deeply impactful Deep Impacts
Willsher’s remarks were an opaque, corporate non-apology. But they also, perhaps fittingly, brought to mind Deep Impact, the 1998 disaster film in which a huge meteor is on collision course with earth. Though there is an impact—a smaller comet hits and wipes out a bunch of people—the deeper one is averted. The crew of a spaceship called Messiah give their lives for humanity by hitting the larger comet head-on. The movie ends with the President on the steps of a half-demolished Capitol Building, declaring that “Cities fall. But they are rebuilt. Heroes die. But they are remembered.” One promotional poster reads: Oceans Rise. Cities Fall. Hope Survives. I wouldn’t recommend it.
In disaster movies, hope survives. Many other things perish—people, buildings, landmarks, cities, civilization—but hope survives. In Armageddon (1998), which came out the same year as Deep Impact and has a nearly identical plot (astronauts blow up meteor, save world), one man dies so that the world can live. The leader of the mission, Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), detonates nuclear weapons on the threatening comet, but not before approving his daughter’s marriage. In saving humanity, Stamper’s death also sanctifies another disaster-movie obsession: the nuclear family. Dying to save the earth isn’t just duty but dowry.
Disaster movies, after all, tend to be hostile to change. Brushes with extinction don’t force reckonings but reaffirm the status quo: the family, the nation-state, the geopolitical order, the military industrial complex. It is worth noting that Stamper, savior of mankind, is the third-generation owner of an offshore drilling company.
Writing about the many disaster films of the 1970s—star-studded hits like Airport (1970), Earthquake (1974), and The Towering Inferno (1974)—Enrico Quarantelli notes that
The films often end on a closing shot of survivors starting again to pick up their normal routines, but with no indication that there is going to be much difference in the future, either in terms of preventing a recurrence or in regard to the ways in which the disaster threat will be handled if it does recur.
Most disaster movies are about preventing catastrophe in the heroic heat of the present, not those that may come in the future.
This is certainly true of many films from the 1970s peak, as well as the 1990s and 2000s: Independence Day (1996), The Core (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Perhaps because of the cultural hegemony of Marvel movies, where ever-larger disasters are averted by supragovernmental übermensch, proper disaster films of the past ten years have consisted more of lazy reboots and IP crossovers—Battleship (2012), Geostorm (2013), San Andreas (2015)—than dramatizations of climate change. (Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) is a notable exception.)
There are two not-quite-disaster films from that period, however, that I find illustrative of reactions to the current climate crisis. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), that disaster movie for Bezos types, climate change is left behind through sentimentality and last-minute innovation. Science prevails. Time is of the essence. Love is all you need. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), a disaster movie for depressives and nihilists, all is always already doomed; the characters approach the end differently but it comes nonetheless—with the suggestion that maybe it’s not such a bad thing either.
These films (which, to be clear, I don’t mean to reduce to climate allegories) might stand in for what climate activist Daniel Sherrell calls we’re fine and we’re fucked mentalities.1 He writes that
“We’re fine” and “we’re fucked” are not answers, they’re expressions of fear, walls we put up to avoid having to look at the Problem ourselves. And this is the point: that eventually you will have to look at it yourself, develop your own relationship to it. Eventually you will have to feel whatever feelings it evokes.
What feeling does an oil spill evoke? It is certainly too small for the cinema. Nobody would ever make a disaster movie about an oil spill because I don’t think it even registers as a disaster. Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr only called the spill “a potential ecological disaster” (emphasis mine).
In disaster movies, the threat must be existential. These disasters are too, in a way, but they keep happening. The last oil spill off California’s coast was in 2015, when 143,000 gallons of crude oil leaked from a rusted pipeline north of Santa Barbara. There were offshore spills in California in 1969, 1971, 1990, and 2007. 100 years ago, a newspaper reported on an oil spill in Yorkshire, England, observing “that the plumage of the birds had become so heavily coated with the oil covering the surface of the water that they could neither fly nor dive.”
In disaster movies, hope survives. In actual disasters, hope is beside the point. There is wreckage to reckon with, bodies to move, measures to be taken. Nothing is suffused with glowing acts of global citizenry and American valor. It is the stuff of banality and decline: closed beaches awash in dead animals, stinking and dissolving and black in the sun.
In films like Deep Impact, calamity wipes the slate clean literally and spiritually: the survivors are humbled but saved. Things could have been worse. Hope paid off. The people in power did the right thing, got lucky, or both. In real life, in the Anthropocene, calamity is a crescendo of smaller ones. Hope is for the technocrats. For everyone else: disaster.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, recently announced that William Shatner, the 90-year-old actor famous for playing Captain Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, will go to space next week.
The deepest oil platform in the world is operated by Shell in the Gulf of Mexico. It is called Perdido: “Lost.”
ben tapeworm