Lumen Winter 2023 - Flipbook - Page 34
Love affair with
disaster movies
By Ben McCann
In her influential essay ‘The Imagination of
Disaster’ (1965), the American writer and
intellectual Susan Sontag argued that in the
post-World War II era, modern society had
become obsessed with the idea of disaster,
as seen in the proliferation of science fiction
and disaster films. She writes that these
films are concerned with “the aesthetics of
destruction” and “the peculiar beauties to
be found in wreaking havoc”. For Sontag,
this obsession with disaster mirrored a sense
of anxiety and unease about the potential
for catastrophic events in the nuclear age.
The films serve as a way of processing and
coming to terms with these fears.
Sontag’s ideas remind us that popular genre
films continue to articulate contemporary
social concerns; in other words, they
“reflect” the times in which they are made.
The argument goes, for instance, that 1950s
American science-fiction films like The
Thing from Another World (1951), Them!
(1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) might on a surface level be telling
stories of alien invasion or rampaging ants,
but they are also mounting a far deeper
interrogation of specific contemporaneous
fears such as communism, nuclear power
and technological anxiety.
Films about the end of the world have
always been big business. They trade on our
fears, astound us with their state-of-theart special effects and remind us not just
of the fragility of our home planet, but of
ourselves. We think of the post-apocalyptic
Mad Max (1979), where resources are
scarce and society has broken down, or
The Road (2009), in which a father and son
struggle to survive in a world destroyed by
an unspecified disaster.
Hollywood remains fascinated by threats
from above and beyond. These threats
usually involve aliens (Independence Day
[1996], War of the Worlds [2005), A Quiet
Place [2018]), meteorites (Deep Impact,
Armageddon [both 1998]), solar flares
(Knowing [2009]), or the Moon falling into
the Earth (Moonfall [2022]). All feature
recurring tropes: spectacular scenes of
planetary destruction depicted in vivid CGI,
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
a small group of people banding together
to thwart an external threat, ruminations
on humanity’s own contribution to its
precipitous downfall, and so on. Often,
much of our pleasure derives from
predicting which cast members will survive
or which globally famous monument will be
the first to topple.
But more recently, in this era being referred
to as The Anthropocene, Hollywood has
turned to a different type of ‘end of the
world’ film – films about environmental
catastrophe triggered by humanity. One of
these defining tales about an impending
global apocalypse was a full-blown
Hollywood disaster film – The Day After
Tomorrow (2004) – which depicts the
catastrophic effects of global warming,
leading to a sudden onset of a new ice age
and a series of extreme weather events that
threaten the survival of humanity. It was
directed by Roland Emmerich (who had
already made Independence Day); Emmerich
would go on to make 2012 (2009), another
disaster film replete with volcanic eruptions,
tsunamis and a global flood.
Like these earlier ‘alien invasion’ films, such
films explore themes of survival, heroism,
and the human condition in the face of
seemingly insurmountable adversity. While
The Day After Tomorrow may at times play
fast and loose with scientific accuracy –
the phrase “climate tipping point” from a
geological perspective means decades, but in
cinematic terms, that means minutes – the
film succeeded in bringing anthropogenic
climate change into the mainstream.
Hollywood has not looked back since.
These films are representative of ‘climate
fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ - a genre of literary fiction
that explores the potential impacts of climate
change on a personal or a global scale.
Prominent examples include Ian McEwan’s
Solar (2010), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone
Gods (2007) and J. G. Ballard’s The Wind
from Nowhere (1961). These texts don’t just
raise awareness about the dangers of global
warming and its consequences, but also offer
possible scenarios for mitigating its effects.
Cinematic cli-fi has become progressively
mainstream in recent years. Bong
Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) shows Earth
Scene from The Day After Tomorrow
as a frozen wasteland brought about by
bungled attempts to counter global warming
with a risky geo-engineering method. Wall-E
(2008) and Avatar (2009) are two popular
films that sound clear warnings about what
might happen if human activities continue
unchecked. And isn’t Happy Feet (2006)
actually a film about climate change? Take
away the dancing penguins and a much
darker vision emerges, of an Antarctica
surrounded by calving ice shelves,
overfishing and ocean pollution.
And watch Christopher Nolan’s widely
admired Interstellar (2014) again - the words
‘climate change’ are never heard, but they
don’t have to be: Nolan depicts Earth as a
place ravaged by dust storms, failing crops,
and total biosphere collapse. Little wonder
that the main thrust of the story follows
a group of astronauts who travel through
a wormhole in search of a new habitable
planet.
None of this is new, of course. Science
fiction cinema has frequently intertwined
its narratives of space travel, flying cars,
and robots with broader environmental and
ecological concerns. Silent Running (1972)
saw Bruce Dern as a botanist, fleeing Earth
and tending a giant rainforest inside a huge
space freighter. Ridley Scott’s still colossally
influential Blade Runner (1982) depicted
a rainy urban world devoid of plants
and animals, while in Steven Spielberg’s
A.I. (2001), rising sea-levels from global
warming have devasted coastal cities. And
who can forget the unnerving Soylent Green
