Destruction II: World

Operations of destruction in media and culture echo the fantasies and fears of the audiences that consume them. In the chapter that follows, I discuss representative examples of world destruction, and the desire audiences have for these images, which, in turn, echo the appetite for disaster in contemporary news cycles. The repetition of endless iterations of world destruction in recent film history suggests an attracted paranoia for the end of a world that provides comfort and cushioning from the apocalyptic desperation that audiences imagine would follow it. The reason for this paranoia is because, as Claire Colebrook has observed, ‘these