It is tempting to parse the title as speaking of the time of armageddon. I think instead the film reflects on the nature of armageddon’s duration. The catastrophic time for the Jewish family in the film is in the past, but the past is always present, and the shadow of past conflicts extends the catastrophe into the future as they perpetuate the giving of scars while trying to leverage enough time and space to nominally heal their own.
I have seen Armageddon Time referred to as a white guilt film, but I think that is a mistake. The Graff’s are not aligned with the white Americans of the film. The circumstances that throw Paul and his black friend, Johnny, together are not coincidental. The boys’ joint status as class (educational and economical) outcasts suggests they have something more material in common than the skin pigmentation that might otherwise separate them.
The central epiphany that Paul has is not that racism is bad, although it is. His central epiphany is that victims too often act complicity with victimizers out of fear and as a futile down payment on a moral mortgage that allows them to occupy forbidden spaces just a little longer.
Armaggedon Time is painful to watch at times because of the omnipresent threats of violence — institutional, domestic, and existential — that seemingly (but not really) come out of nowhere. To learn the triggers for that violence is the first survival lesson of any trauma survivor, and it is often a bitter one because the consequences of error in a trial-and-error methodology can too often fall on the just as well as the unjust. In fact, if the lesson takes too long to learn, we may lose any meaningful distinction between the two. — Kenneth R. Morefield (2022)
Arts & Faith Lists:
2022 Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury — #10