Cloverfield, A.I., The Day After Tomorrow, and Planet of the Apes

So I’m watching 2012. I’m watching California slide into the Pacific just like everybody said it would. I’m watching Wyoming explode into an atomic fireball, Nevada splinter apart, and Washington DC sink under a blizzard of ash before a tsunami wipes everybody out. As the calamity moves east, the Vatican teeters and falls on a desperate crowd while we munch popcorn in the dark.

Slackjawed in my seat, I try to count how many times I’ve seen this movie and I wonder why I keep paying to watch it again: Cloverfield, I Am Legend, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Independence Day. There’s terrorism, tsunamis, and suffering all over CNN — why pay ten bucks to watch it with Will Smith and a soundtrack?

I enjoy disaster movies but I’m not sure why. Are heavy Freudian mechanics at work — or is it simply that explosions are cool? Some questions:

1. What, exactly, is the appeal of watching our monuments get trashed?
2. Is there a connection between the appeal of disaster films and the tendency for some religious folks to bang on about the Apocalypse while searching for signs of The End in severe weather, the bad manners of children, and patterns in their breakfast toast?
3. A latent death wish? We seek out the epic to give our lives meaning and it’s perversely encouraging to believe that these are the most important times in humanity, if not its final days.
4. Or catharsis. Like a scary rollercoaster or a haunted house, the safety of a movie theatre allows us to get close to the things that frighten us. (This might be giving Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich too much credit.)

I’m sure there are piles of research on this subject within the annals of Film Studies and Psychology, and I’d love to be pointed in the right direction. In the meantime, I’m counting the days until the release of The Road.

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Classics IV – Stormy
Imperial, 1968 | buy mp3s
Some 1968 smoothness from Jacksonville, Florida.

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Jackie Mittoo – Earthquake
Blood & Fire, 1976 | buy mp3s
Jamaican keyboards from the founder of the Skatalites and musical director of Studio One.

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Tomorrowland – Stormy
from Anemone. Red Antenna, 2003 | more here
A house favorite. “Entering from across the Atlantic, you can see the Krautrock feel of Can, the mechanical loops, two hundred years of industry lost in a whimpering daze.” — Detroit Metro Times