Re-packaging Disaster Post 9/11 and Christopher Nolan’s

Abstract

Disaster movies have been a staple fare of Hollywood since the 1930s. However from the 1980s, it began to assume the categorical imperative of a ‘genre’ having its own structured norms. Typologies of disaster movies vary from the unabashedly pyrotechnical to the cerebral. The aim of this article is to analyze the idea of disaster in Hollywood disaster films as events that are human-constituted. This is done by reading Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy as texts that represent different types of the anarchic world view. Therefore, the focus of this article would be to read ‘anarchy-as-disaster’ in the context of the trilogy. The three films appear to have typologies of the anarchic world view that could be classified into three broad categories: ‘anarchy as cleansing’, ‘anarchy for chaos for the sake of chaos’ and ‘anarchy as emancipation’. This study attempts to read Nolan’s trilogy as cultural products that are able to generate fear of impending disasters brought upon Western industrialized society by certain inscrutable forces. In underscoring the politics of representation, the three films appear to emphasize values that are ‘liberal’ (democracy, capitalism, liberalism) as opposed to ‘conservative’ (socialism, radicalism, religious fundamentalism), the latter being dismissed off as obsolete alternatives. The problematic of urban space, technology fetishism and their role in re-packaging disaster mediated through tools (disaster movies) of popular culture will constitute the major premises of this study.