The Origin of the Collapsitarian Narrative in the Breakdown of the Bifurcated Futurism

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom. 

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil...
- Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready (New York Times, June 5, 2010)

The Collapsitarian narrative has been with us for a long time and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

In modern memory its memetic lineage can be traced back to The Great Futurism Bifurcation of `68* when, in the spring of that year, two divergent visions of what may lie ahead began an epic battle to dominate the cognitive space of the West's cultural (and celluloid) spiritus mundi.

Early that April Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered, presenting visions of a crisp clean, technologically modern futurism where science offered solutions to all but the most fundamental metaphysical problems and a new species of starchild stood teetering on the brink of creation.

A week previously, Franklin Schaffner & Rod Serling's "Planet of the Apes" had debuted in theatres, offering a wholly contrasting vision of the the future; one primitive and backward, a post-apocalyptic, dead-end, post-collapse non-future of our own tragic making. Over the highly charged summer of 1968 these two rival visions would compete head-to-head on the western world's movie screens, setting the stage for a protracted turf war over our culture's mental landscape.

For the next 40 years these two narrative storylines would continue to develop along their separate paths; each memetic line evolving into its own distinct and specialized species, with its own framing patterns and expressions.

What would eventually develop into the Collapsitarian Narrative gained its toehold quickly, producing four more sequels over the following five years and even a Saturday morning cartoon series.

At that point the die was cast.  From Omega Man to Mad Max, from Terminator to Tank Girl this narrative frame, once developed, soon become ritualized in its traditions and self-perpetuating in it's memetic structure, birthing a sub-genre with a distinct vocabulary of imagery, concepts, and framework for ideation. 

It has become a mythic arch well established and easily adapted to the particularities of whatever crisis currently dominates the anxieties of our modern time.  The current Collapsitarian Narrative is just the latest in a long line of these manifestations.

*Previously these competing visions of the future had existed as part of a single narrative.  As can be seen in Menzies 1939 adaptation of H.G.Wells "Things to Come" the collapse narrative is quite evident, but exists within the storyline as a precursor period only; a dark age that must inevitably be passed through before the eventual rise of humanity into the promised Utopian future.