.H. Lawrence, it was thoroughly ugly and morally reprehensible:

 For Revelation, be it said once and for all, is the revelation of the undying will-to-power in man, and its sanctification its final triumph. If you have to suffer martyrdom, and if all the universe has to be destroyed in the process, still, still, still, O Christian, you shall reign as a king and set your foot on the necks of the old bosses![v]

And American literary critic Harold Bloom denounces it in terms that remind one of Sontag’s descriptions of the disaster film:

A lurid and inhumane work, very poorly composed [like the cheap sets and special effects of the B-movie] in the original, the Apocalypse of St. John was rightly called one of the “nightmares of anxiety and triumph” by the late Northrop Frye. It is a nightmare of a book: without wisdom, goodness, kindness, or affection of any kind.[vi]

Despite these parallels, it may still seem ridiculous to compare cheap movies to an ancient religious text. But Sontag believes that even poorly imagined films are attempting to deal with serious problems of modern society. While her analysis is focused on Cold War-era politics, Camille Paglia sees in them a yearning for old time religion in a secular age that offers only technology or therapy:

Like Fifties science-fiction films, Seventies disaster films, such as The Towering Inferno, have been blamed on international political tensions and anxieties. I disagree. . . . The present preoccupation with nuclear apocalypse is also crypto-religious [as Perry Miller’s essay also recognizes]. Fear of world holocaust is another self-haunting, a way to subordinate the self to the cosmos in an era of easy, all-forgiving therapies and faiths.[vii]

Perry Miller’s essay on the end of the world begins by marveling that people in the middle ages could live lives of ease when they were surrounded by churches bearing “terrifyingly realistic scenes of the last judgment,”[viii] especially considering that their lack of knowledge of the cosmos meant that for them, only God’s will held kept the universe in motion, and not only could he choose to end it at any time, but at some point he certainly would end it. But this is no more remarkable than our society, since we too are surrounded with detailed images of the end of the world, which we happily consume in our own homes or when we make pilgrimages to the movie theatre. And for us too, there is “no scientific reason why the awful blow should not fall at any moment.”[ix] If it doesn’t fall for the universe as a whole, it could at least fall for that part of it we care about the most: human civilization. As long as this is the case, there will be apocalyptic images to address our anxieties. And even if critics judge the images as bad art and bad morals, I don’t think they will cease to be fascinated by them either.

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[i] Perry Miller, “The End of the World.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1951.

[ii] Sontag, Against Interpretation. Farrar, Stras & Giroux, 1966.

[iii] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Farrar, Stras & Giroux, 1966.

[iv] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Farrar, Stras & Giroux, 1966.

[v] D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse. Viking Press, 1931.

[vi] Harold Bloom, The American Religion. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

[vii] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. Vintage, 1991.

[viii] Perry Miller, “The End of the World.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1951.

[ix] Perry Miller, “The End of the World.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1951.