2012: Great mat boards of destruction!
If you are at all a perceptive being, then you feel that “collapse” is in their air. The rise in apocalyptic fiction, books, TV shows, documentaries and cultural groups are expanding exponentially. This Fall’s slate of blockbuster films is no exception. As cultural interpreters, what can we glean from the craze? Well, first of all, it’s not new. Disaster films were big in the ’70s, not coincidentally at the moment when the US was reeling from the oil crisis, failed imperial war, disgraced presidency and flat economy. Still, in regards to the state of our global ecology, the sense of impending doom is not trivial. But whereas one generation’s response was the punk anthem, “no future,” the current 2012 meme is the end of the future. Period.
Unless you are a Hollywood producer.
Nonetheless, it’s about time that time ended. Mechanical time, like our outmoded view of nature, needs to be destroyed. But when it’s done in film, it may stave off the necessary cultural adjustment needed at a time of crisis. Many media theorists have pointed out that film, photography and mechanical recordings have a way of capturing “contingency.” If we can put it into film and be entertained by it, then the danger has been contained, because media has a way of turning the inexplicable into a narrative (for example, post-9/11 TV news turned the disaster into a visual narrative so it would look like a movie instead of crisis with complex origins). Christians have borrowed from Aristotle’s notion of the three act play in which there is a final, concluding drama that culminates the historical and linear drama of civilization. Now we have Monday Night Football.
To put this on the Maya (because it is from them we get this idea of 2012 ending time) is too bad, because it is a wild misapplication of Western metaphysics on non-Western perception. The Maya believe (I use present tense because they still exist) time is *circular*– 2012 can not end something that is nonlinear. This doesn’t mean that their ancient calendar is not important or insignificant. There is a great deal of correlating evidence that shows that the calendar is quite accurate in mapping solar sunspot cycles, which introduce more radiation and potential for mutation than at other points of time. As we know from observing nature, there are cycles within cycles within cycles, but we tend to be oblivious of the impact of sunspots on evolution. What may be hitting our intuitive radar is the transition from one large solar cycle to another. As sensitive biological creatures we may know that. But because of our cultural aptitude, our way of dealing with that sensitivity is to turn it into cathartic spectacles rather than as a tool for organizing political action.
Anyhow, you may enjoy the following trailers. I think they offer a good feel for the cultural Zeitgeist, including the few that have bimbo intros which make global destruction sound as enticing as Michael Jackson’s funeral.
Follow the jump to see video clips.
Knowing: “Are we going die?” “I will never let that happen. Never.”
The Road: “A cannibalistic barbarism”
The Book of Eli: Another kung fu Western?
9: “Sometimes fear is the appropriate response… you should protect the future.”
Les Derniers Jours Du Monde (The End of The World): Apocalypse French style… nude sunbathing and all.
