I can't help but wonder

[hkellick]

Last Edited: 5:51 10/30

I saw an odd movie last night that I didn't mention. I only saw the first 30 minutes or so. The synopsis of the film was due to the Chinese setting off nuclear bombs underground, the pacific plate was shifting and cracks were opening in the ocean floor, letting magma (or at least thermal energy) esape, compounding the greenhouse effect. Oh, and earthquakes and wildfires were happening the world over. And the only way to stop this from occuring was to create a force of the same magnitude from the opposite direction.. by nuking Los Angeles.
After an earthquake happened in a tunnel in Los Angeles, causing a gas main to break and an enormous explosion to occur in the tunnel, killing everyone but a 14 year old girl thrown in the trunk by her mom, I turned it off.
But it got me thinking.
We (I'm not sure if "We" are Americans or everyone) are obsessed with doomsday scenarios.
What if Aliens came out of space using mind-bogglingly powerful heat rays to destroy the world. (*cough* ID4 *cough*)
What if a HUUUGE Asteroid was heading for a collision course with Earth?
Or... what if Nazi Terrorists implanted a small tactical nuke in a cigarette machine and set it to go off at the Superbowl
What is an unknown disease wipes out 99.99% of the people on Earth?
And this is just in popular media.
Heck, the media takes a backseat to real life. At least in popular media, there's a hero (or heroes) who somehow save the day.
Just look at real life, though, we have our own set of real life doomsday scenarios, some a little closer to home than others.
What if terrorists start doing in the US what they do in Israel (or Russia), strapping bombs to their chests and heading to our theaters and malls and pizza parlors?
What if Al Qaeda does hit again, more spectacular and more terrible than before?
What if Iraq, fed up with our shit, dropped one of their biological or chemical weapons on us? Or Israel?
What if, out of nowhere, I was shot and killed tommorow by an idiot with a grudge?
What if all the future holds for us is a long drawn out battle drawn on religious lines that will inevitably draw in nearly every nation in the world?

Sometimes I think we just like the struggle. We like watching people struggle against odds stacked far above our own because it puts our own pathetic lives in perspective and as our own lives get more violent, more terrible, the odds our heroes will have to go through even more and more violent scenarios.
With the way real life is going, I think you'll find the heroes of tommorow will have to brave the pits of hell over and over again to keep ratings going.
I guess we'll just see.
Until then, let's all just play our happy little doomsday "what if" games.

Comments

[soreth.livejournal.com]

Western culture has a huge amount of doomsday mythology running around. Megiddo. Harmageddon. The Last Judgement. The End Days. The Rapture.

Hell, early Christians believed that this was it - the Messiah had come and been crucified, and he'd come again in a short time and then the world would end. Now here we are, ~1970 years later, and he ain't returned yet. "Gee," says popular thought, "Maybe it's about time now. Maybe it's time for a reckoning."

This kind of thought has persisted for a long long time, and it's going to continue to persist.

And we can also look at this without any kind of religious or political commentary. How about looking at it fiscally?

Movies sell.
Movies with heroes sell well.
Movies with disasters sell well.
Movies with heroes who fight to save people from disasters sell better.

Now... what's the biggest disaster we can make a movie about?

This is why we'll continue to see the Hammer fall for a long long time.

[nissacrosseyed.livejournal.com]

As I pointed out in my reply earlier, the Christian apocalyptic idea was inherited from Jewish apocalyptic ideas (because early Christian movements were thought not to be a world religion in themselves but Jewish sects). It wasn't a new idea introduced by Christians; there had been tons of sects beforehand and afterwards that thought the end was near. The group, the Essenes, that kept the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, were a tight little community that existed right around the start of the common era that really did believe they were living in the end times (it was right about the time that the Temple was being destroyed for a second time, too, which gave them more evidence for their claim).

But I agree with you, for the most part, on everything else. :)

[soreth.livejournal.com]

I should probably note that I didn't see your post - I was typing away in the comment screen when you posted it. :)

Had I seen it already there, my reply would have been different.

[nissacrosseyed.livejournal.com]

(nods) I figured that you didn't, that is why I replied to yours. :)