Page - 63 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

The Problem of Evil | 63www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 59–74 sent by his father to lead humanity to peace. But while superman’s story can be read in light of Christology, iron Age comics are increasingly impregnated with Christian eschatology, more specifically with the futurist approach of Protes- tant eschatology that sees in the gospels of Matthew (24:15) and Luke (21:20), in the texts regarding the Great tribulation, the foretelling of the end of the world. in the genre’s evolution during the last three decades, we can identify two main modifications to the medium’s syntax: the loss of the Golden Age comics’ lightness and naïve optimism, and the borrowing of science-fiction elements, and especially its dystopian features, with twentieth-century adult science fic- tion preferring a darker vision of humankind’s future.10 those elements are re- current during the Iron Age and can be identified in the major publications of the 1980s, all of which were adapted into movies in the 2000s: Days of Future Past, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta. When we consider the blockbusters of the last 15 years, and specifically the 25 biggest worldwide hits of each year, we notice that a growing proportion of those movies shows, in different ways, massive destruction, whether of a city, a country, a civilization, or even the whole world – between one and three films per year in the mid 2000s, eight in 2013 and 13 in 2014 (7 of those 13 movies were among the 10 biggest hits of the year). in dystopias, post-apocalyptic movies, disaster movies or Superhero film, images of massive and global destruction became not only the visual and narrative convention of a blockbuster, but also a promotional tool. We do not yet have the hindsight that is necessary if we are to identify clearly the symptoms behind the recent apocalyptic imagery – that task awaits cultural studies in the future.11 But it is noteworthy that popular cinema, usually a medi- um of escapism and comforting utopias, now targets the fundamental fears of the spectator. the “cinema of catastrophe” (in which we can place the genres referred to earlier) is today the most popular cinema worldwide. 10 It seems natural that genre borrowing from science fiction would eventually produce a more pes- simistic illustration of humanity’s future. Science fiction itself rapidly grew beyond the utopian bursts of the nineteenth century and became increasingly associated with dystopia. the works of h. G. Wells and Jules Verne are good examples: both authors re-evaluated the optimism of their first novels and by the end of their literary careers were presenting a darker vision of the future. superhero literature has a time delay when compared to science fiction. It inherited the lightness and optimism of science fiction at the moment the latter was losing these characteristics after the bombing of Hiroshima and during the Cold War. in the early 1980s, however, the same kind of disenchantment caught up with the superhero genre. 11 the literature representing the apocalypse, or any story reminiscent of the Gospel’s Great tribulation, never appears ex nihilo. recently, Muriel Debié, a research director at the École Pratique des hautes Études, Paris, launched a project on apocalyptic writings of the seventh and eighth centuries, focusing in particular on those of the Middle East region during the Muslim expansion. Every major turmoil in a society’s social, political, and cultural fabric leads inevitably to the rise of an end-of-days literature.