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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.

The Enduring Mythology of Apocalypse

Modern prophecy scenarios are in fact updated versions of very ancient ones. In some cases highly specific beliefs have been transmitted intact for over 1500 years or more.- Paul Boyer

In my previous posts I tried to demonstrate how the apocalyptic myth emerged as a fantasy of supreme power in a precarious moment for Christianity (and Judaism before it), and I explored how apocalyptic forms a specific tradition in Western art that has lasted well over a thousand years. Religious and art history are specialized fields, and apocalyptic art and religion form subgenres within them, so I have not yet suggested how pervasive apocalyptic thinking has been to Western civilization. It has been a driving force behind not just minor episodes, such as the radical Protestant revolts of the 16^th-century, but also the Crusades and the Cold War. Revelations has been the obsession not just of kooks and cult leaders like Charles Manson and David Koresh, but some of history’s most important figures: Christopher Columbus thought that his discovery of the new world was prophesied and portended the end of the world, Martin Luther thought the world would end by 1600, and Isaac Newton wrote a commentary on thebooks of Daniel and Revelations. The Book of Revelations has been the favorite of nearly-illiterate authors of populist political tracts. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More describes how American pamphleteers used Revelations to agitate against the British during the time of the American Revolution, interpreting the Stamp Act as the infamous “mark of the beast,” without which one cannot buy or sell. It has generated pulp novels, such as the recent Left Behind series, which as political as it is eschatological, casting the antichrist as—of all things—the secretary-general of the United Nations. On the other hand, it has also influenced some of the greatest poets of the Western canon: Dante, Milton, Blake, Shelley, and Yeats.

More important than the specific events and people who have been influenced by the apocalypse myth is the fact that the nearly two-thousand year-old visions of John of Patmos have entered into the deep structure of our civilization, forming a mythology which forms a dark undercurrent to our official mythology of perpetual progress, and undercurrent which forces its way to the surface in times of great social conflict and anxiety in the face of an uncertain future.

Fiction

Reality

The corpse is a new personality.- Gang of Four

Apocalyptic ideas and themes continue to inform films and novels even in our secular and scientific age. If you don’t believe that this mythology has shaped the popular consciousness today, then I have one word for you: zombies. The dead rising from their graves has its ultimate source in Revelations’ description of the last judgment (see my post on apocalyptic art for zombie imagery in a gothic cathedral). The zombie genre, like the biblical genre of apocalypse, was largely the creation of one visionary during a time of social turmoil (though Romero and John of Patmos both built upon and transformed prior influences). George Romero’s Nightof the Living Dead, the first modern zombie film, opened in 1968. The story of undead cannibals can be read as an allegory for the racial (the black protagonist is mistaken for one of the undead and shot by redneck cops) and generational (a young child attacks and devours her unwitting parents) conflicts that seemed to be tearing apart the fabric of American society in the 1960s. The 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, satirized consumer culture by staging the battle between zombies and survivors in a mall (satire being a decidedly un-apocalyptic mode), but this can also be seen as an expression of economic anxieties in the age of stagflation (a perfect economic storm that combines high consumer goods prices with high unemployment). Later Romero films and their knockoffs became a recognized horror sub-genre, but they didn’t enjoy mass popularity until the 2000s, which have seen a remake of Dawn of the Dead, three more installments of Romero’s Living Dead series, 28 Days Later (and its lackluster sequel), Zombieland, and a television series, The Walking Dead, just to name a few. Why are zombies so popular? I believe that zombies are figures of apocalyptic dread, and with the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and the prospect of global warming and peak oil, we have plenty of reasons to wonder what kind of future, if any, our civilization has. 

It's not just zombie movies, either. Apocalyptic themes have recently become popular in more “serious” genres as well, from art-house films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (perhaps also his apocalyptically-named Antichrist, but I haven't seen it) and Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, to novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, which was of course also made into a movie.

Fiction

Reality

It should be noted that the modern apocalyptic genre by and large dispenses with God as an eschatological agent and replaces it with nature, (typically in the form of diseases and natural disasters), but Gaia proves to be as vengeful a master as Jehovah. In its more fantastic modes it merely changes the apocalyptic monsters from angels, demons, and beasts from the sea into zombies, aliens, and vampires. What is truly different in the modern apocalypse is its ending. With few exceptions, at the end of these films and novels are a small number of humans (perhaps only one, perhaps even none) who have survived the catastrophe. The religious command of repent-and-be-saved is replaced by the Darwinian imperative of survive-at-all-costs. The building of Zion is deferred, left as an ambiguous hope at best. The old version of apocalypse was a brutal fantasy, but in the end it offered utopia. The new secular iteration is far more pessimistic, doubtful that humanity is worthy of a new earth, much less a new heaven.  

Future Tense: A Personal Apocalypse

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

As an adult, in a new millennium, I will become an atheist, though gradually and after a detour into New Age mysticism. During this detour I will seek out the apocalyptic (in the sense of “revelation” and “uncovering”) in meditation and psychedelic drugs and esoteric literature. The results will be inconclusive. I will still find the end of the universe interesting to contemplate, though I will have no expectation to be around when it happens. The end of human history, on the other hand, will remain an open question.   

The word “apocalypse” does not mean the end of the world, nor does it necessarily have to do with catastrophic destruction. Most people don’t know this, because they either first learn the word at church (if they are Christians) or at Hollywood movies. Everyone is familiar with the scenario: a strange new disease is killing people by the thousands, formerly tame animals are attacking people, a comet is screaming through space headed straight for Washington, D.C. Perhaps mankind must do battle with zombies or aliens or the antichrist or Cthulhu. But these evil forces are not ultimately to blame. No, we are to blame, with our hubris, our wickedness. It’s doomsday. It’s Armageddon. It’s the apocalypse.

"Don't Fuck With the Apocalypse" by Raymond Pettibon

During my high school years in the 1990s, I will begin to have recurring nightmares of nuclear destruction. In my childhood, contemplating the destruction of the world will hold no fear for me; in fact, I will find reading all of this crazy end-times literature an odd pleasure. Children cannot contemplate the future as having a real existence, so this activity will be no different than reading a novel or a comic book. As I grow older, however, I will begin to weary of end-times scenarios, my skepticism will grow, and the apocalyptic part of my imagination will be diverted into film and literature (and even my musical tastes will be affected). I will develop a taste for the future-oriented genre of science fiction, and for visionary poets such as Yeats and Blake.    

Well, it’s an apocalypse, a variation on a theme first stated by Saint John of Patmos, who wrote down his bizarre visions of the final battle between good and evil on earth. This became the last book of the Bible, and the template for all of those disaster movies you’ve seen. It was called “The Apocalypse of John.”  The word’s etymology is Greek, and it is translated variously as “revelation,”  “disclosure” or “uncovering.” I prefer the last word, because it implies that there is a world underneath the material world of our ordinary reality, which acts as a kind of veil; it does not imply any divine messenger necessary to aid in the uncovering. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” asked William Blake.

In addition to picking up threads of loose talk, I will read one of my Dad’s books on prophecy. It will detail the last days: how the world will become wicked, worse than it has ever been (awful to contemplate, considering the decadence of Rome, the holocaust, etc.), how god will destroy particular cities by fire, flood, or earthquake. There will be no Rapture, however, that smug totem of American evangelicals. The saints must stay on earth and duke it out with the sinners, but they will have the guiding hand of the Church, and its prophetic wisdom. One’s own dreams are not out of bounds, either. My Dad will often recount his prophetic dreams.

There is another word for the study of the end of the world: eschatology. Here is the most convincing eschatological scenario, a prophecy but in no sense an apocalyptic one, from the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov:

“. . . someday, billions of years from now, our sun will expand and the earth will crisp and sere and vaporize into a gas of iron and rock with no sign of the life it once bore.”

Throughout the 1980s, in my childhood, I will often stay up past my bedtime listening to the adults (my Dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles—though not my mom, who is pragmatic and present-oriented) spinning wildly speculative tales about the near future, interpreting contemporary political events in accordance with scripture and the prophets of the Church. Much of this talk will, under the covers so to speak, be motivated by anxieties about the Cold War, though I will not realize this until later. The USSR will be perceived as a major threat to what will be referred to as “the Free World,” though in fact the Soviet menace will by then already be on its last legs, both economically and politically, and doomed to destruction, though this will not be known until a few years later. (In fact, my Dad will maintain his belief in a Russian/Chinese invasion of the United States, including the Rocky Mountain States, Red Dawn-style, well into the next millennium.) In the meantime, I will be led to believe that I may be part of the last generation to live in the world as we know it. 

It is kind of breathtaking, this cold cosmic indifference, and it does give some sense of the awe that apocalyptic visions can inspire (the quote comes from an essay called “Science and Beauty”). But from a human perspective it is somewhat irrelevant. True apocalyptic has to do with the final showdown between good and evil. There is, however, a significant overlap between apocalyptic and eschatology. Insofar as the revelation is a revelation of the ultimate nature of reality, we must also be dealing with the final goal of mankind, when god, or the gods, or nature will pass judgment on us. 

In 1981, I will be born into a world of magic and miracles.  I will be raised on stories about spirits of the dead which pierce the thin “veil” which separates this world and the world beyond to warn those in danger or comfort the grieving, stories of prophetic dreams and miraculous healings. One of these will be about me, in the days following my birth. My father (in the story) will observe a lack of focus in my eyes, and will conclude that I am blind. He will not consult a doctor. He will consult my grandfather, the family patriarch, who will lay his hands upon my head and bless me with the power of his priesthood, and I will be healed. My grandfather, I will be told when I am older, has performed many such miracles, though I will never see any of them myself. This story of my healed eyesight will first inspire awe and gratitude (in my child’s egotism, for being the recipient of the miracle), and then resentment (in my adolescent rebellion, for seeming to owe a debt to god), and finally mere incredulity (as I write these words, finding no other attitude I am able to take).

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

-Soren Kierkegaard

      

The Origins of Apocalypse

The Apocalypse of John, or The Book of Revelations, is one of the most influential texts in Western culture, and yet we know little about its author. We know that he received his vision on the Greek island of Patmos, where he is widely believed to have been banished by Rome for preaching Christianity. The text dates from the end of the 1^st century AD, under the reign of either Nero or Domitian.[i] The book either describes events of John’s own time, or cataclysms yet to come, or is a broad allegory of the struggle between good and evil. Institutional religion (the Catholic Church, for example) prefers the first or third interpretations, thus rendering the book irrelevant or subject to the church’s own interpretive authority. The second interpretation (or, I should say, interpretations, since no two are alike) is the perennial favorite of cranks and revolutionaries. Or there is the interpretation offered by playwright George Bernard Shaw: “a peculiar record of the visions of a drug addict.” Reading the bizarre, lurid images of Revelation, it’s hard not to have some sympathy with Shaw’s view. Chapter 9, for instance describes an army of locusts sent to torment all who do not have the seal of God on their forehead:

7. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

8. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

 9. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

10. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. [ii]

St. John Eating the Book by Abrecht Durer

But, strange and horrifying as the images are, one should remember that they are only symbols. Few people, even believers, expect an actual prostitute from Babylon to come riding in on a seven-headed beast at the end of days. The whore of Babylon is clearly an allegorical figure, representing the corruption and decadence of earthly political power. What Shaw’s dismissal of such imagery ignores is that, however much The Book of Revelations ups the ante, such visions have ample precedent in the Jewish apocalyptic genre, in texts like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The book of Daniel is the most immediate precursor to John, in which the prophet interprets the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar. The king dreams of a statue with a head of gold, breasts and arms of silver, brass belly and thighs, and feet of iron and clay. A stone falls upon the feet, causing the stature to crumble and fall, after which the stone grows into a great mountain. Daniel interprets the dream eschatalogically, declaring that the rock represents the kingdom which god will establish at the end of time. The different parts of the statue represent the various earthly kingdoms god will destroy, the crown of the stature being Nebuchadnezzar’s own. The relationship to the John’s apocalypse is twofold: first, the narrative pattern of destruction followed by the setting up of the kingdom of god on earth, and secondly the historical context of the story itself. Daniel is typically dated from 167 BC, when the Jews were ruled by Antiochus IV of Syria, who had placed a pagan altar in the temple, and forbade Jewish religious practices. There was a revolt in Jerusalem led by the Maccabees after Antiochus’ death in 164, but when Daniel was written, things looked pretty dire. In When Time Shall Be No More, Paul Boyer writes that “The power of this vision, penned at a moment when Judaism’s survival hung in the balance, underlies the book’s continuing appeal.”[iii] Fast forward a couple hundred years, to the time when Revelations was written, and the situation looks similar for the Christians under Nero.

It is clear that the apocalyptic genre is, at least in part, the dream of ultimate power by powerless people. As Grant Underwood describes the political nature of this dream:

Apocalypticism is the dream of ‘the great reversal.’ Growing out of a profound discontent with the status quo and seeing society and its power brokers as evil and antagonistic, it promises that the first will be last and the last first. Because the forces of sin are felt to be in control, apocalypticists see little hope in working through ‘the system’ . . . only God can make the situation right, and such divine intervention is expected to come dramatically, even cataclysmically, as superhuman forces square off in the final showdown of good and evil.[iv]

         

Apocalyptic has appealed to revolutionaries of various stripes. There were medieval heretics such as Joachim of Fiore. Also Protestants Martin Luther and John Calvin, who believed the Pope was the Antichrist. But they did embrace Revelations nearly as much as the more radical protestant Anabaptists.  Self-declared prophet Jan Bockleson led an army and in 1534 declared the Westphalian (now German) city of Münster the New Jerusalem. He also declared communal property and compulsory polygamy. Some scholars have argued that Communism is a kind of secular apocalyptic, which offers a foreordained cataclysmic struggle, followed by a peaceful millennium.[v]

            

The novelist and literary critic D.H. Lawrence’s book on Revelations, Apocalypse takes a dim view of the apocalyptic imagination. It was certainly a distortion of Christianity:

Always the titles of power, and never the titles of love. Always Christ the omnipotent conqueror flashing the great sword and destroying destroying vast masses of men, till blood mounts up to the horses’ bridles. Never Christ the Saviour: never.[vi]

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[i]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation

[ii] http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/book.php?book=Revelation&chapter=9&verse=

[iii] Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992). Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

[iv] Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (1993). University of Illinois, Chicago.

[v] http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard206.html

[vi] D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (1931). Viking Press, New York. 

Fearful Symmetry: Images of Apocalypse