Photo by Joseph S. Angan
They say the world will end in 2012. Thousands have cited the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as the sign of the apocalypse, and many of us have begun to believe it—with or without the help of a Hollywood blockbuster or the History Channel.
Our reactions to this recent apocalyptic prediction are like our reactions to Y2K, but as we all saw, the world didn’t end at the beginning of the new millennium—at least, it didn’t end in the way that we all feared it would. We all expected dark days of wild, unbridled apocalyptic chaos; instead, we got days spent in the dark, with an LCD monitor to guide us.
Apocalypse, please
Every year, there has and always will be a movie about the end of the world. Though the paths toward and reasons for those fictional apocalypses vary, one thing remains the same: our fixation with the idea of our doom.
Media are “the shapers of this drama, and not merely its passive transmitters,” says Stephen O’Leary in his book, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Apocalypse-themed movies, books and TV shows don’t only feed our fear, but create and perpetuate it.
Fear plays a large role in the popularity of apocalyptic predictions, so much so that our society has become obsessed with it. It isn’t just that, though: according to O’Leary, people feel the need for “narrative closure” or an end to the story of their lives, because they like believing that their lives are movies. People have the tendency to create drama in their lives because they’ve been led to believe that human beings function better under stress.
And though it sounds too big a generalization, the idea of being one of a few survivors in a post-apocalyptic world appeals to our egos—perhaps because we feel that each one of us is special enough to have something inside that would prevent us from turning into zombies.
Waiting game
Popular meltdown scenarios include asteroids (Armageddon), tsunamis (Deep Impact), earthquakes (Aftershock) and volcanic eruptions (2012); others involve man-made disasters, such as a nuclear fallout (Dr. Strangelove), the spread of an incurable plague (Contagion), and a zombie apocalypse (Dawn of the Dead). According to Robert Hamerton-Kelly in his essay “Politics and the Apocalypse,” violence is a staple in any apocalypse-themed story, and is one of the key motifs in any apocalypse-themed production.
The second motif involves something less obvious: humanity. According to novelist John Scalzi in the article “Why We Love Our Post-Apocalyptic Flicks,” doomsday films offer “the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.” Almost every apocalypse-themed movie revolves around the idea of the main character finding a cure, other survivors or a haven. Viewers enjoy seeing people at their breaking point and love the way it twists their hearts when the hero finds himself alone and scared.
However, what we don’t like is when they do break and cannot save themselves, because we don’t want to imagine a situation in which humanity doesn’t survive. Hence, most of our apocalyptic fantasies stay as that: fantasies—things blocked by the fourth wall of the media. And though a small, sadistic part of us enjoys watching the heroes squirm under pressure, we call the safe world before any of it gets really out of hand.
Out with the old
Whether or not we want it to, the world is changing. In the past decade, we’ve seen global society go online. We’ve seen tsunamis, magnitude 10 earthquakes and eruptions from volcanoes with unpronounceable names. We’ve become witness to man-made disasters as well, thanks to terrorists, extortionists and Ponzi scammers.
We’ve grown up in a society that valorizes consumption, and we’ve all suffered for it. We’ve all become aware of the current environmental crisis, especially after Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth—but until recently, that’s all it’s been to most corporations: an inconvenience. After increased pressure from NGOs and from concerned citizens, more shopping malls have switched to eco-friendly bagging materials, and some cities and states all around the world have banned using plastic altogether.
Other than that, the widespread selflessness in the wake of typhoon Ondoy in 2009 highlighted the concealed truth that change in our attitudes can happen, and, in fact, after tropical storm Sendong, continues to happen. Instead of focusing on the lack of electricity and running water, most Filipinos decided to help each other out, rather than put themselves over everybody else.
Aside from that, the recent Occupy Movement signals a shift in cultural impulses as well—even if its effects weren’t so strongly felt in the Philippines. Seeing Americans rise up in protest against capitalism, which our modern economies are undoubtedly founded on, can be likened to watching tectonic plates moving: slow, but at one point, the ground will give way.
At home, protests have been held against real estate giant SMDC, not only in Katipunan but in Tagaytay as well, where SMDC has already begun building a condominium that will completely obscure the view of the once idyllic tourist spot. Slowly, we have begun to disdain the consumer capitalist culture that has governed our lives for so long.
Resetting calendars
The end of the world looms large over our collective consciousness, with the Mayan apocalypse set to come on December 21, 2012. What most of us don’t know, though, is that the Mayan Long Count calendar lasts 5,000 years—and resets. According to Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, for the Mayans, completing a cycle was a reason to celebrate, and “to render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.”
We think of our world as one in crisis—one going through a time of intense difficulty. However, many don’t realize that the Greek origin of the word “crisis” meant “decision.” We stand at a precipice, and it matters now, more than ever, how we face the world’s troubles. In most apocalypse-themed movies, the heroes and heroines only begin to act once the end of the world has descended upon them, but why should we wait?
Photo by Joseph S. Angan
With research and reports by Apa M. Agbayani and Cristina T. Tantengco
