In Frank Kermode’s The End, there is one particular passage that caught my attention. Kermode wrote: “We may be sure that the failure of 1964, or even so far of 1965, to produce atomic war and the burning of Paris will not have dismayed the author; his book is founded on centuries of disconfirmed apocalyptic prediction.” Kermode attributes disbelief as part of apocalyptic theories. In past two thousand years, many dates have been given to the End, and these dates have obviously not come true. The people that fabricated those dates and their followers truly believed that the End would come upon that date, but to other observers of history, such dates have come to mean very little. I am very skeptical of such dates, and as the closest apocalyptic date approaches, December 21, 2012, I have yet to fear the end of anything coming. Perhaps there will be a new awakening with in humans, who knows, but as of now, I prefer to not think about.
The failures of past Apocalypses keep me from believing in any future ones. I think that Kermode is trying to say that people would be much more surprised to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse descending from the sky then they are to see one of these theories fail. It is now expected. A new theory arises, a date is set, the date arrives, and the world simply continues.
Elizabeth K. Rosen talked about the word apocalypse in a sense that correlates with one of my past posts. She writes:
The application of the word apocalypse to this image of destruction was indicative of the
profound shift from a descriptive term that referred specifically to the hopeful biblical story
of ultimate judgment and reward, to an adjective now understood to be a synonym for the catastrophic or devastating.
I had spoken about not so much the use of the word apocalypse but of the Apocalypse, as an event, in movies. It is used as an excuse to create movies for entertainment because American moviegoers love a great scene in which a whole city obliterates into a million little pieces. The word and the event are tied to destruction rather than a hope. Rosen touches upon this new way at looking at the Apocalypse, an event in which there is no hope after the End, but just destruction. New Jerusalem is taken out of the equation and only destruction is left. This is what American culture finds entertaining. The only after that is included is what Rosen calls a new vision rather than a new eternal, peaceful city. This makes the idea of Apocalypse much more secular and more accessible and acceptable to a larger audience. The context is broadened in order to broaden the audience, but traditional version of Apocalypse is lost in the adaptation.
Both of these readings touched upon the evolution of Apocalypse and the changes it has seen. It has been adapted from the book of Revelation to a pop culture phenomenon that is contextualizing the idea of Apocalypse as a whole.
