Disaster Movies by Stephen Keane

Author:Stephen Keane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

3 THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

According to Disaster Online, 32 disaster movies were released throughout the 1980s, the most productive year being the 1970s rollover year of 1980. Surpassing even the 1970s disaster cycle, 83 disaster movies were released in the 1990s, with 21 films released in the peak year of 1998. As argued throughout this book, all disaster movies can be said to address, with varying degrees of success and sophistication, issues pertinent to the times in which they are made. This approach is, however, complicated somewhat when it comes to the 1990s disaster cycle. Simultaneously recycling 1950s and 1970s precedents, and tapping into a number of fashionable anxieties surrounding the run-up to the end of the millennium, it is difficult to read disaster movies of the 1990s without reference to previous disaster cycles or, conversely, the altogether hyperbolic prospect of imminent doom. Similarly, where the 1970s disaster cycle lasted the whole course of a decade, what might be claimed as an equivalent, long-running, 1990s disaster cycle can be qualified in two ways. First of all, the 1990s cycle refers to a wave of films almost exclusively restricted to the late 1990s. Secondly, where the 1970s disaster cycle has been read with specific, identifiable, social and political factors in mind, the concentration of disaster movies in the late 1990s has, indeed, principally led to them being regarded as ‘millennial movies’, their main rationale, it would seem, being to face up to nothing less, and little more, than the end of the world (see, in particular, Newman 1999).

Certainly, the stakes are generally much higher in the 1990s disaster cycle. Ranging in scope from tornados and volcanos to alien invasion and approaching asteroids, the natural disasters are overwhelming, and the aliens and asteroids invariably bring the world to the brink of total destruction. Whilst providing their often far-fetched causes of disaster with not altogether inexplicable motives, however, reading disaster movies of the time solely as ‘millennial movies’ ignores not only industrial imperatives but also further, ideological readings that can be brought to bear on them. With regard to commercial considerations, certainly disaster movies can be said to have tapped into, and further energised, the ‘pop millennarianism’ of the time; the tabloid stories, television documentaries and bestselling books that effectively worked in turning anxiety into interest (see, for example, Drosnin 1997). Above all, the millennial aspect of the 1990s disaster cycle provides for exaggeration. This impacts not only upon the greater causes of disaster but also the more determined responses that are brought to bear on them. Looking at the responses more closely, however, it becomes clear that they are decidedly 1990s responses. Which is to say that the disasters have the effect of bringing existing social and political themes to light, issues independent of pure Zeitgeist and characteristic of the decade as a whole. 1990s disaster movies characteristically work through issues of class, race and gender, but more than ever before, explicitly representative of national and even international concerns.

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