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The following Abyss
transcript presents portions of a December 8th, 1999 National Public
Radio broadcast, a Morning Edition story entitled "Doomsday
Predictions."
National Public Radio's Barbara Bradley reported
on some of the millennial doomsday scenarios that have been portrayed
on television, in movies and in popular music. Airing just weeks
before December 31, 1999, the story sought to examine the
entertainment that proposed the world would undergo a cataclysmic event at the turn
of the millennium.
The Millennium television
series receives special mention in this report, although there is a minor
error. Catherine Black is credited with receiving the "Horses" vision
instead of Lara Means. The sequence Bradley refers to is taken from Glen
Morgan and James Wong's second season finale, "The Time is Now."
Bob Edwards: As we near the end of this millennium there’s a
lot of discussion about religious and right wing extremists, how they could use
the year 2000 as an excuse for violent acts. But those who study
millennialism, that is the idea that the world is approaching a cataclysmic
event, say that a millennial mindset is not limited to extremists. It’s
become a subtext in our society and, as NPR’s Barbara Bradley reports, the mass
media both present and promote the modern day apocalypse.
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Barbara Bradley: In the Book of Matthew Jesus speaks of wars
and rumors of wars, of earthquakes and fires. When you see those signs, he
tells us, the physical world is about to end. Ever since then people have
been scrutinizing the weather and the examining the political landscape, trying
to decide if now is the time. The problem, according to Stephen O’Leary, a
millennium expert at the University of Southern California, is that there have
always been wars and earthquakes. But, as he pointed out at a recent
conference about the millennium, something is different today. “Now we
have CNN there with the television cameras as images of death and destruction
appear nearly instantaneously or live in one’s living room. So, the
presence of the media makes us more aware. So, maybe there are just as
many wars as there always were, we’re just more aware of them.” And so,
O’Leary says, the media, especially television, radio, and the internet, have
fueled the notion that the world is about to end. It has also exposed
fringe ideas to huge audiences...
...Ideas that were once relegated to sci-fi books are on primetime. The
X-Files, for example, or another program, Millennium (music of “Horses” by
Patti Smith plays). In a gripping eight minute sequence, one of the
show’s main characters, Catherine Black, experiences an apocalyptic vision to
the beat of Patti Smith’s song “Horses.” Her vision careens through images
of natural apocalypse, fires and hurricanes and floods, then lurches through
scenes of man-made destruction, an atomic plume, black helicopters and SWAT
teams, the scream of a monkey with Ebola virus. “The sequence from
Millennium is extraordinary.” Mick Broderick works for the
Australian Film Commission and wrote the book Nuclear Movies.
“It’s a retelling of the book of Revelation and John’s scriptural
text… while it’s being transposed onto what’s current in the society,
the apocalyptic fears. You have images from Waco, atomic tests,
there’s hurricanes, there’s earthquakes, material off the TV news.
It’s essentially our daily lives that’s being recast and retold to us
as modern revolutionary mythology of the apocalypse."
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