Stephen Keane, Wallflower Press, 144pp, 12.99
Recently, when I was reviewing Poseidon, I found myself wondering what was the point of disaster movies. Now, with the second edition of Stephen Keane’s book on the genre, I find myself wondering what’s the point in writing about them. For it seems a relatively straightforward subject – the projection on screen of a rip-roaring spectacle of destruction. That’s what the punters are paying for and that’s what they get. Where are the layers of thematic complexity that bolster the Western or the film noir, for example?
Keane’s analysis of the films under discussion is always trenchant, illuminating and mercifully free of jargon. He patiently traces the genre’s history from the Italian epics of the silent era to the CGI marvels of the present day, focusing on the best-known examples like Airport, The Towering Inferno and The Day After Tomorrow. And he avoids the obvious pitfalls of the socio-political readings that bedevil academic writing, carefully dismissing the claims that ‘70s disaster movies are self-evidently conservative and patriarchal. Personally, I’ve never believed that films are so closely tied to the political era in which they appear and have thought this level of discussion is the tired recourse of lazy academics. It’s refreshing to come across a writer who agrees.
But the thoroughness of Keane’s approach only serves to highlight the absurdity of his project. These movies yield so little in the way of enlightening argument that you wonder why they’ve been picked as an object of discussion. Is it simply because…they’re there? And if so, the book falls into the trap of much modern academic literature in the way it concerns itself with minute discussions of any old garbage – the symbolic discourse of the Star Wars trilogies, the hermeneutics of The Matrix – rather than the investigation of great works of art. It’s telling, for example, that no foreign language movies are considered as case studies and that movies like The Core are passed over because “the critical response and low box office were such that the film was regarded as too out of keeping with the post 9/11 mood.” Since when do other people’s verdicts determine how valid a writer feels a film is for discussion? And because no-one went to see The Core, does that really mean they avoided it because it didn’t fit the “mood” or because they thought it might be a bit crap?
The most serious problem with this study, though, is its inability to answer the basic question: what is the appeal of disaster movies? Why, for example, after 9/11, did DVD rentals of disaster pics sky-rocket? What is it in the modern zeitgeist that yearns for cataclysm? Keane proffers a few interesting theories, like the Nero Complex, where the ordinary man gets to watch the “burning of Rome” and feel a vicarious sense of power, and the love-hate relationship with celebrities, so enamoured of tabloid editors, which finds us enjoying the suffering of the very people we most idolise. But none of these ideas is developed as well as those in the essays of Susan Sontag and Nick Roddick, which Keane noticeably leans on in the introduction. There’s a chance here to investigate the decadent mindscape of a West that revels in disaster. There’s also the chance to explore the way in which new advances in technology actually create their own genres – CGI being ideal for apocalyptic panoramas on the big screen. But both opportunities are missed and the book never reaches satisfying conclusions.
Ultimately, it’s significant that Keane’s best writing concerns his impression of a real disaster: 9/11. His careful, lucid – and honest – account of how footage was edited together to create a genuine “disaster movie” is the highpoint of this second edition. But, of course, that, in turn, only raises the question of whether 9/11 has made all fictional disaster pics redundant. Their continuing popularity might argue otherwise, but now the horror has stepped out from the screen into our modern world, can we really enjoy the genre as we did before?