Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

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Another Earth, Consumer Capitalism, Depression, Eschatology, Film, Hysteria, Lars von Trier, Marx, Max Weber, Melancholia, rationalisation, The Sirens of Titan, When Worlds Collide

Picking up where I left off, and continuing our exploration of cinema and/as exorcism – see also here (on Australian film), here (on District 9), here (on 2012), here (on the wretched Avatar), and here (on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) –  I want to branch out in new territory here and discuss the ways Lars von Trier’s utterly brilliant but utterly nihilistic new film Melancholia is being sold to the American public, a collective audience notorious – but not of course universal – for its dislike of moral ambiguity or philosophical complexity.

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Melancholia is von Trier’s best film, and by a long chalk.  It is also the most purely entertaining science-fiction defence of a nihilistic worldview since Kurt Vonnegut’s incomparable 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan.  While I have heard some (though not many) critics and fans pan the film for being too accessible and for lacking the blunt controversy of something like his 2009 film Antichrist, Melancholia succeeds in my book as no other von Trier film for no other reason that von Trier steps back from his usual strategy of rubbing the audience’s face in the depravity of humanity and simply allows the film to quietly and calmly make its points, letting the film’s preternatural stillness and its deliberate pacing tell the story far more effectively than the melodramatic mode of many of his previous films.  Melancholia, in the simplest terms, is the first von Trier film I have ever watched without feeling the need for a shower immediately afterwards.  The ability for a film to make the viewer feel literally, physically soiled is of course the mark of a true cinematic talent, and here von Trier, with his talent for evoking mood and tension to the point where it becomes palpable, can be counted among the ranks of such directors as Paul Schrader and John Hillcoat.  It is, however, infinitely refreshing to see someone as gifted as von Trier working in a different, less confrontational, and more formally Romantic mode.

For all its almost gentle touch, the film presents a view of the world – no, of the universe itself – that is bleaker and more final than anything in von Trier’s oeuvre.  Even films as stark and forbidding as Breaking the Waves or Antichrist are shot through with something resembling hope.  In Waves, Bess’ unshakable goodness and belief in love anchor a film suspended over an abyss, an abyss that von Trier, then a recent convert to Catholicism, chooses to ignore with his final – and in my mind, completely misguided – image attesting to the literal truth of Bess’ salvation.  Even the end of the determinedly repellent Antichrist offers a kind of redemption when the male protagonist, known only as He, leaves a metaphoric wilderness, having rejected his cold psychologist’s view of the world. (For a pdf of an intriguing scholarly article by Gitte Buch-Hansen offering a positive reading of the film from a feminist biblical studies perspective, follow this link; for two very good discussions of the film from a religious studies perspective by S. Brent Plate, see Religion Dispatches here and here.)

Melancholia first appears to be a riff on a theme that appears from time to time in science fiction, the collision of the Earth with another planet, but I think there is more to be learned in placing it next to the history of texts – again, most of them from sci-fi, which trace the impact of the discovery of previously unknown planets.  The best-known – and simply the best – of these stories is Isaac Asimov’s classic short story ‘Nightfall’, which first appeared in a 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  In Asimov’s spare and ultimately devastating tale, the greatest scientific minds of a complex society on the planet of Lagash discover on the very eve of its destruction that its society is doomed by the eclipse of one of its suns by a  previously hidden planet, an alignment of celestial bodies that happens only once every 2049 years.  Thrown into total darkness, unknown on the planet, which is lit by no less than six suns, the people of Lagash are driven to madness and to set massive fires to provide the heat and light that they simply cannot exist without, especially given that most of the population does not know that this is a temporary situation.  In the story, an intrepid band of scientists discovers the coming of the darkness, something that has been long predicted by the Cultists, Lagash’s dominant religious tradition, but are unable to convince the population to prepare for it.  Here we find not only the classic sci-fi conception of religion as bad science and poorly remembered history, but also a potent allegory for the futility of scientific knowledge when dealing with a fearful and undereducated public.  ‘Nightfall’ ends on a fittingly bleak note as Lagash’s society again, faced with the enormity of darkness and the devastating and sudden revelation of its own ignorance – the astronomers, working only in daylight, believed that the universe contained only six suns, but the darkness reveals that there are millions, quite unseating Lagash as the centre point of the observable world, a repeat of the Copernican revolution taking place in seconds rather than centuries – sets fire to itself and all that it has built over more than two millennia.

There are other, simpler entries into this rather obscure sub-category of sci-fi, including Philp Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s classic 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, made into a space opera-style film of the same name by Rudolph Maté in 1951.  In both, the Earth encounters not one but two rogue bodies in space, one of which destroys the Earth, though a small band of intrepid scientists and travellers manage to escape destruction and take up life on one of the new worlds, Bronson Beta, which shows clear signs of previous inhabitants.  While Wylie and Balmer’s slim pot-boiler of a novel has become largely neglected, Maté’s film is better-remembered both for its Oscar-winning special effects – including a still-stunning vision of the flooding of New York City – and for its wildly uneven tone, veering from melodrama to cheesy whimsy from one scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.  This is probably most obvious in the closing scene, played to rapturous, triumphant music and with blissful happiness from our intrepid astronauts, who are overcome with an uncomplicated joy when safely landed on the Technicolor wonder of Beta, despite the fact that billions of people have been obliterated and they are the only human survivors (this being the 1950s, they are apple-cheeked, white, healthy, and Christian survivors).  The final image says it all, really.

Interestingly enough, there is another film this year, Another Earth, which grapples with the existential questions raised by the discovery of an unknown world, this time an exact duplicate of Earth which may or may not have duplicate versions of each every person living, though this need not detain us here for long.  Where Another Earth ends on a New Age-tinged moment of self-realisation, and thus a note of hope, though not one so strident as that which concludes When Worlds Collide, von Trier’s Melancholia ends on an even bleaker note than Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’.  In ‘Nightfall’, at least, the reader is free to assume that the people of Lagash will rebuild, though this is tinged with the near-certainly that all of that newly built world will turn to ashes on that fateful night some 2000 years in the future.  Melancholia ends with the irrevocable and inescapable end of the Earth, smashed into rubble by the far larger planet Melancholia.

What is most interesting – in this reporter’s opinion, at least – is how thorough, and ultimately how brutal, Melancholia‘s social critique really is.  The film is essentially a character study of two sisters, the melancholic Justine (very nicely played by Kirsten Dunst) and the resolutely ordinary Claire (a surprising turn from Antichrist‘s Her, Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Each of the sisters gets a half of the film named after her, though, really, this is Justine’s story, and her perspective is the one the film champions in the end.  After a stunning Prologue of ultra-slow-motion images that comprise a series of vignettes of the end of the world, set very appropriately to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, the film’s narrative begins with the lavish and increasingly uncomfortable spectacle of Justine’s wedding reception, celebrating her marriage to the increasingly baffled Michael.  Von Trier stages this sequence, much of which is riotously if uncomfortably funny, as a piece of social-realist cinema, not unlike many of his other films.  Shot on an isolated but extremely luxurious golf resort in Sweden but set in an unidentified Anglo-American no-place, the first half of the film shows us Justine’s increasingly futile attempts to play the part of the happy bride that everyone around her (with the exception of the sisters’ acidic mother) expects her to play.  Justine commits the unpardonable sin of failing to pretend to be happy and satisfied and instead ends up rejecting not only Michael but her family and her smarmy boss, who has come to the wedding to offer her a promotion.

Claire’s section of the film is set months later as she struggles to care for the borderline catatonic Justine, who has come to live with her at the resort, and to prepare for the arrival of the rogue planet Melancholia, which experts tell everyone will miss the Earth and cause minimal damage.  As it becomes ever clearer that the planets will collide and that everyone and everything on Earth is doomed to a violent death, Justine emerges as the sanest of the characters.  Her reaction to the news of the destruction of the Earth is as much indifference as it is anything else.  While Claire fears for her son Leo and begins to fall apart psychologically, Justine has the one truly rational reaction in the film, that of resignation.  For Justine, the end of a world which is facile, inauthentic and meaningless is nothing to mourn.

Michael, Justine, and Claire in Melancholia

That the film takes Justine’s side is, of course, debatable, but I will lay out my case here: Justine works in advertising and is thus implicated in selling the world of wealth and privilege that she despises to a public that cannot afford it.  In this role, she becomes a representative of a consumer society that defines itself through a lie that it does not ultimately believe is possible.  Justine is the only one the film (again, aside from her mother) who is not buying what she herself is selling.  Everyone at the wedding is clearly invested in the mythos of comfort and happiness that such events of conspicuous consumption both celebrate and make normative, but Justine, try as she might, is unable to invest herself in the role that she and others have laid out for her.  Claire’s husband, John, the owner of the resort, is angry and bitterly disappointed in Justine, not because she is in genuine distress, but because she is a failed consumer, because she does not participate in the wedding passively, but questions its meaning at every turn, perverting the gathering with her unpredictability and her lateness, profaning such familiar ritual elements as the cutting of the cake and the reception dinner.

Ultimately, Justine is the film’s voice of reason and, oddly enough, its conscience.  Her rejection of the trappings of bourgeois respectability – and what is more bourgeois that golf? – is the film’s rejection of these trappings, especially the ever-more-pervasive discourse on ‘happiness’.  Indeed, the film is a coherent argument on the futility of the dream of happiness as an ineffective and ultimately hopeless strategy for keeping the problems of the world at bay.  In von Trier’s nihilistic universe, Justine’s choice to simply reject her role in a system of value and morality is the most rational choice and would be the most ethical one if the film had any real interest in right or wrong.  It is Justine who understands the world and the place of people within it and her heroism lies in the simple, honest, straightforward rejection of all of it.

As the film draws to its inevitable conclusion (the Prologue leaves no doubt as to what is going to happen), Justine is also the only one to show any true selflessness, distracting and comforting Leo with the task of finding and carving a set of ‘magic’ tree branches that she says will protect them from Melancholia.  Claire, who has bought into the fantasies that Justine makes her living selling, struggles against her fate and rails against the absolute meaninglessness that it reveals.  She is also unable to offer any comfort to her son and thus abdicates her final responsibility to the sister she has been unable to convince of the value of the life of luxury which she has built and in which she is has invested so much of herself.

In the end, then, given the utter finality of its situation, Melancholia is as damning a critique of contemporary Anglo-American-European values as can be imagined and as thorough a skewering of the consumer mythos of a never-defined ‘happiness’ lying just around the corner as has been committed to celluloid for years.  It is an articulate, clear-eyed, historically and culturally astute fable for a world and a closed system of value that is in the process of perhaps inevitable and irreversible decay.  A world as hollow and as lacking in conviction as this, the film intimates, is better destroyed, echoing again von Trier’s fondness for Nietzsche, to whom Antichrist is also deeply indebted.  To this world, literally nothing is preferable.

Melancholia‘s marketing, on the other hand, does everything it can to soft-sell the film, to exorcise it of its very real demons.  The marketing scheme chosen for the film is ingenious, consistent, and systematic.  In short, it runs something like this: Melancholia is a metaphorical film about depression.  Though this is a perfectly defensible interpretation, this is also the safest and most palatable way possible to read the film and its allegorical structure.  In the press kit issued for the film, both the studio’s voice and that of von Trier emphasise that Justine has the measure of the world only in a state of crisis, something the film nullifies by setting the first half of the film at a time when much of the world is unaware of the coming of Melancholia.  In a short promotional video released via the Apple Trailers site, Dunst underlines this, saying: ‘Justine is a very sensitive, creative human being that felt things maybe sometimes more than other people.  To me, her relationship with the planet turns into almost her being a representation of the planet’.

This gesture, to dull the edge of genuine (and almost always systematic) social criticisms by accusing the critic of insanity, is, of course, a common strategy in the mainstream media when dealing with acts of violence – often labelled selectively as ‘terrorism’, though rarely when such acts are committed by anyone other than a Muslim – whose political or economic subtext is uncomfortable.

While it is easy enough to understand why the film’s distributors would be interested in reading the film’s allegorical construction in the narrowest, most private, and thus least threatening manner, we, as viewers and critics, need not feel the same compulsion, given that we have no financial stake in the film itself.

For, lurking not far outside of this metaphorical reading of the film is a far more radical critique of contemporary Western societies.  As the film draws to its conclusion, it becomes apparent that it is not only the ludicrously elaborate and costly wedding reception that is hollow and ultimately empty; it is the whole of Claire’s bourgeois world.  When Claire invites Justine to wait out the end on the patio overlooking the golf course with a glass of good wine and some classical music, Justine’s refusal of this idea as ‘shit’ is more than a simple symptom of her state of mind, it is rather something more, an admission of the futility of Claire’s entire life and the entire world of privilege and taste that it represents.

Claire’s husband John, a stock von Trier character, the resolutely rational man who is utterly unable to make any sort of the sense of the world around him, which makes him something of a personification of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationalisation’, takes the only route that his character could possibly take: he commits a sad and sordid suicide in the stables, even robbing his wife and child of the painless poison that Claire was relying on as a last resort.

John, Melancholia‘s Weberian Fool

In the end, all that Claire, Justine, and Leo are left with are the sort of simple, intuitive magical lies that people tell their children.  In the indelible final image, as Melancholia looms ever larger in the background and begins to quite literally devour the Earth, we are left with the image of three lonely people sheltering under a tripod of dead tree branches, helpless in the face of the meaningless destruction of a meaningless existence.

It is in this final moment – and in the diegetic world of Melancholia, this is an absolutely final moment, the end of life in the universe – that von Trier makes his kindest gesture to date, that he allows the three last people on Earth to hold hands, to face the end together, even if it means less than nothing for them to do so.

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Cinema as Exorcism (three): 2012 and the Persistence of the Apocalyptic Imagination

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2012, Apocalypse, Catholicism, Frank Kermode, Michel Foucault, Roland Emmerich

It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

Frank Kermode

And now for the next instalment of the ongoing if irregular series on cinema and/as exorcism (and further proof that I am incapable of writing anything of reasonable length, even on a weblog) …

A Promotional Image from the film 2012

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film 2012, is many things.  Taken as a simple story, it tells the tale of what might happen if the disaster of 2012, the one predicted by the Mayan calendar, brings about the end of the world, an end that comes through the massive shifting of the earth’s crust, which is somehow related to the alignment of the planets.  As a piece of storytelling, it is monumentally stupid and filled to the brim with plot holes large enough to sail an ark through (if you don’t believe me, re-read that last sentence).  It is also lazily written, bafflingly paced, and at least half an hour too long.  It is a dramatic and narrative sinkhole where a number of decent actors – Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton (here saddled with a naff, unconvincing American accent) – go to die for more than two hours in dark rooms all over the world.  There is also no denying that it is a visual feast, a thrilling compilation of some of the very best large-scale CGI ever rendered.  As a spectacular piece of moderately entertaining cinema, it goes one more step towards proving Guy Debord’s theory that spectacle is becoming all, that the spectacle will soon be, if it is not already, the sole remaining element in contemporary culture.  It also offered this viewer the guilty pleasure of watching Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the worst cities on earth, crumble to dust.

An International Poster for 2012

All aesthetic matters aside, as a cultural document and as a virtual catalogue of Orientalist stereotypes, the film is almost perversely fascinating.  We get the wise old Tibetan lama telling his student that the end of things is not all that bad, and then he surprises us all by producing the keys to an old pickup so the apprentice can escape.  Good ol’ lama!  So clever he is, just like those Mayans, who had it all figured out way before we, with all our fancy science, ever did!  We see the devout – and vaguely feminine – but still stridently technological modern Indian man who dies with a crushing dignity with his family in his arms, his saviours from America having failed to pick him up on their way to the secret giant arcs built in the Chinese hinterlands.  At the very end of the film, we are left with the image of the earth’s survivors – mostly wealthy, white, powerful Europeans, of course – sailing in giant arks towards Africa, where, given how profoundly dull all of these people are, will probably build strip malls and Red Lobster franchises.  Due to the massive geological upheavals, there is a new mountain range in the south of the African continent, to which our heroes are heading.  In a final Orientalist master-stroke, this mountain range, before any of the Europeans ever see it, has already been given a European name.

One of the reasons 2012 is so fascinating, and ultimately so worrying, is that how we imagine our end is an important element of who we are as a culture, as the literary theorist Frank Kermode reminds us in his classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Kermode argues compellingly that every human culture needs visions of the end of things and that they are a necessary element in how we seek to find and maintain narratives that make the world coherent and thus liveable.  Kermode writes,

[C]risis, however facile the conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavours towards making sense of the world.  It seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one’s own time to stand in an extraordinary relationship to it.  The time in not free, it is the slave of a mythical end.  We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.[1]

We in the twenty-first century have a number of crises to choose from, from climate change to overpopulation to the very real possibility of a global conflict over dwindling resources, a number of which are poised to, perhaps inevitably, lead to the end of life as we know it.  The seemingly endless cinematic drive to show us just how these ends might be met is in itself very interesting, as is the fact that such representations appear more frequently as the threat of real-world destruction grows more prominent.  No wonder we have Emmerich, who threatens us with the end of the world not only in 2012 but also in Independence Day (1996), his dismal New York-set English-language remake of Godzilla (1998), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004), to serenade us as we march towards the end that people for all time have thought lies just around the next corner.

On top of all this, in important ways, 2012 offers a fascinating case study of the depths in which modern, even ostensibly secular cultures remain indebted to the Bible, and to its vision of the end of days.  One of the biblical traditions’ greatest legacies, still readily accessible through such works as 2012, is that it has solidified and given form to that apocalyptic imagination that we still seems to haunt us.  Literature, in the form of the modern novel, from which the narrative feature film is a direct descendant, has taken over from the biblical imagination to some degree, but many if not all of the images of the end that we see today (at least in the European and American contexts) are deeply rooted in the Bible’s vision of apocalypse.  There is even an interesting and even necessary historical linkage between the two.  Kermode notes that there is a crucial point of historical contact between the decline of Christianity’s earthly authority in modernity and the rise of the novel: ‘It is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority’.[2] Fiction, then, is crucial to our own self-understanding as modern people living in modern cultures.  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, his maddening account of the rise of the modern subject, in fact establishes the absolute importance of literary language for modernity:

It may be said in a sense that ‘literature’, as it was constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age, manifests, at a time when it was least expected, the reappearance of the living being of language … literature achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of ‘counter-discourse’, and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century … Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture – and at its centre – for it is what has been most foreign to that culture since the sixteenth century; but it has also, since this same century, been at the very centre of what Western culture has overlain.  This is why literature is appearing more and more as that which much be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification.[3]

Literary fiction then becomes an important site for examining the complexities of the relationship between modernity and the religious, the ways in which modernity both receives and mutates the different elements of its religious inheritance.  However, precisely describing any relationship between the religious and the literary is a difficult task, as Franco Moretti acknowledges:

Virtually all book historians agree that the publication of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of devotion.  This said, one major question must still be answered:  did the novel replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular form – or because it was a religion under a new guise?  If the former, we have a genuine opposition, and the novel opens a truly new phase of European culture; if the latter, we have a case of historical transformism, where the novel supports the long duration of symbolic conventions.[4]

An International Poster for 2012

To a scholar of religion, two sequences in 2012 are of particular interest: in one, we see on television a mass of people being crushed by a massive stone statue of Jesus as Rio de Jeneiro’s O Cristo Redentor tumbles to the ground, broken from its hillside eyrie by an earthquake; in the second, we get to see St Peter’s Basilica – which for some reason is given the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – collapse and crush thousands of people gathered in the Vatican City for desperate prayer.  In a nice, subtle touch (and this in a film where subtlety is the enemy), the first cracks in the dome of St Peter’s separate God’s finger from Adam’s, pointing to depths that this film doesn’t even begin to address.

Even in this deadly, apocalyptic mayhem – in which the audience is treated with almost perverse regularity to the sight of thousands upon thousands of little digital people falling into massive rents in the Earth’s crust, being crushed by falling cars and buildings, drowned, impaled, etc., etc. – not one of the characters, not even Lama Profundity, stops to ask any of the questions that I imagine most people would be asking in such a situation: What is humanity?  What is civilisation?  Can people make sense of a world in which they are separated from their traditions and their hopes, as the crack in Michelangelo’s fresco seems to imply?  Do we in some sense deserve this sort of treatment?  Can there be any meaning in any of this?

In 2012, do the people either in front of the camera or behind it ever wonder about any of these things?  No, they do not.  What is perhaps the most singular disturbing thing about 2012 is just how banal and superficial it makes the literal end of the world.  It offers no existential or religious insights, and does not even consider the idea that such events could lead to a real crisis of meaning.  It doesn’t even seem to give the people who survive it any pause for thought.  The world ends because it ends, because it is necessary to the spectacle of the thing.  Despite its lame, ultimately callow conclusions – that humanity must work together to survive, that the home is love, not location – 2012 is perhaps the single most nihilistic film in recent memory.  It is enough to make one nostalgic for the cinematic world of even a decade ago, when in October 1999 David Fincher was able to offer an honest, challenging look at nihilism in his visionary take on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.  In this sense, the quiet, gradual end of things that appears in Douglas Coupland’s new novel Generation A is far more chilling and far more plausible than the one so vividly visualised by Emmerich and his cohorts.

2012 does nothing to exorcise the demons of the apocalypse that seem to still posses us all.  Its vision of the end of things is both utterly implausible and repellently appropriate for the times.  The world may indeed come to an end someday, it tells us, but it really won’t matter all that much.  By stripping the end of the world of its weight and by refusing to consider its meaning, the film (and so many others like it) give us new spectres to fear in the long moments when we’re alone and afraid in the dark.  What is gives us most of all is the fear that indifference is the new fall-back response, even to our own ignominious finale.

When this world ends, the film suggests (though I am sure it doesn’t intend to), no one in their right mind is going to miss it.

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[1] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94.

[2] Kermode, Ending, 67.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translator unknown (London: Routledge Classics, 1966), 48-49.

[4] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London:Verso, 1998),  169, note 30.

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The Antichrist Revealed! John Key has been Prophesised in the Word of God!!

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Antichrist, Barack Obama, Chinese, David Letterman, End Times, John Key, Merchant Bankers, National Party, New Zealand, Prophesisation

The Word of God, the Bible, provides many descriptions of the Antichrist. The Bible tells us that, in the End Times, the Antichrist will ascend to dominion over the coming New World Order. He will then begin his reign of terror, in which he will persecute the Church of the Saints. 

It has become clear to some of us in recent months that this person has now revealed himself. So he must now be named and, although we believe he will do all in his power to suppress or discredit this information, we must bear a stong witness.

The Antichrist is John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand. The Scriptures are clear. He who has ears, let him hear!

The Bible’s description of the Antichrist are in agreement with the facts of John Key’s life – on every point! This cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence!!

See for yourself:

1. It is prophesised: He will be a little man, but grow exceedingly great toward the south, east, and the beautiful land (Daniel 8:9-12).

John Key stands at only a little over five-and-a-half feet. After being born in Auckland, he moved to the South Island as a project manager at Christchurch-based clothing manufacturer Lane Walker Rudkin, before moving to the East as head of Merill Lynch’s Asian foreign exchange in Singapore. He has now become Prime Minister of Godzone, the beautiful country, New Zealand.

2. It is prophesised: He will speak arrogant words (Daniel 7.11).

When actress Keisha Castle-Hughes campaigned against global warming, John Key arrogantly dismissed her with the following words of harsh (and satanic) invective, “My advice to Keisha is this: Stick to acting.” In addition, as a sign of his march towards absolute dictatorship, John Key now refuses to speak with the media. Instead, he tells them, in what was hip late-1990s teenage slang, to “speak to the hand.” Oh, the arrogance!

3. It is prophesised: He will become very strong… but not by his own power… in his quick rise to fame (Daniel 8.24).

Barack Obama, John Key - A Secret Covenant Between Muslims and Jews? Note the unidentified man in foreign-looking hat in foreground.

Although he was only made leader of the opposition in November 2006, he rose to become leader of the powerful South Pacific nation of New Zealand just under two years later – backed by the shadowy organisation known as The National Party. On 25 July 2008, Key was added to the New Zealand National Business Review (NBR) Rich List, with an estimated wealth of NZ$50 million. John Key has become so famous that he now appears on the Late Show with David Letterman. Barack Obama has also appeared on Letterman.

4. It is prophesised: He will be blasphemous, and speak against God and his Word (Revelation 13:6).

John Key opposed the Biblical right to smack children, instead throwing his support behind the ‘Whore of Babylon,’ Sue Bradford. Sometimes when he speaks, the words are so unintelligible that he could well be speaking the most blatant and vile blasphemies against Jesus, and nobody would ever know. Except Jesus, who knows everything.

5. It is prophesised: The “merchants of the earth” will grow rich by supporting the New World Order (Revelation 18:3).

John Key was a Merchant Banker, who grew rich by playing with Kings and Rulers. But he has never revealed the exact means by which he amassed his curious wealth.

6. It is prophesised: His number will be 666 (Revelation 13:18).

John Key joined the National Party in 1998. The number 1998 is exactly 3 times 666.

7. It is prophesised: He will be a king ‘different’ from those who preceded him (Daniel 7.24).

The election campaign portrayed John Key as ‘different’ from your average politician, more an average man in the street. Sure, a man in the street with $50m in his back pocket, but it was a very average $50m.

8. It is prophesised: He will be called the Messiah (Matthew 24:5).

John Key supporter with John Key himself. John Key has cunningly arranged a picture of himself with the messianic image of a cross over his left shoulder.

To be heralded as ‘King of the Jews,’ the Messiah must have Jewish descent. John Key is descended from Jews! John Key is also followed everywhere he goes by sect members wearing cultish blue garb, proclaiming their adherence.

9. It is prophesised: He will be miraculously healed, the whole world astonished (Revelation 13:3).

In January 2009 Key slipped on some stairs at a Chinese New Year celebration, breaking his right arm in two places. This has since healed, miraculously, as noted by The Chinese Community. There are more than 1 billion Chinese on the planet today, most of them pagans. In addition, 2009 is the year of the ox in this pagan (and so demonic) system of thought. The ox is a horned creature. In Daniel 7:7, the Antichrist is portrayed as a horned creature.

10. It is prophesised: A false prophet will arise to be his right-hand man, causing all to take a mark, erecting a “living image of him” (Revelation 13.12-15).

John Key’s office has erected a website with his own “video journals” – displaying a “living image of him”. This would not have been possible before the arrival of the internet. The Bible knew about the internet, proving it was inspired by God!

All of this has been fulfilled to the letter. The odds of this are, approximately 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!!

The conclusion is clear: John Key is the Antichrist.
You have been warned.

J.N. Darby’s End-Times Family Tree: Is Dispensationalism from the Bible or Evangelical Tradition?

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Cyrus Scofield, Dallas Theological Seminary, David L. Cooper, dispensationalism, Gog, Hal Lindsey, J.N. Darby, John Nelson Darby, John Walvoord, Late Great Planet Earth, Left Behind, Lewis Chafer, Rayford Steel, Tim LaHaye, Tribulation

In his 1970 work, The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey claims that the complex system of dispensationalism he professes simply ‘falls out’ of a plain reading of the Bible; it requires little theological education and no knowledge of the dispensational theories of others – though he is quick to assure readers that he does actually have formal theological training. They are the only ones who don’t have the NT wrong. On his biblical interpretation, he claims to be doing nothing more than “diligently [seeking] to follow” the plain sense of the biblical text. He quotes David L. Cooper’s 1940 work, When Gog’s Armies Meet the Almighty in the Land of Israel:

“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word as its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”

Another well-known author of some of the most popular Christian fiction ever written, Tim LaHaye, adheres to the same idea, calling this sentiment of Cooper’s “the golden rule of biblical interpretation.”

However, it is possible to trace the development and transmission of these ideas right back to John Nelson Darby.

John Nelson Darby has been called the “father or dispensationalism.” While he was not the first to explicate the idea of dispensationalism, it was he who expanded on and developed the complicated theory of salvation history, which identifies a series of epochs following one another in a linear fashion. He was also the first to solidify the concept of the rapture of the church, based on 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Darby had significant influence on Cyrus Scofield’s beliefs during the Bible Prophecy Conference movement throughout North America at the end of the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that Scofield borrowed copiously from Darby while writing his annotated Reference Bible.

Where does the trail lead from there? Scofield became a close friend and colleague of Lewis Chafer, who went on to found the Evangelical Theological College, which would eventually become the Dallas Theological Seminary. Chafer taught at Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield School in Massachusetts from 1902-1910. During this time, he came into contact with Scofield, who, fresh from the Bible Prophecy Conference movement of the late 1800s, encouraged Chafer’s development as a theologian and preacher. Chafer explicates in an article in Sunday School Times, published in March, 1923, that Scofield was profoundly instrumental in his adoption of his dispensationalism.

In 1924 Chafer, founded the Evangelical Theological College. In 1936 it underwent a name-change to become Dallas Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Theology, finally becoming simply the Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in 1969. Its first students were a small group of only thirteen that were taught under the guidance of Chafer, who presided over the school from 1924 until 1952, at which point John Walvoord took over as president. Walvoord and Chafer were like-minded colleagues that shared many similar ideas. In 1926, Chafer wrote one of his most significant publications, Major Bible Themes, of which Walvoord revised and updated in 1974. During Walvoord’s presidency at DTS, who else but Hal Lindsey attended the institute, and it was here, under the direction of Walvoord and his staff that Lindsey solidified his pretribulational, premillennial dispensationalism.

The final link in this chain is Tim LaHaye. While LaHaye never credits Lindsey for any of his ideas, it is clear that he has relied on large parts of The Late Great Planet Earth for his writing of Left Behind. While reading The Late Great Planet Earth, there are clear similarities between the two authors’ work: from Lindsey’s account of modern warfare during the Tribulations and LaHaye’s description of World War Three, to the words of LaHaye’s main protagonist, Rayford Steel, on his learning of his wife’s disappearance in the rapture – “Rayford had to direct people to the Bible… he had begun taking [his wife’s] Bible everywhere he went, reading it wherever possible;” compared with Lindsey’s, “I’m going to find myself a Bible and read those very verses my wife underlined. I wouldn’t listen to her when she was here…” Compare Lindsey’s account of a football game, “It was the last quarter of the championship game…only one minute to go and they fumbled – our quarterback recovered…when – zap – no more quarterback – completely gone, just like that!” with LaHaye’s soccer game, “most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground.” Though these similarities may seem coincidental, when reading the two books simultaneously, the parallels between the books are striking, especially in the depictions of the events that occur during the Tribulations.

Although neither Lindsey nor LaHaye ever explicitly deny that their ideas stem from this tradition, they are both self-deceived in their belief that the ideas they profess are merely interpretations of “the plain sense” of the biblical text.

The Bad Boys of Prophecy