Monday, October 05, 2009

Post 9/11 Apoco-porn




The latest film from "Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich doesn't feature space aliens trying to destroy humanity.

Whew. . . .

Instead, God does the job. And much more thoroughly than the space aliens, who could only blow whole cities up.

Oops. . . .

You see, God can blow Los Angeles up and then make it slide into the sea. While bringing down the Vatican on top of Catholics praying for salvation. While wiping out the Eastern Seaboard with a giant tsunami and dropping the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on top of the White House.

My God is an ironic God.

This isn't a new meme for Emmerich -- in "The Day After Tomorrow," a new Ice Age followed California tornadoes, Tokyo thunderstorms with football-sized hail, a massive New York tsunami and a flash-freezing, 150-below vortex sweeping across the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, it may be the end of the line --
where can one possibly go with this genre once you've destroyed the whole freakin' planet?

WHAT I WONDER, though, is what all this means? Not the whole "End of the World: 2012 . . . Because the Mayans Said" phenomenon -- we've had such and Nostradamus, too, for ages -- but instead Hollywood's (and our) fascination with catastrophe on a global scale.

What does it mean that this persists in the aftermath of 9/11, when we got to see the real thing "up-close and personal"? And when we got to see how horrific that is when removed from the sanitary confines of films like Emmerich's.

Why the continued fascination? I ask this as a self-confessed aficionado of "blowed up good" movies who finds this latest one to be a collapsed bridge too far.

In 1998, columnist and author Peggy Noonan tackled a similar cultural meme in a piece for Forbes ASAP:

Here goes: It has been said that when an idea’s time has come a lot of people are likely to get it at the same time. In the same way, when something begins to flicker out there in the cosmos a number of people, a small group at first, begin to pick up the signals. They start to see what’s coming.

Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly this decade, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.

This is not new: In the ‘50s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” that if we don’t become more peaceful our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren’t coming close, they’re hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest-grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.

Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn’t even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

I don’t mean: “Uh-oh, there’s a depression coming,” I mean: We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It’s a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.

A LITTLE LESS than three years later came the horror of 9/11. You'd think that would have changed us somehow -- at least culturally. You'd think we would have emerged from that Lower Manhattan dust-and-debris cloud a little more serious . . . a little more selfless . . . at a minimum, a little less seriously devoted to the utterly unserious.

If anything, we're even worse. Consumed by Kanye, M.J., Jonandkate and David Letterman's stupid-human tricks, now our depraved popular culture is cinematically hurtling toward the Apocalypse.

I wonder what that's saying about our cultural subconscious, circa 2009?

Well, if I had to hazard a guess -- and I'm operating in full-Noonan mode here -- I'd say that maybe Peggy was off just a little bit. Maybe we're not afraid it's all going to end, and perhaps us with it.

Instead, maybe we want it all to end -- and perhaps us with it.

OH, OF COURSE we have John Cusack, one of 2012's stars, quoted about how the film celebrates people transcending their "normal capabilities and normal morals" in difficult situations.

But isn't that the case with every single disaster flick? Besides, you don't have to spend nine figures to make a movie about the transcendent power of the human spirit.

No, if you want to call 2012 (and the deep cultural current that spawned it) anything, call it a death wish by a terminally ill culture looking for God -- or the cosmos -- to assist in its suicide. Could it be that's the deepest subconscious desire bubbling to the surface of the Superfund site we call a culture?

Otherwise, what percentage would movie execs see in what amounts to a $200 million snuff film?

1 comment:

Carlin said...

Or maybe we will be annihalated by the likes of something completely and totaly out of the realm of Earthly,Godly, deeds. Maybe we are headed in a direction that is completely out of or control. No man, no missile, and maybe because he disgusted with the whole damn world that God will not intervene. All it would take since the Haiti Tsunami slowed down the rotation of our earth, is for just a little swipe of the meteor headed in our direction. Well who is to say we may just find out what a thierd word war would be like. That is if you live long enough to witness the first Nucleur Blast it will cause. If you have that much time, be sure to look away. Other then that. Run like hell right into it.!