"When Will the World End Already?: Climate Change, Christian Eschatology, and the Hollywood Blockbuster after 9/11"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Christian eschatological thought has had a profound impact on American culture and traditions. This thesis examines the ways in which Christian apocalyptic models and contemporary anxieties around climate change intersect in Hollywood blockbuster cinema in the years after 9/11. With religious fervour stirred up by the U.S. government in the wake of the attacks, films such as The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds, Knowing, 2012, San Andreas, and Geostorm reclaim religiously conservative values through their focus on family drama in which the apocalypse acts as a positive force of social change. I argue that these films harmfully conflate climate change with notions of biblically redemptive Armageddon, reinforcing the idea that climate change can be understood within a Christian understanding of the End as cumulative and purposeful.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".