Apocalypse Boring
Being the jaded, cynical misanthrope that I am I can't help but reserve a space in my heart for Apocalypse fiction; the world being sandblasted clear of the nuisance that is sentient life is an idea I can squarely get behind, at least in fiction anyways. Unfortunately my lovely little doomsday scenario seems to have become annoyingly mainstream and uninspired. In the past the end of the world could come from all manner of exotic things but now it seems that everyone is bowing down to the great radioactive masculinity of the presumed nuclear holocaust. Now I understand the cultural bias here people, after all the nuke was the most recent step in our long ladder of more and more impressive ways to turn 180 pounds of sentient flesh into 180 pounds of very depressed ash and bits of teeth. But it's been 65 years since it's conception and 25 since the end of the cold war, it's hardly the clear and present danger that it once was.
I hate to break it to all the conspiracy nuts out there but Putin is not sitting in Russia with his finger gently resting on the button labeled "Rape quivering moist americans with giant steel phallus of fiery discontent". Further more the idea of a nuclear apocalypse at all is a bit out of date. All the great nuclear powers are so deadlocked by mutually assured destruction and general bureaucratic malaise that they might as well not even have the bombs. Plus any rouge nation which happens to get it's hands on and actually use a warhead would be doing the social and political equivalent of telling dead baby jokes at a combined seminar for anger management and proper shooting technique that was attended exclusively by mothers of victims of SIDS.
It seems however that certain movie studios and authors have gotten the message that nuclear war is a little bit passé and decided instead to leave the cause of their particular global genocide unnamed. The problem is this is that, while it may not be called a nuke it certainly still acts like one; everything is still burnt and exploded, everyone is still dying of radiation and its still all shit all the time. Sometimes they attempt a flimsy renaming (it's not radiation, it's just that the air is filled with invisible pterodactyl spunk which causes the exact same effects as radiation) or sometimes it will just be the dreaded plot convenience syndrome which causes people to cough up blood randomly, like their chest cavity is filled with mice that occasionally nip at things for fun, and to die when most poignant. In the end though it’s still the same, it’s a nuclear doomsday in everything but the name; its like a great big atomic Ragnarok madlib where all the proper nouns have been replaced with various swears and references to genitalia.
The one exception to this seems to be the more recently popular standby of the viral Apocalypse. In reality the only differences here are usually that all the cities are mostly intact and that instead of your ass getting blown up it just turns to pus and falls off. Perhaps these are the first spawn of the new shadow of bioterrorism which hangs above our heads today, the fictional tendrils of the perceived pandemic promised by SARS and Swine flu. The major problem that I have with this flavor of doomsday is that it seems to inevitably lead to one thing: Zombies. You’ve got your “28 days later“, your “The crazies”, your “zombie land” and literally hundreds of movies like them but regardless it always seems like any disease these days will not simply kill you but also cause you to lurch about like a thanksgiving day Butterball with a fist up it’s bum. And it’s not like it’s necessary, disease is plenty scary and dramatic all on it’s own without having to resort to necromancy. What always strikes me as unintentionally hilarious is when they attempt to give the fictional virus some semblance of realism by connecting it to a real disease; as though measles suddenly got really pissed about always getting beaten up so it did squat thrusts until it could defy the laws of physics.
And it’s not as though the zombie problem is exclusive to the virus club either, it as an alarming trend of popping up in good old nuke land as well. Radiation in fiction has this amazing power to do pretty much whatever the fuck it wants, from granting superpowers to reanimating the dead, and often times this leads to some very surreal scenarios. It’s like we’ll have some intensely serious movie about the horrors of nuclear war and then in galumphs a radioactive moose with 3 heads and a dick made of pythons. And while I’ve never seen that particular event transpire I have seen scenes handled with equal ineptitude. Things like zombies just don’t go very well with the idea of a serious drama about the end of the world; they just ring too false to have any real impact and serve more as big screamy amusements for the protagonist to shoot in order to keep our bloodlust sated.
In the end though the true problem is that all these Apocalypse thrillers seem to be is a big vehicle for the message of “Humans are dicks”. It almost seems like these fictional atom bombs have some sort of asshole radar and have no effect people who are massively, cartoonishly, stupidly evil and/or have always wondered what human flesh tastes like. The bomb ceases to be a bomb at all, it’s just a convenient plot device which removes all semblance of law and order and then sticks one or two ordinary people smack dab in the center of cannibalistic rape land. This works once or twice but you can’t build a franchise on a message that should be more then self evident if you ever turn on the evening news. It would be like having a series of movies where an unnamed disaster effects the world so one lone protagonist decides to open up a chain of dairy queens in order to convey the message that people like ice cream. People do bad things, history is a testament to this fact, I don’t need to see some guy get his nipples bitten off to drive this point home. Perhaps next time an author or movie maker feels like ending the world for our collective amusement rather then filling it with flaming nuclear cliché he can make it about neon green zebras descending to earth from the farthest reaches of space in order to hug us all to death.
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Topic: Apocalypse Boring (Read 1504 times)