Why I Like Disaster Movies, by Extemporanea, aged nearly 5

[freckles_and_doubt]

A random thought has occurred to me. I have burbled before, in this forum, about my complete love for disaster movies, and for watching large tracts of human civilisation explode, erupt, disintegrate, drown, get swallowed by earthquakes, get blown up by aliens or otherwise interestingly fall apart. However, watching the Na'vi Hometree char and collapse, despite its lavish provision of explosions and giant things going crunch, gave me no enjoyment at all, engendering instead a sort of sickened disgust.

This has been somewhat revelatory. I think I enjoy disaster movies, in the average expression of the genre, because they offer an apocalyptic response to something I feel very strongly about, which is that human civilisation simply doesn't work. On average it's an unreflecting, unintegrated, fundamentally self-destructive society we belong to, one that is probably stuck in a downward spiral to some kind of collapse. Being gleefully destroyed by some imponderably and irresistably enormous external force, whether alien or environmental, operates on some level of my subconscious not just as a lovely externalisation of inherent qualities, but as something we probably deserve. The Na'vi, on the other hand, are a functional society in perfect and harmonious balance with their habitat. They didn't deserve to be destroyed. Hence, no enjoyment.

This basically suggests that somewhere in my subconsious is a sort of stern Victorian governess with a very large ruler, saying over her pince-nez, with steely determination, "If you break one more thing there will be trouble." I'm OK with that. I'm also going to stop talking about Avatar now, I seem to have mostly expelled the fury by blogging.

Comments

[mwotn.livejournal.com]

Interesting philosophical idea. The concept of humanity "deserving" annihilation is an interesting one too (it irks me that you live on a continent. This would be a good debate to while away a few evenings). I've not seen Avatar so can't comment on it, tho, sadly.

On other business, Happy New Year! Apologies for my very erratic nature, revision is destroying my life.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Revision of what, pray tell? I mean, you're perfectly entitled to pop up here erratically as your life permits and hang out for a bit, it's a free blog and no-one's keeping a register, but enquiring minds want to know.

And, yes, vague philosophical meanderings ftw, preferably debated while tipsy.

Don't see Avatar unless you are very forgiving about crappy scripts and really like the colour blue. I used to.

[mwotn.livejournal.com]

Engineering. Which, for some reason that now completely eludes me, I chose for my degree. I have exams later on this morning (breakfast is for surfing the internet!)

I might give Avatar a go then. I tend to turn my brain off for cinema so am normally quite forgiving and I daresay I can stump up enough appreciation of the colour blue to sit through how ever many hours of giant blue aliens...

Double, double, toil and trouble

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

It's not destruction per se that delights you, it's justice? And righteous destruction is overdue justice writ large and clear.

Well, I think, me too.

"Good" thing about it? The pleasure of (sane) morality. Justice wish fulfilment implies justice wish.

"Bad" thing about it? In reality, very few groups are so bad that annihilation is the best fate for them. The good people among us have probably evolved from groups that seemed irredeemably bad. Taking pleasure in the Smiting Arm of Justice hardens us against our compassion. Our desire for simplicity can lead us to be simply wrong.

So, as fantasy? Yay! If it were to happen in reality? We should weep.

Re: Double, double, toil and trouble

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting corollary to disaster movie catastrophes, which is that by and large they're weirdly abstracted, you don't see the people suffering. You identify on a human level with the carefully-selected group of Characters, TM, who suffer from Pain and Death in carefully-balanced ratios, so that there's a bit of gosh-how-sad but not much this-is-a-human-tragedy. I agree with you that it's not really about empathy at all, and therefore is potentially dangerous, but in fact I suspect that on a generic and qualitative level it's about something rather different and very much emblematic rather than humanly real.

Or something. God, after a day of orientation admin it's so good to indulge in actual pseudo-analysis.

[(Anonymous)]

"On average it's an unreflecting, unintegrated, fundamentally self-destructive society we belong to, one that is probably stuck in a downward spiral to some kind of collapse."

Yeah, i know what you mean, the centre cannot hold, things fall apart and all that, everything tends towards entropy. And feel pretty much the same way.

And yet...history shows us that, on a human timescale, everyone who's ever thought this has been wrong. Which makes my brain hurt. But if the world ends soon at the hands of some fundamentalist group or other, as seems to be the most likely prediction, is that a symptom of gradual collapse? Or an apocalyptic event? Kind of feels like it would be both, at the same time. Hm, brain hurts more lol.

ps. hello!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Valid point, but I don't think that we've ever before utterly screwed up our own environment, globally, to the point where it's difficult to see how we're going to recover in order to survive in any kind of non-apocalyptic shape. Civilisations rise and fall, cultures come and go, technologies reshape us periodically, but the Earth endures. Except when it doesn't.