Last year’s most popular film was the dystopian The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The most watched show in cable history is another post-apocalyptic favourite, The Walking Dead. It seems that we love to see our world destroyed.
What’s more, we find our fondness for destruction in pop culture reflected in our 24-hour news cycle. That, coupled with the relentless updates of Twitter and the Huffington Post, have provided an instant fear-of-collapse impulse to feed apocalyptic visions. Disappearing airliners and biological robots carry with them the uneasiness of possible dystopian futures.
The end is coming, it would seem, from any number of causes. Zombies. Viral outbreaks. Science run amok. Or, as in Snowpiercer, climate change and the failure of human technology. Our screens and pages are filled with similar apocalyptic scenarios, and we find them hidden too in our culture and politics and media.
No comments:
Post a Comment