Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (review)

Cinematically speaking, I cannot keep my eyes off the dead, or the body captured in a state of dreadful ruination. Wherever I look, wherever I am directed to look by the all-seeing eye of the camera lens, the individuated body, the imagined or constructed public body of 'civilised' culture and of the Nation State, and the technological and carnal body of the screen, come into troubling view. Bullets burrow through soft skin. Sharp knives penetrate weakened flesh. Bodies are endlessly tortured, hidden, kidnapped, lost or forgotten. Blood seeps its way into everything. Insides become outsides. Corpses are repeatedly buried. Isolation and anomic despair seep into the souls of listless, world-weary and dislocated protagonists who all seem to have had enough of life and of living. They move, interact, drift through contemporary films like the walking dead. Dust floats in the air. Leaves scatter. Smog suffocates. Matter – everywhere – disintegrates. The incessant rain washes everything – keepsakes, memories, mementoes, rooms, buildings, bridges – away; in fact, whole cities collapse or fall in a mournful celebration of the will to disaster.

Increasingly, digital film captures all this destruction with a heart-rending simplicity and verisimilitude so that the death in cinema feels as if it is a passing of often unbearable weight and affect. And in digital film's cheap and throw-away aesthetics, reel film is surpassed or supplanted or, more aptly, silently murdered by the high-definition, hand-held smoking gun of the binary lens. Nonetheless, the reel camera's mode of being or cinematic body expresses itself through the figure of the corpse. I cannot think of another time when the death in cinema has been so prominent. While film is an art form born in and of violence – according to André Bazin the film image is akin to a death mask, and as such is involved in killing the world it seeks to shoot – there is something historically specific about the lens that has so much of the blood of the world on it. Culturally speaking, the death in cinema – the dead and the dying found in Kirsten Moana Thompson's Apocalyptic Dread – speak of the death all around us, as we enter a new phase of terror-stricken globalisation, and a new front in the War on Terror and the War on the West.

In Apocalyptic Dread, Thompson suggests that from the late 1990s contemporary American cinema has been driven by an over-determining death instinct, with the fear of global catastrophe and a foreseeable or easily imagined termination point for humankind shaping its dominant narrative arcs. The approach taken is a textual-historical one, with Thompson analysing in chronological order six key films of the period, each film representing a particular version of dread, or 'the paradoxical qualities of attraction and repulsion … the conflicting desire to know and yet not know, to see and yet want to look away' (18–19). By the time War of the Worlds (Spielberg US 2005), Thompson's last case study, was released, apocalyptic dread was mediated through its post-9/11, war-laden invasion paranoia and through its call to patriarchy and the nuclear family to help heal the wounded Nation State. Throughout the book dread is argued to be an articulation of diabolical, eschatological, messianic and repressed moments that impact upon the constitution and continuation of the family. Thompson's deployment and exploration of dread is largely done through the work of Søren Kierkegaard, who links dread to the fear of radical freedom or absolute choice, situated ambivalence and 'the cataclysmic qualities of trauma' (18). Apocalyptic Dread is an extremely well researched book, full of insightful and provocative analysis, and with an acute sense of the trauma that haunts the contemporary imagination. It is a riveting and thought-provoking read.

Particularly impressive is Thompson's examination of Cape Fear (Scorsese US 1991) and Se7en (Fincher US 1995), not least because of...