I just watched the film, Knowing, starring Nic Cage as an MIT professor of astrophysics (why not?) who faces an escalating series of catastrophes. Spoiler warning: it doesn’t end pretty for Nic or the rest of us. Turns out the sun is getting ready to emit a solar flare that incinerates all life on our fair planet. Who knew?
Evidently, we did. In fact, we know a lot. We know our world could flood (Waterworld), comets could pummel us multiple times over (Deep Impact, Armageddon), a sudden ice age could bury civilization (Day After Tomorrow), humans could become infertile (Children of Men), and a cure for cancer could mutate into a virus that either kills or alters survivors into feral animals (I Am Legend). And these visions only scratch the surface of what could happen.
Now, we also know that these things are all highly improbable - and even scientifically erroneous on a ridiculous scale - but we know them in the sense that we know there are certain natural vulnerabilities to the lives we otherwise take for granted. We also know that knowing is half the battle (thank you, G. I. Joe). To know is to retain a certain amount of perceived control, or at least a sense of agency in the very act of knowing. Indeed, that is the underlying theme and ultimate frustration of the film Knowing. Having foreknowledge of events does not necessarily stop them from happening, yet knowing they are going to happen - and thus seeing a kind of pattern to the events (however chaotic) - helps the characters make sense and find peace (even faith) in the face of cataclysm.
But can we know too much? Aside from the perennial interpretations of apocalyptic films that probably have something to do with Freud’s theory of the death drive or some more spiritual interpretation about our own curiosity about mortality, I wonder if such visions of our fate have less to do with death itself than with knowing far too many possible ways to die.
Further, in a WSJ.com article this past weekend, “Hollywood Destroys the World,” the authors note that there has been a shift in recent years (especially after 9/11) to films that are post-apocalyptic. The last-second salvation found in films like Armageddon no longer appears to be an option. Even in Knowing, the hope is not for those on Earth but for those who leave it (in a literal and disappointing deus ex machina twist). Earth itself is swallowed by the reach of the sun’s radiated belch, and in the film we get a long sequence of scenes showing exactly how our world will be destroyed (well, the world of Boston and New York, since those are the only areas worth destroying on screen - except maybe LA). Moreover, as the article notes, the next set of films are post-apocalypses of varying kinds, including 2012, which has a graphically destructive trailer circulating already:
Yet rather than the usual religio-psychological reasoning for obsessing over our own demise, could this post-apocalyptic shift, from the 90s to the 2000s, be construed as a kind of exhaustion from knowing too much? There are simply too many things that could destroy everything we know - and we know those many things well enough to envision them happening to us over and over and over again. Even the Mayan prediction looks like it will be interpreted as a global upheaval of the earth’s crust, causing any number of disasters - notably the exaggerated force of the tsunamis that recently hit southeast Asia.
But maybe at a certain point, knowing just isn’t enough. Thus we experience our world being destroyed, or we imagine surviving in a world fundamentally transformed, without the kind of grand-scale hope that celebrated the nuking of that hurdling meteor in Armaggedon.
However, knowing too much does not negate hope entirely. After all, even the ultimate apocalypse in the fantastic documentary and History Channel series, Life After People, still offers the hope that Earth itself will survive our ravages, thus offering a kind of postmortem redemption regardless of what the future holds. Knowing that life goes on at all is perhaps the only knowledge worth gaining from these prophetic visions, regardless if we’re still in the picture or not.
