The Way the World has Ended: An Alternative Apocalypse in Richard Kelly’s Disaster Movies Simon R. Troon
Hollywood is a major reference point for how we imagine disaster and apocalypse. In a swathe of recent blockbusters—from franchise sequels like Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Independence Day:
Resurgence (2016) to standalone movies like San Andreas (2015)—stories of impending catastrophe and imagery of heroes standing amidst rubble circulate widely. At the same time the concept of the
Anthropocene, “a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, where natural forces and human forces have become intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other” has entered into broader cultural contexts.1 Attempts to conceptualize and come to terms with the Anthropocene are, particularly in the humanities, often characterized by evocations of spectacular endings as connections are drawn to anthropogenic climate change and related disasters.
The opening paragraphs of Jeremy Davies’ The Birth of the Anthropocene, for example, discuss sea level rise, extinctions, pollution, and illnesses, and Srinivas Aravamudan describes how looming eco- catastrophe re-awakens “conceptions of human finitude from a past rich with apocalyptic nightmares.”2 At the inauguration of this epoch, a sense of finality looms large.
Thinking about how films figure disaster and apocalypse keys in to how humanity’s present juncture can be narratively and conceptually framed in popular consciousness. This essay unpacks some generative potentials for the cinematic representation of disaster by examining two films directed by Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko (2001) and Southland Tales (2005), that move beyond the
1 Jan Zalasciewicz, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen, “The New Word of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Science and Technology 44, no. 7 (2010): 2229. 2 Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Catachronism of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41, no. 3 (2013): 9.
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52 predictably triumphant tropes of Hollywood’s disaster genre. Kelly’s films were released following a cycle of Hollywood disaster movies in the late 1990s and operate as subversive addenda to those films, offering a critically differentiated vision of disaster that nonetheless occupies the same thematic territory. Hollywood disaster movies are, as I shall explore, extremely formulaic in the way they pitch humanity against forces of nature or extra-terrestrial entities in contests of resourcefulness and resilience inevitably won by human heroes. Kelly’s films, meanwhile, detail apocalyptic scenarios and environmental disturbances in more enigmatic ways that help us to imagine the “intertwining,” as Zalasciewicz et al. put it, of humans and nonhuman forces in more complex, nuanced ways.
My reading of these films is broadly informed by thinkers who explore ways that the
Anthropocene prompts a rethinking of ontological categories and work to renegotiate human subjectivity. The concept of the Anthropocene has proliferated far beyond the scientific disciplines it emerged from as the proposed name for this new geological epoch that recognizes humans as the dominant influence on the earth. It has become, as Jamie Lorimer writes, “a wider intellectual event” and catalyzed a “rich and multidisciplinary diversity of academic work.”3 Aravamudan details “new genres of philosophy,” including object-oriented ontology, that re-evaluate human agency as
“breakout conceptual structures in the wake of the Anthropocene.”4 Lorimer describes how a major component of this work, undertaken by many thinkers in diverse disciplines, is the “generation of new ontologies for environmentalism” that reconceive of “the Earth and the human subject.”5 A loosely affiliated cohort engaged in this type of work is described by Joanna Zylinska as “theorists of post-anthropocentric thought” who catalogue the potential ethical responsibilities and obligations of the human subject as it works to situate itself ecologically in this new epoch on Earth.6 I set out to
3 Jamie Lorimer, “The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1 (2017): 117-118. 4 Aravamudan, 24. 5 Lorimer, 125; 128. 6 Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 16.
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53 think about disaster movies with Zylinska, and the bodies of work described by Lorimer, in mind.
My film analyses are provoked by those whose work they cite including Rosi Braidotti, Timothy
Morton, and others from eco-philosophy and the environmental humanities who investigate the interrelation between humans and the nonhuman and pose notions of human subjectivity for a world shaped, and also imperilled, by human dominance.
I seek to bring their thinking to bear on the cinematic representation of disaster and apocalypse, and also on the disciplinary contours of film studies and the categorizations and periodizations that these contours enact. Braidotti argues that “the complexities and paradoxes of our time” call for “conceptual creativity,” and I am interested in the kinds of conceptual creativity that film studies can be poised to deploy. 7 In striving to apprehend something about the proliferation of disaster as a cinematic theme and popular imaginary, conceptual creativity may mean re-evaluating established notions of genres and cycles. Seeking new methodologies for categorizing and comparing films may mean drawing connections in ways that are, to borrow from Donna
Haraway’s recent lexicon, “tentacular.”8 Weaving interdisciplinary paths through and across variegated theoretical terrain, attaching ideas to films, and films to other films, in unexpected but potentially fecund ways might help us to hone in on popular understandings of disaster and apocalypse that work beyond one-dimensional notions of finality.
This essay thus explores some attachments of disaster thematics and post-anthropocentric thought beyond Hollywood’s disaster genre. This genre is usually thought of as being bound in two clearly delineated historical cycles, but its resonance is far-reaching and crucially significant for understanding how major blockbusters of the 2010s conceptualize disasters of different kinds.
Posing Kelly’s two films alongside and against this genre offers ways of understanding it as a
7 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 54. 8 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 31.
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54 significant filmmaking force within the wider cultural contexts provoked by the Anthropocene, and also draws attention to ways in which the role of humanity on Earth might be reconceived in the
Anthropocene. Examining the attachments of Kelly’s films to Hollywood’s disaster genre and their divergences from it highlights ways in which they can be understood as instructive for our current juncture.
Disaster Movies in the 1990s
Before examining how Donnie Darko and Southland Tales refract and subvert the thematics of
Hollywood disaster movies, it is necessary to establish an understanding of how those films concretized as a genre when they cycled into popularity and box office dominance for a second time in the mid to late 1990s. As a temporally bound period of film production, this cycle of films has specific and particular characteristics, but a full understanding of those characteristics requires locating the cycle in relation to the filmmaking traditions that precede it.
Susan Sontag first proposed a disaster genre in a 1965 essay titled “The Imagination of
Disaster” that describes a set of 1950s and early 60s science fiction films like Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956) and The Fly (1958) that, she writes, are essentially “about disaster” as they reflect post-war anxieties about nuclear technology’s capacities for mass annihilation.9 In these films, shocking alterity in the form of alien intruders, new technology, or monstrous animal presences promise death for humanity, but are effectively and efficiently neutralized or eliminated as human heroes prevail. Sontag locates a “hopeful moral simplicity” in these films but emphatically formulates them as an “inadequate response” to the demands that the trauma of World War II and the atom bomb place on representation.10 The formulaic narratives of these films focus on the
9 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Penguin, 2009), 213. 10 Ibid., 220; 224.
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55 banishment of threatening alterity, and thus they attest to the unwillingness of both filmmakers and viewers to confront the historical shock of the war and the disasters it entailed.
An altogether different disaster genre was later formalized in Hollywood in the 1970s via a cycle of films that deal with a different set of anxieties relating to forces of nature and the aspirations of human technologies. Nick Roddick explains that “fear of the bomb was very much a folk nightmare of the fifties and early sixties,” while the disaster movies of the 1970s reflect “tampering with The Ecology” and threats arising from earth, air, fire, or water.11 The prevalence of threatening nature is also apparent in Maurice Yacowar’s early theorization of a disaster genre trope, the “natural attack” that “dramatizes people’s helplessness against the forces of nature.”12 Technology remains an important feature of these disaster movies as disaster scenarios are organized around the failure of contemporary technologies in the face of elemental nature: a snowstorm threatens air travel in
Airport (1970), a tsunami capsizes a ship in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), skyscrapers cannot withstand a seismic shock in Earthquake (1974) or a fire in The Towering Inferno (1974). Roddick suggests that these films show “sybaritic, self-centred beings totally reliant on a technology, which they utilize without understanding and which proves incapable of resisting basic elemental forces.”13
Yacowar similarly argues that cinematic natural disasters such as these may be understood as a kind of punishment for humanity’s hubristic presumptions.14
The narratives of these films revolve around the staging of catastrophe as a means to recover humanity from a fallen state of technological advancement without requisite practical capacities and
11 Nick Roddick, “Only Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies,” in Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television 1800-1976, eds. David Bradby, Louis James, & Bernard Sharratt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 248; 253-254. 12 Maurice Yacowar, “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 314. 13 Roddick, 252. 14 Yacowar, 315.
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56 moral values. This recovery is achieved via the installation of heroic protagonists who master technology and overcome challenges posed by nature. In the dire scenarios of these films, writes
Roddick, “a natural ‘leader’ emerges” who is “invariably white,” male, and uniformed and who
“averts the disaster or leads its victims to safety.”15 This leader often inhabits a social role that reflects institutional authority: a serviceman, a priest, a firefighter, etc., and is comparable to the heroes of Westerns, as Roddick notes that:
The new hero has all the attributes of the old—muscles, good looks, sexual aggressiveness— but is a hero for the technological age: Charlton Heston with a degree in electrical engineering.16
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner similarly suggest that these films enact “ritualized legitimation of strong male leadership.”17 The assertion of masculine authority is thus seen as crucial to restoring humanity’s powers.
By centring traditionally masculine figures in their narratives, these films reflect and reify a historically dominant masculinist subjective disposition that appears in discourse around the
Anthropocene and is critiqued by many theorists of post-anthropocentric thought. Rosi Braidotti invokes “He: the classical ideal of ‘Man,’” who embodies “a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values” and asserts “the almost boundless capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectability.”18 This vision of the human subject as rational and masculine pervades modernity, and is powerfully present at our present juncture. Indeed, the formal and narrative structures of these 1970s films, which see masculine leaders master both technology and nature,
15 Roddick, 256. 16 Roddick, 257.; Heston plays the hero in Skyjacked (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Earthquake, and Airport 1975 (1974). 17 Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 52. 18 Braidotti, 13.
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57 prefigure Zylinska’s observation that contemporary scientific discourse and media representation both posit that “salvation from the Anthropocene’s alleged finalism” will come from “an actual upgrade of humans to the status of Homo deus” as “Man separates from ‘nature’ to emerge standing, proudly erect.”19 The heroes at the core of 1970s disaster movies, with their bravery, strength and intelligence, are emblems for the unflinching progression of rational, modern humanity and its apparent triumph over the elements and the nonhuman world.
The disaster movies of the 1990s incorporate features of the sci-fi described by Sontag as well as the genre films described by Roddick and Yacowar. While some almost directly recover the conventions established in the 1970s, others recombine and rework both sci-fi elements and “natural attack” tropes, updating them for a new historical context and cultural milieu while also further codifying them. These films are framed by Stephen Keane as attendant to larger, more apocalyptic anxieties manifest at the millennial turn and during a rise in popular awareness of global warming, their task being “to face up to … the end of the world.”20 Keane suggests they be viewed with “an environmental message in mind—that we are poisoning the planet” but also observes that anxieties around global warming “quickly bled into rather more hysterical millennial concerns about Satan, aliens and asteroids,” as disaster became “an all-round bandwagon.”21 In this cycle of films, localized natural disasters become conflated with apocalypse. While Twister (1996) and Volcano (1997) recall
1970s disaster movies with their isolated scenarios, in films like Independence Day (1996), Armageddon
(1998) and Deep Impact (1998) the scale of disaster is significantly larger, as human heroes encounter extra-terrestrial forces that threaten the survival of the planet. The alien species of Roland
Emmerich’s Independence Day are irredeemably animalistic in appearance, combining elements of
19 Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 12. 20 Stephen Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London: Wallflower Press, 2001), 73. 21 Ibid., 78.
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58 insectoid, reptilian, and cephalopod species, and when their vessels arrive they appear in the sky among fiery cloud formations; uncertain weather conditions that transform into alien menace.
Similarly, the impact of a comet in Deep Impact first affects the atmosphere, displacing clouds before smashing into the sea, the sky turning flame red as an immense tidal wave sweeps toward cities.
Ecological nature thus continues to be thematized as elemental forces become aesthetically enmeshed with other, more fantastical kinds of disaster.
In order to meet these larger threats, heroism in these films is available to a more diverse ensemble cast of characters. The mastering of these scenarios requires the collaboration of many organisations as well as individual heroics, and Despina Kakoudaki argues that the disaster movies of the 1990s provide viewers with resolutions “preoccupied with how to coordinate massive military and police mobilization, how to reorganize the chain of command, and how to make the human group more effective by resolving racial tension.”22 In Independence Day, a Jewish scientist and a black jet fighter pilot upload a computer virus to an alien mothership while the president of the United
States leads Air Force pilots, a washed-up crop duster, and other volunteers in an attack on another vessel. Despite this ostensible diversity, most of these characters are linked to institutional authority through their roles, often as service people. These films thus echo the disaster movies of the 1970s, but upscale the heroism: they enact the global mobilisation of a dominating masculinist disposition via military and professional forces rather than solely individual heroics. Armageddon, in which intergenerational male heroes are played by Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, even explicitly acknowledges the masculinist tradition that it participates in, as Charlton Heston narrates its opening sequence (a prologue that shows the extinction of the dinosaurs and presages the same fate for humanity). The disaster movies of the 1990s model an expansion of the masculinist subjectivity
22 Despina Kakoudaki, “Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 141.
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59 familiar from the 1970s such that it is now equipped to exhibit mastery on a global scale. With their continued thematization of nature as threatening alterity and their emphasis on globally co-ordinated solutions they enact what Davies, critiquing the “environmental management” proposed by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in an initial articulation of the Anthropocene, describes as “the managerialist belief that it is humankind’s duty to regulate the natural world from the outside.”23 They subdue alterity under managerial machismo, further reifying the mastery of humanity over the world.
Since the 1950s, variations on the disaster genre have periodically risen to prominence in
Hollywood. The genre functions on a social level to exorcise anxieties—about nuclear weaponry, the inadequacy or danger of technology, and about nonhuman nature—by staging the defeat of all kinds of alterity by heroic protagonists who stand in for a normative, dominant vision of humanity bound up in masculinist tropes. Disaster is thus framed as a platform for the elevation of a particular identity (white, male, professional) but also a disposition—eminently courageous, physically strong, technologically capable—that reflects the western Anthropos designated in the naming of the
Anthropocene: a technologically advanced humanity, wholly separated from nature, over which it enacts ultimate mastery.
Donnie Darko: Strange Apocalypse
The beginning of Donnie Darko involves the same kind of airplane disaster threatened in Airport or, more recently, Sully (2016). A jet engine, shorn from the wing of a plane, falls through a stormy night sky. Rather than showing panicking passengers or pilots plotting an emergency landing, as a
Hollywood blockbuster might, this film positions viewers inside a middle-class family home where,
23 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 50.
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60 as the father snoozes in front of late-night TV static, the jet engine smashes through the roof. The mysterious appearance of this technological object transforms the domestic space of the nuclear family into a territory delineated by the sudden and unexpected eruption of death.
The engine falls directly into the bedroom of the troubled teenage son Donnie, but the scene immediately prior has shown viewers that Donnie sleepwalks, and thus evades disaster. The film begins with a sound like thunder cracking, conjuring images of stormy weather, but as the first shot fades in we see clear morning sky and Donnie waking up on a road in the hills, next to his bicycle, which he proceeds to ride home. As he pedals a song plays – “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the
Bunnymen – that presages disaster lyrically (“the killing moon will come too soon”) but also paratextually foreshadows Donnie’s later encounters with Frank, a ghostly figure in a darkly stylized bunny suit who prophesies the end of the world. Donnie’s own nocturnal encounter with disaster occurs soon after when Frank, whose voice lures him from his bedroom to a golf course, tells him
“twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, twelve seconds. That is when the world will end.”
The remainder of the film chronicles these twenty-eight strange, disastrous days.
The opening segment of the film exemplifies its relationship to Hollywood. In keeping with the subversive attitudes of independent cinema, its inverse view of an aviation disaster shifts the focus away from potential heroics, and relocates our perspective to a seemingly ordinary suburban, domestic setting. Donnie Darko can be positioned alongside other independent films including Short
Cuts (1991) and Magnolia (1999) that are grouped together by Adrian Ivakhiv as a subgenre of
“indirect disaster” film produced in the shadow of Hollywood’s 1990 disaster movie cycle.24 These films feature “unconscious eruptions, storms, quakes, and freezes”25 as background properties to
24 Adrian Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013), 276. 25 Ibid., 276.; In addition to Short Cuts and Magnolia, Ivakhiv references The Ice Storm (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and American Beauty (1999).
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61 more central concerns around the collapse of the nuclear family and affluent suburban communities, and are characterized by decentred narratives.26 Representing disaster in this way makes it a creepily traumatic event rather than a spectacular one. Indirect disasters are oppositional to those of
Hollywood: rather than creating conditions for a rebuild, where society is remodelled in the image of a hero, they constitute ruptures in the social fabric that do not precipitate repair. Indeed, as I shall discuss, the oblique narrative of Kelly’s film does not lead to tidy resolution.
The imprint of Hollywood convention remains apparent in Donnie Darko, however. Geoff
King locates it at the commercial end of the indie spectrum, noting that its production was made possible “on the back of traditional Hollywood star power” through Drew Barrymore’s production company and her appearance in the film as Donnie’s sympathetic English teacher.27 King also observes that the film “conforms in general to classical narrative conventions” with the major exemption that “key sources of information have been left out,” making it extremely enigmatic.28
Though he positions it in relation to many familiar genres, including noting the incorporation of science fiction elements, disaster movies are not part of King’s discussion. I posit, however, that much as American independent cinema generally is critically framed as being against Hollywood,
Donnie Darko can be understood as being against disaster movies in both oppositional and proximal ways.29 It incorporates their apocalyptic thematics and imagery of threatening nature while also subverting their narrative trajectories. Like Armageddon and Independence Day it premises a countdown to apocalypse, and makes saving the world the task of its protagonist. Unlike these films, however,
26 Ibid., 269. 27 Geoff King, Donnie Darko (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 8. 28 Ibid., 69. 29 Sherry Ortner, “Against Hollywood: American Independent Film as a Critical Cultural Movement,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2 (2012): 1-21.
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62 there is no explicit foe, no force of nature or extra-terrestrial threat that Donnie must overcome to assert mastery over the world.
Rather, Donnie must confront Frank, a more mysterious and defiant force that prompts a significantly more complex engagement. As the film’s narrative orbits around this encounter Donnie is, in some ways at least, an unusual protagonist. Like Heston’s characters he is white and male, but there is difference located in his teenagehood and ostensible mental illness, both of which exacerbate the way that disaster thrusts him into uncertain, liminal territory. What Claire Perkins calls “the ordinary emotional confusion of being a teenager” is apparent throughout the film, and
Donnie’s confusion makes him anxious and seemingly unreliable.30 In addition to his sleepwalking tendency, his psychiatrist describes him as a paranoid schizophrenic who experiences “daylight hallucinations.” The uncertainty experienced by Donnie, however, combined with the domestic, suburban setting of the film reflects precisely the kind of anxiety that eco-philosopher Timothy
Morton contends is the “basic mode of ecological awareness”: “the feeling that things have lost their seemingly original significance, the feeling that something creepy is happening, close to home.”31
This brand of anxiety keys us into a connectedness to all kinds of entities that Morton names strange strangers: seemingly familiar presences who, when apprehended via ecological thinking, can
“confound our limited, fixated, self-oriented frameworks.”32 Morton’s evocation of uncanny confrontation almost perfectly describes Donnie’s connection to Frank, who seems to be a hallucination, but in fact is very much real, and the destabilized, anxious Donnie’s role as the averter of apocalypse confounds generic expectations created in Hollywood’s imagining of disaster.
30 Claire Perkins, American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 154. 31 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 130. 32 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 19.
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Donnie and Frank’s initial meeting marks Donnie’s entry into an alternate temporality that is referred to as a “tangent universe,” and their encounter thus marks an ending to the world as
Donnie has known it. But rather than being a threatening force, Frank’s role in these changed conditions is ultimately to assist Donnie with saving the world while also upholding abreactive anxiety as a valid, even useful, reaction to impending doom. Perkins deploys Deleuze to describe how Frank “transpires as Donnie’s act of becoming-animal – he is an active alternative, a refusal” that allows Donnie to escape from the limitations of the normative adult world.33 Encouraged by
Frank, Donnie mocks powerful adults for their simplistic outlooks, and unmasks them as hypocrites.
When asked by his sanctimonious P.E. teacher Kitty to participate in a “lifeline exercise” predicated on the binary categorisation of human behaviour according to either love or fear, Donnie remonstrates, telling her “life isn’t that simple . . . you can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.” The kind of morality performed by Kitty is not dissimilar to the simplified morality observed by Sontag in her theorisation of a disaster genre, and when viewers see it from Donnie’s perspective we understand it to be hypocritically self-centred, ridiculous, ironically childish, and ill-equipped for complex situations.
In addition to prophesying apocalypse, Frank compels Donnie to become an agent of exactly the kind of elemental disaster that features in Hollywood’s genre movies by flooding his school and burning down a house. Donnie’s flooding of the school is presaged by a spectacular dream image in which parts of a school hallway appear flooded, an expanse of water surrounding lockers that tower like monolithic skyscrapers. This surrealistic image echoes more literal scenes from Waterworld (1995) or even the later The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or 2012 (2009) in which eco-
33 Perkins, 153.
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64 catastrophe and biblical cataclysm precipitate global flooding.34 However, its calm water and clear sky evince a serenity—equated with Donnie’s resolve and clarity—that is altogether distinct from the grim scenarios of those films. Donnie’s destructive acts have positive functions within the film’s narrative. The school flood causes him to walk home with his love interest. The house that he burns down belongs to another moralizing adult, a corporate motivational speaker who has been concealing a child pornography operation in his basement, which is revealed as a result of the fire. In
Donnie Darko elemental disaster, although certainly traumatic and decentring, operates in part as a generative force that is conducive of a clearer, more complete understanding of the world.
Donnie’s growing awareness of the apocalyptic world, prompted by Frank, and his relationship to elemental disaster, can be understood as a form of ecological awareness or, at least, as recognition of responsibility. In his theorization of indirect disaster films, Ivakhiv borrows the term
“strange weather” from the title of Andrew Ross’s 1991 book in which Ross explores ways that “the spectre of climate change” has come to “haunt the political soul of popular consciousness.”35 For
Ivakhiv, the strange disasters that occur in Short Cuts and Magnolia – an earthquake and a biblical rain of frogs – constitute unbidden returns of the repressed, wherein the repressed other is “recognition of our complicity with the ecological crisis” of climate change.36 In a similar manner Lorimer asserts that “the story of the Anthropocene” articulated in the “new ontologies” of thinkers like Morton,
Latour, Donna Haraway, and many others, “speaks of the return of the repressed, the power of an inhuman nature to tip the planet out of the benign climate envelope of Holocene.”37 Frank’s unbidden appearances, often occurring when Donnie looks in the bathroom mirror while taking
34 It is noteworthy that The Day After Tomorrow also stars Jake Gyllenhall, but in a more conventionally heroic role as the son of a paleoclimatologist who survives a massive flood and fends off a pack of wolves in a frozen-over Manhattan. 35 Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 197. 36 Ivakhiv, 274. 37 Lorimer, 128.
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65 medication prescribed by his therapist, align him with these notions of traumatic psychological return. As the countdown toward apocalypse proceeds Donnie’s apprehension of his position within the material and temporal world advances: he sees liquid tendrils that pre-empt the movement of other characters, and Frank shows him portals that distend time and space. When Donnie finally learns, near the end of the film, that Frank is actually a time-travelling dead man (killed by Donnie, who shoots a bullet through his eye), he understands that in order for the timeline to be restored and apocalypse prevented he must return to his bed to be crushed by the jet engine. Time collapses and rewinds and we see Donnie lying in bed, his power relinquished, waiting to die. Frank brings
Donnie a more complete awareness of the world, occasioning a more ecological understanding of how people, events and objects are interconnected. His appearance pushes Donnie to act in ways that accord with a responsibility to the world beyond himself, and to accept that he can restore this world, even though doing so necessarily spells his own personal doom.
I will discuss the conclusion of the film in greater detail below, but for now it is clear that
Donnie’s relationship with Frank and his acceptance of death epitomize his characterising tendency: his willingness to embrace disaster and be decentred in the face of the apocalypse. This marks
Donnie out as entirely oppositional to Hollywood’s disaster movie heroes. He is an instructive character in the context of the Anthropocene and anthropogenic climate change because, as the crux of the film, he facilitates the potential for a disaster imaginary that embraces anxiety and unsettlement, tending away from the human mastery over the world continuously recapitulated by
Hollywood. Though it remains ambiguous, Donnie Darko’s narrative intimates that if the world is to be saved, it may be necessary to forego aspirations of dominance.
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Southland Tales: Doomsday Scenario Subjectivity
Much like Donnie Darko, Southland Tales begins with the incursion of disaster into a suburban, domestic setting. Where the jet engine in Donnie Darko signals an adjacent yet subversive relationship to Hollywood disaster narratives, the opening of Southland Tales establishes how the imagination of disaster in Kelly’s subsequent film proceeds according to a wild logic entirely of its own. Rather than retracing time to play the disaster differently, as Donnie Darko does, this film goes on to detail various fragmentations and collapses that are occasioned: of the material world, of socio-political discourse, and of identity and subjectivity. In this way the film’s narrative is consonant with the notion that global eco-catastrophe has already happened or is presently underway, and we are living in a sort of aftermath, as Morton writes, “We sprayed the DDT. We exploded the nuclear bombs. We changed the climate. This is what it looks like after the end of the world.”38 In a more overt way than Donnie
Darko, this film imagines disaster not as a looming spectacular threat but something that already underlies everyday lived experience in the neoliberal, extractive, mediatized world of the
Anthropocene.
The opening sequence consists of a two-part epigraph that signals how catastrophic disaster intermeshes with a whorl of media regimes. Firstly, we see a suburban Independence Day street party in Texas through a handheld camera wielded by two young boys: tables laden with food, water pistol fights, a bouncy castle. The screen flashes white and, as the camera weaves through a gathering crowd and dust fills the frame, a mushroom cloud rises in the distance: a nuclear bomb has exploded. This home video perspective does not return in the film, but a multitude of other audiovisual modes are immediately deployed as it cuts to the “Doomsday Scenario Interface,” a multifaceted infographic display that synthesizes a range of visualisations. This display conveys story details covering the subsequent three years, leading up to the beginning of the film’s narrative:
38 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 98.
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World War III, the invention of a technology named fluid karma that harnesses energy from Earth’s oceans, and the subsequent appearance of an anomalous rift in the fabric of space-time. Throughout the remainder of the film conventional cinematic presentation is blended with newsfeeds, advertisements, music videos, HUDs, aerial visualizations, and other kinds of imagery. When disaster intrudes into domestic space here it coincides with an abrupt break in style: from a first- person camcorder aesthetic to a view-from-above, live-update mode that surveils and compiles images of different kinds. The entire film operates in this polyphonic manner, as Steven Shaviro explains: it is “filled with inserts, it overlays, juxtaposes, and restlessly moves between multiple images and sound sources.”39 It is “paratactic and additive,” everything being a matter of
“juxtaposition, ‘free’ association, and the proliferation of multiple levels of self-referential feedback loops.”40 The narrator, a scarred military veteran suffering PTSD, tells viewers “this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper but with a bang.” His reversal of the famous final line of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men auguring an amplified recursion of disaster, an apocalypse, which is continually deferred until the conclusion of the film.
The scenario of Southland Tales echoes the science fiction films discussed by Sontag and the disaster movies of the 1970s. As it begins with a nuclear bomb, and the time-space rift is located near nuclear test sites in Nevada, the film channels notions of post-war nuclear fear. In this manner it offers, as David Ingram notes, a “narrative of technological hubris” that “follows generic expectations.”41 Indeed, fluid karma—a perpetual motion and quantum entanglement technology—
39 Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Book, 2010), 71. 40 Steven Shaviro., “Southland Tales,” The Pinocchio Theory, last Modified December 10, 2007. www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=611. 41 David Ingram, “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-Film Criticism,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, eds. by Sean Cubitt, Salma Monani, & Stephen Rust (New York: Routledge, 2012), 54.
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68 is laden with deathly risk and invokes ontological uncertainty in much the same way as the teleportation machine that is central to The Fly and other fantastical devices from 1950s sci-fi.
Despite these resonances, Shaviro’s descriptions of its aesthetic structure detail how
Southland Tales wholly refuses linear narrative of the sort that sees Hollywood heroes reliably triumph over disaster. Where, as I have noted, Donnie Darko has the shape of a conventional classical narrative with crucial information occluded, Southland Tales creates the impression that a cohesive, continuous story probably exists, but offers viewers only diffracted glimpses of it. The narrative of the film is radically decentred, even more so than one might expect from formally ambiguous independent cinema. Rather than weaving distinct threads into a “patchwork” narrative, as the independent indirect disaster films discussed by Ivakhiv do, this film allows some threads to unravel and disappear into its cascade of images, picking up others and making many unpredictable divergences.42 Over its long runtime it details military manoeuvres, political machinations, entrepreneurial ventures, drug deals, abductions, and impersonations involving a massive cast of characters.
Fragmentation and obliqueness are thus crucial formal elements of Southland Tales. With this sense of disorientation at its core the film formally simulates an experience of displacement much like the temporal displacement experienced by Donnie. It enacts precisely the type of “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” that Cathy Caruth describes when defining trauma.43
From the initial detonation of the bomb, Southland Tales posits a world punctuated by instances and returns of disaster (both lived and mediated) so frequently that the punctuations become like striations on a plane, a terrain constituted by recursive rupture. It posits disaster as a constant force
42 Ivakhiv, 269. 43 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3.
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69 rather than a singular, interruptive event, and this precludes any kind of straightforward narrative advancement. As the film’s spasmodic addition of imagery and scattershot narrative fragments proceed, we see the relentless proliferation of disaster rather than any kind of progression toward overcoming it. As Southland Tales reworks sci-fi and disaster tropes, it thus scrambles the potential for the mastery of humanity to emerge as a foregone narrative conclusion, circumventing generic expectations and insisting, instead, on the reification of anxiety and frenzied, traumatic decentring.
Viewers encounter the characters of Southland Tales as emissaries of its fragmentary logic.
Kelly’s adjacency to Hollywood and simultaneous disrespect of its conventions are more pronounced in this film as primary characters are all played by stars who are cast in opposition to their celebrity identities. As Shaviro posits, “their acting cuts sharply against their familiar personas.”44 The film leans on star power and celebrity, but also inverts the expectations thus engendered: The disfigured, drug-addicted narrator is played by the boyishly good-looking Justin
Timberlake; Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Krysta Now, a porn star turned reality television aspirant.
Dwayne Johnson, the action star and professional wrestler known as The Rock, plays Boxer
Santaros, a timid, anxiety-riddled actor whose memory has been wiped. Seann William Scott plays
Roland Taverner, a Southland police officer and war veteran, as well as his duplicate Ronald— ostensibly a twin brother but actually a clone created during a passage through the time-space rift.
These figures are all amnesiac and post-traumatic. They travel through time and use mind-altering drugs. They are clones and actors thrust into roles they are unprepared for. They also watch and record themselves and each other obsessively. In all of these ways they build on the self-aware but dissociative and eminently liminal tendencies that I have described in Donnie, and represent a honing of Kelly’s vision of disaster in which traditional heroism becomes impossible.
44 Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, 89.
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As the film charts the interactions of these characters, its imagination of disaster does not include any extra-terrestrial or ecological threat. Rather, it is haunted by the mediatic proliferation of human images: recordings; doubles; spectres; clones; versions of self, splintered by disaster.
Shaviro’s analysis of the film in Post Cinematic Affect is concerned with exploring how neoliberalism and digital media have “given birth to radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience.”45 With its inclusion of a scenario in which radically new extractive technology causes a rift in the fabric of existence, Southland Tales also pushes us to acknowledge that a third major engine of lived experience is anthropogenic climate change and global eco-catastrophe. The environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose frames our present moment as one of mass extinction and overwhelming death and, invoking the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, contends that the question of our time is thus “to ask to whom, or what, does one come face-to-face.”46 The characters of Southland Tales, faced with disaster and apocalypse, look only at themselves and each other. In this way the film ciphers a clear sense of human complicity with ecological degradation and the possibility of the end of the world.
The question of whom one comes face-to-face with is to do with accepting responsibility in catastrophic scenarios. Rose parses responsibility in a world of ecological extinction, seeking a reconciliatory ethics wherein we “recognize and respond to the other’s call” and “grasp the fact that we are mutually becoming with each other.”47 The characters of Southland Tales glance around frantically, often seeking to blame each other for the crises that envelop their world, but see only images of themselves. Viewers similarly see only the proliferation of demented star images: unexpected contortions of Hollywood celebrity. Everyone is addled and splintered, caught in
45 Ibid., 2. 46 Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 13. 47 Ibid., 12.
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71 feedback loops of aspiration, blame and guilt, and thus they are ultimately ineffectual, incapable of averting apocalyptic crisis. The film seems to suggest that there is no one to blame but ourselves, and that without acknowledging this there is no possibility of acting together to save the world.
Facing Disaster
I will conclude by considering a motif that is apparent throughout both Donnie Darko and Southland
Tales and comes to prominence in their final scenes. This helps to advance the notion that the pair of films ought to be viewed as a sort of diptych, and also the suggestion that Kelly, with these films, is something of a disaster auteur—an indie Roland Emmerich. At crucial moments in these films, and at their endings, wounded characters look each other (and viewers) in the eye, offering a sense of face-to-face encounter that fully instates a subjective ethical disposition contrasting sharply with
Hollywood’s assertions of macho mastery.
As Donnie waits to die there is a poster on his bedroom wall featuring an enlarged eye with a skull in the dark pupil. This resonates with Donnie’s shooting of Frank’s eye, and also an earlier scene where Frank removes his bunny suit and the two look at each other, sharing a protracted moment of mutual understanding. As this image suggests a face-to-face encounter with death, though, it simultaneously suggests a more ultimate alterity than Frank, evoking Maurice Blanchot’s poetic description of ethical responsibility to the other in The Writing of Disaster, his attempt to reckon with the horrors of the Holocaust: “the Other is death already, and weights upon me like an obsession with death.”48 Donnie’s awareness of his responsibility to Frank and to the world trumps his own capacity for mastery and, perhaps, his desire to live. The eyes that appear throughout the film in moments of encounter and realisation thus become like portals, conduits to a new awareness
48 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 19.
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72 of the world, and signifiers of a wavering but transcendent power located in Donnie’s vulnerability, precarity, and embrace of death.
The ending of Southland Tales is more oblique, but also hones in on a notion of responsibility in face-to-face encounter. Like Donnie Darko, it imbues a transcendent power in its three main male characters, who all become martyr-like figures at the onset of the apocalypse. The most central is
Seann William Scott’s Roland Taverner, who is designated “the new messiah” by the drug-addled narrator. With the end of the world imminent, Roland and his twin/rift-clone Ronald are alone in a van that has mysteriously levitated into the sky. One of Ronald’s eyes has been shot out in the same manner as Frank’s, leaving a pulpy mess of blood, as the motif of the eye as an opening recurs. The wounded Taverner threateningly wields a pistol, upset with guilt over a friendly fire incident during the war. Roland tells him, “it wasn’t our fault,” and they repeat in antiphony the words “friendly fire” and “I forgive you” as we see their faces in close-up and hear the gun clatter to the ground.
The world ends, as does the film, with a man, ready to die, facing down and forgiving his wounded, traumatized self.
Both of these endings are highly ambiguous, and although they depict the protagonists’ demise, they are also strangely ameliorating and hopeful. Kelly’s characters have learned, literally, to die in a sense not dissimilar to that proposed, more poetically by Roy Scranton in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, where he writes that “we need to learn to live with and through the end of our current civilization. Change, risk, conflict, strife, and death are the very processes of life, and we cannot avoid them.”49 Kelly crafts films that are cryptic and oblique but offer honesty and perhaps even hope for a strange Anthropocene world that, as Morton argues, may have already ended.
Global eco-catastrophe is a foregone conclusion, a fact of being alive on Earth at the present time,
49 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 22.
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73 and Kelly’s films are instructive for this situation. Where Hollywood disaster movies are concerned with constant deferral of anxiety about death, and are preoccupied with the absolute management of change and risk, Kelly shows us protagonists who confront anxiety and work through it to accept their decentred positionality in changing worlds, and their responsibilities to others.
As they are shown facing down disaster and apocalypse, Donnie and the mirrored figures of
Southland Tales can thus provoke us to re-evaluate the ways we think about the disasters bound up in lived experience of the Anthropocene. These films interrupt dominant ways of imagining eco- catastrophe and the potential end of the world as we know it, working with tropes of heroism, masculinity, and apocalypse, but also collapsing, confusing, and subverting them. As Hollywood’s disaster genre cycles into prominence once more, with Dwayne Johnson as a figurehead now playing lead roles very much according to type (macho and militaristic), Kelly’s disaster films offer a powerful counterpoint as they imagine disaster in ways that account for processes of recognition and complicity, and of finding ways to accept precarity and vulnerability.50 Through their protagonists they gesture toward ways of responding to forces of impending disaster that move beyond masculinist mastery, and perhaps signal ways of reconceptualising the role of humanity on Earth.
Simon R. Troon is a Teaching Associate at Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism and a Research Assistant in the School’s Environment and Media Research Program, having received his PhD there in 2019. His ongoing research conjoins film studies and the environmental humanities to investigate the ethical dimensions of cinema's fascinations with disaster.
50 Johnson stars in San Andreas as well as Rampage (2018) and Skyscraper (2018).
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