Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film

This essay, on the political and cultural significance of the disaster films of the 1990s, was completed in 1999. I had just finished the editorial revisions on the original version for inclusion in this issue when the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 changed the stakes of the visual, moral, and political landscape I trace in the spectacle of disaster. Personal accounts of the aftermath of the attacks often revisited the disaster film genre. "I thought it was an ad for a new blockbuster movie," "I thought I was in a disaster film," "This was just like Independence Day," were some of the responses I heard from friends and in news reports. Such references to disaster films are not surprising given how many of these films were released in the last decade, and how successful they were in terms of box office, video, DVD and merchandise sales. Because of their pervasive presence in the visual landscape of the last decade, these films seem to provide the referent of disaster. Even people who do not routinely watch these films acquire the necessary genre literacy through advertisements, trailers, print, and newspaper media. Neal Gabler's editorial for the 16 September issue of the New York Times, "This Time, the Scene Was Real," thematized this process of visual recognition: "The explosion and fireball, the crumbling buildings, the dazed and panicked victims, even the grim presidential address assuring action would be taken—all were familiar, as if they had been lifted from some Hollywood blockbuster." ¹ The real scenes of the disaster zone, around the Twin Towers especially, and the photographic and filmic reporting of these scenes shared an uncanny similarity with the preexisting fictional depictions of disaster movies.

I am certain that there will be more analyses of this effect in the next months, and possibly renewed critical interest in the disaster films of the 1990s. Since I was caught in the process of revising what was already a finished article, I am acutely aware of the temptation to look back in wisdom and find prophetic relationships and correspondences between the imagined landscape of the disaster and the recently experienced real events. It is ironic to have to explore the unprecedented reality of this attack in terms of a kind of déjà vu. ² In the political and journalistic sphere, the quest for precedent has different effects. Political commentators and analysts fall back to historical links with Pearl Harbor as the last attack on American soil and revisit World War II (not Vietnam or the Gulf War, interestingly) to remind the public of its own resiliency. After a while, the incomprehensibility of terrorism is translated into the frightening but orderly demands of war, and the stunned silence of the first days is replaced by other emotions. To understand what happened politically, we do indeed need a wide range of referential historical analyses, going back and forward in time and place, in our search for relevant conditions, strategies, and approaches. But what do we do with the emotional impact of the literally "screened" false memory of the disaster we carry from the spectacular movies of the 1990s? Do these memories constitute an emotional precedent, and, if so, what is its effect?

The visual landscape created by the science fiction/disaster films of the last decade was pervasive, obsessive, and, in my view, politically eloquent despite its lack of depth. ³ But it seems clear to me that it was not motivated by or enjoyed through a need to understand the global political landscape, and it did not overtly thematize the political responsibility we seek in our present situation. Given the recurring feeling of visual referentiality, it may be tempting for film and cultural critics to discuss these films as prescient heralds of a new world order and redeem their cultural relevance a posteriori. These types of readings are already coming up in relation...