In armageddon, one of this summer's two big-rocks-hitting-the-earth films, there is a sequence in which Paris, hit dead centre by a fragment from the meteor, is flattened by a wave of explosive force spreading across most of the city. The sequence lasts about a minute and, by itself, accounts for about a dozen people in the long special effects credits. This sequence ($500,000 worth?) has no relevance to the plot. The fragments which hit New York at the beginning and those which later obliterate Shanghai are key plot turning points. But this is incidental, in the way that only scenes of mass destruction can be.
Why destroy Paris? A riposte to French resistance to Hollywood imports? (Movies do not come more "Hollywood" and American than this.) A belated protest against the planning style of Baron Haussmann? Perhaps out of a desire to attract the French audience, to offer them exactly the thrill they want? Just for the hell of it?
Armageddon is part of the reappearance, over the past three years, of the disaster movie-and its big brother, the science fiction apocalypse movie. Witness Independence Day, Starship Troopers, Volcano, Dante's Peak, Titanic, Deep Impact, Godzilla, Armageddon, Daylight-an incomplete list which includes several of the biggest grossing films of the year and, indeed, in the history of cinema.
The critic who wants to decode everything risks seeming po-faced when confronted with 1990s Hollywood blockbusters. But the problem is these are not "just films." Successful Hollywood films are the most powerful cultural forms today, with the exception, perhaps, of certain kinds of marketing and branding material.
The difficulty is that these films are, simultaneously, incredibly blunt in the kind of demands they make on the viewer and incredibly sophisticated in the complexity of their references-their symbolic functioning. They are also often acutely self-aware, pop culture savvy and fliply ironic.
There is no need to denigrate these films-although they certainly vary in quality, from the dire to the genuinely entertaining. The question is not one of value but effectiveness. What are these films doing? Perhaps it pays to be a killjoy for a while. I'm laughing, yes, but I wonder whether irony and quotation are not, in the end, just meaningless, and whether meaninglessness is quite as meaningless as it seems.
Films about destruction on this scale are political films. A disaster movie is always a film about some kind of community in crisis-and therefore also a response to that crisis. The disaster movies of the 1970s belong to the reaction against the political and social changes which erupted in the 1960s. If not exactly dystopian, these are movies which punish utopianism-in the characters and in the spectator. Technology (planes, tower blocks, ships), confidence in social good and the sexual revolution seldom survive.
The other films which are ancestors of the 1990s disaster movies are the science fiction apocalypse movies of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the long-running Japanese series of Godzilla movies and War of the Worlds. If the disaster movie configures the social changes of the 1960s as catastrophe, the science fiction movies turn on a series of closely-knit anxieties about the post-Hiroshima, cold war era: the "red" threat, the impersonality of modern life, the destructive capability of the human race and the ambiguous value of science and technology.
But the fictionalisation of social anxiety is not the only function of these movies. The representation of crisis also offers the pleasures and lessons of response to that crisis. Indeed, it may be that disaster movies are driven not by the need to represent disaster, but the desire to represent the kind of politics necessary to answer it.
Consider this summer's other rock-meets-earth story. Early in Deep Impact, a journalist pursuing a Clintonesque story of sexual misdemeanours is driven off the road by secret service men, abducted, and told by the US president to bury the story. Topical? Unconstitutional? Yes, but no. "Ellie," the supposed mistress, is in fact ELE, an Extinction Level Event-a comet on a collision course for earth. From here on anything is justified.
This knowledge has, after all, been kept secret by the Russian and US governments for over a year. Soon, martial law is imposed and the National Guard brought out in force. At the end of the movie, total global wipe-out heroically averted, the president addresses a huge crowd from a podium in front of the devastated buildings of Capitol Hill. The American people will, he says, rebuild-and every brick laid will be a memorial for the heroes who died to save us. It's a shot-and rhetoric-of which Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.
Or consider Volcano, in which the eponymous geological hazard erupts in downtown Los Angeles. The movie is a kind of fantasy solution to LA's race problem. Mark Fuhrman and Rodney King are mentioned. The plume of smoke rising above the city is a visual reference to the riots. A black man who initially has a bickering encounter with a blonde, blue-eyed police officer ends up working with him to halt the river of magma flowing down the street. (The disaster film belongs to the same genre of political fantasy as the mythology of the Blitz.) At the end of the movie a child remarks that the falling ash has made everyone look the same colour-what a relief.
More troubling than this absurdity is its corollary-the absolute authority of a single man. The disaster films of the 1990s give a new twist to an old theme: the elevation of a single source of power; the denigration of any notion of politics as conflict; the elimination of social, even global, division; the kind of political rhetoric which it would now be difficult to deliver deadpan in any other kind of film; and, of course, binding it all together, the absolute threat of destruction.
It would be ridiculous to say that these are fascist or totalitarian films, even if the central fantasy-of a great Evil which necessitates eliminating political debate and common freedoms and transforming the people into The People-is recognisably the logic of totalitarianism. Rather, politics here is one part of the fascist seduction in its germ: a fantasy of the absence of politics, escapism politics, escaping politics.
What kind of escapism? The disaster movie of the 1990s differs from its predecessors in one important way: the anxiety has gone. Even the most serious does not attempt the kind of assault on the viewers' emotions that, say, The Towering Inferno (burning bodies falling screaming out of the building) does. Volcano certainly touches on a genuine social anxiety-but the body count at the end of the movie is absurdly low and the dominant note is one of triumph. What, at the other end of the scale, are we supposed to make of Independence Day, now one of the highest grossing films of all time, in which at least 100m people die in one day of alien attack and the viewer feels... precisely nothing?
In part, this different attitude to destruction is a result of the end of the cold war. Several of these films have destructive threats which are either explicitly or implicitly analogues of nuclear war. The aliens in Independence Day station their space ships over the main cities of the world and devastate them with a blue beam of energy. Armageddon, Deep Impact and Volcano all describe the destruction threatening them in nuclear terms-"nuclear" winter, an eruption with 27,000 times the force of Hiroshima, and so on. With the end of the cold war these representations are, in a sense, seeking to redeem nuclear destruction. The "first strike," whether by aliens or large rocks, does not come from the US, and nuclear weapons are an essential element in our salvation.
If the release of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan suggests anything-with its "new," realistic portrayal of war-it is that America cannot now provide itself with a positive and direct imagination of war. Part of the popularity of these films of global apocalypse is their ability to give Americans a celebratory symbolisation of the era of America as sole global superpower, engaged in "surgical," aerospace-dominated conflict. It is difficult to provide a truly heroic representation of such actions as the Gulf war or the cruise missile strikes against alleged terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. With their paeans to air power, Nasa, bombs and missiles, these films are at least beginning to do the job.
But there is more at stake than simply a new relationship to the US's military past and future. The attraction of these films is something we might call the ecstasy of destruction. Titanic is a good example. At the heart of the conventional disaster film is the ensemble cast, the sense of a community in crisis. Here, on the other hand, is a film which is essentially romantic; while it contains scenes littered with the deaths of extras, the only characters we really care about are Jack and Rose (DiCaprio and Winslet). The point of the love story is precisely that it does not connect with the sinking of the Titanic-the sinking is incidental to it. There is just love story (foreground) and destruction (background) and we are safe to enjoy either. (Jack dies but is resurrected in the frame story in Rose's memories.)
Thousands or millions die, but they have no subjectivity, so we feel nothing. This is disaster without tears. The body is simply obliterated-death as a form of forgetfulness, as annihilation. Take away the anxiety and what remains except a longing for weightlessness, the thrill of nihilism? An image which has become a clich?f action films suggests this: the character, usually running towards the viewer, being pursued-frequently propelled-by the force of some explosion or wall of water behind. The viewer desires to be engulfed, by this destruction-and by this film.
At the same time, these are films obsessed with the destruction of buildings (or boats or cars). Buildings blow up or collapse, cars explode, boats break in half and hurtle into the sea. This destruction is always politically weighted by these structures' status as symbols of our social life. (Some of these movies blow up the buildings or cities most symbolic of social order and authority-the White House, Paris, New York.) But these are not rebellious movies-quite the opposite. The scenes of destruction represent the sheer negative revolutionary moment-the empty thrill of an empty dissatisfaction.
The crisis, perhaps, is that there is no crisis. Here, after the fall of communism, the so-called end of history, is the ultimate symbol of a political vacuum, escapism of the most spectacular kind. What these movies ultimately offer is a complete evacuation-of meaning, of political difficulty, of personal responsibility.
We might imagine a kind of distillation of the genre. The visuals: a sequence of progressively more grand explosions, instantaneous dematerialisation. In the foreground, some butch, slightly maverick leader stands grimly to attention. Voiceover: Frighten me. Release me. Command me. (Repeat to fade.) I'd go to see it.
