I am not sure if it’s the current situation or just a morbid fascination, but I have been binge-watching disaster films for the past few months. The disaster film is arguably one of cinema’s oldest movie genres, from the stories about Pompeii to giant monsters, there is no shortage to be found. But what really constitutes a disaster film?
There are so many variations, with the relatively new-to-the-stage environmental disasters, the too-close-to-home disease and pandemic outbreaks, and the creature-from-another-world invasions. Often all housed in different categories such as thrillers or science fiction, they are all cut from the same cloth. And what cloth may that be? Refugee stories.
In the recent Amazon Prime release, Greenland, starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin as husband and wife John and Allison Garrity who, ahead of the onset of a major natural disaster, are offered a spot in a safety bunker. In a heart-wrenching scene not 30 minutes into the film, their neighbour runs into the road blocking the Garrity’s car from leaving the suburban cul-de-sac, carrying her crying daughter in her arms begging the couple to take her daughter so that she may survive.
This scene was so reminiscent of the harrowing news clips and images of refugee parents trying to offer their children any chance, no matter how minute, at safety and survival. It is impossible not to feel moved by this moment, especially as John Garrity refuses and eventually drives off leaving the neighbourhood, and the devastated mother and daughter, behind to their inevitable death.
When we think of refugee stories, our minds inevitably take us to war refugees. The news is full of stories of the Syrian, Palestinian and Rohingya Muslims refugees. The history books included detailed accounts of Jewish refugees escaping the violence of the Nazis during the Holocaust and the causes of the refugee crisis in the DRC for example. But at the base of every refugee crisis is the issue of displacement from one’s home. Indeed, United Nations bodies and humanitarian agencies all present “the refugee” as a kind of victim, one who has been expelled from a national and natural “home.”
The fundamental feature in disaster films of any kind is the loss, destruction or forced displacement from home and the attempt by the main characters (and everyone affected by the main event) to reach somewhere safe.
Ashcroft et al. state that a ‘special . . . crisis of identity [is] the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place’.[i] That is to say that the connection our sense of self has with geographical locations is so powerful that often times humans will develop their identities around the connection they have with a specific place. So much so that ‘a valid an active sense of self may [be] eroded by dislocation’.[ii] At its core, the premise of all disaster films is this sense of self and place. The action around it, whether that be the destruction of home, the risk of homelessness due to a catastrophe, or the desire to find/go back to a home, all come back to that same relationship between self and place.
In essence, the characters find themselves becoming refugees, whereby disaster films have appropriated the refugee story for entertainment’s sake. Now, this is not to say that they aren’t enjoyable or entertaining! I’m a sucker for a good disaster film, if you ask me to I can recite the whole Independence Day speech at the drop of a hat.
They’re great fun, though, I might not go so far as to say it’s always great cinema. However, the issue is not the success of the entertainment, but the resounding silence regarding the fundamental theme disaster films present. Whatever way they are wrapped up—aliens, dinosaurs, natural disasters, you name it—the fundamental storylines are real and have been inspired or taken from a very real and ongoing crisis in human history. And a crisis majorly affecting non-white, non-English speaking western populations.
It raises the question of why the film industry finds purchase in narratives of displacement and tragedy? Not because of their political commentary surely, as the very concept of most of these films (aliens, unexpected ice age, or giant lizards) are unexpected, to say the least. Could it be an attempt to garner more sympathy for those going through the experience of displacement? If so, why is it necessary to do it from an almost exclusively Western context? Is it only sympathetic enough when it’s an affluent, beautiful white suburban family with two and a half children at risk?
Indeed, this is not the first time that the western film or publishing industry have co-opted historical crises in the formation of a genre. Over the last decade, many scholars have drawn attention to the underlying themes of colonialism and imperialism within science fiction.[iii] The trend towards remakes has a history of using non-Western stories and heavy-handedly dripping them in CGI special effects. The original Godzilla movies, for example, were created by Japanese cinema and yet, it has been recreated by Hollywood many times over with Western and white cast. It’s almost as if non-English films are treated as non-existent in the purview of the Hollywood audience.
On the one hand, the stories can generate a greater understanding of the refugee colonial and war-torn narrative of the vulnerability in attempting to find safety and shelter. On the other hand, as Noah Berlatsky states, ‘reverse colonial stories can erase those who are at the business end of imperial terror, positing white European colonizers as the threatened victims’. In other words, flipping the narrative risks the erasure of those who are faced with the tragedy of being refugees from their homes and silences any possible accountability of those who are either complicit in causing the situation or in refusing to support the refugees.
That is to say, to take the event of losing one’s family and home to a disaster out of the context that spurred it into being results in the erasure of the specific economic, racial and geographical elements. Why is this so dangerous? Chris Jordan, author of Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics, argues that ‘Blockbuster movies – which combine the technologies of film and TV – have a penchant for reducing debate over crucial social and economic concerns to mere entertainment. Blockbusters tend to emphasize spectacle and action over character development, resulting in a flattening out of important issues’iv. In other words, there is a very real risk of oversimplification that overlooks the specific complexities of disasters in the real world, minimising the need for social and political debate to reduce casualties and future crisis.
Hollywood blockbusters are here to stay. The money and entertainment that the film industry has come to rely on are not going to stop. However, that does not mean that viewers have to go in blind. Reading between the lines is crucial to recognising where lines are blurred and ensuring they do not go unchecked.
[i] Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2002, pp. 8.
[ii] Ibid, pp. 9.
[iii] See Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire and Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal, Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World.
[iv] Jordan, Chris. Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics. Praeger, 2003.Featured Image by Julie Ricard on Unsplash
