Even Doomsday sayers need editors |
According to the Christian evangelical, who has previously predicted the end - obviously unsuccessfully - the Rapture will occur on Saturday, May 21, at 6 p.m. (apparently in each time zone so there is less of a rush of the chosen few for the pearly gates). After that, the world has about six months to go to hell, literally, before Jesus shows up for his Second Coming.
The upside to Camping's prediction is that he has been wrong before. The downside: Dec. 21, 2012 is just around the corner, when the Mayan calendar ends and possibly signals yet another end-of-world situation.
But there is still more good news. Pretty much since the beginning, humanity has been thinking about the end. The only thing that makes Camping's prediction unique is that it's really the first Social Media Apocalypse.
His movement gained attention because the message was spread across the Internet. Even when the theory is being mocked, it is still being propagated. Not unlike a "winning" Charlie Sheen clip, auto-tuned "Bed Intruder Song"
Plus, let's face it, both the Camping Rapture and the 2012 Mayan Calendar theories keep us enthralled because the end of the world is damn fine entertainment. Whether the end really is here or nowhere near, the end to apocalypse porn - like the Camping Rapture - is nowhere in sight.
Apocalypse porn isn’t a new thing in the media, either. In a thesis project studying genre fiction from the last 200 years, Chandra Phelan writes the main thing that’s changed is a spike in unexplained end-of-world scenarios in the mid-1990s.
The “beginning that comes after” has been the appeal for me following Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
The world Mad Max inhabited was different. The burnt-out, oil-depraved and nuclear-ravaged land was bleak and hopeless. As if marauders roaming an unforgiving, yellow desert wasn’t bad enough, the one city to be found was run by Tina Turner in a fright wig.
Even with a “happy” ending (hey kids, we get to live in scenic, decimated Sydney, Australia!), the message was clear: The future sucks. But survive in it, and you earn a Samuel L. Jackson B.A. degree (Denzel in The Book of Eli
Living through the bitter end is the greatest challenge. Entertainment depicting a sunny tomorrow is fun. Yet the greater adventure is when, if the future’s so bright you gotta wear shades, it’s because the Earth is hurtling towards the Sun and we’re all melting.
A Tomorrowland where the final frontier is so ... final is more intriguing. There’s a primal connection to surviving “out there,” and trying to find something to eat without getting eaten.
When it comes to the last gasp of humanity, I’m a zombie-head. I prefer scenarios where a ragtag group of survivors fight off hordes of the walking (or shuffling or running) dead craving a little filet o’ flesh. Hence the reason I've spent more than a few nights staying up playing Left 4 Dead 2
But if re-animated corpses aren’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer apocalypse porn to be in the form of the cataclysmic planetary pole realignment, as in 2012
Whether it’s the aforementioned zombie attacks (George A. Romero’s oeuvre, Zombieland
Plus, apocalypse porn can be viewed in a practical way.
It is great training watching the ugly stuff where mankind is crawling towards extinction; where the survivors are few, the good guys even fewer and Charlton Heston is the apparent king of Dystopia (well, based on Planet of the Apes
Be it the fascination with the Mayans, or the Camping Rapture or armageddon movies, our affinity for end-of-days entertainment definitely says something about us - but I don't believe it's that we're a culture of joyless wretches who have lost all hope in a better world.
In fact, It's open to interpretation, but McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road sums it up nicely for me. The Pulitzer-winning work - perhaps the bleakest piece of pop I'm aware of - is about a father and young son trying to maintain their humanity while staving off starvation and sickness, and avoiding cadres of cannibals, on a dead highway to the coast.
But at one low point, the father says to his boy, "when your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be ... you have given up."
To me, this means our dreams of a blissful world where Elroy zooms to school and Rosie the Robot cleans the house is a rose-colored distraction. End-of-days entertainment is a cautionary tale, a scared-straight warning of what could be.
Maybe as long as we’ve pop culture that warns us the end is near, we will be less interested in having an apocalypse now - or anytime soon.