“2012” Movie Exploits America’s Fears

by lisa ~ October 19, 2009

Oct. 19, 2009 - Not since the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s radio broadcast of an adaptation of “War of the Worlds” have people taken a media event as seriously as the launch of the new film “2012.”On Oct. 30, 1938, Orson Welles terrified an estimated 4 million to 12 million listeners with his tale of a Martian landing in the real town of Grovers Mill, N.J., according to this Washington Post article. Americans, particularly those on the East Coast, were sent into a panic.

The film “2012″ claims that the world will end on Dec. 12, 2012 - a date that was supposedly predicted by the Mayans. The cause will be a collision between earth and a mysterious planet named Nibiru that was discovered by the ancient Sumerians. NASA, to avoid causing worldwide chaos, is concealing information about this impending astrological catastrophe.

Well in advance of the film’s release on Nov. 13 release, Sony Pictures has been running TV commercials and supplementing them with ingenious rumor-mongering web sites. The Institute for Human Continuity (slogan: “Ensuring the end is just the beginning”) has launched a “human preservation” effort. Fortunate winners of its lottery will gain access to personal bunkers and floating cities so they can be saved.

Sound crazy? Well, yeah. But apparently a lot of people are taking the movie seriously. Here are just two of thousands of web sites selling the same Kool-Aid:

http://www.surviving-nibiru.com/

http://www.thenibiru.com/

Sky and Telescope magazine is trying to counter the rumors with a November cover story authored by noted astronomer E. C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in L.A. (The article is available to subscribers only but a summary of it can be found here.)

Some concerned citizens are reaching out to NASA directly. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific allowed its former president David Morrison to attempt to debunk these myths by devoting an entire issue of its newsletter to this nonsense. Morrison is a planetary astronomer and director of the Lunar Science Institute headquartered at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

“Morrison says it’s hard to know whether the people who have written to him with their fears represent a fringe or a larger cross-section of Americans who, distrustful of traditional sources of information and the authorities behind them, are falling victim to the Internet’s snake-oil salesmen,” according to this Los Angeles Times article. He has even coined a term for this phenomenon: “Cosmophobia” means fear of the cosmos.

The studio has done a brilliant job of capitalizing on existing cultural interest in a doomsday scenario. A segment of the society that could rightly be called fringe has combined with a subset that’s predisposed to believe conspiracy theories and another group that’s fearful of astronomy and the universe (presumably because it gets its information from Hollywood blockbusters and the Internet). The PR value of this type of intersection is indeed priceless. The result is a primed audience that’s sure to help this film break box office records.

Lisa Tibbitts is the principal of Tibbitts Creative, a public relations and marketing service that emphasizes corporate communications. She has an extensive background in financial services and an MBA in marketing. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FinancialPR.

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