Why do we Love Disaster Movies?
Premise: We are living in a REAL Disaster movie and either are unable to face that reality or we leave ourselves off the hook by thinking “whatever I do wont’ change anything”. Both attitudes are not realistic or useful.
Perhaps the popularity of Disaster movies can tell us something useful about our behaviours?
There seems to be something about DISASTERS that we enjoy in some weird way. Let’s explore why that is and how it is relevant to our current world socio-environmental disaster we are inflicting upon ourselves. My daughter’s favourite disaster movie is 2012. Because I am visiting her here in Kelowna I watched it again last night. It was, of course, silly and predictable but surprisingly, in a weird kind of way, “satisfying” – but I would NOT recommend you see it! After watching it for the 3rd time a new question came to me: why is it that the movie’s classic American “Happy Ending” sends the message that “all is well that ends well” when the whole movie is about billions of people dying horrible deaths? This degree of “Schadenfreude” is beyond absurd, and yet, at the level of raw emotion it works. Of course as soon as I thought about it – the whole thing became cruel and crazy. I then asked myself: why is that we over identify with the one family we follow throughout the film who survive against all odds and simply “forget” about everybody else who dies? This is VERY odd. Why is that we love the fact that a little dog survives but a nasty Russian oligarch dies? Why is that the writers manipulate us feel that, in spite of the fact that the world as we know it ends and 99% of the human race dies “that at the end of the day goodness triumphs once again?”. This is all very odd and disturbing – IF you think instead of just feel. Our emotions are very, very odd. So, given the fact that according to some we too are living through a “doomsday” kind of scenario I thought it would be helpful to explore these strange emotions manipulated in disaster movies like 2012.
Here is real disaster playing out right now that is not climate/environmental related and thus easier for us to admit to [I chose Ecuador as my nephew had been teaching at an International school there for years and kept me up to date on Ecuador – fortunately he left a few months ago]:
Gangs, gunmen & cartels running amok. As terror grips the streets of Ecuador, even the armed forces live in fear
Ecuador’s faith in public order is declining
Ecuadorians’ confidence in police and the judicial system has fallen over the past 10 years. In 2022, only two in five expressed trust in local police and only one in four in courts
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/americas/ecuador-gangs-terror-cartels-intl/index.html
What was your first response to the above news? If you are like most of us it’s probably some version of this: “It’s very sad that people in Ecuador are suffering but thank God I live in Canada where everything is well. Secondly, most of us then assume that “well, that cannot happen in Canada because we are so different that Ecuador”. In other words, we distance ourselves emotionally from the pain and suffering and in a strange way it makes us “feel better” in a “Schadenfreude” kind of way. It’s quite the defence mechanism and denial mechanism and sometimes also a way to say “the world is going to Hell but there is nothing I can do about it”. Of course the reality is, like so many disasters out there, that what is happening “there” could easily happen “here”. You and I could easily be the next victim of the breakdown in public order as the drug crisis is many ways worse than Ecuador as we are the ones buying and using all the drugs sold from South America. It’s quite the denial mechanism we have that gets us to survive today but risks killing us tomorrow as we don’t face up to the longer term problems that are now endemic to the whole world. I would say that it is only a matter of time before the “failed state syndrome” reaches our shores and in some ways I think it already has. Why do I say that? Notice in the above it says “public confidence has fallen over the past 10 years”. Is the same thing happening in Canada.
Climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our collective cultural imagination.”
Dr Ben McCann SFHEA, Assoc Professor French Studies
Of course there is another, almost opposite side to the Disaster movie story. “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. It is clear then that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our collective cultural imagination. Films about those topics are still enormously popular with audiences around the world, but contemporary cinema is increasingly concerned with climate anxiety and cli-fi preoccupations.
As I write this, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) has just become the third-most watched film of all time at the global box office: that’s a film as much to do with biosphere harmony and ecosystem respect as it is with terrorism and interplanetary pillage. What these recent cli-fi films – both fact and fiction – remind us is that the “imagination of disaster” remains a thrilling, often perversely enjoyable experience, but it is becoming progressively more complicated. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/alumni/news/list/2023/05/17/love-affair-with-disaster-movies#:~:text=For%20Sontag%2C%20this%20obsession%20with,to%20terms%20with%20these%20fears.
In other words – our love for Disaster movies is our unconscious trying to cope and perhaps even tell us something: the Disaster we love to see in movies are playing out in the real world and we would be well advised to stop thinking of them as only existing in the movies but instead wake and look around us all become as heroic as the heroes we see on screen who ‘save the day’ and survive to build a better world after the old is washed away.
Here is a 3rd dimension to our obsession with Disasters. People want their disasters to be simple. They want certainty. Life goes on or we go extinct. No messy “It depends upon what I and we choose to do”. So Disaster movies risk also being a way to avoid facing the fact we have choices, we do have the power to choose, and that we are responsible for the future that unfolds. “As an example of what I mean by this, let’s look at global warming, if it’s going to be a disaster people want it to be a true apocalypse. Something which scours the Earth of the wickedness of humanity. Though actually, as I already pointed out, this vague longing for global warming to wipe out humanity is really not about whether people are wicked or not, it’s about the fact that it’s far easier to toss up your hands and say, “Well we’re all going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” Then it is to really figure out what you should be doing and then do it. John Michael Greer, who I reference frequently, described the state of people’s thinking about global warming in this way: It’s a measure of how drastic the situation has become that so many people have fled into a flat denial that anything of the kind is taking place, or the equal and opposite insistence that we’re all going to die soon so it doesn’t matter. That’s understandable, as the alternative is coming to terms with the impending failure of the myth of progress and the really messy future we’re making for those who come after us. A future where uninterrupted progress continues until we reach technological utopia is a clean future. But also futures where we all die from global warming or an out of control AI are pretty clean as well. However, none of these options are likely. It’s far more likely to be messy, and hard, and full of unexpected difficulties.” https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/the-apocalypse-will-not-be-as-cool
So, dear friends, what can you do? Get ready for a messy future. Realize when you fall into the trap of Schadenfreude. Avoid simplistic, one sided solutions or points of view. Work very hard to change – both physically and in your values and imaginations of how we can live differently. Realize that everything we do matters – especially if it does not seem to right now. See the crisis as opportunity. As I wrote in another reflection: who changes when things are going well? Only by seeing how bad things really are can we change and create, albeit with some pain, a future where live can thrive again. Part of that journey means learning from past disaster, looking around at the disaster happening today – for example:
Antarctic sea ice cover crashed for six months straight, to a level so far below anything else on the satellite record that scientists struggled for adjectives to describe what they were witnessing.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/01/19/news/red-alert-antarctica
And instead of thinking: “”Thank goodness that is far away”. Or, “Thank goodness the impacts of this will only be felt after I am dead”. Or “This means are certainly doomed and there is nothing I can do about”….. instead – roll up your arm sleeves, have a good cry, grieve and then seize LIFE and live differently and do whatever you can to nurture LIFE. The worst thing that can happen is that your experience of being alive will improve and the best thing that could happen is that other people will be inspired by you and start to work with you to make the changes we need – which includes simply adapting to a changed and very, very messy future
Leave a Reply