Apocalyptic themes prevail heavily in the films Apocalypto, Children of Men, and 28 Days Later. While these movies use different plot schemes and settings, they converge at the portrayal of a largely apocalyptic event in which doom has disrupted the world “as we know it” and created a post-millennialist scenario. Through graphic and technological means, these films offer visual representations of the awaited and questionably irrevocable doomsday experience.
I am definitely interested in the romantic elements of apocalyptic phenomenon that are redefined by these films. In all three films, we sense the transitioning roles of men and women, which serve to mimic the chaos and social disruption that coincide with the end of time and civilization. As Lee points out in her essay, “The Days are Numbered’; the Romance of Death, Doom, and Deferral in Contemporary Apocalypse Films”,
“In these films, themes of lost fertility, for both humanity and the earth, the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction, and the blurring of masculinity and femininity abound as prime ways of expressing destruction, chaos, doom—and sometimes hope.” (5)
We witness this blurring of masculinity and femininity across a wide range of scenarios. In Apocalypto, Jaguar Paw serves as the protagonist/ hero who fights his way to salvation in the midst of the Mayan apocalypse, which comes in the form of his tribe’s capture. However, Jaguar’s wife, Seven, equally represents a heroic figure as she braves her way through pregnancy, managing to keep herself and her son alive in this moment of complete and utter obliteration of their people. Similarly, in 28 Days Later, Selina is set up as the brave and macho heroine from the get go, leading the remaining uninfected individuals to safety and not hesitating to kill anyone who may get in the way of her plan. On the other hand, Jim represents the man who requires frequent saving and guidance from Selina, thus altering the banal romantic cliché in which the woman in distress is saved by the man only and the action can never reciprocate. Ultimately Jim does gain the strength and adeptness to come to the rescue of Selina and Hannah, but this took some time to map out. Similarly, Julian in Children of Men instantly portrays a heroic leader when she tries to get pregnant Kee, the only source of hope for the future, onto the ship with the Human Project; in doing this, she embodies the “idealism” and romanticism of a heroic figure as well. So we can see that these apocalyptic narratives abide by some romantic themes, but certainly redefine them in terms of “particular” objectives.
The emphasis on women has some contradictory messages. On the one hand, we see that women are considered the only source of hope for the future through fertility. The motif of pregnancy in Apocalypto and in Children of Men furthers this concept, considering the strong focus on the pregnant “belly”. This certainly fits into the post-modern apocalyptic lens through which Rosen depicts elements of a hopeful future. At the same time, however, women’s fertility and sexual prominence also poses a threat to the social order, creating a “vehicle for chaos.” In 28 Days Later, climactic chaos ensued when Jim and the others learned that the men at the base were hungry for women and planned to rape Hannah and Selina in order to propagate for the future. This leads us to question the extent to which the post-apocalyptic world can be considered egalitarian. On the one hand, the romantic element is elucidated by female bravados in these films. And yet, it may be this growing importance of the female in the post-apocalyptic world that destabilizes the civilization, or what’s left of it. It may be that such an idea prevails in the pre-apocalyptic era as well. After all, fertility was just as emphasized with the impotency of one of the tribesmen in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Such a scenario was quite surprising, especially in a primitive time where male power and reproductive ability were the prime aspects of their respectability in civilization. Being that this was a subject of focus prior to the capture, we can presume one of two things: either Gibson was setting us up for the apocalyptic disaster, and prepping us with instances of intimations of fertility, or women make up more of the romantic sector than we have always been taught to consider.
By analyzing these apocalyptic films through gender ambiguities and transformations, we can see that the apocalypse can definitely be understood from a romantic angle. It would seem as though the classification of doomsday films under a romance genre is a paradoxical symbol of hope. It would be much more settling to know that rebirth and apocalypse are a dynamic duo that work in collaboration rather than existing as two separate entities that cease to coexist in the post apocalyptic realm. By “beseeching us to seek endings to human-made suffering and to forge new ways to imagine actions of courage and conviction that have been too narrowly defined under the traditional romance of the hero”, these narratives may help rebuild the apocalyptic story from both a postive and reformational stance. Only then, would we start approaching the apocalypse as more of a new beginning rather than an end.
