I started watching Waterworld (1995) yesterday. My takeaway? Our apocalypses betray us.
Post-apocalyptic media is just as much about what remains the same after the apocalypse as what has changed. Fundamentally the contemporary “post-apocalyptic” genre doesn’t really imagine a different world, just scarcer material goods. The Mad Max series, The Walking Dead series, and the printed literature that accompanies them (as just a few examples among many others) presents us with the same social conditions we currently have: late capitalism, total war, oil-based technology, fiat currency, personality cults formed around populist leaders, creation reduced to mere matter, the kind of tribalism that can only exist within our contemporary superstructures of regional control, classic rugged individualism, milquetoast nihilism, etc.
Stories such as these are fascinating not because they imagine a possible future, but because they shed light on and expose the collapse of the age in which we already live. Most often they take the bones of biblical cataclysm (flood, exodus in wilderness, Leviathan, consuming tempest, civilizational collapse, etc.) and apply the conditions of secular modernity. If you’ve seen or read any of the stories I’m referencing you’ll know: secular modernity doesn’t do well under biblical cataclysm.
A few examples might be instructive:
“Mad Max” is the Exodus narrative without the God of Moses.
“Waterworld” is the Flood without Yahweh’s covenant with Noah.
“The Walking Dead” is the conquest of Canaan without the Angel of the Lord, commander of the Host of Heaven.
“The Book of Eli” is an inverted Jonah story, where he makes it to Tarshish, and the Word of the Lord is not preached to the city.
What Charles Taylor has called our “Secular Age” cannot imagine a future without itself —without secularism. We believe the world will end, but not our political order in which the State itself is God. Insofar as we imagine this we expose our inner conviction as a society that Secular modernity is the Kingdom of God, which will not pass away though heaven and earth be destroyed (Dan. 2:44; Matt. 5:18-19; cf. Acts 14:22).
At the same time, however, these films and books also expose the death-rot in the house that secular modernity has built. And insofar as they do this they also invite us to imagine a world beyond Fury Road and Waterworld. What if secular modernity is not The End? What if, after everything that can be shaken is shaken, the thing that remains is not Neoliberal order, but the actual Kingdom of God (Heb. 12:27)?
It is this possibility we begin to hope for at the end of each of these stories. But, precisely because secular modernity cannot think beyond itself, it is just at the point of hope —at the point of resurrection— that the film or book must end. We cannot fathom the resurrection of the world after the collapse of secular polity without the God of the Resurrection.
It is hard to kick against the goads (Acts 26:14).