A week or so ago, I recorded Dante’s Peak when it was playing on one of the cable channels. I didn’t think I’d seen the movie, and I’ve always had a bit of a weakness for disaster movies (I think that the “what ifs” appeal to a sci-fi type like myself), so tonight I watched it as I ate my dinner. Actually, I think I did see it, a while ago, though I got bored and didn’t watch it all the way through. There’s only so much frenzied digging through rocks/ash/mud as the camera shakes wildly that I can take, after all. This time wasn’t much better, but I fast-forwarded through to the end and their recovery. Because, of course, they were saved.
However, sometime in the midst of watching this, I had to pull up its synopsis on the screen, because I wanted to know when it had been produced. 1997. Hmmm. In ten years, a lot has happened (obviously).
It made me think, though, about how very much different our definition of “disaster” has become since September 11th, 2001. Think about it–in most of the disaster movies that came out prior to then, the disasters at hand were manageable in scale. An earthquake, a tornado, a high-rise on fire, a volcano–it might be stuff that affects one city pretty radically, but in the end, almost everyone (except for the disgustingly crude people) is saved, and the bedraggled displaced citizens clap as the victorious hero emerges from whatever scrape the last act of the melodrama had put him in. Independence Day had this ending, even if their destruction was a little more widespread at the beginning. Then again, it was aliens.
(Though I remember that on 9/11, watching footage of the towers collapsing and flames erupting from the Pentagon, and the swirling paper and ash that blanketed Manhattan, what immediately came to mind was the skyscrapers exploding on Independence Day. I wager that lots of people thought the same thing.)
Of course for a few years after our real-life disaster, we weren’t in the mood for make-believe disasters. It was too crude, too disrespectful of the lives we had lost on that day. But over time we healed, and the disaster movies came back. However, thinking about it, the tone to them is completely different. We’d experienced real loss, the sense of what a real disaster would be. We’d had a taste of Armageddon, even just a little taste, and it altered us. And from that time, I think that disaster movies have taken a darker turn.
You don’t pull a happy little personal narrative out of the midst of the horror, like Rose on Titanic making a new, empowered start on life after losing the one man who allowed her to see what she truly wanted… No, rightfully, I think (though perhaps a bit pretentiously), we realized that disasters are truly grim and daunting things, and that the grim heroism that it takes to weather them doesn’t lend itself to hearts-and-flowers endings, but instead to the overwhelming prospect of starting over from the beginning. Yes, we’ll make it through, but we’re going to have to build a whole new society. And yes, I’m thinking of the movie The Day After Tomorrow, which, despite its shaky science and implausibility, is in my mind all that a disaster movie should be–implausible! Over the top! What’s the absolute worst that could happen–times ten??? And then how would we respond to it?
I think in some way, the Attack on America made us face up to the fact that the worst can–and sometimes does–happen. And because we realized that on that day, we couldn’t continue to create “disaster” movies that tied up all the loose ends of the narrative in a pretty bow. A harrowed band of survivors who will have to rebuild all that they know is so much more plausible, logically and emotionally, now that we’ve seen what a disaster can be.
Posted by Kjirstin 
