The end is near! Why disaster movies make sense in the '90s - and dollars - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, April, 1997 by Howard Rabinowitz

Comparing the disaster flicks of the 1970s and the 1990s, it's remarkable to see how little the moral equations have changed over time. In both, Nature isn't the ultimate villain; it's corporate greed that worsens the catastrophe. (Hollywood has always loved to point a finger at money-hungry businessmen, while using the other hand to stuff ridiculous sums of cash into its pockets.) In '70s disaster movies, cost-cutting measures undermine public safety; cheap wiring leads to the barbecued high-rise in The Towering Inferno and shoddy architecture ensures that the massive trembler in Earthquake will cause scores of deaths. In Twister, the one bonafide villain, played by Cary Elwes, is a rival scientist who steals the hero's research and, even worse, has corporate backing for his project. Hovering in the background of Dante's Peak is a developer with a scheme to invest millions of dollars in the idyllic little town. Simply considering the plan is enough to doom the city council members.

One nouveau disaster movie that doesn't directly villify corporate greed is Independence Day. Its bad guys are unmistakable: extraterrestrials. (With a not-so-subtle streak of xenophobia, the movie suggests that over-trusting folks who welcome the aliens with open arms deserve to get fried.) The departure isn't surprising, given that with ID4's disaster-movie structure is a pastiche of a dozen classic science-fiction and action movies: Star Wars meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Top Gun meets Alien. Still, the aliens' take-no-prisoners strategy to conquer Earth isn't unlike that of the major movie studios' marketing of summer blockbusters: "Open big, strike everywhere, and make sure you get everybody."

The job of a decent disaster movie isn't simply to give us villains, of course. We need heroes, too, and Independence Day, of all the recent disaster movies, seems truest in form to what we remember of its '70s predecessors. While watching Independence Day, I recalled the plot of movies like The Poseidon adventure and The Towering Inferno as a story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances working together for their mutual survival. In memory, the movie's catastrophe brought together its characters across racial and gender lines--men and women, black and white, young and old--to build camaraderie and courage.

But like the S.S. Poseidon, memory is a fragile vessel. I was wrong about the feminist and multicultural slant. On second viewing, I found that Poseidon features no black actors or actresses. Aside from the nobly sacrificed Shelley Winters, the women are shrill or hysterical and utterly dependent on the men, without whom they wouldn't be able to find their way out of a paper bag, let alone a sinking luxury liner. In The Towering Inferno, Faye Dunaway (who only a few years earlier lit up the screen as the sexy, tough-talking outlaw Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde) is rendered practically mute, gazing devotedly at Paul Newman. Inferno's one black actor is none other than O.J. Simpson, and he has little more than a cameo. His greatest heroic act is to rescue a cat from a burning bedroom before disappearing from the movie altogether after his 15 minutes of flame.