It's 2013 and We're Still Alive!

I recently watched the movie 2012, and it was basically about the world coming to an end. The movie “was inspired by theories that the calendar of the ancient Mayans foretells the end of civilisation on Dec 21, 2012” (Philip Sherwell and Hernando Garcia 2009). Hollywood spent more than $200 million on creating this film as it was meant to attract a global audience. The end of the world is considered a big catastrophe affecting every individual on this planet. Since Hollywood is a tool of capitalism as our Cinematic Sociology textbook described, all it cares about is making money. The whole story of the movie 2012 wasn’t realistic and convincing, and yet the producers managed to create the film through using visual effects to portray the natural disasters seem real. Now let’s analyse the movie from a sociological perspective. For example, from the conflict theory lens, we see that in the movie there was a portrayal of conflict between social classes. The bourgeoisies were the elites and people with power who managed to get on the spaceship without any problems, where as the proletariats weren’t able to get on the spaceship because they weren’t rich and they were from the working class who built the spaceship. The bourgeoisies were able to protect their interests and arrange society in a way that most benefits them, at the expanse of the proletariats. This means that the elites and the people with power had the resources to afford getting on the spaceship by purchasing the boarding tickets ahead of time. The proletariats were less fortunate since they were the labourers, and didn’t own the means of production. Social inequality played a role in the 2012 movie. The innocent ordinary people in the movie were left behind and weren’t notified to evacuate ahead of time. They weren’t also informed about the spaceship to rescue themselves. It was interesting to watch 2012 and analyse it from a sociological perspective. I happened to learn about the Mayan calendar, and I learned that Nasa ended up writing an article dedicated to answer people’s inquiries and to clarify the fact that 2012 is not the end of the world.