Disasters

I was watching Meteor a few days ago, which is a Sean Connery film from 1980 about a giant meteor that's going to hit earth. I started watching it because I couldn't get to sleep and I figured nothing would knock me out quicker than a meteor flick.

The strange thing is it didn't work. I was up until four waiting to see what would happen. As I was watching the movie I was also thinking to myself, "Why am I watching this movie?" I don't think the answer has anything to do with Meteor itself, but was more the result of the generic narrative form of the disaster movie.

Disaster movies are narrative reduced to their simplest and purest form. Conflict is initiated by some external force (Holy crap! It's a meteor!), tension builds as the disaster approaches (Here it comes!) until we reach the climax (It's here!), and resolution consists of either total annihilation or a narrow miss (Ouch! or Phew!). Imagine a short film where a baseball is flying toward the back of someone's head in super slow motion. My guess is it would be just as engaging as your average disaster movie.

The worst disaster movies are the ones that make the disaster the result of some abuse of the natural world instead of a completely random and reasonless event. There has been a slew of global warming movies recently, and by and large they couldn't be more boring. The real disaster movie elicits an acknowledgment of your own existential insignificance. The ones that blame humans are just a way to reassure ourselves that nature is an object over which we exercise complete control. The real disaster movie is about the limits of control. Meteors don't just destroy worlds, they destroy fantasies too; meteors are the death drive at its purest. The best disaster movie constructs its narrative trajectory by introducing a nonsensical mechanism of annihilation that eliminates all fantasies about the stability of civilization.

The disaster movie speaks a truth that resists integration into a schema of the world which domesticates nature as an object of control. Having written this, I'm not sure there has ever been a "pure" disaster movie where humans simply fail in all attempts to avoid their doom and the world is completely destroyed. The most satisfying disaster movies give us at least a partial destruction while the major disaster is narrowly averted. If a disaster movie was pure in the sense that it ended with complete annihilation of everything, what would this do to narrative? Would complete annihilation retroactively cancel the narrative that had led up to the moment when the meteor hit, and would this cancellation be displeasing?