Representing politics in disaster films

Abstract

Since its resurgence in the 1990s, the disaster film genre oscillates between the demands of two competing desires, the desire for realism and cultural relevance, and the desire for fantasy and spectacle. The premise of the genre, its narrative dependence on threats, attacks or natural disasters, can be adapted and used to interrogate the meaning of political institutions, but can also occasion purely spectacular narratives that traffic in paranoid nightmares of threat as well as utopian fantasies of patriotic unification. From the shaky camera work and mysterious alien of Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) to the dramatic intensity and realistic threats of Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011), and the references to current biotechnology research in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), disaster films operate in a hybrid representational space that combines realistic fears and conditions with their imaginary and exaggerated counterparts. But even when the premise of a disaster film is outrageous or far-fetched, there is important political content in the representational gestures of the genre. Despite the formulaic tendencies of disaster films, their fantasmatic depictions of trauma retain political and emotional connections with historical events and real-world catastrophes (Dixon 2003). In what follows, I outline the ways in which political realities shape the genre’s fantasies, drawing from three films that span the latest waves of disaster movies: Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009).