Verified by 
How do we conceive of disaster? Through the intricate monsterology of Hell displayed by Hieronymus Bosch of Aachen to the witty collection of characters encountered by Dante and his cicerone Virgil in the Inferno, we visualize the imagination of certain European peoples of the 13th and 15th century concerning the end of time. In these images and words, we can visualize how the book of Revelations sculpted their imagination of the underworld. How do we imagine cataclysm, the intriguing and terrifying notion of the end of days? And is there an end to the imagination, places to which it cannot carry itself?
In her essay “The End of Imagination,” writer and activist Arundhati Roy explores nuclear apocalypse, first in the lived context of the conflict between India and Pakistan, then opening up into a haunting description of what it means for elected officials in temporary associations of governmental power to have control over weapons of mass destruction. She argues that the existence of nuclear weapons leads us beyond the imagination, that we do not conceive of the nature of the threat in an adequate fashion. In this powerful essay, Roy demonstrates how due to our sense of hope, or victory, or nationalism, the horror that would be a nuclear apocalypse is rendered beyond our ken.
Whereas an accurate vision of such a horrendous event does not seem possible for the sensitive minds of human beings, it has not stopped numerous cultural productions (like movies, TV, books, etc.) from putting forth imagined spectacles of what an earth-destroying event would look and feel like, at least for a small group of intrepid humans. We can observe such fantasies in George Romero’s classic series on the living dead or subsequent reflections on the end of society in the "28 days" franchise and others. What we see here is the cultural imagination expanding upon what it would be like to survive a cataclysm and what kinds of behaviors would be sanctioned when the legal and social bonds of civilization are removed. There is plenty to consider in these scenarios and copious amounts of ink and celluloid have gone into helping us imagine this kind of disaster.
While there have been many versions of non-state actors instigated chaos, a watershed blockbuster movie about such a terrorist attack is The Dark Knight in which, along with other bad men, Heath Ledger as the Joker engineers a collapse of Gotham city. This portrayal is horrifying for several reasons: like the zombie flicks one form of horror is the emphasis on how the deterioration of social mores pits all against all in a sort of twisted prisoner dilemma, another reason is the movie’s depiction of the collusion between corrupt politicians, sadistic police officers, outlaw justice, and the vicissitudes of the mob.
Notably, the realism with which such CGI-enhanced disaster sequences are displayed adds a layer of uncanniness. We view images that look and sound like the disaster is really happening. In the case of this movie, it is far too easy to imagine the city of Chicago breaking out into some such pandemonium. It would look eerily similar. In some way we experience these as-if scenarios simply by watching the screen; we can get an idea of the anxiety, of the craziness. Adding to the uncanny nature of this experience, we would probably turn to the same screen to see what is happening in a real scenario, which, oddly, might not even look as believable as the big-budget movie.
A contemporary vision of psychological horror that explores the disaster of our technological dystopias is the series ‘Black Mirror.’ It is about the uncontrollable, strange uses of technology, and one is struck while watching that it may not be science fiction at all. The first episode portrays the scenario of a strange hostage situation communicated through the media where politics, sadism, and entertainment meet in a live broadcast. One question the viewer may be pushed to ask is, ‘what if this really happened, how would it be any different than this?’ What is the effect of our regular encounters with cultural productions that stretch our sense of reality and expand our imagination to entertain this layering of reality with possibility, dread, and visions of disaster?
Our cultural imagination is replete with disturbing material. Some real-life violent attacks are in fact copycats of things that have happened in movies or in questionable news stories, or simply via misunderstanding the context and content of cultural productions. Maybe the availability of images of disaster makes them more likely to occur?
Does disaster cinema serve as a sort of vaccine to inure us from what might come to pass? Are we simply fascinated by the end of life as we know it? Reflecting the Freudian notion that the heart of man is always beyond civilization, maybe imagining horror is the pure sublimation that anesthetizes us from real anxiety? Or is it a sick pleasure to see what is not happening to us? There are plenty of horrors that are occurring and which we can see on the news, or, depending on where you live, go and see in a close-by neighborhood or prison. But imagining disaster seems more like a form of millenarianism, that immanent Second Coming, transposed into contemporary media formats. There has always been a fascination for imagining what it would be like to be there when world-historical events, like cataclysms, unfold.
Arundhati Roy is proposing that our imagination does not take in what such a disaster would really be like, we can only imagine some continuation of the reality we already inhabit, or some version of a cultural production we have taken in. Even the apocalyptic scene of say ‘Dreams’ by Akira Kurosawa when the mountaintop is covered with red smoke, or the reimagining of Chernobyl in a recent television series fail to convey the lived experience of hopelessness. Imagining a disaster, or watching such imagination is different because we can turn it off, because we experience no physical reactions to the radioactive air, we don’t stay up all night hearing the zombies clawing at the doors. The cultural imagination of disaster can come to seem another type of thrill, like the way we imagine historical scenarios or romantic melodrama or the murder mystery.
The human imagination is vast. In the words of Emily Dickinson,
The Brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.
Maybe we are imagining everything and disaster is but one instance (albeit highly effective and captivating) of our omnivorous informavore-ality? Or maybe the end of humanity is impossible to imagine and all these efforts are vain attempts to think ourselves into situations we can handle only as long as they are not real.
References
Roy, Arundhati. (1998). The End of Imagination. In My Seditious Heart. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
