The End is Near!
Rabinowitz, Howard
THE END IS NEAR! Why disaster movies make sense (and dollars) in the '90s BY HOWARD RABINOWITZ AN EMBARRASSING CONFESSION: I remember The Poseidon Adventure as one of the most exciting movies...
...Studio execs’ subtle sense that people are anxious about the impending collapse of the natural world...
...Perhaps a John Travolta-inspired nostalgia for the Me Decade...
...I was wrong about the feminist and multicultural slant...
...Hollywood’s proximity to the mud slides, earthquakes, firestorms, and race riots that have made L.A...
...Inferno’s one black actor is none other than O.J...
...with practically her last breath, she apologizes to her husband for failing to do as he asked...
...But special effects are only part of the story...
...Why has the Heroic White Guy reemerged in the 1990s to protect us in a confused and perilous world...
...Hollywood hasn’t unleashed such a massive dose of catastrophe on the viewing public since, well- Showgids...
...The hero for the ’90s isn’t a comic book fantasy, a Rambo or Terminator, whose sheer brawn and massive fire power can dispense with the bad guys, but an educated, resourceful middle manager with just enough wits and stamina to survive...
...So to what can we credit the return of the disaster movie...
...Why disaster movies make sense (and dollars) in the '90s BY HOWARD RABINOWITZ AN EMBARRASSING CONFESSION: I remember The Poseidon Adventure as one of the most exciting movies of my childhood...
...On second viewing, I found that Poseidon features no black actors or actresses...
...Would we panic or stay calm...
...This summer we’ll find out how far we’ve come from The Poseidon Adventzlre when James Cameron’s $180-million Titanic hits the screen...
...Before the climactic battle in Independence Day, Will Smith marries stripper and single-mother Vivica Fox, and environmentalist good guy Jeff Goldblum reunites with Margaret Colin, his ex-wife...
...A Twister or Jurassic Park is designed like a virtual roller-coaster ridewhich is exactlv what the audience wants...
...canoes, Dante’s Peak and FGkano...
...She disregards his order and pays with her life...
...Saved from the aliens’ death ray is yet another family dog...
...In Jurassic Park, when a character is introduced as a lawyer, the audience knows he’s going to be lunch meat for T-Rex...
...it is fun and forgettable in the way that only certain expensive Hollywood trash can be...
...Still, the aliens’ takenoprisoners strategy to conquer Earth isn’t unlike that of the major movie studios’ marketing of summer blockbusters: “Open big, strike everywhere, and make sure you get everybody...
...Separated or divorced couples in Outbreak and Twister have reaffirmed their love by the time the credits roll...
...In Independence Day, the president’s wife (Mary McDonnell) fails to obey her husband’s request that she return home after the aliens have landed...
...In Twister, the one bonafide villain, played by Cary Elwes, is a rival scientist who steals the hero’s research and, even worse, has corporate backing for his project...
...In ’90s disaster movies, catastrophe seems to be lending a hand...
...Roddy McDowall...
...and moved to tears by the enormous Shelley Winters, portraying a self-sacrificing Brooklyn Jew...
...Implicit in the moral equation of who-lives-and-who-dies is a stern warning that the paterfamilias must be respectedor else...
...Of course, today The Poseidon Adventure plays like pure camp...
...Like the best and worst of the ’70s disaster movies, it is junky film making, with soggy dialogue and over-the-top performances...
...With a not-sosubtle streak of xenophobia, the movie suggests that over-trusting folks who welcome the aliens with open arms deserve to get fried...
...In Dantek Peak, Linda Hamilton, who portrayed a fierce, gun-toting action babe in James Cameron’s Terminator movies, frets over her kids while Pierce Brosnan extricates them from their volcanic jam...
...Red Buttons...
...In jbrassic Park, Laura Dern’s near-deadly encounter with a velociraptor plays like a narrow escape from a slasher in a horror flick, while Sam Neill’s match-up with Tyrannosaurus Rex is a more of a battle of wits...
...Star Wars-level exciting...
...If the latest wave of nouveau disaster movies is any indication, however, it’s still a man’s world when calamity strikes...
...And Titanic is just the tip of the iceberg...
...If catastrophe is a test of character, then only an anointed Everyman like Paul Newman or Chuck Heston has a N0.2 pencil...
...Moviegoers can choose between two films about exploding volHOWARD RABINOWITZ is a screenwriter living in San Francisco...
...The disaster movie’s appeal also lies in its application of a reassuring moral logic to human survival, the suggestion that if we are virtuous, we’ll probably survive...
...His greatest heroic act is to rescue a cat from a burning bedroom before disappearing from the movie altogether after his 15 minutes of flame...
...In the 1970s’ the Heroic White Guy represented a conservative streak in an America where his voice was often drowned out by a chorus of disparate voices: anti-war protesters, Black Power militants, feminist revisionists, and more...
...Good thinking, Bill...
...Simply considering the plan is enough to doom the city council members...
...terrified by the crash of the enormous tidal wave...
...No, the classic ’70s disaster movie isn’t a Man-vs.Nature team-building exercise, but a chance for one (or, in The Towering Inferno’s case, two) beleaguered but super-competent Heroic White Guy to flex his muscles and use his wits...
...His professional expertise (architect, engineer, fireman) is window dressing on the fact that he’s “got what it takes” in the hero department...
...In memory, the movie’s catastrophe brought together its characters across racial and gender lines-men and women, black and white, young and old-to build camaraderie and courage...
...Think of Charlton Heston in Earthquake rescuing Genevieve Bujold from a makeshift medical center just before it’s washed away by a flood...
...The job of a decent disaster movie isn’t simply to give us villains, of course...
...Poseidon, memory is a fragile vessel...
...cheap wiring leads to the barbecued high-rise in The Towering Inferno and shoddy architecture ensures that the massive trembler in Earthquake will cause scores of deaths...
...It’s Nature’s way of ensuring that the Heroic White Guy doesn’t get permanently downsized...
...At the heart of jkrassic Park, with its undeniably impressive digitized prehistoric supporting cast, is an extended child-rescue sequence (a disaster-movie staple), as Dr...
...As the helicopter whisks the survivors away at the end of jhrassic Park, Laura Dern looks lovingly on as the kids fall asleep against Sam Neill, their once reluctant surrogate father...
...marveling at the upside-down sets and all-star cast (Ernest Borgnine...
...Hidden within the family-values gloss of the nouveau disaster movie is a reproach, however...
...Alan Grant (Sam Neill) uses his dinosaur savvy to ferry two terrified kids to safety...
...While watching Independence Day, I recalled the plot of movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno as a story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances working together for their mutual survival...
...Like their ’70s predecessors, all three films rely on cutting-edge special effects to portray havoc (natural, man-made, and alien) loosed on humankind-and the heart-stopping rescue sequences that must logically follow...
...the disaster capital of the world...
...At the end of Dante’s Peak, the dashing and single Pierce Brosnan has filled in the missing-father slot in singlemother Linda Hamilton’s family...
...and next fall brings us Firestom...
...But not before realizing her grave error...
...The fantasy played out in these movies is not simply that our Heroic White Guy will survive the ordeal, but that the catastrophe will heal his frayed or broken family...
...Aside from the nobly sacrificed Shelley Winters, the women are shrill or hysterical and utterly dependent on the men, without whom they wouldn’t be able to find their way out of a paper bag, let alone a sinking luxury liner...
...When jets are falling out of the skies and the ground is giving way beneath you, these movies seemed to be saying, thankfully Father still knows best...
...Actually, the answer is simpler: Hollywood’s bottom line is money, and none of these projects would have been bankrolled if not for the phenomenal success of three movies-Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and Twister-each of which carried a strong whiff of the ’70s disaster-movie formula...
...But like the S.S...
...But it does the job-it entertains you for more than two hours...
...In both, Nature isn't the ultimate villain...
...In a way, it makes perfect sense that in the 1970s the standard-issue, status-quo-upholding Heroic White Guy would find his proving ground in the disaster genre-he found practically no other genre where he could stand tall...
...Guess who’s not going to make it to the final reel...
...The sci-fi, pop-art cartoon Independence Day, which cheerfully envisions the destruction of threequarters of the earth‘s population, also has its share of implausible rescues amid the carnage...
...We need heroes, too, and Independence Day, of all the recent disaster movies, seems truest in form to what we remember of its ’70s predecessors...
...Save ourselves or our loved ones...
...Hollywood has always loved to point a finger at money-hungry businessmen, while using the other hand to stuff ridiculous sums of cash into its pockets...
...The audience doesn’t merely imagine disaster, we imagine how we’d behave in the situation...
...Network television has even offered up the mini-series Asteroid and Volcano: Fire on the Mountain...
...In 1997, for better or worse, major Hollywood studios have returned full force to recycling that particular brand of trash...
...In Independence Day, we can tell if a character is going to live or die based on whether or not he recycles an aluminum can...
...The script manages to turn up the tension every 15 minutes or so as the ship sinks ever deeper and new calamities threaten the survivors...
...An exception is the Noble Sacrifice of a Featured Supporting Characterwhich is equally worthwhile in the disastermovie ethos...
...It’s dazzling displays of destruction that draw the crowds- the bigger and bolder, the betterand a skimpy story and bad dialogue can be incidental if the effects are good enough...
...Gene Hackman’s straight-shooting, self-righteous priest bullying the Poseidon’s survivors to the ship’s hull...
...Comparing the disaster flicks of the 1970s and the 1990s, it's remarkable to see how little the moral equations have changed over time...
...One nouveau disaster movie that doesn’t directly villify corporate greed is lndependence Day...
...The gripping story of a capsized cruise ship on New Year’s Eve, it follows a handful of survivors’ struggle to escape before the boat goes under...
...it’s corporate greed that worsens the catastrophe...
...George Kennedy in Airport clearing an obstructed runway so a jet can land safely...
...For the first three-quarters of Twister, Helen Hunt is a strong, independent woman, and an equal in the storm-chasing department to Bill Paxton, but it’s still up to Paxton to save her life at the end with the plan to strap themselves to a metal pipe...
...Lesson 1: It’s good to be a dog in a disaster movie...
...In ’70s disaster movies, cost-cutting measures undermine public safety...
...You could argue that eye-popping visuals are the raison d’etre of the genre...
...Simpson, and he has little more than a cameo...
...Of course, the film’s heroes manage to free Aunt Meg and her dog just before the structure caves in...
...Hovering in the background of Dante’s Peak is a developer with a scheme to invest millions of dollars in the idyllic little town...
...Surprisingly, I enjoyed the movie much better when I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying...
...Watergate left authority figures open to scrutiny and suspicion...
...Its bad guys are unmistakable: extraterrestrials...
...major summer releases include Steven Spielberg’s jkrassic Park sequel, The Lost World, and the waterlogged adventure flick The Flood...
...It’s impossible to imagine the nouveau disaster movie without its strong but feminine women, however...
...The departure isn’t surprising, given that with ID45 disaster-movie structure is a pastiche of a dozen classic science-fiction and action movies: Star Wars meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Top Gun meets Alien...
...A disaster movie is filled with moral shorthand...
...Because the new model of the disaster movie has changed so little from the ’70s version, we can speculate that the perceived threats are similar, too...
...I was too young to catch this disaster classic’s first run in a movie theater, but as a seven-year-old I saw its network TV premiere, and it left me on the edge of my seat-wondering who’d survive and who’d perish (people in disaster movies always “perished...
...Have the wisdom to see the tell-tale signs and the agility to react in time...
...In Dante’s Peak, Linda Hamilton’s stubborn mother-in-law ignores Pierce Brosnan’s exhortation to flee her volcano-side cottage...
...In The Towering Inferno, Faye Dunaway (who only a few years earlier lit up the screen as the sexy, tough-talking outlaw Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde) is rendered practically mute, gazing devotedly at Paul Newman...
...It’s an enjoyable bad movie, but not a so-bad-it’s-good one...
...Vietnam brought the war-movie machismo of the John Waynestyle swagger into ill repute...
...With sensitive, introspective method actors like Al Pacino and counterculture rebels like Jack Nicholson on the rise, disaster movies provided an ideal forum for old-fashioned movie-star heroics that guarded home and hearth in a world turned upside down...
...In a global economy, with a shrinking professional job market, you might find the Heroic White Guy checking the Help Wanted ads these days-and not finding many opportunities...
...When George Lucas and Steven Spielberg lured Hollywood’s special-effects wizards into outer space in the late O OS, it dealt a death blow to the disaster flick...
...The subtle conservative message of disaster movies in the ’90s is that all is not right in the world and now more than ever we need a Heroic White Guy who can get us out of a fix...
...Through his heroism, the White Guy asserted his place in the world and his moral right to occupy it...
...The question remains: Why now...
...On a recent trip to Mexico, I happened to catch a version of Twister dubbed into Spanish, a language I don’t speak...
...Twister shows Mother Nature hitting the spin cycle, air-lifting a cow and devastating countless farms, a drive-in movie theater, a fuel tanker, and the house of the heroine’s aunt...
...Even in Independence Day, which offers a multi-ethnic trio of heroes (white president, black fighter pilot, Jewish computer whiz), it’s up to the men to save the world...
...After two decades of genre revisionism-after La Femme Nikita, Thelma and Louise, and Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Aliens-you’d think studio honchos might get the idea of tossing a Heroic White Gal (or, more daringly, Heroic Black Gal) into the disaster mix...
Vol. 29 • April 1997 • No. 4
