I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a while now, but I never got around to it.  Paul Harris at The Guardian beat me to the punch, so I’ll run his thoughts instead.

The recent wave of post-apocalyptic films flooding and being prepared for the marketplace is intriguing indeed.  Fads always pop up in Hollywood output, whether it’s the one-two punch of “Volcano” and “Dante’s Peak” in 1997, “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” a year later, “The Truman Show” and “EdTV,” etc., studios know when something is hot and when to strike.  But it’s usually two or three projects and then on to the next thing.

But this year and next, we have Alex Proyas’s “Knowing,” the Cormac McCarthy adaptation “The Road,” Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” Shane Acker’s “9,” Ruben Fleischer’s “Zombieland,” The Hughes brothers’ “The Book of Eli,” television’s “The Colony” and a new “Terminator” installment, all productions either depicting a post-apocalyptic environment or the end of days in some manner or another.  It all perhaps started with the Will Smith vehicle “I Am Legend” in 2007.  The trend even extends to animated films, as our commenters shrewdly note “WALL-E” as an example.

Harris talks to a UT professor who seems to think the trend reflects an uneasy awareness of an ever-changing world, whether its an economy that’s in flux, the rise of expedited means of communication or shifting demographics, not to mention the delicate state of the environment.

A few thoughts:

…experts say the trend towards apocalyptic thought does not only reflect anxiety over a difficult period of history but, just as important, changing times. Indeed it is often the concept of change as much as the concept of destruction that triggers popular interest in apocalyptic themes, according to Professor Barry Brummett of the University of Texas at Austin. Brummett notes that the first world war produced more apocalyptic popular culture than the second world war, despite the latter being on a much bigger and more destructive scale. “The key thing was that the first world war was new and different. That’s why it triggered more apocalyptic thought,” Brummett said.

In this interpretation it is the fact that the world seems to be changing so quickly that is triggering apocalyptic themes in our culture. The advent of a new internet-based economy, the rise of China, new ways of fighting wars, changing demographics, growing environmentalism and even the election of America’s first black president all add up to a wave of huge change.

I like the theory.  It’s certainly sound in its reasoning, but I’ve been wondering lately if the attraction to post-apocalyptic stories has more to do with an American sense of solitude as of late.  The last eight years effectively marginalized the country to much of the rest of the world.  Warped ideology and questionable policies have taken us out of the good graces of the rest of the planet, diminishing our “superpower” comfort label and ruining our value in the global economy as well.

These are foreign ideas to us, so maybe we feel like Will Smith, Viggo Mortensen or Denzel Washington, charting out in the wilderness of an unknown new world that no longer sees us as the high and mighty nation of hope and achievement it once was (though we’re obviously inching back).  Perhaps a post-apocalyptic world is a metaphor, to Americans, for a post-American-dominance world, and therefore, terrifying to those who’ve never known anything more.

Read the rest of Harris’s piece over at The Guardian.

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