I GREW UP heavily steeped in ’90s Christian rapture culture. I’d polished off all 40 books of the Left Behind kids series before I finished 6th grade, and holes formed in the knees of my favorite butterfly jeans because I wore them as often as I could to make sure I was raptured in them. While the rapture is no longer central to my faith, I never realized how much apocalyptic thinking is soaked into our culture — and how much of it I absorb — until I picked up Dorian Lynskey’s latest book.
In Everything Must Go, Lynskey chronicles humanity’s unending preoccupation with the end, detailing how apocalyptic thinking has pervaded the media and pop culture throughout history, “turn[ing] fear into entertainment.” His book focuses on examples of apocalyptic thinking that “reveal something important ... about the times in which they were created.” Most obviously, apocalyptic imaginings reveal what we’re afraid of. Each era has had a different disaster to fear, be it nuclear, ecological, or cosmological. For millennia, the world has been ending again and again. “There is simply no end of ends,” Lynskey writes.
And some of the most influential end-time tales come from the Bible. From Genesis to Revelation, scripture is full of disaster narratives. “It is the Bible that supplies the primordial tales that surface over and over again in the art, literature, cinema, and television of the West,” Lynskey writes. “The Christian apocalypse is still with us, then, in a range of disguises.”
Most often, Lynskey explains, these modern apocalyptic narratives fall into three different categories: Total demolition of the planet itself (as in the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon), the extinction of the human race (The Road, A Quiet Place), and the collapse of civilization (Mad Max, Station Eleven).
Every generation seems to believe that they are the ones who will experience the end of the world — and has turned that suspicion into art. “We attempt to take the mess and mystery of the future, which has always been frightening because it is the ultimate unknown, and tidy it into a story.” In other words, we’ve imagined ourselves at the end of it all, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event, to somehow beat the disaster to it. But do these stories help us? Does watching one particularly compelling episode of Doctor Who frighten us into rethinking our dependence on technology or does it merely scare us?
Because fear isn’t always a good thing. After all, “The Bomb was born of fear,” Lynskey writes. Decades before the Manhattan Project began, science fiction author H.G. Wells introduced the idea of atomic bombs in his novel The World Set Free, potentially influencing the development of atomic warfare. Additionally, many scientists justified their involvement with the atomic bomb because they feared that someone else might invent something just as sinister. We bring our own destruction through the fear that destruction is headed our way.
So what do we do with the weight of the (end of) the world? Lynskey believes “we have to live in the space between ‘Everything will be OK’ and ‘everything is f****d,’ between denial and despair.”
In that in-between space, we can see the world for what it is: fragile and beautiful — something worth saving.
“Everybody dies, everything ends — but not yet. Not yet,” Lynskey writes. And what a blessing that is.
Olivia Bardo is a writer, artist, and baker from northern New Jersey and is a former editorial assistant for sojo.net.
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