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Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were enjoyable and relaxing, and that 2012 has good things in store for you. Don't let the title of this month's column fool you - this isn't a dire prediction on horrible things to come this year, nor is the title a cheap trick to make things sound more interesting and ominous by adding, "of DOOM" to it. This is actually a column talking about the changing face of doom in literature and movies.
Humanity seems to have a cultural obsession with global calamity, tracing back thousands of years to mentions of such things in the prophetic portions of religious texts such as the Jewish Tenach and the Christian New Testament, among others. In more recent years, fiction writers have offered numerous takes on end-of-the-world scenarios, and it is these concepts that I find the changing perceptions interesting.
One of the earliest fiction stories dealing with the end of the world, that I know of (and by no means do I claim exceptional knowledge in this area), is found in Edgar Allen Poe's, "The Masque of the Red Death." Poe offered a dark tale of a world ravaged by a natural plague, and a cadre of survivors, safely quarantined away from the contagion. If you haven't read the story, I won't offer spoilers as to how it ends, but suffice it to say, if you know anything about Poe, you know better than to expect happy endings.
H.G. Wells presented the idea of wide-spread destruction in the form of complacency and the lack of mental challenges, in his tale, "The Time Machine." He focused less, though, on the doomsday, than he did on the long-term aftermath when humanity divided into two separate cultures, the Morlocks and the Eloi.In the book, Wells postulates that the two distinct descendants of humanity become dependent on each other in a way that removes the need for higher thinking and reasoning. The Eloi become childlike and so naïve as to be oblivious even to the danger to their fellow Eloi, while the Morlocks are brutish and savage. The implication in Wells' story is that ease is the danger which would doom mankind.
Wells also offered another concept, which scores of other writers and filmmakers would expand on - the threat of otherworld invaders attacking and decimating the Earth. In the early 20th Century, comics and movie serials popularized characters such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, fighting tyrants and threats from other planets, in order to preserve the Earth. Our doom would fall on us from the sky, in the form of space travelers who were as greedy and unscrupulous as we had often been in the past (and often still are today.)
The end of World War II ushered in a new, and more plausible, end of the world situation for us, when warfare entered the nuclear age. Once the Soviet Union achieved nuclear capability, it seemed to many that thermonuclear holocaust was inevitable. Films such as "Dr. Strangelove," "The Bedford Incident," and "Failsafe" gave us depressing views of just how easy it would be for the uneasy standoff of the Cold War to suddenly escalate into a shooting war. For the first time in our history, humanity could truly be the authors of our own doom, and in short order. Even more, we realized we held in our control the power to reduce the entire planet to an uninhabitable wasteland, for not only humans, but for any living thing of higher order than a cockroach.
Nuclear Doom would prevail as the mainstay of the end-of-the-world cause through the 1970s and into the early 80s, losing steam once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Once the most likely opponent in the scenario was gone, doomsday writers needed another source of calamity to bring about the destruction of our world.
The Zombie Apocalypse grew in popularity, mixing the old threat of plague, with the new horror element of the infected becoming nearly mindless predators against the yet uninfected remnants of humanity. Now, we not only had to fear being killed, but also the idea that we would become an undead shell of our former selves, turning on those we once loved in cannibalistic frenzy. Well, if you can call shuffling after people a "frenzy."
On a side-note, I already have my Zombie Apocalypse survival plan. I'm going to hide at work. Even mindless zombies know better than to seek after brains in that place. My co-worker says the Zombie Apocalypse has already happened, and the company simply recruited the brainless undead to fill management and engineering positions. I'm not sure I can collect sufficient evidence to refute that hypothesis, and the plethora of University of Phoenix diplomas only supports it further.
For a short while, Y2K gave us a new threat for world doom, as all of our computers would suddenly crash when they couldn't process a date with a year starting with something besides "19". By the end of the 20th Century, we were so dependent on computers for everything, that such a crash would surely result in a total breakdown of all infrastructure, leading to complete anarchy and chaos. For a few years, at least, being Amish didn't seem like such a bad lifestyle, after all. When New Year's Day 2000 came and went with barely a hiccough in our computer networks, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief, except maybe those who had hoarded large supplies of food and ammunition, and planned on becoming the local tribal lord in the wake of the chaos. Alas, they had to go back to running their local HOA's instead, and eating tons of freeze-dried and canned foods, before their investments went completely rotten.
More recently, we have the concept of Global Warming, amended to Climate Change, as a possible agent for mass extinction. Whether through human action, or a cyclic pattern of weather, we're going to end up with either another ice age, or a world-wide hothouse, spelling death and destruction for most, if not all, of humanity. While the science of all this is still being argued about (and it doesn't matter which side of the argument you're on, it IS still being argued about), it does make for some good fiction in the meantime. In this scenario, our doom took on the face of gas-guzzling 4WD behemoths, incandescent lightbulbs, and CFCs. Admit it - didn't you suspect all along that Cadillac Escalades were really straight from the pits of Hell? It seems too many of them are being driven by the devil himself, that's for sure.
Doomsday in fiction has almost come full circle now, with plague once again being a popular theme in stories and movies. "Contagion" presents the very real possibility of a deadly strain of flu, transmitting rapidly around the world through our modern transportation networks. Interestingly enough, this concept was the basis for a 1949 book by George R. Stewart, titled "Earth Abides." The same idea is suggested in the recent, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," though it was easy to miss for many in the audience. If you have not seen the movie yet, don't give up when the credits first start to roll - you need to see the final scene that is still to come, or you'll miss the real kicker.
Weaponized virii are sometimes being offered as the final demise of humanity, and, like nuclear holocaust, the idea isn't too farfetched. Taking a contagious disease that is dangerous in its original state, and modifying it to be more dangerous, is a pretty obvious formula for trouble. This is true whether we're talking a fictional scenario, or a real-life research program. The fiction writer throws the monkey-wrench into the works, to bring about the world-threatening calamity of his plot. In reality, things happen. For all the safety measures we put into place, there is always a chance that something the researchers didn't anticipate will happen.
What's next? Who knows? It could be argued that we've managed to explore every possible cause of global destruction imaginable, and I've only touched on a few in this column. The movie "Idiocracy" suggested we'll breed ourselves into such stupidity, that we might be too dumb to survive much longer. I don't know whether to be impressed, or frightened, by how much of our imagination we devote to conceiving of our own doom. Either way, keep watching - someone will come up with a new idea soon.
Until then, keep smiling, and have a happy New Year.
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