Maybe it is something in the water (or oil?), but American imperial pop culture suddenly seems to have taken over by some strange apocalyptic vision. Novels like M.T. Anderson’s Feed and James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand; television shows like CBS’ “Jericho,” ABC’s “Lost,” and Fox’s “24;” and recent films like The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the deeply bleak but strangely compelling writer Cormac McCarthy all construct stories of a civilization teetering on the brink, or already engulfed in flames.

“Art mirrors life,” as the old saying goes, and sometimes, art even anticipates life, creating fictitious futures that, if grounded in some prescient or prophetic vision, may help us real-life denizens of this thing we call “reality” wrap our heads and hearts around the emerging realization that our new 21st century is shaping up to be very little like the 20th.

“The Book Of Eli” is such a film. Set in the not-too-distant future, the movie stars Denzel Washington as the aptly-named Eli/Walker, a lone and mysterious figure who makes his way westward against a blasted wasteland that once was American consumer civilization in all of its materialistic glory. Charred cars, blackened human bodies, emaciated kitty cats, collapsed bridges, the remains of KFC wrappers and mp3 devices – all the tropes of life after “The Flash” – are immediately brought to bear in scenes that look and feel very much like The Road. This post-nuke world is one Thomas Hobbes recognized: life is nasty, brutish and short, powerful men dominate, women are relegated to servants, sous chefs, and sex objects, and children seem completely absent. Lucky them.

Eli/Walker is well-equipped to cope with the frightening obstacles that immediately block his path as the film opens - most menacingly, marauding gangs of deformed men who pillage, rape, and kill at will. Turns out, Walker is handy with knives, bows, and guns – and proves his bad-ass mettle by dispatching two posses of bad guys in the film’s opening scenes with little more than a few whispered words and some well-timed martial arts maneuvering. Things get a bit more complicated, however, when Walker finds himself in a frontier town run by a sinister baddie named Carnegie (played with a bit of a smile by Gary Oldman). Carnegie serves as the town’s “mayor” (for lack of a better term), and works his will by – surprise! – physically abusing women, wielding threats through his organized gang of thugs, and verbally abusing his underlings. Ho hum. This has all been done before, and even Denzel Washington’s cool persona doesn’t quite kick in enough to keep the viewer from stifling a few yawns.

But then, things get a bit more interesting. Turns out, Carnegie is looking for a special book (hint: the Bible) that he believes will give him the power to restore civilization to the burnt-out landscape (in a brief but funny scene, we learn that The DaVinci Code doesn’t make the cut – when his men bring him several copies, Carnegie orders them all burned.) Eli/Walker is in possession of some sort of a book, as it turns out (See hint above), and Carnegie, deciding that this is the book he seeks, sets out to wrest the text from Walker, by femme fatale or force, if necessary.

How events play out I leave for you to discover. Suffice to say, though, in the Age of the Image, it is refreshing to have so much post-apocalyptic attention paid to, yes, a BOOK. While the film leaves this typography-might-save-humanity theme grossly underexplored, to its detriment, there are a few interesting surprises that unfold before film’s end. And it is somehow comforting to think that books – those tangible cultural, historical and even sacred artifacts that connect us with generations and civilizations that have come before, now ignored in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube - might offer us some sort of continuity as we collectively move into what will surely be interesting times ahead.

And the film’s ending is actually worth the wait. To say more would ruin the surprises.

Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

The opening scene of director Jason Reitman’s new film “Up In The Air” features a soulful yet deeply ironic version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” – accompanied by aerial shots of Anywhere, USA from 10,000 feet up. The familiar tune, repackaged tongue in cheek, is quickly followed by a quick-cut montage of newly-fired anonymous company employees – the white collar workers of a troubled U.S. economy - unpacking their souls in front of the camera.

Their attentive listener is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a professional pink slip dispenser and occasional motivational speaker whose chief raison d’etre is to remain in perpetual motion, forever between places, time zones, and relationships. “To know me is to fly with me,” explains Bingham, who delivers “how big is your backpack” advice to rapt if road-weary conference attendees who quietly gather in random hotel conference rooms, when he is not deftly downsizing unfortunate white collar types in rapid-fire solipsistic sojourns to Dallas, Omaha, Miami, Chicago, and other cities from coast to coast. “I tell people how to avoid commitment,” he confides to the audience at one point.

“The Road” is Ryan’s home, and he much prefers a nomadic existence of permanent weightlessness as a so-called “transition specialist” - 270 days in flight - to the realities of living on the ground. Light on his feet, Bingham has made his peace with life “up in the air,” including a new-found occasional romantic rendezvous with a woman named Alex, a fellow “elite status” traveler, with whom Bingham enjoys witty verbal banter and casual sex. “Just think of me as yourself,” Alex explains to Bingham via mobile phone, “only with a vagina.”

All is well with Ryan Bingham and his quest to attain his goal of 10 million travel miles, until his world is rocked by a young and confident new consultant named Natalie Keener who convinces company management to embrace a “glocal” policy of “virtual downsizing” via tele-screen. Suddenly, Bingham’s bedouin-like suitcase-savvy happy-traveler world is turned upside down, but he sees an opportunity to educate Keener in the hows and whys of “making limbo tolerable” for newly-canned corporate
unfortunates. “I stereotype,” he explains to Keener in one of a dozen airports in the film. “It’s faster.”

Director Reitman has a knack for channeling the American cultural zeitgeist. His last film, “Thank You For Smoking,” arrived in theaters just as American public opinion turned on the tobacco companies in earnest. In a 21st century America marked by severe recession (we can’t use the “d” word - yet), massive job layoffs, and an uncertain future, “Up In The Air” explores difficult territory, especially when we hear the voices of those employees cast adrift by the impersonal vagaries of corporate misfortune (apparently Reitman captured interviews with the real-life downsized as fodder for the film.) And the arch-eyed, cynical, and slightly-off-kilter George Clooney, in his guise as Ryan Bingham of the Empty Backpack, is a near-perfect divining stick for channeling the mojo that infuses our post-modern Facebook-surfing, cellphone sporting civilization of yak yak, marked by euphemistic buzz phrases and a culture grounded in nothing but placeless-ness and shallow expressions of good will. “This is America, this is what we were promised,” one character confides to him toward the film’s end. “Oh, really?” Reitman seems to be asking.

And yet, oddly, Reitman manages some nods to our essential humanity here - in the drunken Cyndi Lauper karaoke, the perfunctory pillow talk via text messages, and his sophisticated if subtle sense that the transitory nature of “practicing protocol” might ultimately lead to something more lasting. “You have set up a life of permanent self-banishment,” Keener snarls at Bingham in one tense moment. Perhaps, and it is Bingham’s insistence on face-to-face firing over virtual axe-dropping that represents the last relational thread connecting him to his fellow man.

And in the real world of the U.S. Empire, with the airline industry in the throes of semi-permanent bankruptcy, job losses at 20 percent nationally, the federal government at the mercy of the Big Banksters, and the specter of Peak Oil knocking on the door, “exploring our options,” as Keener so happily phrases it, and turning to our neighbors and friends for deliberate community building on the ground, may be our best collective step forward, a more realistic 21st century alternative to life “up in the air.”