This November marks the release of 2012, a Roland Emmerich movie seeking to capitalize on our decade’s hysteria du jour and general unease. Originally slated for July release, it was quietly pushed back to a timeslot thought to be more favorable. 2012 seems to embrace all of the cliché cheesiness that has characterized its director’s career. The trailer features a nearly incomprehensible series of calamitous events worldwide, with seemingly no central theme or purpose rather than “blowing stuff up real good.” It’s the ultimate culmination of Hollywood’s years spent driving home the fact that cobbling together random scenes of improbably-scaled cinematic carnage will amount to box office revenue.

On the other side of the coin is the fact that the Dec. 21, 2012, hysteria is real. It’s at least real enough to have gained the attention of the portion of the non-tinfoil-hat public. Wrapped up in this myth is a whole menagerie of misconception, wishful thinking and desperate escapism. Central to all theories is the concept that the Mayan “long count” – a calendar devoted to extrapolating celestial events in the long-term, is thought to mysteriously end on the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Solstice of 2012. Theories are then cut with standard doses of Nostradamus, lizard people, the so-called New World Order – the usual suspects – and an internet-born cultural meme slowly comes about.

The movie trailer suggests the film runs the gamut on 2012 theories, but it’s safe to say that it cannot possibly cover it from all angles. These “theories” are often prefaced with “RE: RE: RE: RE: FWD: U GOTA RED THIS. SCARY STUF :O!”, as is the custom in scholarly journals. These writings then stumble through a melting pot of modern fringe paranoia, but usually involve a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles, the collision of a mysterious “Planet X” (also called Nibiru, from Babylonian mythology), a “galactic alignment,” and various permutations and paranoia revolving around human activities (particularly the currently-broken Large Hadron Collider).

These may appear to center around one central catastrophe unless one takes the time to examine the revolving-door nature of doomsday predictions. For its part, the movie seems to include massive and impossible flooding, asteroid impacts, the literal collapse and disintegration of California along the San Andreas faultline, and what appears to be enormous tsunamis cresting the Himalayas. That all of these images can be crammed into one two-and-a-half minute trailer is astonishing in its own right, but this fact also suggests that the movie was storyboarded with a grab-bag of pseudoscience.

The prevalence of film featuring disaster for disaster’s sake cannot be solely attributed to the proliferation of cheap, readily available special effects. The past 30 years have seen an unprecedented wealth distribution upward in Western society, and the prominence and breadth of doomsday theories may reflect a popular disconnect. Even in cases where there is an ounce of truth, embellishment and oh-so-convenient linkage is unfathomably common since the advent of the internet, and there is a slippery slope in theory-crafting that may very well achieve critical mass with the release of 2012.

From this perspective, 2012 and its predecessors are a tragic reflection of the idly destructive fantasies of a public with, by some accounts, less free time than at any point since feudalism, and even less willingness to chalk their plight up to the random machinations that drive modern commerce. For the workaday public, “Science” is cryptic and cumbersome, and is not nearly as fulfilling as the mad-lib media daydreams that characterize so much of downtime in the West. Our “news” is tailored to entertain and exaggerate, and it should be no surprise that popular science has become a loosely-interpreted spectre of failed high school curriculums’ past.

The most astonishing aspect of the 2012 hysteria, however, is that like most doomsday theories, it stems from anxieties that are at least somewhat rooted in truth. The science populist and gregarious physicist Neill DeGrasse Tyson has, by his accounts, devoted months of symposia and panel discussions to dispelling audience-queried myths of imminent doomsday. In short, none of them hold much water. However, the most surprising tale from Tyson, perhaps, is the acknowledgment that an object called “99942 Apophis” has a real possibility of striking the Earth in 2036. It is one of many “rogue” asteroids transiting the solar system, and has a diameter of roughly 270 meters (890 feet), and would impart a massive release of kinetic energy if it happened to strike Earth. This finding may be cause for real concern, but more likely it will simply be fodder for the creation of new and fresh myths. This object was marked for concern in December of 2004, and slated for impact in 2029, but new data showed that it would be a very near miss.

Among the leading “theories” there is hardly anything factual to be distilled. The “galactic alignment” is a very routine occasion, and in fact occurs at every solstice as the Earth and Sun align with the galactic plane in very mundane, predictable fashion. Impact by an entire planet is even more dubious, and laughed off within the science community. Fears about the Large Hadron Collider’s destructive potential seem to be a combination of sensationalist misinformation and residual doomsday fetishization leftover from the Cold War and possibly before.

Doomsday fantasy is a very human invention. While mass extinction events have occurred throughout natural history – in fact we are currently creating one of the quickest die-offs in Earth’s history – the concept of “the end of the world” doesn’t necessarily parse in practical reality. Whether people admit it or not, there is an undying fascination with humanity’s demise. The prehistoric Mount Toba eruption is an example of a proto-Apocalyptic, Black Swan event that ducks human memory. Roughly 70,000 years ago, the human population is thought to have bottlenecked to some 10,000 individuals. This is by far the largest proportional die-off of the human species thus far. Yet, because it’s so far removed by history, it isn’t regarded with the same finalistic reverance reserved for doomsday theories. Looking back, any notions the prehistoric victims of Toba had of “the end of the world” seem absurd in light of our current development.

Even if it isn’t articulated as such, most of our species seems to believe that we have a capital-D Destiny which we are either straying from or fulfilling, in varying degrees. On an individual level, speculation about our terminus results in numerous afterlife beliefs and unwavering commitments to doomsday predictions that, while entertaining, have universally proven to be apocryphal lines in the sand. If humans are going to be special, then our terminus is largely held to be special as well – ‘the “end” of humanity must be cinematic or it can’t really be the end.’ In extreme cases, it becomes apparent that many people just can’t imagine the world continuing without their personal presence to observe it.

As with other conspiracy theories like the 9-11 Truthers, or the New Age junk science that populates used book store shelves, the 2012 hysteria reveals more about the state of society as it exists today rather than its ultimate end. It represents the deep-seated fears and anxieties of a growing subculture of the populace and utilizes the guise of scientific reassurance to claim legitimacy. 2012 theories and mass media cash-ins reveal a deep-seated feeling of vulnerability just as much as they offer a superficial romp through civilization’s explosion-filled demise. Movies are more formulaic than they’re given credit for, and on some level this movie is likely just “[Relevant cultural anxiety] + too many special effects to comprehend.”  I’ll watch it, but I’ll hold myself back from becoming too engrossed to play the world’s tiniest violin in the theatre.