From the End Times to the End of Time

Resignation, Nostalgia, and Presentism in Contemporary Pop Culture

Abstract

This study examines how conceptions of historicity and the future have been transformed in twenty-first-century popular culture, with particular attention to the narratives of mainstream genre films that explore the social dimensions of temporality. Drawing on François Hartog’s theory of presentism, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of simultaneity, Eva Horn’s work on representations of ecological catastrophe, Fredric Jameson’s writings, and Vivian Sobchack’s account of the mythologization of science fiction, the author argues that the dominant tendencies of contemporary popular culture no longer imagine alternative futures but instead rely on the reconfiguration of the present and the aesthetic recycling of the past. This shift is interpreted as a significant cultural symptom of the crisis of historicity and the erosion of social imagination. The study concludes that, in Hollywood narratives seeking to alleviate the tensions of the contemporary condition of abstract and paralysing apocalypse, the possibilities for collective agency have become increasingly limited, giving way to patterns of stagnation, resignation, and nostalgia. At the same time, the rise of retro culture, franchise logic, and multiverse narratives reflects the same broader tendency: the spatialization of time and the gradual weakening of causal historical thinking.