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Reframing the Disaster Genre in a Post-9/11 World

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Reframing the Disaster Genre in a Post-9/11 World Wesleyan University The Honors College Reframing the Disaster Genre in a Post-9/11 World by Matthew James Connolly Class of 2009 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Film Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2009 1 Acknowledgments To begin with, thank you to Scott Higgins. Your ―History of World Cinema‖ class made me want to become a Film Studies major. Your ―Cinema of Adventure and Action‖ course led me to the notion of writing a thesis on disaster cinema. And your intelligence, humor, patience, and unfaltering support as a thesis advisor has made the end product infinitely better and the journey all the more rewarding. Thank you to the Film Studies department: especially to Lisa Dombrowski for her perceptive, balanced, and always illuminating teaching; and to Jeanine Basinger, whose seemingly boundless understanding of film and her passion for sharing it with others has forever changed the way I think about movies. Thank you to all of the brilliant and inspiring professors I have had the pleasure and honor of learning from over my four years at Wesleyan, especially William Stowe, Sally Bachner, Henry Abelove, Claudia Tatinge Nascimentio, Mary-Jane Rubenstein and Renee Romano. Thank you to all of my beautiful and brilliant friends who have supported me throughout this entire process. I want to especially thank my housemates Sara Hoffman and Laurenellen McCann, who have sat and talked and laughed and cried and ate and drank with me from start to finish. There are no words. Thank you for every moment. Finally, I want to thank my wonderful family, and especially my parents. You have been there every step of the way, offering strength and encouragement, humor and advice, and boundless love. I love you so much. 2 Table of Contents Introduction 3 Chapter One 17 How Did the Disaster Films of the Mid-to-Late 1990s Envision Disaster and its Consequences? Chapter Two 83 How Did the Disaster Genre Initially Respond to the September 11 Attacks? Chapter Three 151 How Did Filmmakers Handle Direct Representations of September 11 Beyond the Disaster Genre? Chapter Four 184 How Did the Disaster Genre Deal Directly With the Images and Themes of September 11th? Conclusion 280 Works Consulted 295 Filmography 305 3 Introduction On some level, we watch disaster films to have certain questions answered. These questions are often simple. What would it look like if an entire city were to suddenly be washed away by a tidal wave, or a whole building engulfed in flames, or an entire planet pulverized by alien lasers? And furthermore, what would it feel like to witness it? These may not be the deepest of human curiosities, but they get at something fundamental about why we go to the movies in the first place: to see people, places, and experiences that lay beyond the confines of our lives, our world, and even our imagination. The disaster genre fulfills this basic desire to experience what we have never seen, and perhaps cannot even conceive of. It does so through the construction of spectacular and terrifying imagery—often created through the latest in special effects—that entrances and frightens us with both its aesthetic power and its unsettling implication that what can be created on the screen might one day be duplicated in reality. Lest the act of witnessing what mass cataclysm and destruction would look like becomes too distressing, however, disaster movies also know when to pull us back from the brink and assure us that the scary and marvelous images we‘ve just witnessed are ultimately controllable and confined: either by the actions of the film‘s protagonists or the parameters of the disaster genre itself. Writing specifically about the disaster films of the 1970s, J. Hoberman might have been referencing the entire genre when he wrote that, ―despite their overt fatalism, the disaster films were fundamentally reassuring.‖1 That paradox perhaps summarizes the inherent appeal of these films as a whole: their ability to take viewers to the edge of our fears and 1 J. Hoberman, ―Apocalypse Now and Then,‖ The Village Voice, 19 May 1998: 75. 4 curiosities about large-scale catastrophe; allow us a good, long look; and pull us— and, usually, the endangered world within the film— back to safety just before all seems lost. If the genre rests upon the notion of witnessing spectacular disaster from a entrancing but ultimately safe vantage point, what happens to our desire to see catastrophe on screen when it enters our actual, everyday existence? Do we still feel the same urge to imagine disaster when we can turn on the television or think back in our minds and find images more immediate and haunting than anything seen in a movie theater? These were the questions that confronted the disaster genre in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What was once kinetic fantasy became sobering reality as the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground in a manner that so many people saw as reminiscent of the imagery in 1990s disaster films like Independence Day, Deep Impact, and Armageddon. Films that defined escapism on September 10 now became markers of a crass and insensitive pre-9/11 mindset towards entertainment. The world had changed, many said, and no one wanted to see mass urban destruction and chaos on screen at all, much less made into big-budget fun. Or did they? While an inevitable period of shell-shocked aversion to any imagery reminiscent of the September 11 attacks proved only natural, this thesis argues that the disaster genre most certainly did not disappear after 9/11. On the contrary, real-life tragedy inspired the creators of disaster cinema to look at the genre—its strengths and limitations; what it could offer a viewer in a post-9/11 world—and alter generic expectations to make films that would resonate with the new 5 set of fears, curiosities, anxieties, and fascinations that viewers now felt toward catastrophe and its consequences, and would inevitably bring with them into any new disaster film. Balancing artistic, industrial, economic, and cultural considerations, these post-9/11 disaster films show both how the genre‘s fundamental appeal remained intact after September 11 and where generic strategies needed to be reformulated to remain culturally relevant and formally compelling. Why focus upon the generic shifts within the disaster film after September 11? In doing so, one is able to see how genre responds to the multitude of aesthetic, industrial, and societal imperatives placed upon it at a moment of particular historical friction. 9/11 questioned the fundamental pleasure viewers received from disaster movies. Why filmmakers and Hollywood studios chose to continue the genre and how they modified it to fit the post-9/11 era illustrates the dynamic processes through which film—as an artistic medium, as an economic practice, as a reflection and a generator of cultural ideas and values—changes in the aftermath of a critical societal and historical moment. Additionally, studying the disaster genre‘s relationship to September 11 offers an ideal opportunity to complicate a fairly standard assumption regarding the genre: that its value comes primarily as a receptacle of cultural mores at any given time. The argument goes that, because disaster films concern themselves with the destruction and rebuilding of society (on either the micro or macro level), these films provide a window into what ideals American culture valued at the time, and what ideals they thought should be discarded. I‘m not denying that the disaster genre can indeed reflect societal changes; my entire argument hinges upon the notion that viewers 6 would have a distinctly different impression of cinematic catastrophe after witnessing the events of 9/11 and its aftermath. However, there is a key difference between a prominent real-life disaster impacting viewer perception of its constructed equivalent on screen and the assumption that every disaster narrative somehow becomes imbued with the cultural zeitgeist of whatever era it happens to be produced in. From my perspective, genres are impacted by multiple factors (cultural included), but are principally influenced by the artistic impetuses of the filmmakers behind individual movies and the economic and industrial imperatives of the moment in which they are made. Films within the disaster genre primarily function as artistic and economic entities, and will incorporate or reject dominant cultural attitudes as fits these more fundamental missions. However, sometimes a cultural event proves too large and too impactful to ignore. September 11 proved to be such an event for the disaster genre, and filmmakers and studios had to balance issues of representation, sensitivity, and taste while continuing to appeal to the basic viewer desires and fears that prompted them to go to disaster films in the first place. In this way, the post-9/11 disaster film provides a fruitful case study in how culture can impact and reshape generic conventions in connection with aesthetic and industrial factors. Indeed, when considering the films that came after September 11, one can see how an unexpected and potentially harmful real-life event can provide filmmakers with a fruitful artistic challenge, resulting in films that expand the boundaries of what we assumed the genre could do. This points to the final reason I have chosen to focus upon the disaster genre post-9/11. Due in part to the aforementioned assumption that disaster movies should be studied primarily as barometers for social mores, few 7 scholars have bothered to examine these films on a formal level.
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