One of the forgotten aspects of the seventies is the prevalence of Christian eschatology in American pop culture. Events such as the oil crisis, Watergate and Three Mile Island caused people to lose their faith in economics, politics and science, respectively, and a large number of Americans began looking to religion to find a definitive source of meaning. Christian eschatologist Hal Lindsey’s book The Late Great Planet Earth was highest selling non-fiction book of the 1970s, leading to a psuedo-documentary film version narrated by Orson Welles.
The Late Great Planet Earth begins with a sequence that has been made ironic by the passage of time. Angry villagers chase a prophet onto a cliff, pelting him with stones until he plunges to his death. His crime? His prophecies didn’t come true. In 2009 we are long overdue for many of the global catastrophes that Lindsey depicts in his film and advancing technology and changing global politics have rendered some of his predictions impossible.
The film is still greatly effective if not terrifying in parts. Most chilling is the prediction of a virus that sounds unmistakably like AIDS a full two years before the CDC would recognize the disease. Other topics discussed in the film are still plausible, some even more likely now than in the seventies. To his — and the filmmakers’ — credit, Lindsey obtained interviews with respected figures from the scientific and political worlds; a fact that separated his film from the legions of other “docsploitation” works that prophesied the end of the world in the 1970s.
In addition to the few nuggets of plausibility that exist in The Late Great Planet Earth, the film has obtained a new relevance in modern America. Eschatology and end-times prophecies have returned to our cinematic consciousness in a large way due to recent global events. Though speculative documentaries are now solely the domain of television, seven of the twenty-five highest grossing films of 2009 feature some type of massive global destruction or end time scenario. Still to come is the much-hyped 2012, which is based on an apocalypse scenario from Mayan eschatology.
It is likely that audiences find a sense of comfort by using eschatological cinema as an avenue to explore their anxiety about the world through the safety of entertainment. One would hope that the recent popularity of such themes would cause a revival of the last batch of eschatological films like The Late Great Planet Earth. Perhaps then audiences could take comfort in the fact that pronouncements of the end of the world have always been wrong. So far, at least.
by David Carter | Source: DVD
11 Nov 2009 11:15 PM | Submit Comment
