Word: doomsdayers
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...Doomsday Safe...
...Impossible to pin down or pigeonhole, as full of contradictions as his movies, Altman became a specialist in both two movie forms: epic and the intimate. Nashville, a Doomsday kaleidoscope set to country music, splashed the whole South with his wily cynicism; Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson said that American history was a lie dressed up in showbiz frills; and A Wedding, his black spray-paint on a four-tier nuptial cake, contained 48 characters, for no better reason than that Nashville had had 24. But there was a quieter, artsier side to Altman...
James Poniewozik's essay "Postapocalypse Now" [Oct. 23] was an interesting look at pop culture's fixation on doomsday fantasies, but what we should take from the current visions of mass destruction is not the notion that we're getting too comfortable with Armageddon but the realization that fears of Armageddon have always been with us. Our time is little different from all the eras in which people believed the end of the world was imminent. Yet here we are in a world that somehow has not come to an end, resurrecting ancient symbols to describe our modern doomsday...
...there's a common thread to these disparate works, it's their intimacy. Jericho, for instance, gives us doomsday as soap opera. The postapocalyptic tales of the cold war--On the Beach, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Day After, Threads--were books and movies that had conclusions; a TV series is open-ended, like life. Jericho doles out its horror in doses--flickering TV images of ruined cities, radiation victims dead by a lake--and softens it with soap-opera B-plots. The survivors have affairs and family fights; teenagers flirt and throw parties. Chicago may be burning, but somewhere...
...Bombarded by doomsday obesity messages, however, people may expect that, sooner or later, the trend of rising weight will start chipping into average life expectancy. But here's another evidentiary problem for those beating the obesity drum: life expectancy in Australia is slated to go on increasing for at least another half-century. According to ABS projections, an average 50-year-old in 2051 will live to age 87; an average woman to 89. These represent increases of six and 4.5 years respectively on projections for the current crop of 50-year-olds. So how should we reconcile apparently being...