2012: WE HEART DOOM

Posted by: John Marks on 11/17/2009 @ 9:48 am

Disaster movies are all about missing the bullet. We never identify with the body falling out of the building. We always inhabit the eyes of the living, who watch as the body plummets. In this, we obey the camera. The building topples, the bullet whizzes by, and we receive the frisson of a special grace, conveyed by the placement of the lens. We alone survive to tell the tale. We alone rise inside the plane as the earth gives way beneath us.

I was reminded of this truth as I watched 2012, a movie that I had to see, if for no other reason than I’d been subjected to the trailer so many times that I had inadvertently memorized it. By last weekend, when 2012 opened, I could cut and paste the succession of its preview images down to the last tidal wave. Cue the image of a fuzzy television screen tuned to a station showing a Mayan temple.

Surprise, surprise. The movie is better than expected. It’s the best disaster movie in three decades, in fact, which isn’t saying much. One can make a strong case that there is no such a thing as a good disaster movie, much less a great one, for the same reason that there are no truly great serial killer movies. The genres feel too close to pornography; instead of exquisitely-calibrated bouts of penetration, we get expertly timed gouts of destruction. The rhythm of delivery is the same.

Still, pornography caters to visceral needs, and so does 2012, which was roundly and predictably dismissed by critics. I was ready and eager to join their ranks, but I’m here to tell you that Roland Emmerich’s latest destruct-a-thon is his masterpiece, as close as he is ever likely to come to a Wagnerian magnum opus on the theme of global annihilation. Earlier disaster movies are referenced and catalogued and regurgitated. We get sequences from the Airport movies, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Birds, Earthquake, Titanic, Meteor, Volcano, World Trade Center, everything but The Swarm, the last in the series of Irwin Allen blockbusters that introduced the world to the big budget, special effects driven doom spectacular.

My first was the original Airport, starring Dean Martin, Burt Lancaster, Van Heflin, Helen Hayes, Jacqueline Bisset (baring her sinuous naked back in one scene) and George Kennedy as the indomitable Joe Patroni, who would return chew scenery and cigars in two more of these increasingly awful films.

I saw the original Airport on television, probably as a Friday Night movie, and as a young Texan devoted to the smug cool of Dean Martin, I only wanted one thing from the movie. I wanted Dino to survive, and he did. Improbably, Helen Hayes won the Oscar for her performance as a stowaway.

My first big screen disaster movie was also my first experience of a hit so huge that audiences lined up around the block to see it: The Poseidon Adventure, which came with the tagline: “Hell Turned Upside Down”. For me, this is still the very  best of the genre, the one entry in the form in which actors are expected to act, in which plot more-or-less dominates special effects, in which restraint trumps self-indulgence. The film actually has a philosophical point of view, delivered in the lines of a god-hating pastor played with honey-glazed abandon by Gene Hackman.

Can we imagine a blockbuster film today in which a man of the cloth who also happens to be the central protagonist of the movie curses god and dies? The remake was a travesty in large part because it abandoned the existential nerve of the original, which was directed with wit and intelligence by Ronald Neame, a man who must have bridled at the intrusion of so many special effects on his otherwise quiet body of work.

Roland Emmerich never made a quiet movie in his life, unless you include his early student short, “Sabine Goes Hang-gliding”. (Just kidding) He has built his career on thunder and lightning, and to that extent 2012 has the feel of a culminating work. It distills and repackages and recapitulates everything from Universal Soldier and Independence Day to Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow. I would invoke Cecil B. DeMille if there were any craft or artistry involved, but Emmerich has always chosen to stay within the bright lines of other, better movies. On the rare occasion when we do feel the presence of a signature touch, we register the unmistakable flavor of a Mentos commercial.

Apocalypse: The Freshmaker!

Still, despite every conceivable caveat I might raise, something  aesthetically viable happens in this new movie. The primal need that it addresses–i.e., to watch other people die and yet survive yourself–is met and surpassed. It’s not just that Emmerich is at the top of his game. He’s also nailed the timing. Audiences were ready for a cosmic spanking. Some of them think Mayan predictions about civilizational collapse are correct, and that this is really going to happen in a couple of years. They await a molten crust with some optimism. How else to avoid another endless presidential campaign?

We’ve been here before. The first great wave of doom spectaculars appeared in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in the midst of assassinations, Vietnam and the end of the postwar economic boom. As if in response, the earth shook, the ships overturned, the planes exploded and the buildings burned. The doom-specs externalized a sense in the audience of societal collapse. Yo, 2009!

Is it any wonder that both the art-house flick of the week, Lee Daniels’ Precious and the commercial blockbuster 2012, are essentially disaster movies, one on a small scale, the other writ gigantic? (The only real difference is perhaps the role played by body mass index. In Precious, the plus-size protagonist  is the ultimate survivor and heroine. In 2012, fat people are either villainous or they die like flies or both.)

Sony must have banked on zeitgeist. 2012 plays on the funky religious undertones and high tech anxiety of our own era. Otherwise, how do we explain the fact that such an expensive, non-comic-book movie got made, especially when the same director’s last big ticket flick flopped? Evidently, Emmerich sold the script to Sony before that one–10,000 BC–came out, but the studio then went on to spend an estimated $500 million on production and marketing anyway. No matter how popular the movie is, and it’s already a worldwide hit, 2012 will never be as profitable as, say, Paranormal Activity, made for $15,000 and well past $100 million in revenues.

Still, even if the movie breaks even, we can probably expect more, which is a depressing thought. A proven rule of thumb when it comes to doom spectaculars? The first one is always the best. The knock-offs suck beyond measure.

One last thing should be said about Emmerich’s movie. It’s political. In fact, it’s possible to see the whole thing as his auteur’s verdict on the 2008 election. The heavy, a White House Chief of Staff played with requisite snarls by Oliver Platt, is named Anheuser. Get it? As in Anheuser-Busch? The hero is a black geologist played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and his love interest is an under-utilized Thandie Newton who is the daughter of a noble black American President Danny Glover, the Helen Hayes of this movie, a beloved older actor making a brief but memorable return to the screen in hopes of a career revival or Oscar. (Or is that George Segal, who plays a completely disposable jazz musician?)

By Emmerich’s standards, the politics are subtle, but they are unmistakable. For better or worse, this is his Citizen Kane, featuring Mother Earth in the role of Charles Foster Kane, bloated with water-weight and dying at the end, calling out for Rosebud, which turns out to be us.