Oshima and “Waiting for Armageddon” on DVD

Radicalism reigns in the new Oshima boxed set and the religious fanatic doc "Waiting for Armageddon."

I wished there were more teeth, more serration and sawing action in “Waiting for Armageddon,” the new doc by Kate Davis, Franco Sacchi and David Heilbroner, a film that endeavors to document our three major monotheisms’ current lust for end times. It’s not an insignificant topic, and it does intimately involve hundreds of millions of people, horrifying as that is to contemplate.

But did the filmmakers, who do not overtly mix in their perspective, somehow believe there was a way to remain objective here? The film focuses on American evangelicals and Zionists in and out of Israel, and the discussion helplessly trains in on how Biblical prophecy will decimate the wicked and scorch the Earth and of course rescue the handful of twinkly-eyed maniacs who are convinced they’re doing God’s business like no one else.

Except, of course, if hundreds of millions believe the same thing, then it might be the minority of us who will suffer the tongues of flame and so on, in which case, why will the Rapture come at all? The contradictions embedded in the bullshit only begin there, as much as the filmmakers don’t want to say so.

The implicit assumption here is that we lefty doc-watchers don’t otherwise have a clue as to what the flyover netherlands are thinking, and how badly and graphically they pine for our destruction. Which may be true — I, for one, ignore Christian mythologizing every opportunity I get.

To be fair, the three filmmakers do eventually trot out a smattering of scholarly, sensible voices to season the stew, looking sociologically at the phenomenon of millenialism, but the film, perhaps purposefully, is still mostly a serving of one ingredient, and it’s an ingredient that smells. To hear one horse’s ass, a non-New Yorker, crow about how we can expect “9/11 two or three times a day!” is to feel yourself reach for a gun. (Amid the preachers and self-made pundits are a reasonable young couple who long for the apocalypse but work for a fighter jet manufacturer in the meantime.)

The circuitous reasoning in which the film’s interviewees engage is often torturous to listen to — torturous because you can’t correct them. Maybe that’s me. But oh, the signs are everywhere, every day in the newspaper. It never occurs to anyone in sight that the occult significance attached to Jerusalem and Israel and the Temple Mount, the supposed epicenter of the whirlwind, is why so much blood has been spilt there in the last 60 years, not the other way around. It’s a tautology a third grader could dismantle.

The big questions — like why the large majority of human beings are such superstitious apes, committing themselves to ludicrous fairy tales? — are left for us to ask and stew over. Another documentary is waiting to be made, to take the beast on.

“Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties” (Criterion Eclipse) and “Waiting for Armageddon” (First Run Features) are now available on DVD.

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