Filmic interpretations of the apocalypse often focus on the anxiety between progress and destruction, because the way we see different technologies is intimately tied to how we see ourselves. Technology is shown alternately as our savior in trying times, a testament to our intelligence, or a testament to our mastery, but also as an accident waiting to happen, an isolating force, or a feeble attempt to raise ourselves to the level of deities. The stories we tell about technology, (especially nuclear!) are also stories about our own histories and cultural contexts. I will use two films as case studies to better explore these stories and make conclusions about their meanings; Deep Impact and Kairo.
Deep Impact is a 1998 Hollywood film, directed …show more content…
The characters eventually meet and the storylines combine. The film, opens on Michi, a young woman who has recently moved to Tokyo, and begun working in a garden shop. Along with other coworkers, Michi is worried about a co-worker named Taguchi who has not shown up for work for some days. She’s told he has been working on a computer disk. She goes to Taguchi’s apartment to check on him, and finds him physically there but mentally absent, aloof, and uncommunicative. During the conversation Taguchi quietly excuses himself, makes a noose, and hangs himself. Michi is horrified, and she and other co-workers return later to look for clues as to what happened to their formerly cheerful co-worker. The disk he has been studying was found, and was shown to reveal unnerving images of Taguchi staring into his monitor. The co-workers also discover a large black stain that appeared on the wall beside where Taguchi hung himself. As the story progresses, stranger and more grotesque things keep happening, and characters commit suicide, vanish into black smudges on the walls, or retreat so far into themselves that they are unreachable phantoms of their former selves. The second story follows a university student named Ryosuke, who while trying to get his internet working, is bombarded with terrifying images of people in strange rooms with bags over their heads, with “help me” written on the walls. It is …show more content…
When we read these films cross-contextually and place them in appropriate cultural and historical contexts, we learn about the relationship between each place. Apocalyptic scenes in art are especially useful for giving insight into ideological shifts as well as into a nation’s fantasies, trauma, and memories. Kairo and Deep Impact, while vastly different, both hold insecurity about nuclear warfare, social organizing, and the dissolution of social and cultural norms at their core.
Kairo operates as the negative function to Deep Impact’s hubris, the smiling all American heroes’ dark shadows are the black smudges on walls where whole people were incinerated. Guilt and emptiness are cross cultural symptoms of using a weapon that is so devastating that it is impossible to be really prepared for what its use did to those who dropped it, and to those who it was dropped on. Deep Impact’s orderly crisis, resolved by progress and tech, is haunted by the meaninglessness and estrangement that characterizes
Deep Impact is a 1998 Hollywood film, directed …show more content…
The characters eventually meet and the storylines combine. The film, opens on Michi, a young woman who has recently moved to Tokyo, and begun working in a garden shop. Along with other coworkers, Michi is worried about a co-worker named Taguchi who has not shown up for work for some days. She’s told he has been working on a computer disk. She goes to Taguchi’s apartment to check on him, and finds him physically there but mentally absent, aloof, and uncommunicative. During the conversation Taguchi quietly excuses himself, makes a noose, and hangs himself. Michi is horrified, and she and other co-workers return later to look for clues as to what happened to their formerly cheerful co-worker. The disk he has been studying was found, and was shown to reveal unnerving images of Taguchi staring into his monitor. The co-workers also discover a large black stain that appeared on the wall beside where Taguchi hung himself. As the story progresses, stranger and more grotesque things keep happening, and characters commit suicide, vanish into black smudges on the walls, or retreat so far into themselves that they are unreachable phantoms of their former selves. The second story follows a university student named Ryosuke, who while trying to get his internet working, is bombarded with terrifying images of people in strange rooms with bags over their heads, with “help me” written on the walls. It is …show more content…
When we read these films cross-contextually and place them in appropriate cultural and historical contexts, we learn about the relationship between each place. Apocalyptic scenes in art are especially useful for giving insight into ideological shifts as well as into a nation’s fantasies, trauma, and memories. Kairo and Deep Impact, while vastly different, both hold insecurity about nuclear warfare, social organizing, and the dissolution of social and cultural norms at their core.
Kairo operates as the negative function to Deep Impact’s hubris, the smiling all American heroes’ dark shadows are the black smudges on walls where whole people were incinerated. Guilt and emptiness are cross cultural symptoms of using a weapon that is so devastating that it is impossible to be really prepared for what its use did to those who dropped it, and to those who it was dropped on. Deep Impact’s orderly crisis, resolved by progress and tech, is haunted by the meaninglessness and estrangement that characterizes