The Mayans had it wrong but Hollywood has already been there, done that. In the film 2012, we saw the end of the world cinematically speaking, and the survival of a chosen few. but there is something about avalanches, killer sharks, rampaging gorillas, meteors, asteroids and comets, earthquakes, epidemics, sweeping floods and raging fires, alien attacks, volcanoes, crisis ridden airplanes, submarines and spaceships, that sends Hollywood into a creative frenzy. As The Impossible, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, finds its way to the Oscars after recreating the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, there is renewed interest in how the human spirit deals with, yes, the impossible.
And it is easy to recall some of the most indelible images from the genre. A hungry, vengeful great white shark (in Jaws, a 1975 film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Peter Benchley’s novel) coursed through popular imagination to the score by John Williams and became more famous than any of the actors who played its victims. Alfred Hitchcock’s almost surreal The Birds (1963) based on a 1952 story by Daphne du Maurier imagined a spate of bird attacks at Bodega Bay, and the horror that struck the hearts of the viewers was real even though the events unfolding before them were not.
The many times Godzillas and King Kongs have stomped through cities, and aliens have attacked the world on film screens are too numerous to be mentioned though Peter Jackson’s King Kong brought into the gimmicky formula, a measure of great human tenderness. James Cameron’s Titanic (1977) remains the definitive shipwreck film and if one were to recall the first significant fire disaster, we would revisit the compelling images from The Towering Inferno (a 1974 film directed by John Guillermin) where a San Francisco building catches fire and a human drama begins to unfold amid fear, tragedy and sacrifice. The movie also inspired an Indian rip-off called The Burning Train (1980) where a bomb planted in a super-fast train explodes, and hundreds of lives are endangered. The 1981 Manmohan Desai film Naseeb also tried to copy the climax of The Towering Inferno but the tacky special effects in both Hindi films showed us why the disaster genre remains largely unexplored in India. A 1969 film Anmol Moti, based on the lives of fishermen and sea divers tried hard but its premise of a killer octopus ensnaring anyone who dared to dive for a precious pearl evoked more laughter than fear.
Hollywood, though, with its superior technology has loved blowing up iconic buildings, destroying entire cities and its romance with elemental forces began as early as in the ’30s when Darryl F Zanuck’s 1939 epic The Rains Came recreated a stunning earthquake and flood sequence in a fictitious Indian city of Ranchipur. The film perhaps also inspired Raj Kapoor to stage a similar sequence in the climax of Satyam Shivam Sundaram. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), the Cecil B De Mill epic, detailed a shocking circus train wreck. Titanic and War of The Worlds were first made in 1953. The 1970 hit Airport based on a Arthur Hailey novel is considered the first major airplane disaster film in Hollywood. The Day After (1983), a television film remains one of the most frightening films ever made on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and the ensuing devastation. Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Twister, Dante’s Peak and many more films have explored Hollywood’s deep fascination with disaster though it is not often that American films explore the devastation their country’s politics has unleashed on other countries. There has never been an American reconstruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the incessant bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan though 9/11 has had its sensitive cinematic narratives.
Maybe with time, Hollywood scriptwriters will write about disasters that begin within and carry a great human cost and are not just about visitations from other planets. And natural elements with no political agendas.
(Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight, editor of unboxedwriters.com and an RJ)
