On the Destruction of the World.

I have seen New York under siege. I’ve seen a shockwave tear across the Los Angeles Basin; watched the letters of the Hollywood sign tumble into the San Fernando Valley. The Cathedral of Notre Dame? Crumbled to bricks, its buttresses splayed like chicken bones. The Saint Louis Arch went up in a magnesium flare like the element of a cracked light bulb. In the center of the Pacific a chasm opened between the Nazca and Antarctic plates. The oceans rushed between the tectonic sheets and seethed, foamy, out again. The moon slipped out of its orbit and circled once, twice, and then with aching slowness, crushed Europe to microscopic dust. Radiation from the solar flare (I mentioned the solar flare, didn’t I? There was a solar flare, and it) stripped the planet of its atmosphere. What water remained on the planets surface boiled off into space and the lifeless carcass of the earth waited to be pulverized by an asteroid shower.

When it’s all over, we brush the popcorn detritus from our laps, leave our soda cups in the garbage can, and go home, feeling somehow better for all the ruin which we’ve witnessed. “Gawddamn, that was awesome.”

It was awesome. But why are there so many movies that destroy the earth? It can’t simply be the fetish of spectacle when there are so many other varieties of spectacle, ones less prone to schlock, sentimentality and overrun budgets. What particular joy is there in watching the destruction of the earth?

There are corrupted pleasures, sure. Millions of the sweaty-palmed cruelies that have incubated slice-n-dice flicks into today’s thriving gore-porn industry turn up for disaster movies, they may even compose the majority of an average disaster movie’s audience. Indeed, it’s difficult to argue that there’s not something prurient about seeing the side of the Grand Canyon collapse onto a group of hikers or a hot spring that becomes so hot so fast that the couple of nubile (and naked, naturally,) hikers sitting in it are boiled like lobsters.

So what then?

Still, I have to argue, even if it’s only to preserve my respect for my own love of the genre, that there is something more to disaster movies than the satisfaction of sick jollies. There’s something of penitence in a good disaster movie. Something practically holy.

I say, then, it must be catharsis. When New Orleans melts like wax beneath a wall of nuclear flame, well, it makes it easier to forget about Katrina. When New York is leveled the craters that lay where the towers stood are harder to distinguish.

But it’s more than that. Vicarious catastrophe doesn’t only absolve other catastrophes. When we see the sea wash over what remains of the Great Sphinx, it makes it somehow okay that Napoleon’s army used it for target practice in 1798. When gravitational stress opens fissures across North America, we can be forgiven if we forget the Trail of Tears. If the Earth crosses a comet’s tail and the homeless are microwaved wholesale in the streets, it won’t matter that we failed them so badly. If there is no new generation of youth, we don’t need to worry about how to raise them. If there are no people, there are no people hungry, and it’s not anyone’s fault.

Included in the End of Everything, then, is the end of guilt, the end of failure, the end of missed opportunities, the end of consequence.

The end of consequence.

In “Decadence” from Writing in Restaurants, David Mamet postulated that most disaster movies express our

“collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly-veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious. [emphasis his]”

To this I’d like to offer a counterpoint. The purpose of a disaster movie is the fuckin’ disaster, the release of it, not the avoidance of it. Despite the fact that disaster movies are by their nature blockbuster-type fare, and the good guy must prevail (or at least die nobly), and somebody better be there to smooch (or comfort) the leading lady. It’s the whole goddamned point, frankly: to destroy shit. This isn’t for the sake of spectacle or sicko urges (though, certainly, those aspects put butts in seats). It’s because whatever is left must be rebuilt. Whatever injustices persist we remain responsible for. The actions of warlords, true believers, and governments–even those that occurred before the disaster–may need to be contended with. We’ll no longer be able to submit ourselves to the lazy whim of the heartless universe. It will be blindingly (and for once) clear that the future is up to us.

Survivors must have equal rights, as it turns out. They’ll want to vote, and maybe not “our” way. If there are gay couples left, they’ll want to marry.

And they’ll need health care. And who can stomach that?