Engineered Amnesia: How Hollywood Teaches Us to Stop Thinking

By the time the umpteenth CGI asteroid hurtled toward Earth last summer — this one apparently big enough to take out not just civilization but also our suspension of disbelief — there’s a collective shrug ripple across the audience. Another day, gee another apocalypse. In 2025, Hollywood has turned the end of the world into a streaming-service comfort food. How so? Easy to binge, easy to forget, and designed to leave you craving more.

Hollywood has turned the end of the world into a subscription plan. Today’s apocalypse is bingeable, algorithmically queued, and beautifully color-graded. The fireballs look better every year. The moral stakes? Not so much.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, it’s more than cultural noise. The sci-fi genre shift from speculative “what if?” to adrenaline-drip “oh well” is not just aesthetic — it’s ideological. This whole dynamic validates what Fredric Jameson argues: our culture finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and contemporary science fiction has obliged by giving us endless worlds to watch collapse. Catastrophe has become the only future we can picture — and that inability to imagine alternatives is the real catastrophe.

From Inquiry to Spectacle

Science fiction once served as a thought lab for democracy. Le Guin, Butler, and Asimov used imagined futures to interrogate technology, ethics, and power structures. These were not mere entertainments but what Le Guin called “exercises in imagination” — training the mind to anticipate, to doubt, to resist.

That tradition has been strip-mined by Hollywood into what Susan Sontag once called “the imagination of disaster,” but now delivered as a global franchise. We are no longer invited to ask why the world ends; we are simply invited to enjoy it ending — again and again, in HDR. The result is what Jean Baudrillard might call a hyperreal apocalypse: a simulated collapse that feels so real it neutralizes the urgency of the actual one. Climate change becomes just another Netflix backdrop.

The Spectacle and Its Uses

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle argued that modern capitalism doesn’t just sell products; it sells mediated experiences that keep us from confronting reality directly. Hollywood’s doomsday obsession is a perfect example: it gives us the thrill of catastrophe without the politics of prevention.

And this is not merely accidental. As Slavoj Žižek observes, cinema tells us not just what we desire but how to desire — and today it teaches us to desire our own destruction. The audience doesn’t leave thinking about the systems that might avert collapse; they leave charged for the next trailer drop.

Anti-Intellectualism as Design Principle

Richard Hofstadter charted America’s long history of distrusting intellectualism, tracing it to evangelical pragmatism and a national suspicion of “eggheads.” That suspicion has been repurposed by mass media into a profitable asset: thinking too hard risks breaking the spell.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned that mass entertainment under capitalism standardizes culture, producing passive consumers rather than engaged citizens. The doomsday blockbuster is the perfected form of this “culture industry” critique — a two-hour anesthetic that rewards passivity and restores us just enough to go back to work, or back to streaming.

Schooling for Catastrophe

If audiences seem primed for passive consumption, it’s because they’ve been trained for it. John Rury’s An Age of Accountability traces how standardized testing reshaped education into an obedience drill: memorize, regurgitate, forget. These are perfect skills for surviving a zombie horde but disastrous ones for interrogating power structures.

Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, argued that capitalism has colonized imagination so thoroughly that alternatives feel impossible. The dominance of dystopian spectacle reinforces this colonization: collapse is treated as inevitable, resistance as futile. The result is a public fluent in survival narratives but illiterate in systemic critique.

Collapse as Comfort Food

This explains why our most popular futures are not just dark but resigned. Hollywood’s apocalypses rarely ask who benefits from collapse or whether it could be stopped. Instead, they give us catharsis: collapse as rite of passage, as narrative necessity, as entertainment.

Baudrillard might say that these films are not even about the end of the world but about the pleasure of watching the end of the world — endlessly, on loop. We’re no longer imagining alternatives to catastrophe; we’re consuming catastrophe itself as a luxury good.

Cracks in the Facade

And yet, there are signs of resistance. Ted Chiang’s stories pry open the future to ask what it means to be human in a machine world. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy interrogates the politics of apocalypse, daring to suggest that the system — not nature — is the villain. Even Black Mirror, at its best, restores the speculative “what if” as a form of cultural critique.

These works are not immune to commodification — Netflix owns Black Mirror, after all — but they remind us that science fiction can still be insurgent, still capable of forcing the question rather than soothing it.

Toward a Culture of Imagination

Jameson once wrote that the task of our time is to “map the present” so we can imagine a different future. That’s what inquiry-driven science fiction used to do, and what it could do again — if we demanded it.

Sidney Perkowitz calls for a “responsible spectacle”: stories that still dazzle but also sharpen our understanding of science, ethics, and power. Such a revival would not only save the genre’s intellectual integrity; it might help save our capacity for collective imagination, which late capitalism seems determined to suppress.

Thinking as the Real Rebellion

Adorno and Horkheimer warned that mass culture turns us into docile participants in our own domination. To resist, we must think — critically, collectively, and inconveniently.

That is why the fight for better science fiction is not trivial. It is a fight for the imaginative muscles a democracy needs to survive. Because if the only futures we can picture are ruined ones, we may stop believing we have the power to prevent them.

Takeaway

The next time the world ends on screen, don’t just watch. Think. Ask the real question: why this is dystopian diet so repetitive and ubiquitous? Asking and thinking: gee, may be the most subversive thing you’ll do all week.