2012

By James Bowman
Not, I hope, to seem too much devoted to my one of my pop-cultural hobbyhorses, but the attraction of apocalypse movies to a mass audience seems to me to be essentially the same as the attraction of superhero movies. Both, that is, are forms of power fantasy designed to appeal to the younger -- and, increasingly, older -- adolescents for whom Hollywood movies are now made by satisfying the urge to be rid both of their feelings of weakness in relation to the adult world and their sense of helplessness under the crushing burden of the past. In Roland Emmerich's 2012 the frisson of excitement as we watch the collapse and utter destruction of the Washington Monument, the Vatican, the White House and (as you will have seen on the posters) the Art Deco Cristo Redentor that overlooks Rio de Janeiro cannot be unrelated to a general sense of relief at seeing the symbols of Western civilization at last deprived by raw nature of their power to intimidate.
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