Author Archives: ericandrewbarbera
12/21/12 is Coming Up, And People Are Freaking Out.
Hey everybody, I came across this article in the New York Times yesterday, and thought it was worth sharing!
The Zombie Fixation and Zone One
From day one in our class, the buzz about zombies has been present and persisted, despite the vast majority of our material not being zombie-related. Being a fan of zombies myself, I’ve always wondered what it was about them–and the prospect of a zombie apocalypse–that draws so many of us in. Reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I felt he highlighted something about zombies that I had never picked up one: wish fulfillment.
In a scene towards the beginning of the book, when Mark encounters four zombies that had been cooped up in the break room of a legal office, he muses about being an angel of death with a chilling amount of glee. From that passage, it was clear that a part of Mark enjoyed participating in the apocalypse’s carnage. That’s when it hit me:
On some level, we’d all love to go on a killing spree.
We’re all imbued with that primal energy–that Freudian Id–which gives us a capacity for violence. These thoughts are curbed by our learning and internalizing of societal rules (like don’t murder people). Both of these attributes make sense in an evolutionary sense: those that were strongest and best at fighting got to pass on more of their genes over the course of many generations, and likewise those that could cooperate effectively also succeeded in dominating the gene pool. A zombie apocalypse lets us toss off our societal shackles and appease our violent impulses without having to deal with the moral hangups that accompany murder. Zombie apocalypse scenarios are–purely and simply–guiltless indulgences of our primal predisposition to violence.
Nuke York, New York and The City as a Punching Bag
The more I read and reflected upon Mick Broderick and Robert Jacobs’s Nuke York, New York, the more I realized just how much New York gets obliterated in movies. Continue reading
Apocalypto’s Ending
Viewing Apocalypto, 28 Days Later, and Children of Men (All for the second time, incidentally) and reading “The Days are Numbered,” I found it most difficult to wrap my head around Gibson’s film, mainly because of how it ends. I first saw each of these movies shortly after they were released in theaters and enjoyed them all, though something about Apocalypto didn’t sit right, even with 14-year-old me. Quinby articulates my formerly ineffable misgivings in her essay, stating how Apocalypto “is both pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. This doubled effect of pre-and post-apocalyptic action is part of what gives the film its contradictory set of messages” (8).
Jaguar Paw’s journey as a hero is compelling enough, but the arrival of the Spanish coming on its heels–to me, at least–devalues the story somewhat; it’s almost as if Gibson calls “take backs” on the tale he just presented to his audience. Can one really imagine that Jaguar Paw and his family will hide and somehow survive the Spanish decimation of the Mayans? I guess it could be argued that the ending is ambiguous, but knowing the history, even the most fervent of optimists would have to learn toward “no”. If that’s the case, then the “new beginning” Jaguar Paw and his family go back to the forest to find is nothing more than a deferral of their obliteration at the hands of a different violent, oppressive group. That strikes me as an incredibly Nihilistic ending, one that a devout man such as Gibson probably didn’t intend to place in his film.
The movie’s tag line is “No one can outrun their destiny” (Quinby 7). Does this mean that being struck down by a larger, violent group is the destiny for Jaguar Paw and his family, and their escape at the end is merely a futile attempt to outrun the inevitable? This seems to be in direct opposition with sentiment of finding a “new beginning”. Maybe the more pertinent question is one that’s a bit more metaphysical: if Jaguar Paw and his family are soon found and killed by the Spanish, does that truly diminish his escape and his and Seven’s heroics that make up much of the film?
The Seven Seals of Fundamentalism
What caught my eye in this text (well, what caught my mind, I guess or…my mind’s eye?) was Strozier’s notion of the elect, because, to me, this is one of the most crucial dimensions of the Book of Revelation that makes it so dangerous, especially in a fundamentalist context. If a fundamentalist group truly believe they are elect, then anything they do could potentially be justified. It reminded me of Calvinism and the notion of predestination, which stated that God had already decided who was elect and who was damned, and there was nothing that could be done to change to which group an individual belonged. This idea gives people who believe they are in the elect a blank check, essentially, which has tremendous destructive potential, especially when considering that rigid, dualistic-thinking fundamentalists may be likely to believe they are members of the elect.
Following this line of thought, I think I’ve picked up on yet another strange contradiction Revelation embodies: it’s an “ugly and dangerous text,” yet it has enacted some positive social change (Strozier 119). This got me thinking: to what degree is any text a rorschach, onto which people project their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires? How much control does any author have over his or her work? I recall the George W. Bush quote that we were shown from Kurt Eichenwald’s 500 Days, where the president seemed convinced that Gog and Magog were convening in the Middle East; how much of how we interpret any text are we just like Bush, seeing things that may not be there at all?
Glorious Appearing and The Fundamentalist Mindset
Reading Strozier and Boyd’s essays and following up with Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, I–like pretty much everyone else who posted prior to my writing this response–thought that the ideas and concepts about fundamentalism that Strozier and Boyd outlined can be clearly and easily observed in Glorious Appearing. Continue reading
The Rapture: About 20 Minutes Too Long
For most of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, I felt it presented itself as a film about the seductive quality of faith in the confusing and chaotic landscape that is the modern world. Continue reading
Watchmen and the Apocalypse
Though I had heard innumerable great things about Watchmen and thus went into the experience with considerably high expectations, it’s surpassed all of them. I’m honestly flabbergasted. I wish I had a little more time to reflect and whatnot, so I’ll just keep this simple.
Looking at Watchmen within the context of our apocalyptic studies so far, I think it handled one of the fundamental challenges of telling a modern apocalyptic story quite well. In Rosen’s introduction to Apocalyptic Transformation, she outlines a fundamental struggle that some authors have, “Because the apocalyptic genre’s roots are religious,” she posits, “secular authors face certain challenges in adapting it in their narratives.” Essentially, how do artists go about telling a fundamentally religious story in a non-religious way, without compromising some necessary elements? Watchmen in my mind, navigates this confusion successfully.
Though the overarching theme of nuclear panic permeates the story (and I think it contains many elements that remind one of nuclearism, the idea Strozier outlined in one of our earlier readings) that is reminiscent of a kind of “godless” kind of apocalypse Kirsch devotes a chapter to in A History of the End of the World, it’s combined with a kind of fanatical religiosity that’s apparent from the first page, especially in the notes of Rorscharch’s journal; he sounds like a modern-day John of Patmos. Take, for instance, an excerpt from the first few pages, “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.” These bitter, violent, society-condemning sentiments feel to me like echoes of the Book of Revelation.
In reality, I believe Watchmen is able to imbue its story with some religiousness (and, in particular, some Revelation-esque qualities) while keeping the story’s secular qualities intact. And that is remarkable, and one of the many reasons I enjoyed Watchmen.
The Need for an End
Reading sections from Frank Kermode‘s A Sense of an Ending and the introduction to Elizabeth K. Rosen’s Apocalyptic Transformation, I was introduced to a way of looking at the Apocalypse that up until this point had only occurred to me fleetingly, and never hit me head on. Continue reading
