Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sun Sep 1 06:05:06 PDT 2002



> > The Left Behind series

Michael Pollak:
> Has anyone ever read any of these? I was just wondering if they were at
> all gripping. Because the movie _The Rapture_ is kind of weirdly
> fascinating. If the books were as interesting as that, the fact that 7
> million people -- 2.5% of the population -- were fired up about them
> wouldn't strike me as at all odd in this land of a thousand mini cults,
> where women meet to discuss at great length their shared fantasies of
> Spock and Kirk having sex.

It seems sort of, well, chiliastic to believe that there is some end-times right-wing political flood running over the banks bringing locusts and war, because of some popular novels. A few years ago it was angels fixing flat tires.

_The_Rapture_, the movie, doesn't belong to this category of mythopoetics. After all, at the end the heroine judges God and finds him wanting, and most of the audience will agree with her. The movie subverts the framework it accepts.

-- Gordon



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