A History of the End of the World (32 page)

Then, too, the very prospect of victory over the Axis by force of arms was something of a disappointment to the apocalyptic doomsayers precisely because the defeat of a mortal enemy, no matter how barbarous and cruel, was not equivalent to the defeat of Satan. “Uncle Sam will be no match for the Antichrist,” insisted the
Christian Digest
in 1942, alluding to the Armageddon yet to come and delighting in the knowledge that only the Lamb of God will be able to vanquish the ultimate villain. But neither Hitler nor Mussolini was the Beast: “The worst is yet to appear.”
¹²³

Ironically, the apocalyptic idea can be seen on both sides of the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism in World War II. The Nazis, like the first readers of Daniel and Revelation, “believed that they had arrived at the crucial moment in human history,” explains Damian Thompson. “A new heaven and a new earth was within the grasp of the Elect—so long as they did not yield to the forces of the enemy.” The Nazi leaders of Germany may have disdained the kind and gentle Jesus of the Gospels—“National Socialism and Christian ity are irreconcilable,” declared Martin Bormann in 1941
¹²⁴
—but Hitler plainly understood the terrible power of the millennial ideal: “There can be little doubt that the thousand-year reign of the saints lies behind the vision of a thousand-year Reich,” observes Thompson.
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Nazi Germany provides a case study of the terrible things that can happen when apocalyptic passion and true belief are fused in the hearts and minds of otherwise civilized human beings. “It is a grotesque irony that Nazism should have unconsciously adopted the structure of belief partly developed, though not necessarily invented, by the Jews,” Thompson points out, referring to the fact that the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism begins in the book of Daniel. “But in terms of blood or sheer malignant hatred of the enemy, Daniel and the earliest apocalypses do not begin to rival the Nazis’ apocalyptic struggle; for that we must got to the book of the Revelation.” For the Nazis, as for the author of Revelation, the adversary was imagined to be “pure evil…in human form” and “so resilient that he can be defeated only in a cosmic war,” a conviction on which they relied in carrying out the crimes of the Holocaust.
¹²⁶

Indeed, the “millenarian roots of Nazism” can be discerned in Norman Cohn’s masterful study of apocalyptic violence in the Middle Ages,
The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Cohn looked all the way back to such apocalyptic excesses as the mass murder of Jews during the First Crusade—but he was provoked into undertaking his work when, as an intelligence officer in World War II, he was called upon to interrogate captured SS men and thereby found himself face-to-face with “a mind-set ‘in which one can actually feel it is a
good
thing to shove small children into ovens or to send millions of people to starve and freeze to death.’”
¹²⁷

Still, the Second World War produced something wholly new in the apocalyptic tradition. The authors of Daniel and Revelation were capable of imagining the end of the world, but human experience seemed to confirm that the world was not so easily destroyed. After all, the extermination of humankind and the destruction of human civilization had proved to be far beyond the will or the power of the barbarians, the armies of Islam, the Spanish armada, or the Napoleonic battalions, all of which were seen as the work of Satan. Over and over again, the world had persistently refused to end.

At 5:30
AM
on July 16, 1945, the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico gave proof that the power to destroy the world actually exists. The successful test-firing of a nuclear weapon, code-named “Trinity,” produced a curious phenomenon: the silica in the desert sand was fused into solid glass for a distance of eight hundred yards in every direction from ground zero. For the reader of Revelation, the spectacle calls to mind one of the visions of the throne of God as it is described in the ancient text.

Indeed, the sight of the first thermonuclear explosion in the history of the world inspired an apocalyptic vision in J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb, but he borrowed from Hindu tradition to describe what he glimpsed in the smoke and fire: “I am become Death,” Oppenheimer later mused, quoting the words of Vishnu, “the destroyer of worlds.”
¹²⁹

To discern
any
deity in the iconic mushroom cloud at Trinity, however, misstates the significance of what Oppenheimer was beholding at that moment—a scientific experiment that demonstrated the power of humankind to destroy itself. With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the Apocalypse took a quantum leap into a new and previously unimaginable realm, and humankind was suddenly forced to confront the awful knowledge that the end of the world does not require God at all.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Surely some revelation is at hand….

W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
Y
EATS,
The Second Coming

A
n intimate apocalypse is played out in the final scenes of
On the Beach,
a 1959 motion picture that imagines a nuclear war with no survivors at all. An exchange of atomic bombs has created a toxic cloud of radioactivity that drifts around the globe, silently killing all living creatures in its path, and the last human survivors are awaiting the same fate in distant Australia. Every single man, woman, and child on earth—including Gregory Peck in the role of a U.S. nuclear submarine captain and Ava Gardner as his Australian love interest—will die of radiation sickness, slowly, surely, and horribly, unless they figure out a way to take their own lives first.

At first glance,
On the Beach
might seem to be yet another variation on the apocalyptic theme that can be detected in the countless books and movies of the late 1940s and 1950s in which the end of the world is depicted. Sometimes the agent of destruction is an extraterrestrial invasion or an ecological catastrophe, but more often it is an atomic war or a monster who exists only because of a genetic mutation caused by the radioactive hell on earth. All of these artifacts of pop culture, like
On the Beach
itself, share the same sense of gloom and doom that was first injected into the American consciousness by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and only mounted as the United States and the Soviet Union competed with each other to achieve parity in their ever-growing nuclear arsenals—a policy of reciprocal nuclear deterrence later known as “mutual assured destruction” or, more simply and aptly, “MAD.”

But
On the Beach
is not a restaging of Revelation in modern dress, and neither God nor the Devil is given a role in the end of the world. Rather, blame is placed solely and squarely on human beings: “The whole damned war was an accident,” explains a scientist, played by an aging and world-weary Fred Astaire, who is poisoned with remorse over his role in the design of atomic weaponry long before he faces the prospect of death by radiation sickness. “In the end, somehow granted time for examination, we shall find that our so-called civilization was gloriously destroyed by a handful of vacuum tubes and transistors.” And then he adds in a bitter aside: “Probably faulty.”

God is invoked only twice in
On the Beach,
and only rhetorically. A Salvation Army preacher delivers a final sermon to a sparse crowd that gathers on the street where government-issue suicide pills are being handed out. “O Lord, give us strength,” he intones. “Help us to understand the reason for this madness on earth, the reason why we have destroyed ourselves.”
¹
And an earnest young naval officer, played by Anthony Perkins, reflexively invokes the deity while anguishing over his fatherly duty to administer a dose of poison to his infant daughter when the first symptoms of radiation sickness appear: “God,” he mutters, “God forgive us.”

Indeed,
On the Beach
strays from apocalyptic tradition in both Judaism and Christian ity for the simple reason that the movie holds out no hope for survival even by a few saints and martyrs: everyone on earth will surely die, whether by suicide or by radiation sickness, and history will come to an end, final and unredeemed. Indeed, that’s what distinguishes
On the Beach
from most of the other books and movies of the postwar era in which the story line focuses on the undaunted survivors. One of the most affecting moments, in fact, is the scene in which the young naval officer, having already administered a fatal dose to his baby, prepares a cup of poison-laced tea for his negligee-clad wife. So far, she has refused to accept the fact that the world will end, but now she is resigned to her fate: “Darling, I’m ready for my tea” are her last words, a coded expression of utter hopelessness and helplessness.

Here, then, is a God-less apocalypse in which human beings have no one to blame except themselves—and, crucially, no one to whom they may turn for rescue or redemption. The point is made in the last frame of
On the Beach,
where we see for a second time the inspirational banner that was previously displayed at the Salvation Army rally. The banner, now tattered and windblown, flies over a street that is utterly devoid of human life, and its encouraging message is shown to have been wholly and tragically wrong: “THERE IS STILL TIME, BROTHER.”
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Even if the Apocalypse according to Hollywood allows no role for God, the fact remains that
On the Beach
carries a few strands of the theological DNA that can be found in Revelation and Daniel. Some of the same shocks and thrills that men and women once found in altarpieces or block prints of an earlier age—Michelangelo’s scenes of the Last Judgment on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, or Dürer’s illustrated edition of
The Apocalypse of St. John—
are now displayed and contemplated on the silver screen. All of these products of the human imagination, from Daniel and Revelation to the latest apocalyptic movie or miniseries, ask the same old and scary questions: When and how will the world come to an end, and what will happen next?

On the Beach
is perhaps the single most despairing expression of an apocalyptic state of mind that seized the American imagination in the 1940s and 1950s—“the postwar ‘doom boom,’” according to Stephen D. O’Leary, a scholar and critic who specializes in the study of the apocalyptic idea in modern politics and popular culture.
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Rather than avenging archangels like Gabriel and Michael, however, the celestial figures in the pop-culture version of the end-times are men from Venus or Mars, and instead of the satanic beasts of Revelation, the monsters are reptilian creatures like Godzilla or mutant insects like the oversize ants in
Them.
But it is also true that apocalyptic science fiction is concerned with exactly the same hopes and fears that are addressed in the book of Revelation—and, like Revelation (but unlike
On the Beach
), most of the books and movies that imagine the end of the world also imagine a New Heaven and a New Earth in which the Elect will survive and thrive.

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the old subjects of art,” observes critic and cultural observer Susan Sontag in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” “[S]cience fiction allegories are one of the myths about—that is, one of the ways of accommodating to and negating—the perennial human anxiety about death. (Myths of heaven and hell, and of ghosts, had the same function.)”
⁴

Significantly, God appears not at all in the bulk of apocalyptic science fiction in the postwar era. Even
Deus Irae,
by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, a theologically sophisticated novel about the quest for God by the limbless survivor of a nuclear holocaust, ends with the shattering revelation that the “God of Wrath” whom he seeks is, in fact, the government scientist who devised “the evil instruments which had shown up the ‘God’ of the Christian Church for what he was”—that is, an impotent if not wholly imaginary deity.
⁵

“The final enemy which Paul had recognized—death—had had its victory after all; Paul had died for nothing,” write Dick and Zelazny, referring to the biblical apostle. “Death was not an antagonist, the last enemy, as Paul had thought; death was the release from bondage to the God of Life, the Deus Irae. In death one was free from Him—and only in death.”
⁶

Salvation in apocalyptic science fiction, when it is available at all, comes not from God but from human beings. The title of
The Omega Man,
of course, refers obliquely to the book of Revelation (“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last”), but the hero of the movie is a mortal man, played by the ruggedly handsome Charlton Heston, who manages to defeat the deformed and slightly demonic survivors of a catastrophic biological war only because he possesses a submachine gun, an electrical generator, a supply of gasoline, and a laboratory where he succeeds in concocting a cure for the plague that killed or maimed everyone else on earth. The movie ends with a distinctly Christological image—the character played by Heston, struck down by a spear, dies in the posture of Jesus on the cross—and the last hope for the survival of humankind is a flask of his own blood, but only because it contains the vital antibodies that will preserve the lives of the rest of the survivors.

“Christ, you could save the world,” says one of the hopeful survivors to the thoroughly human savior, and one of the last children on earth asks: “Are you God?”
⁷

The same theme—scientist as savior—could be discerned among fleshand-blood scientists who felt themselves called to a kind of secular prophecy in the postwar world. The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
for example, devised the so-called “Doomsday Clock” as a consciousness-raising device to call the attention of politicians, generals, and the citizenry to the deadly implications of nuclear proliferation. But the Doomsday Clock, an icon of the Cold War era, played on the same anxieties that have afflicted the human imagination since biblical antiquity: “Like the first followers of Jesus and John the Baptist,” observes Stephen D. O’Leary, “the scientists who attempted to enter the political arena in the late 1940s were animated by the urgent conviction that time was short and destruction was sure unless our course could be changed.”
⁸

The decoupling of God and the end-times in politics and popular culture was complete by the mid-1960s, and it was even possible to regard the end of the world as an appropriate object of gallows humor.
On the Beach,
released in 1959 and set in 1964, contemplates the end of the world with utter despair. By 1964, of course, the world was still intact, and when Stanley Kubrick took a second look at the same scenario, he saw it as a laughing matter. The world ends once and for all in
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
but now it is the occasion for the blackest of black comedies.

Human failings alone are once again to blame in
Dr. Strangelove.
A rogue U.S. Air Force general launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in the mad hope of convincing the president to order a full-scale attack. “Well, boys, I reckon this is it,” says one of the B-52 pilots as he trades his helmet for a battered cowboy hat. But it turns out that the Soviets have secretly deployed a “doomsday device” that is programmed to respond to an American attack by detonating a mammoth cache of thermonuclear explosives and thereby creating “a doomsday shroud”—“a lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years” and “destroy all human and animal life.” If a single bomb falls on Soviet soil, the world will be inevitably and irretrievably destroyed.

Kubrick and his collaborators on
Dr. Strangelove
do not mention God or the Devil at all, but they may have been mindful of the end-time scenario of Revelation when they devised the final scene of the movie. Faced with the utter destruction of humankind, the demented scientific genius called Dr. Strangelove holds out the bright hope of a New Heaven and a New Earth. A few hundred thousand men and women—“a nucleus of human specimens”—can be sheltered “at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts” for a century or so. Men would be selected for their potency and women for their sexual allure. Like the ancient readers of Revelation who imagined the millennial kingdom as an era of abundance, the postnuclear New Earth would be a sensual paradise for those who survived to see it.

“Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” explains Dr. Strangelove. “But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work back to the present gross national production within, say, twenty years.” And when the survivors finally emerge from the abyss, the men and women who had been judged worthy to live in the New Earth will be ready for the brave new world that they will find on the surface: “The prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind,” he concludes, “combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead.”
⁹

At precisely the moment of greatest optimism, however, a single American aircraft reaches its target in the Soviet Union, the doomsday device is triggered, and the atmosphere is suddenly filled with a series of mushroom-shaped clouds, the iconic image of the atomic age. Like
On the Beach
—and, again, quite unlike the other books and movies in the apocalyptic genre—
Dr. Strangelove
ends with no hope of human survival. “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when,” goes the song that plays beneath the final fugue of thermonuclear detonations. The song would be an appropriate soundtrack to the book of Revelation, but now the words are purely and bitterly ironic.

N
ot everyone in America in the postwar era, however, shared the secular and cynical outlook that characterizes
Dr. Strangelove.
For a great many men and women, the comforting certainties of old-time religion—including the end of the world as it is depicted in the premillennialist reading of Revelation—remained very much alive. Indeed, two different and contesting apocalyptic ideas coexist in America, one based on science and the other based on religion. For the religious true believer, the prospect that the world might end in a nuclear conflagration is perfectly consistent with the belief that God, rather than humankind, will be its author.

“Some day we may blow ourselves up with all the bombs, [b]ut I still believe that God’s going to be in control,” declared the Reverend Charles Jones, pastor of a Baptist church in Amarillo, Texas, whose congregants included many of the men and women who worked at the nearby Pantex hydrogen-bomb assembly plant. “If He chooses to use nuclear war, then who am I to argue with that?”
¹⁰

Christian fundamentalism, in fact, produced its own pop-culture version of the Apocalypse, including books, movies, comics, posters, and miscellaneous items of inspirational merchandise. The true believer might buy and wear a “Rapture watch” whose face carried a message to remind the wearer that the end is nigh—“One hour nearer the Lord’s return”—or display a dashboard plaque that was meant to alert passengers that the driver might be “raptured” to heaven at any moment: “If you hear a trumpet, grab the wheel.”
¹¹