(Cross-posted at
Southbound Cinema. This is my first diary, so I'm not quite sure how to format it Daily Kos style. In short, sorry about the italics.)
Devin Faraci, my favorite CHUD writer, interviews UT Austin's Dr. Michael White about the slew of end-times product. From the jump, it appears Dr. White knows his stuff...
Q: Last week I spoke with John Moore, the director of The Omen, and he said one of the differences between The Omen and The Da Vinci Code is that The Omen is based on Biblical fact (that interview is here). What's your take on that?
White: John and I talked about this a good bit. It's the clear that the movies, both the http://chud.com/nextraimages/lmichaelwhite2.jpgoriginal and this one, are more directly cued to ideas from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. Whether you can call that fact or not is another question, it seems to me. That's the issue that I think is at hand here.
The movie assumes that there is an ability to look at current events and say, `Ah, these are the signs - or the omens - that one sees described in the Book of Revelation now coming to fruition, and that means we are approaching the arrival of the Antichrist and some sort of end of times scenario. That's what I think he's alluding to as quote unquote Biblical fact. The difficulty is - is that the proper way to read the Book of Revelation?
To add another component of this, of course it is the case that a lot of different groups read Revelation in that way. The Left Behind novels, for example, are also doing something similar, but with an entirely different system of reading current events as signs of the end of times. They would be quite at odds with one another.
I heart you, Dr. White, big time.
Chances are you know an end-times nut or two. They're even more plentiful than mouthy liberals, which means they get hit with little rocks instead of big ones. Check it out! And hell, if you're just a movie nut, Faraci's the best on the net.