chiller blog

Posted Nov 12, 09 09:13 AM

9-1-1: 2012

I grew up afraid, because I didn't think I'd be able to finish growing up.

Call it an irrational level of fear that no bedtime tuck-in could ever rationally eliminate. And don't linger on the remote possibility that the fiction of movies prematurely and negatively impression-ed my young mind. The truth is, between the fear culture propagated by the evening news, the local paper and Sunday mass, I was sufficiently traumatized.

I was never one for monsters in my closet, nor shadows under my bed. I dealt with realities, like the looming allusion of not living to see the fourth grade. Thanks, nuclear arms race. You made it a picnic to watch Irwin Allen's resume play out. (But scratch The Night the Bridge Fell Down, the master of disaster's TV opus which had the short straw misfortune to run against the last episode of M*A*S*H*.)

Naturally, along came moments to breathe easier, when mankind's destruction scaled back to just my little ol' demise. Once, when KFYR-TV kept bombarding an after-school special with scrolling tornado watches, my big brother Charlie tied me (bawling) to a dining room chair. Thoughtful: getting that front-row view of a severe thunderstorm. Cruel? Well, we never did play "Sorry, The Front Door Is Locked" when I had to brave a blizzard and hightail it to the mailbox and back.

Mortal fear. And beyond. Call it genetic predisposition, but throughout history, every generation dreaded that theirs might be "it," ours included. The Dark Ages ushered in plagues, triggering a colossal infrastructure collapse. The Great War was downgraded to World War I after World War II. Thankfully, the only WORLD WAR III so far was an NBC miniseries starring Rock Hudson as the President. Y2K turned out to be the equivalent of a stunt-pulled fire alarm. Now, no more than a decade removed, put your "whew"s on hold. A not-so-new apocalypse theory is ticking, ticking, ticking -- 2012.

Not familiar? Neither was I. It's goes like this: The French soothsayer Nostradamus - whose prophecies EndTimers "aha!" to and others dismiss as vague and apply-it-to-all "retroactive clairvoyance" - curiously stopped making centuries of predictions past the infamous date. The Maya Long Count Calendar ends in - yes - 2012 (Too bad no one flipped it over and found "January" listed above a Golden Retriever in front of a fireplace). And scientific red flags from global warming to abrupt irregularities in the sun's activity indicate a catechism of cataclysm.

Oy. Why do I suddenly feel the scared Inner Kid stirring inside me?

"We Were Warned," heralds 2012. It's not a Texas-size asteroid, but rather Columbia Pictures' end of the world spectacle smashing into theaters nationwide on November 13. Whatever factuals and hypotheticals aren't in line - don't ask me, I got a B in Physical Science -- the film dangles the queasy carat of worst-case scenarios, then full-on embraces the wholesale destruction route. And delivers. This is the sort of big budget popcorn entertainment - puppy dog rescues, ech, included - that propels you into fascinating latte talk AFTERWARDS about what the movie didn't have the breath to discuss DURING. With all those tsunamis, a supervolcano, 9.4 earthquakes and floodwaters spilling down the Himalayas, why bitch?

Especially when the character moments aren't relegated into the perfunctory. John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Woody Harrelson and George Segal work hard to render genuine immediacy - and even humor - to the globe-circling storylines. That makes startling visions of Hawaii on fire and skyscrapers tumbling into freeways a palatable, even thrilling 158 minutes that curiously - and relievedly -- feels like 120.

I site John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) as the granddaddy of all-star disaster films (assorted types trapped together on a mode of transportation in peril). Airport (1970) resurrected the genre. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) defined escapist fare - with a subtle spiritual quest subtext, although the desert Gene Hackman's reverend leader ushered his flock out from was the steel and iron belly of an overturned ocean liner. The cycle's height - obvious pun intended - was marked by The Towering Inferno (1974), which extolled as much class as cold-blooded irony. Thirty-five years later, the willingness to not merely knock off beloved cast members but to incinerate them and send them flying out of scenic elevators 90 floors above terra firma…well, it's still nightmare-inducing for young eyes.

The cycle ran out of calamity and steam by the early '80s. Box office disappointments The Swarm, The Concorde: Airport '79, When Time Ran Out, and Avalanche (which committed the cardinal sin of using scratchy stock footage) pushed the genre to TV. Lower budgets only lent to excessive padding. Hanging By a Thread - the story of a cable car trapped thousands of feet over a mountain drop - somehow was stretched into two 100 minute segments. That's longer than Titanic.

But leaps in CGI kick-started disaster in the '90s. Suddenly, James Cameron's ship of dreams could sail, Tommy Lee Jones was routing lava down Wilshire Blvd., and the world leapfrogged into a new Ice Age with director Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow. Personally, I miss the star-boxed posters. The upper crust production designs, fantastically crumbled. The dramatic audacity of Shelly Winters-style heroine's "not making it." But I do note that disaster has evolved into a no-glue-showing special effects spectacular where sugared-up pacing and an injection of middle class roles bring the proceedings down to earth, even when the earth is blown into the stratosphere.

In 2012, Roland Emmerich - among an impossible-not-to-take-heed-of list of stylistic and iconic retirements - decimates the White House and Los Angeles (each for the second time in his career). But with such a fatalistic subject, he intones the proceedings with a lighter, accessible breathlessness. When asked where he'd be on the legendary December 21, 2012, the director replied in stride, "I'd choose the highest mountain in the world and go skiing. And if I'm wrong (and nothing happens) - eh."

So who's right? Who can pacify my Inner Kid, worries still skating visions too real of the end of the world? On its recent press junket in Yellowstone (which - SPOILER ALERT - was remarkably intact), Columbia Pictures ushered in three scholars of 2012, each with a distinctly different pedestal.

The first: Daniel Pinchbeck, journalist, psychedelic and author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He contends that humankind has erroneously dismissed the knowledge of previous civilizations as superstition, and that our current age of biosphere (the natural world), technosphere, and noosphere (the world of our internal consciousness) are on unsustainable paths. From an eroding timetable of ecological crisis, Pinchbeck predicts the date will usher in a transformation where - albeit painfully - modern science integrates with mysticism...for those who remain.

Devoting his career to the reconstruction of ancient Maya cosmology is John Major Jenkins. His book, Maya Cosmogenesis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calendar End-Nate, stresses that 2012 - when a rare galactic alignment, indeed, will occur - has been misconstrued, misinterpreted, and mishandled from academia all the way through pop culture histrionics. Shouldn't we take a step back, Jenkins contends, and examine the Maya calendar not from our point of view, but theirs?

Hmm. OK, now my Inner Kid's heart is beating just a little bit slower.

Transformation. Renewal. From the Maya philosophy, these are the signals of cyclical end-dates. And when the Earth, Sun, and Milky Way geometrically rack up, Jenkins cautions us to reconsider possibilities that aren't predetermined to be destructive. For example, even the Bible states that, on the subject of the Second Coming, no one knows the hour - which would be a smack-on-the-head contradiction to the neon airship subtlety of the whole 2012 theory. I relax in Jenkins' scholarly reconstruction, tracking his documented treks through the Maya ruins in Guatemala. He even points out that the term "apocalypse" actually means "unveiling." What's behind the veil is not necessarily to be feared, only revealed.

Inner Kid, meet Lawrence E. Joseph. His work - aside from helping design a plasma-powered furnace that can obliterate toxic waste (wow!) - is Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization's End.

The heart beats faster. But Joseph has a mildly dark yet oddly relaxing sense of humor about the whole shebang. "You're in the 2012 business for a while," says Joseph. "you develop a fondness for doom."

What doom may come?

The galaxy is drifting through a deep space energy cloud, leading to uncharacteristic solar activity from the Sun, whose own storms trigger Katrina-like storms on planet number three. Earth's magnetic field is cracking, resulting in polar shifts. And Yellowstone is explored below ground for what it truly is - a supervolcano milleniums past due for world-shattering eruption.

And just when I was getting caught up with my Roth IRA. Right now, I could sure warm to a John Cusack reaction shot. Really, what contemporary actor better projects a sense of characters deep in thought while still weighed in the predicaments of Everyman humanity?

Buoyed by scholarship and a sense of self-deprecation, Joseph advocates, at least, a partial solution: the implementation of a network of surge suppressors to protect against elusive solar storms knocking down Earth's power grid. Imagine this planet without electricity for a couple years and one can easily grasp the immediacy of his level message.

Pushing the message, Joseph flat out (on page 34 of his book) puts the question to Carlos Barrios, a Mayan shaman:

"Is the world going to end on December 21, 2012?"

"No. Not necessarily. It could all go quite smoothly, in theory. People today are terrified. We live in an age of nuclear weapons, terror, plagues, natural disasters. The year 2012 has become a magnet for all those fears. It is being taken out of context by those who wish to play on people's anxieties. We don't see it as a time of destruction but rather as the birth of a new system."

Births are never a pleasant, pain-free picture. But Roland Emmerich's 2012, disarmingly, provides escape from the greatest fear of the greatest looming unknown.

Time for my Inner Kid to get an overdue power nap.