“The days are numbered”: the romance of death, doom, and deferral in contemporary apocalypse films

Summary

Introduction

The concept of an end time has been a source of narrative inspiration for millennia. Indeed, tracing the range of ways to tell stories about the beginning as well as the end of time across time and culture is one way to pay tribute to the grand sweep of human imagination. Typically, stories of temporal endings carry a sense of threat. Even when, as in the ancient Egyptian world, there was no concept of a final end, but rather recurrent cycles of destruction and regeneration, the ends of days, months and decades were regarded as particularly vulnerable to disruption by demons (Cohn, 1993: 25). For most of human history, various civilizations have envisioned plural and overlapping times rather than a singular and linear time. It is only in the past two millennia that the concept of a final end-time, the Apocalypse, has taken hold, and even then primarily within a specifically Judeo-Christian framework (Weber, 1999). In this version, the end is not only final, it is decidedly deadly, an ultimate destruction of the earth and most of its inhabitants.

Although certain themes remain constant despite this shift from recurrent ends to a final end—for example oppositions between forces of order and chaos and good and evil—in the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse emphasis is placed on a monotheistic God as the ultimate cause of the final destruction, an outcome of unadulterated good over pure evil, and an eternal reward granted to a predetermined chosen group.