Tag: #sst

Here again are my unedited and fairly ramshackle notes from the SST conference, second plenary session.

Michelle Fletcher from King’s College London summarised her paper ‘Edging towards the End: The Building of Disaster‘, an examination of the changing themes in disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Volcano, The Day after Tomorrow, 2012 etc.

Not an attempt to trace their respective eschatologies, but a broad brush assessment of themes and motives.

CHANGES IN EMPHASIS OVER DECADES

It’s a disaster – 1970s – criticism of hubris and technological pride and mismanagement. Developing love for those outside of your immediate circle.
Ending disaster – 1990s – the advance of sfx. Disasters averted by human collaboration. Who is saved? Witty banter introduced, levity.
In the Shadow of Disaster – 2000-10s – distance (a toning-down of first-person pulping), reversal of powers, salvation of those within your own realm (Greenland) and lack of societal connection.
The end of all things – 2020s – Greenland, Don’t look up – the requirement for human action to avert disaster. What is saved? Stuff (DLU), contesting of anthropocentrism (DLU again – flashing images of humans in the context of their environment and fellow creatures)

CRITERIA

Unpicking the Ends
Zone of Impact
Family
Who should be saved?

Don’t Look Up – ‘For the first time in the history of the planet, a species has the technology to prevent its own extinction’ – says the president in reference to nuclear weapons, with the potential to destroy the asteroid.

“During a scene where the President and staff offer ‘prayers’ for the world, her abominable
son Jason says the following:
‘There’s dope stuff, like material stuff, like sick apartments and watches, and cars, um, and clothes and sh*t that could all go away, and I don’t wanna see that stuff go away. So I’m gonna say a prayer for that stuff. Amen.'” (Fletcher 2022)

OUR OWN ENDS

Reversals: New Jerusalem – The question of the ‘stuff’ in Revelation – mimetic of the co-option of Roman grandeur and how this might go on to fuel Constantinian ambitions.
Systems: Outside are the Dogs
Borders: Written in the books – Written in the Lamb’s book of life, Angels on the gates, fornicators not in.
A different focus to the anthropocentric
A difference in ‘who makes it in’

RESPONSE FROM: SAMANTHA HARPER-ROBINS

A dancer, researcher in dance and embodiment studies – dance in the Hebrew Bible.

She described her resonance with the 90s era disaster – watching Armageddon hearing ‘Don’t want to miss a thing’ and witnessing the sacrifice: “There was hope for the world but what about Bruce Willis?!” What is the point in saving the world if we all meet with oblivion anyway? What of an afterlife? The 90s trope places the asteroid as an inevitable and irresistible levelling.

The English cultural upbringing where death is not something contemplated nor prepared for until it is present. We lack meaningful ritual contexts for preparation. The dead body has no spiritual meaning. The disaster movie serves this kind of function. ‘A disembodied cathartic ritual’. How does a developing awareness of intersectionality affect our understanding of the themes.

RESPONSE

Visceral memory – criticised as ’emotional pornography’ – the fast editing speed and the emotive soundtrack (Armageddon) – K-19 the widowmaker caused Fletcher the greatest reaction (not included because of genre – war film rather than disaster – so visceral that she will not forget nor watch again).

Cultural nods to Revelation and prophetic writings – underdeveloped and background knowledge (as in the ‘domestic’ US culture) ‘The worst bits of the Bible!’ / ‘Don’t you know what’s happening?! It’s the apocalypse man!’. In recent efforts The end has returned to a nuclear, heteronormative family as that which is preserved

RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR / ONLINE

1. Very neat endings, threads wrapped up. F – This contrasts with Revelation which has ‘The least neat ending ever – we’re left with the New Jerusalem hovering in the air, asking whether it’s ever going to land!’. Disaster movies need to end somewhere positive for the viewers after all the destruction. This is the notion of the Rebuild – in Skyscraper (2018) Dwayne Johnson is asked at the end what are you going to do? ‘Rebuild!’ Also the ‘waters receding’ in Deep Impact. Towering Inferno – ‘We’ll build better.’ Compare Speilberg with the ‘double ending’ where the ending is shown but then further expounded
2. The fate of ‘the baddies’ in reference to insider-outsider motifs in Revelation. F – in the 1970s – Towering Inferno has a punishing of evil in the death of the perpetrator of the faulty wiring. But there is necessary complexity for the sake of dramatic tension with regards to the salvation of morally questionable and the death of morally commendable characters.
   Revelation – a purging of the Earth – fornicators definitely out, reflecting cultic practices described in the Hebrew Bible.
3. Judith Wolf – The End of the World used as ‘the end of one’s personal world’ and therefore dealing with trauma. F – this is more explicitly present in television series and arthouse films. However, people have been shown to turn to these mainstream films. Post 9/11 there was a feeling to turn from making disaster films for an indefinite time. However, people resorted to renting disaster films as a means of therapy and identification.
4. To what extent do arthouse depictions deviate from heteronormative and other tropes? F – Hope is always there in the big hollywood disasters; Pandora’s box has been opened but it has to end in hope – flying birds, hints of a future. Without this, sales are negatively affected. Children of Men is more on the subject of the post-apocalyptic. There is an interesting cut-scene from Don’t Look Up with Oglethorpe attempting to make up with his estranged wife. Lot and Lot’s daughter ideas – pictures on the walls of houses in France, the visions of the end as an orgy and the politics of survivors.
5. B Movies – Earth-tastrophe etc. – do they exhibit the same themes? Where do the Left Behind movies fit?! A cartoonish take on the themes. Left behind on the other hand is ‘post-apocalyptic’ – what happens when society is completely re-ordered. Things so close to the Biblical material are harder to unpick and analyse because of our own proximity. Perhaps Left Behind is best understood alongside horror films, where the theological questions are around fear, what is motivating the terror etc.
6. The move of focus from bodily death to the abstract destruction of cities. How can we be helped in preparing for our own death and the death of our loved ones? F – Part of the fun of the disaster film is the tension of who will die when. Clubbing together – what should you do to stay alive? Don’t grab someone else’s place or nudge someone out of the way. Staring into the loved one’s eyes when you have no way out (2012, Greenland). Heteronormative loved ones. Also the older widowed man who speaks to the lost loved one who is waiting for you. It is more about thinking of what is important to you now – a good life is where you get to be old and go to the arms of our loved ones. We like buildings to speak for us – the things that survive and speak of the absence of human bodies
7. The opposite shift in Disney films vis the nuclear family – missing parents etc. Survival predicated on different kinships, inter-species. F – We must consider the audience; films targeted at children and to be watched by all. The nuclear family has always been a myth – there is always mess. The idea of Return, of broken families being restored. (Ed. does this parallel the ‘Rebuilding’ trope?) In 2012 Curtis is no longer married In Greenland an estranged family returning and re-establishing the family. In Deep Impact it is forgiveness for the errant father who has re-married. F – Not the real situation but the ideal. And causing us to ask ‘Who do I need to reconcile with?!’
8. Aaron Edwards, Cliff College – Is there a danger of reading the elitism in disaster movies into insider-outsider messages in Revelation? F – Revelation has elicited some really troubling ways of building societally – ‘Everybody doesn’t like Revelation until they realise they can use it against their enemies. They can use it rhetorically’ – the Whore of Babylon etc. But Revelation is a book dealing with collective and individual trauma, it isn’t aimed at one particular group. To approach the text responsibility we need to be mindful of the insights of trauma theory. F. throws the question back to the theologians.
9. Reception history of Revelation – Regarding the influenza outbreak in 1918 which caused people to reach for the Scofield Bible and how the dispensation and rapture propogated. F –
10. What will disaster movies look like post Russian invasion of Ukraine. F – Repeated showing of disasters leads to increase in donations. The research suggests an opening of empathy rather than a desensitization. We are helped by these dramatisations to relate. The lead time in film production means a 5 year delay in interpretation of events. Black Hawk Down was brought forward by 6 months because people wanted to see American soldiers being brave.

Two remaining questions: Are the Marvel films disaster films? F – not if it has supernatural figures – possible, plausible to happen now.
Someone observed that there was a decade-change at SST from the late 90s to now from papers featuring 20 pages on Barth towards the kind of pop cultural considerations this morning!

I am attending the Society for the Study of Theology conference at Warwick university. This year’s subject is ‘The End of the World’

In the first plenary, David Clough summarised his paper ‘The End of Creatures‘ with a further interaction from Marilu Bosoms and questions from the room and online delegates. Here are my disjointed notes.

The ‘end of the world has a history’ – survivors of Hiroshima spoke about it as such. Shierry Weber Nicholson speaks of trauma as ‘world-ending’ for the victims. Clough – ‘The ending of myriad human worlds that have come and gone’

The key question: ‘Who’s world is ending?’

1. A theology committed to God as creator of all that is must attend to the whole creation

2. ‘It’s all about us’ must be contested

Creatures and environments, and humans amongst them. Ps 104 and the impact of human industrial activities. An anthropogenic mass-extinction event. Ps. 104 written well after the ‘Quaternary Megafauna Extinction that made around half of large land mammals extinct.’ Gen 1-2 / Isaiah 11

99% extinction. Theology done on the grounds of creatures which have come to an end.

Scotus’ haeccity / G M Hopkins

Teilhard de chardin’s view of history – ends

‘God’s work of redemption is inclusive of all creatures’

RESPONSE FROM MARILU BOSOMS

Q. What are other compelling theological questions for caring for creation?

Animals reveal more facets of God’s fullness and reveal ways of making God known. Take Job’s command to ‘ask the beasts’ seriously.

The medieval emphasis – Aquinas ‘For God brought many things into being… might be supplied by another.’ [is this dependent upon scholastic metaphysics]

What does it mean to praise the creator of all with the knowledge of human complicity in their disappearance?

CLOUGH’S RESPONSE

At heart he is an ethicist – the exploration should extend beyond the reality of the praise psalms to the actual content of them.

Resistance to formulating theological explanations patterned upon Teilard. Rather focus upon the capacity – God making time and place for creatures, as much pre-comet as post. Thinking redemption in a more than human sense.

QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR

1. Ps. 104 re. God having a secure place for all – Divine failure rates! Do we only care about creatures when they live to a certain maturity level? Quite close to the problem of evil which we have strong reasons for not addressing theologically (clough)

2. What place do these creatures have for you in eschatological perspective? Descartes denied animal souls in order to ensure that Heaven remained a viable Christian doctrine. Because there would be too many bugs. Clough’s vision, by contrast is ‘ridiculously exuberant and maximally inclusive’.

3. Further to the previous: How does the non-competitive nature of God’s care apply to viruses and bacteria? Conservatively, one might say that viruses exist right at the boundary of living and unliving. Clough is ‘allegeric’ to this. A Christian theology cannot get by without reference to the fallenness of creatureliness. Irreconcilable conflict between human and non-human beings. Liberation from bondage must entail harmonious co-existence of creatures.

4. The questions of scale and cheerfulness – Clough’s greatest criticism is for those at the high extremes of both of these. Praise where there is simultaneously sorrow and joy? John Wesley’s sermon ‘The New Creation’ where he mourns that two thirds of creatures can only get by by taking the lives of others. Clough wonders whether this comes over as a bit gnostic – a theologian who is not really into the world as we find it. He thinks not; it is an impassioned love for fellow-creatures which drives the project. Therefore, he remains in love and sorrow and lament rather than tragedy.

5. An invitation for C to expand on his understanding of sin. The Priestly author of Genesis 6 describes it as bloodshed. The other instance of describing it as deficit – inability to now read the book of nature, which is what Paul says. In on animals 1 – C has a passage for describing sin as transcending the human sphere – sin in the more-than-human realm. Ref. Jane Goodall and chimpanze infanticide (and the shock exhibited by the animals in the community).

6. Does the agrarian nature of Abrahamic… self-domestication of dogs and humans: was agriculture ‘human domestication’? Hunter-gatherer vs agrarian. How did the vegan visions of Genesis 1-2 and Isaiah 11 come from an agrarian society using animals for food? The distance between their lived experiences and God’s will. Abolition of argriculture? No!

7. Death. Psalm 104 – God gives life, God takes life. What is so awful about this? What is the difference between dying one by one or mass extinction. How serious is death if there is an ‘exuberant’ future? C says the difference between ethicists concerned with an animals and those with environments: The destruction of a ‘mode and possibility’ of a way of living is the difference. DF – What’s your theology of death?

8. What does good and bad intervention look like? Reconceiving what good living alongside other creatures looks like. We exoticise it – elephants rather than badgers. In On Animals vol 2 a consideration of contexts – Cheltenham races where four horses died this year. 50-100,000 dogs destroyed in the UK last year in consequence of the settlement on companionship.

9. The transformation of relationships between predators and prey in the new creation – does predation become play?

10. Sympathetic refusal of telelogical theodicies – Christology and salvation history does not need to fall with the rejection of theodicy.

11. Regarding animal sacrfice, the sacrificial system and fulfilment in Christ. C – It is not a discounting – the astonishingly radical idea that the only way to kill an animal is under sacrificial, priestly regulation. The ability of the animal to mediate between human and God. Is this an aspect which will be redeemed.

12. Ben Quash quoted Arthur Hugh Clough ‘The Latest Decalogue’: ‘Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive’… We need an account of different kinds of killing. There are forms of killing which deserve the name murder. These are difficult ethical distinctions. C says the place to start is Karl Barth – respect for life in non-human animals specifies a long series of caveats without which, the killing is murder. Augustine thinks it a reductio ad absurdum to think of a stopping-off point for murder beyond the human. C thinks that there are other stopping-off points beyond the human.

13. The goodness of creation. For Schleiermacher the goodness of creations was its openness. C – that which creates the demand for lament. If we could just despair it would be different. But we can recognise the goodness of the telos of these creatures which surround us and their inability to fulfil this is a sorrow to us, ergo the goodness of creation is evidenced by the devastation which prevents its manifestation.