Disaster Movies
Climate change and cinema
AUG 5
Posted by Nick Redfern
Looking at post-war Hollywood cinema we find many disaster movies, which may be sorted into many
categories according to the source of anxiety they present. (See here for a survey).
The major disasters that have thrilled American audiences have been focussed on transport (especially
aeroplanes) that goes of control (e.g. the Airport movies, Speed, The Big Bus, etc) and
geological/meteorological events (e.g. Dante’s Peak, Earthquake, Volcano). You might expect that climate
change would make an appearance in the latter category as a contemporary source of anxiety that could be
used to provide the catastrophic event that sets in motion the story of a plucky band of survivors.
Occasionally, this has been the case in films like The Day After Tomorrow and, more recently, 2012.
However, these are exceptions to the rule and , in general, Hollywood has not really dealt with climate
change to any great degree. One reason for this is simply that climate change is not very dramatic – it is
certainly not as dramatic as a giant meteor smashing into the Earth (e.g. Meteor, Deep Impact, Armageddon)
– and does not, therefore, provide the tension necessary for the disaster movie. The crisis of climate change
is chronic rather than acute, and the disaster movie needs acute events to impel its characters to action. The
threat must immanent and must be dealt with immediately. It is also very hard to show climate change
happening – icebergs do not explode in the same way as a crashing plane or a building hit by a giant space
rock.
Climate change might be motivated as a cause of an event that we do not witness, but which does explain
why human society finds itself living in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Waterworld is a good example of this
use of climate change as background event. But as a background event, climate change is inevitably
glossed over as something explodes.
The first explanation for the absence of climate change movies is therefore quite simple – climate change is
dull.
There is also a second factor to consider: the fact that Americans do not want to watch films about climate
change. If we take the US box office gross for a group of films that can be loosely collected together under
the heading of ‘climate change’ and we divide this by the average ticket price (from the National Association
of Theatre Owners) then we have an estimate of the popularity of a film expressed in terms of the number of
ticket sales. This makes it possible to compare films from different years more directly than using the box
office grosses. This information is presented in Table 1. What is immediately apparent is that, relative to
some recent disaster movies (Table 2), the number of attendances is generally much smaller – though
obviously not in the case of Avatar. Clearly, Nobody went to see The 11th Hour – a documentary narrated by
Leonardo DiCaprio – but An Inconvenient Truth did respectably for a documentary. Of the ‘environmental
films,’ only The Day After Tomorrow comes close to the other disaster movies.Although only a brief survey of
a handful of films, it does appear that the place of the climate change film in the disaster genre is limited, and
that American audiences will go to see non-environmentalist disaster movies in far greater numbers. One
reason for the limited number of climate change disaster movies is that they are simply not popular (i.e. not
profitable) enough. Unfortunately, getting data for a direct comparison of US audiences with non-US
(especially European) audiences is somewhat difficult.
Table 1 US box office and estimated attendance for some ‘environmental films’
Table 2 US box office and estimated attendance for some disaster films
(It is traditional at this point to say something derogatory about Armageddon but I actually really like this film
– it’s good fun and much better than Deep Impact).
Finally, as an interesting aside, here is a report from World Environment Day 2009 on a solar-powered
cinema in South Yorkshire.
Posted in Climate Change, Disaster Movies, Film Industry, Film Studies, Hollywood, Motion Picture
Exhibition
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Tags: Climate Change, Disaster Movies
Conspiracy and Disaster in Hollywood
OCT 22
Posted by Nick Redfern
Two genres that have been significant in post-war Hollywood cinema are the conspiracy movie and the
disaster film. With the end of World War II in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear
arms race that followed, and the paranoia of the Cold War, it is conspiracy and disaster movies that have
voiced America’s deepest fears about its relationship to the rest of the world on the one hand, and the
struggle to define what is American and what is un-American at home.
From the point of view of someone interested in how cinema deals with these types of questions these
genres are interesting because of the way they occur together and interact. Both genres deal with
fundamentally the same problem: that our deepest fears may be realised – that the world is coming to an
end and that the person we share our life is not who we think they are. Both these genres deal with anxiety,
the prolonged, persistent, irrational belief that something (although we may not know what) is going to
happen.
By conspiracy movie I mean a film in which there is some paranoid element that leads us to conclude that
the world as we experience it is not the world as it is – films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1954),
Seven Days in May (1964), The Parallax View (1974), or Shadow Conspiracy (1997) are good examples of
how people are not what they seem, that the US government is ruled by the military, or that through mind
control can be used to turn individuals into assassins. Timothy Melley refers to this pervasive strain in
American popular culture ‘agency panic:’
An intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control – the conviction that one’s actions are
being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful agents (2001: 62).
Agency panic provides a model of conspiracy in American culture based around a notion of diminished
human agency in which the individual is subject to a broad array of social controls (the conspiracy).
Conspiracy theory, in Melley’s view is a defence of the integrity of the self in the face of anxiety about the
nature of individual action. As I have discussed elsewhere, the conspiracy movie is characterised by the
emotional response of anxiety. Agency panic from The Hidden Persuaders, to the Unabomber’s manifesto,
and to Invasion of the Body Snatchers is such an emotional response.
Disaster movies are harder to define as the cause of the disaster may vary considerably, but are
characteristic by a certain scale of their events – disasters should be big, especially in Hollywood – or by
their magnified impact on a small but largely self-contained social group (i.e. Jurassic Park (1993), Airport ’77
(1977)). Global Pandemics (Panic in the Streets (1950), Outbreak (1997)), geological disaster (Earthquake
(1974), Volcano (1997)), or the complete and utter destruction of the Earth (Armageddon (1997)) are all
recurrent topics. There is also a sub-genre of films in which mass transit systems are out to get Americans –
having watched films such as Airport (1970), Speed (1994), or even Titanic (1997) is it any wonder that
investment in US public transport is lacking and that that car is supreme?
Like conspiracy films, disaster movies put the viewer in the position of being unable to control a situation:
earthquakes, swarms of killer bees, meteors cannot be reasoned with. Something terrible will happen and
we will not be able to control it. The potentiality of the disaster is the terrible thing – it is this that produces in
the viewer a sense of anxiety.
Disaster movies are an essentially earthbound form: they operate, almost by definition, within the realm of
the possible. People must believe ‘it’ could – indeed, very well might – happen to them (Roddick 1980: 246).
There is an initial loss of agency in the disaster movie leading to panic – but, and this is where the genre
diverges from the conspiracy film, that loss of agency can ultimately be recovered. The world may never be
the same again but human beings survive. We will be able to land the plane safely, the meteor will be
destroyed (at the cost of Bruce Willis), the aliens will be defeated by a computer virus (which in no way
plagiarises The War of the Worlds) – there will be a plan and that plan will lead to the continuation of the
human race.
There are also some films that involve both conspiracies and disasters: Deep Impact (1997), for example,
starts off with a journalist trying to uncover what she thinks is a conspiracy but in fact uncovers a disaster (a
meteor heading for earth); while in The China Syndrome (1979) California is a risk because of cover-up at a
nuclear power plant.
To chart the changing impact of the conspiracy film and the disaster movie I have searched books,
databases and the internet to find Hollywood’s output since the end of World War II and have come up with
two samples on which I am going to base my analysis of anxiety in Hollywood cinema. I have identified some
93 conspiracy films and 102 disaster movies produced in Hollywood from 1947 to 2006 inclusive (not
including TV movies, straight-to-video), and plotting the number of these types of films released by 5 year
periods we can see some clear trends (Figure 1). Obviously, cycles of films do not fit neatly into five year
periods, and this data set will continue to grow as I carry on the research but it is a useful guide.
FIGURE 1 Hollywood conspiracy and disaster films released from 1947 to 2006
Figure 1 shows that:

There have been three major cycles of conspiracy movies: the ‘red scare movies’ of the early Cold
War (1947-1959, 30 films); the New Hollywood films, in which the individual is threatened by state
institutions (1965-1979, 25 films); and from 1990 to 2006, which includes the nostalgia/history films of
the 1990s (e.g. JFK (1991)), bog-standard conspiracy genre-fare (e.g. Shadow Conspiracy), and new
millennium films that deal primarily with the problematic nature of memory (Paycheck (2003)), identity
and agency (The Bourne Identity (2002)), and reality (The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003).

Although the conspiracy film never disappears, it does drop off markedly in the early 1960s (8 films)
and the 1980s (7 films).

The disaster movie is more of a constant feature of post-war Hollywood cinema, and does not have
such large swings in popularity as the conspiracy film. Nonetheless, there are clusters of disaster
movies – in the 1950s and 1960s there are 15 and 14 films, respectively; in the 1970s this increases
to 28 films; there are 13 films in the 1980s (almost all of which are released in the first half of the
decade); before another increase in the 1990s to 24 films (of which 18 come in the second half of the
decade); and 8 in the 2000s, with 7 released from 2000-2004.

The peak years for disaster movies are 1979 (7 films) and 1997 (8 films).

Of 102 disaster movies, the disasters are: alien invasion (5 films), disease (10 films), man-made
disasters (i.e. fire) (5 films), natural disasters (35 films), nuclear disasters (11 films), and disasters
involving some form of transport (36 films).

Of the 35 natural disaster films 3 involve avalanches, 9 involve some type of fauna (including bees
(The Swarm (1978) and dinosaurs (Jurassic Park (1993))), 13 are geological (i.e. volcanoes,
earthquakes), 5 involve meteors, and 5 involve some form of extreme weather event from tornadoes
to hurricanes to global warming.

Of the 36 transport disaster films 2 involve buses, 10 involve boats, and 24 feature aircraft disasters.
In summary, the genres of the conspiracy film and the disaster movie a born in the early years of the Cold
War and their fortunes broadly coincide as their popularity waxes and wanes – particularly in the 1970s and
1990s. That they should occur together is, I think, due to the shared basis in exploring the our anxiety about
the nature of the world and the potential for action in the face of events that exceed our control.
References
Timothy Melley, ‘Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy,’ in Peter Knight (ed.) Conspiracy Nation: The
Politics of Paranoia in Post-war America. New York and London: New York University Press, 2001: 57-81.
Nick Roddick, ‘Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies,’ in D. Brady (ed.) Performance and
Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film, and television 1800-1976.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980: 243-269.