CULTURE-USA: Hollywood Apocalypse

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 1996 (IPS) - With the approach of the millennium — and the intensification of anxieties afflicting the shrinking middle class — the spectre of an apocalyptic end to human life, or at least the “American Way of Life”, is haunting the world’s last remaining superpower.

Hollywood has not been slow to take advantage. Films about new and diabolical enemies, whose goal is precisely to destroy everything precious to the average U.S. family, have flourished since the end of the Cold War.

The silver screen has featured cunning but mad terrorists (mainly from the Middle East), drug traffickers (especially from Latin America), power-crazed dictators, foreign corporate tycoons, and even the U.S. government itself in roles evocative of the four horsemen of the biblical apocalypse, possibly even the Anti-Christ itself.

Perhaps the most interesting — and convincing — of these threats is not human at all. It’s a virus.

In these times of increasing environmental consciousness, global warming, AIDS, it seems there is something especially compelling about invisible microbes that get inside you and kill.

The rather disconcerting premise of the newly released film ‘Twelve Monkeys’ by sci-fi master Terry Gilliam (‘Time Bandits’ and ‘Brazil’) is that five billion people — virtually all of the human race — will die between the end of this year and some time in 1997, victims of an epidemic of biblical proportions.

A manic and often violent picture, it features one very confused time traveller (Bruce Willis) named Cole, who is literally plucked from a brutal and cavernous underground prison in the year 2035 and transported back into the 1990s to find out how and where the epidemic began almost 40 years before.

The apparent purpose is to report back to a rather loopy group of scientists (identified only by their white dress, white skin, and position of obvious authority), who hope to detect and recover the virus from its point of origin. (MORE)