Screen Machine

Feature: Have a nice apocalypse.

With the release of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 this month, the film industry’s (and society’s) fascination with destruction becomes ever more pertinent. Not to mention depressing. Margaret Pomeranz was on to something when she criticized 2012 for glorifying the end of the world, and for making it seem less-bad that thousands of people were dying as long as the hero survives. Guy Debord labelled the modern world a ’showbiz society’, and this is expressed without a doubt in Emmerich’s film. Everything becomes more appealing with an element of showbiz, of cinematic and celebrity glamour; the destruction of the world, too, becomes more exciting if we get to see John Cusack still alive at the end of it. And in Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998), although the entire world will be destroyed by an oversized tidal wave, we feel personal sympathy only for the death of Téa Leoni and her father. These microcosmic scenarios do make a spectacle of disaster, in our showbiz society, because what we are trained to see is the personal story and social impact of each film, with each ‘disaster’ as setting only, as a launchpad for personal becomings and realizations.

Now, there is of course a difference, semantic at the least, between the simple disaster movie and the apocalypse film. But these days any disaster that occurs is portrayed as so horrible, with such a strong element of we-are-never-going-to-survive-this, that I am happy to equate the two, for the time being. The requisite ‘crazy genius’, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), refers to 2012’s end-of-the-world moment as an apocalypse. Now I don’t know anything about the Bible, but the ferocity of the destruction seems pretty complete enough to be biblical.

Paul Virilio is expressly and theoretically interested in culture’s fascination with disaster. He writes that with the audio-visual image, ‘we have looked on, live, since the end of last century, at endless overkill in the broadcasting of horror and, especially since the boom in live coverage, in the instantaneous broadcasting of cataclysms and terrorist outrages that have largely had the jump on disaster films’. This saturation of television with the spectacle of disaster films has transferred back into the filmic narrative – it is no longer the fantastical worlds of outer space (Star Wars, Armageddon), nor of monsters and aliens (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), nor of a suspiciously Communist bacteria plague that threatens the end of the world (head back to the 1950s). Disaster films these days are all about the natural turning on the human – spectacularly glorified to such an extreme that it seems almost as though filmmakers wish something like that would actually happen just to see how cool it all looks.

The reason why there is so much appreciation (shown through capital) for these movies these days may indeed be the presence of showbiz-disasters in broadcasting. Through film we can take a step back and pretend for a while that terrible things aren’t really happening, because we are watching fake terrible things happening – Baudrillard wrote, post-9/11, that films exorcise the reality of war with their over-the-top images and special effects. As it is said in the film, in reference to a copy of the Mona Lisa, “it’s still a fake.” It is a fake, that is correct, and in Deep Impact and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) we never expect this fakeness to become reality. But because of 2012’s ‘worldly’ setting and appearance, and the constant stream of “people like us” dying throughout the whole film, it’s actually a little bit scary if you think about it.

For a while it seems as though Emmerich could get away with making this film a stab at global warming and politics, but instead the apocalypse is entirely put down to something the Mayans predicted five thousand years ago. So while the film could cut a little close to home if it were a global warming thing (it still could be), the total extremeness of all the destruction makes it entirely unlikely that Jackson (John Cusack) and his family would survive – even past the first forty-five minutes. Planes meet failure having been through less. In fact, everything in 2012 is extreme – from the constant blue-screen “acting” to the CGI-effected punishment of the world to the sickeningly clichéd dialogue. Most memorably, this occured when boyfriend Gordon (Tom McCarthy) says to Jackson’s ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) something like “I just feel like something is tearing us apart,” followed by the ground splitting beneath them and literally tearing them apart by earthquake. Emmerich may as well have just hit me in the face.

Many films are taking on this hit-me-in-the-face technique of late. For example, the intense speed that films such as The Dark Knight employ, and the hyperconscious mobilization of the senses that they make the audience endure, can imbue films with a sense of spectacular disaster although they are not per-se-apocalyptic (arguably). This trend of assault-by-editing is a signal of the acceleration of reality, which also signals the approaching end of one world and the coming of another (post apocalyptic? – but films set in the post are also well occupied with disaster). That is why fast editing in film trailers is so successful, because if all we see are a lot of images which concoct a tale of man vs. world, we will always be drawn to the possibility of the result. As a great recent example, the trailer of 2012 foreshadows the coming of a specific day on which the world will change, and includes a mysterious whisper, ‘I thought I’d have more time.’ This keys into the destruction that is formed by a catastrophic acceleration of reality – and the faster reality accelerates, the faster the film maker gets to blow stuff up.

This fascination with showbiz is epitomized on the small screen too – for example, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode ‘Storyteller’. In this episode, as the apocalypse has (again!) been coming closer and closer, Andrew (Tom Lenk) begins to record Buffy’s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) efforts to prevent it. By recording this process of defending the apocalypse, Andrew is, he thinks, ‘educating and entertaining’. Can disaster films educate? Absolutely not – as if in the face of a ruthless earthquake we can fly a plane in the face of it and still survive? Only someone as handsome and spectacular as John Cusack can do that. Buffy says, fatalistically, ‘This is about war’. At the end of the episode Andrew finally realizes that recording does not achieve anything, it merely serves some selfish need for spectacle.

One of the greatest and cleverest apocalyptic disaster films ever made is Southland Tales (which also stars the fabulously dimwitted/intelligent SMG). The trailer does not do it justice, and yes, repeat viewings are very much rewarded. The reason why I think this film has been so dismally recieved, as in this blog, is that it does not rely on the acceleration of reality, like so many other end-of-the-world movies do. It is a conscious film based on complexity and not reflex. This film is also great because it references, through both the audio and the visual, another of the great apocalypse films, Kiss Me Deadly. In this film, as in Southland Tales, the world ends with a bang (not with a whimper). It is also not concerned with the survival of only one group of people when the rest of the population is being killed off – rather, we suspect that everyone will in fact die one day. Southland Tales favours dialogue, symbolism and visual grandeur rather than snapshot editing for the end of the world. The final apocalyptic tidal wave is contained within the centre of Seann William Scott’s iris, a mini-disaster rather than an overblown and grandiloquent finale. I think that 2012, for one, has been so successful because of it’s use (overuse?) of the disaster film’s “most poignant way to die” – the tidal wave. Leder did it in Deep Impact (go to 1.20 and feel bad for Téa Leoni) and Emmerich does it plenty in 2012. Even the President of the United States dies under a tsunami – and conversely, the post-apocalyptic end of the film finishes on the flattest ocean I’ve ever seen – and the end of the world can’t get more appealing than that.

Eloise is a graduate of cinema studies from the University of Melbourne. She is interested in world cinema and in Hollywood cinema of the classical period, particularly film noir. Eloise is a member of the Melbourne Cinematheque Committee.

→ more articles by Eloise Ross