Conclusion: Post-Millennial Apocalypse

Abstract

Even if ‘the year 2000 did not take place’, as Baudrillard would have it, the post-millennial era has witnessed an increasing proliferation of images and narratives of apocalypse, disaster and trauma in literature, film and television. In its ability to be ‘disconfirmed without being discredited’ (Kermode 1967: 8), the End was projected to the next apocalyptic date, the year 2012, that served as material for genre fictions like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (2009), blockbuster movies like Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), or films from European art cinema like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). This latest recursion of the apocalyptic discourse, however, was coupled with an increasing sense that the apocalypse has already happened and we are ‘living in the end times’, to borrow the title of Slavoj Žižek’s book that begins with his suggestion that ‘the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point’ whose ‘four riders’ are ‘the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and explosions’ (x). Žižek’s contention is indicative of one of the most distinct features of post-millennial apocalypse, its increasing entanglement with discourses and practices associated with globalisation.