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

Rather than examining the obvious films of apocalypse in terms of commercial success and cultural influence at the end of the previous century, such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Independence Day (1996), and The Matrix (1999), or the deluge of disaster movies involving meteors, volcanoes, and other cataclysmic phenomena, Apocalyptic Dread investigates the “horror/crime hybrid” that emerged in the 1990s, in which “apocalyptic dread” is figured through a family threatened by a “monstrous figure, the uncanny double of what the family has repressed” (3). Consequently, Kristen Moana Thompson offers an illuminating analysis of an unusual collection of films for a study with “apocalyptic” in the title: Cape Fear (1991), Candyman (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Se7en (1995), Signs (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005). The final two chapters abandon the horror/crime hybrid for the more conventional Hollywood version of apocalypse in the form of alien invasions, but the exploration of the conservative theme of the restoration of the family lends coherence to the study.

Thompson contextualizes the emergence of apocalyptic dread as a conservative response to “rapid sociocultural changes over the last forty years” (7). She situates the threatened family trope of the horror/crime hybrid within the context of the culture wars that began with the Reagan presidency and intensified in the era of multiculturalism and political correctness. She further contends that the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America has encouraged Hollywood to turn to themes of “Christian millennialism and apocalyptic eschatology” (11). Not surprisingly, these films manage “coded anxieties about family, patriarchy, religion, and ‘family values’” (25). While many of the films Thompson analyzes reinforce conservative family values, they have little overt connection to Christian fundamentalism, with the possible exception of Signs, in which the ex-minister Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) saves his family from aliens and returns to the god he renounced after the death of his wife. Rather, Thompson describes the way in which millennialism has insinuated itself into American culture, informing the interpretation of events and speculation on the future.

The proliferation of forms of dread in this study occasionally dilutes the principal concept: apocalyptic dread. Thompson offers several definitions of apocalyptic dread, from the general, “that fear and anxiety about the future and about the anticipated end of the world” (3), to the more particular, “a free-floating anxiety and ambivalence about the future that is displaced onto the specific dread embodied by each film’s monster, and that dramatizes a compulsive eschatological need to perceive and decode signs” (3). Drawing upon Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, she identifies three key components of “apocalyptic dread”: “first, radical freedom (or the moral dread occasioned by absolute choice), which gives rise to a fear of the future and which is mediated by past actions; second, a paradoxical ambivalence that is connected to the uncanny; and third, a connection to the cataclysmic qualities of trauma” (18). Thompson’s formulation of “memorial dread,” or a fear of remembering a traumatic past, works well in her analysis of Dolores Claiborne, in which Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh) represses her sexual abuse by her father, although the connection to the apocalyptic in this chapter is tenuous. Similarly, “scopic dread,” which she defines as “the ambivalent resistance to seeing what one fears, yet already knows” (124), captures the effect of Se7en with its grisly tableaus of murder staged as a moral lesson. However, the numerous categories of dread that punctuate her chapter on Cape Fear, including “Corporeal Dread” (44), “Dreaded Loss and Dreadful Revenge” (46), “Performative Dread” (47), “Supernatural Dread” (49), and “Legal Dread” (51), belabor the argument and interfere with an otherwise solid analysis of the film.

Trauma figures so prominently in several chapters that a more thorough review of theories of trauma, beyond the brief mention of the work of Cathy Caruth, would have been useful. For instance, the work of Kaja Silverman in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) would provide Thompson a more sophisticated framework in which to...