Catastrophes in popular culture

Catastrophes in popular culture includes real and fictional disasters, as depicted by the media, and are considered social events.[1] Disaster movies made in Hollywood are part of the American pop culture.[2] Catastrophe types can include hostile aliens, climate change/global warming, environmental disasters, financial crises, natural disaster, nuclear apocalypse, pandemics, super heros, terrorist attacks, zombies and other technological meltdowns.[2][3]

History

One of the earliest cultural catastrophic narratives is the flood myth, found among many civilizations in human history.

Theories

There are different theories why audiences consume apocalyptic films, according to filmmaker Roland Emmerich, "They are somewhat cathartic. You see all this destruction and everything but at the end the right people save the day." Wheeler Winston Dixon notes, "I think they’re sort of preparing us for something that’s going to happen in the future."[2]

According to Eva Horn, "What makes today’s obsession different from previous epochs’ is the sense of a “catastrophe without event,” a stealthily creeping process of disintegration. Ultimately, Horn argues, imagined catastrophes offer us intellectual tools that can render a future shadowed with apocalyptic possibilities affectively, epistemologically, and politically accessible."[3]

Fiction

In films

In books

See also

References
  1. "Disaster, Memory, and Popular Culture". University of Richmond.
  2. "The lure of the disaster movie". BBC. Retrieved 7 January 2019.
  3. "The Future as Catastrophe". Columbia University Press.
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