Profits of doom

For Hollywood, disasters are just another special effect

by Peter Keough

"At least he saw the show," says a volcanologist in Dante's Peak after a colleague gets swept away by a nasty pyroclastic flow. As demonstrated by cinematic spectacles from the fall of Babylon in Intolerance (1916) and the parting of the Red Sea (actually, two large slabs of Jell-O) in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923) to the box-office munching T. rexes in The Lost World and the synthesized, plague-infected insects of the forthcoming Mimic, everybody wants to see the show but doesn't necessarily want to be a part of it. Leave apocalyptic murder and suicide to Timothy McVeigh or Heaven's Gate -- for those of us with $7.75 to spare, a vicarious gander at a well-produced natural disaster or day of doom will do the trick.

What's the attraction? The Millennium is used up as a scapegoat and it still has four years to go. The cinema of doom has been around since the beginnings of Hollywood, so long that it has evolved into subgenres. And though each era gives the genre its own individual spin, there are common compulsions, conflicts, fears, and desires.

First, of course, there's the good old death wish, the now disfavored Freudian instinct that, like the pleasure principle, must be sublimated in a civilized society. As Hamlet observes, " 'tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished," or as the melancholic hero of the surprisingly sophisticated The Day the World Caught Fire (1962) puts it, "Not everybody wants to live. They're tired of the pain and fear, the daily, bit-by-bit loss of hope." Neither character will act on this temptation, so fate in the form of a poisoned rapier or the earth jolted from its orbit by nuclear explosions intervenes, to our amusement.

Not that the pleasure principle isn't present. Disaster movies can be seen as allegories of sexual suppression and anxiety. Okay, maybe I should get out more often. But how many times do you see a couple with love problems bitching away as the world goes to hell? Take the estranged married couple and troubled love triangle of Twister, whose sexual malaise summons down those lethal, phallic funnels. Pathetic fallacy, perhaps, but what else about that movie wasn't pathetic?

Then there's guilt: we, or someone else, are having too good of a time, or scientists are getting too cocky, or somehow we've deviated from a divine or natural law and must pay the consequences. What was good for Sodom and Gomorrah is also good for us. Guilt is often paired with or supplanted by self-righteousness: we are saved; Sodom and Gomorrah is good enough for them.

Fear is not to be denied. We know that we're helpless before the devastation of a tornado, an epidemic, an earthquake, a comet, a deluge, nuclear war, marauders, cloned dinosaurs. So maybe by experiencing it as mindless entertainment we can purge that fear, or in some primitive, homeopathic way make ourselves immune.

Finally, there's the disaster as social commentary. Doomsday is a worst-case scenario for some abiding urgent cultural or social conflict. Is it just a coincidence that the magma in Volcano, as Boston Globe critic Jay Carr pointed out, confined itself to the South Central and other lower-rent areas of Los Angeles ripe for urban renewal and gentrification? Or that the carnivores in The Lost World seem inordinately fond of foreigners and people of color?

These, then, are some of the ground rules behind the cinema of doom. Here are a few of the doom subgenres that play with them:

It's not nice to fool mother nature-

Sudden, unimaginable natural disasters are business as usual for humankind. Such catastrophes must have meaning, one would hope, and in movies, at least, they do.

Often, it's a moral lesson -- decadence, greed or injustice get their just deserts from an offended natural order. The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), San Francisco (1936), and In Old Chicago (1937) gave Depression-era folks a taste of each town's high-priced vice before leveling them with their respective paybacks.

Later films of this type were less simplistic, if not downright profound. Although some might look askance at Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1956) as a disaster movie (for starters, the special effects are rather thin), the story of a medieval knight who plays chess with Death to save his life during the Black Plague reaffirms the retribution theme even as it questions it. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) calls for a psychosexual interpretation, with the harpy-like deadly fowl as projections of the repressed id of glacial Tippi Hedren. Similarly, in Outbreak (1996) and Dante's Peak, the virulence of the former's epidemic and the heat of the latter's volcanic eruption parallel the degree to which the couples in each movie are getting any.

Oddly, though, the most profound of these films may be the cheesy blockbusters of producer Irwin Allen. In The Poseidon Adventure (1972), a tsunami overturns an ocean liner full of morally lost, socially varied fun-seekers played by washed-up stars. The microcosm is inverted, and to achieve salvation those with faith have to follow Gene Hackman's hip cleric deck-by-deck, overcoming deadly challenges, to the bottom of the ship, which is now the top. It's a Divine Comedy, though perhaps more of the John Waters kind. More derivative of Dante is The Towering Inferno (1974), in which a penthouse party celebrating the opening of the world's tallest skyscraper suffers a Babel-like fate when it goes up in flames. Here the process is the same as in Poseidon, only with fire, and in reverse; the high point is O.J. Simpson rescuing a kitten and giving him to a teary Fred Astaire.

The beast within is not nearly as bad as the beast without-

Monsters are embodiments of the repressed, both psychologically and politically. And the bigger the thing repressed, the bigger the beast and the special-effects budget.

They don't get much bigger than King Kong (1933), or at least they don't come with more metaphoric baggage. Is the big guy a symbol of chaste Fay Wray's unconscious desires, a representative of a downtrodden working class rising up against the capitalists who exploit it, or an embodiment of the Nazi rise to power? All I know is that the movie was a lot scarier than Jurassic Park, and when the big ape falls, I cry.

The heyday of the civilization-destroying monster was, of course, the beginning of the Cold War in the '50s, when the bomb and radiation seemed to portend the end, or the salvation, of the world as we know it. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) would set the pattern for many such monsters -- Behemoth, Reptilicus, et al. -- to come. A nuclear blast defrosts a giant dinosaur, who returns to his breeding ground, now New York City. Havoc ensues until the visitor decides to relax in an amusement park. The moral is that far from showing the way to the future, atomic energy plunges us into a savage, primal past. This idea was embraced by the Japanese, who knew its truth all too well; they made the definitive statement with Godzilla (1954), though the British came up with a touching variation with Gorgo (1961), which established dinosaur family values long before Spielberg.

Them! (1954) reprises this theme when a nuclear test brings to the surface another submerged monstrosity -- mutated ants the size of Oldsmobiles. Are they stand-ins for the creeping Red Menace? A better candidate is The Blob (1954), an amorphous pink protoplasm that infiltrates Middle America from a meteorite and literally absorbs the minds -- and bodies -- of its inhabitants. Its nemesis is cold (as in War, presumably).

No new contenders in the monster field would arrive for a few decades after the various Japanese permutations of Mothra/ Ghidrah/Rodan etc. in the '60s. Perhaps geopolitics had become too complex, or people too cynical, to reduce ideology to a giant rubber special effect. It took the computer technology of Jurassic Park to make dinosaurs viable again, if only as sheer spectacle. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was right: the downfall of its kind was an amusement-park ride.

A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing-

Ignorance may not be bliss, but human intellectual hubris is an open invitation to cosmic comeuppance. The Overreacher has gotten us in trouble since Adam and Eve. At no time was that more an issue than in the '60s, when the fruit of human progress and technological advancement was a system of mutual destruction seemingly beyond human control. Such was the case in Stanley Kubrick's brilliant, mordant satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1962), in which Peter Sellars in his multiple roles single-handedly skewered the political, military, and scientific mindset that leads the world, inevitably, to nuclear destruction. More melodramatic, if more chillingly realistic, Fail Safe (1964) made much the same point in its demonstration that our foolproof nuclear-defense system is a proof of fools.

By the '70s it had become clear that nuclear weapons weren't the worst thing the diabolical genius of military researchers could come up with. Both the mock-documentary The Andromeda Strain (1971) and the freewheeling, sometimes-not-intentionally farcical The Omega Man (1971) broached the subject of biological warfare while tying it into a broader issue -- social alienation in Andromeda, class conflict in Omega. But leave it to John Milius and Red Dawn (1984) to rechill the Cold War, blaming pointy-headed liberals for allowing the Cubans and Nicaraguans to invade the U.S. of A., with only a guerrilla band of brat-packers as our last line of defense. Sorry, John, I find The Blob more plausible.

These days, the bad guys who bring on disaster are no longer ideological but ecological. Ruthless industrialists, scientists indifferent to the consequences of their actions -- these are the people responsible for the doom scenario of Waterworld (1995). They and the filmmakers themselves, those greedy overreachers who invest $200 million in films like Titanic. Which, at least in one sense of the word, could prove the ultimate disaster movie.