The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television (review)

The period coming up on the millennial year 2000 and since has seen the proliferation of books dealing with apocalyptic themes. Now, theology professor John Martens offers an interpretive study of 'apocalyptic thought' and a clutch of contemporary films. Martens begins his attempt to size up these movies with a condensed three-chapter account of canonical and non-canonical biblical Judeo-Christian apocalyptic texts. He then proceeds, over six subsequent chapters, to discuss selected films sorted into six categories: 'traditional apocalypses,' 'alien apocalypses,' 'post-apocalyptic dystopias,' and a grab-bag of 'technological, futuristic and natural apocalypses.' There are considerable problems, beyond even the well-known interdisciplinary one of ever fitting analysis of films to theology, facing a critic with Martens's loaded agenda. His book does not meet them adequately and in fact compounds them because he tries to match the films to an account of the apocalyptic texts in their original context rather than taking account of the peculiar cultural career they have had.

We know by reading them that these thundering texts take themselves in earnest. But who reads them with the level of seriousness that the West recognizes in the Prophets, the Gospels, Exodus, and the Letters of St Paul as indeed central to its civilization? A conservative position among biblical and theological scholars takes it that apocalyptic writings manifest a falling off from the heights of ethical monotheism achieved by the Prophets and that the phantasmagoria of the Revelation of St John is a bit grotesque when read beside the Gospel of St John. Subsequently, we know that an increasingly normative Christianity deployed its hermeneutics to finesse even the canonical apocalyptic texts into 'eschatology,' as in Augustine's classic The City of God.

Apocalyptic tendencies, then, became not central but marginal. They find favour mainly among the more raving evangelicals, the more leathery heavy-metal rock bands, the science-fiction and horror fantasists from which much popular cinema derives, and some Republicans lately prominent in Washington. A theologian who prefers assertion over explanation, Martens neglects to offer an account of his supposed centrality over two thousand years and resorts to the catch-all term 'myth' - as if apocalypse were in the same cozy category as an Jungian archetype - to assert that films which replay apocalyptic scenarios tap into our collective consciousness and, therefore, these films find a 'ready audience,' presumably religiously ready to read off their apocalypticism and respond to movies like The Omen, Deep Impact, and Independence Day as partaking in mythic forms 'rooted in 2,000-year-old texts.'

While it is true that many of the films Martens discusses do envision large-scale destruction and spectacular planetary threats, does that alone connect these films to apocalyptic texts? Martens does not entertain alternate explanations, and this gets him into trouble. Hypertrophic cinematic spectacles of destruction - train wrecks and urban fires - have attracted viewers from the start of cinema even before films had plots. Now, one could account for this because cinema is a medium that arose symptomatically just as industrial modernity's violent and radical transformation of the lived world became apparent. Its first great florescence as a popular form coincided, after all, with the First World War.

This sort of history of apocalyptic visualization is not Martens's métier. His idea of an apocalypse is strictly biblical and text-based, his model essentially a narrative, and his analysis is dogmatically oriented. So, when he comes to discussing the films, his approach is to provide a plot synopsis and compare its elements with earlier chapters' account of the biblical texts. This is bound to run into difficulty. Faced with movies like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen, and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the scrupulous scholar also points out just how many 'biblical passages' quoted in these films are likewise free inventions of the filmmakers. Such deviations soon sink Martens's core claim of a continuum between the...