‘Tis An Ill Wind, Indeed...

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with hundreds of thousands of people rendered suddenly homeless, potentially thousands of people dead, much of New Orleans still under water, and the property and economic losses projected to be $100 billion or more, you can be certain that there are scriptwriters and producers out there already putting together and getting ready to pitch a whole new generation of reality-based disaster movies. A sad but true fact of life in Hollywood, such as it is.

Hollywood has always had a fascination with disasters as the subjects of movies, going back at least as far as D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in 1916, subjects have included historical natural disasters such as the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and man-made catastrophes like the sinking of the Titanic and the fire that destroyed the Hindenburg. And when reality hasn’t provided enough examples, scriptwriters have threatened the world with dangers ranging from giant asteroids (Armageddon and Deep Impact) to continent-shattering earthquakes (10.5) to global warming cataclysms (The Day After Tomorrow). Destruction and loss of life, or at least the potential for them, on a large scale seems to be endlessly mesmerizing not only to those who make the movies, but to those who watch them as well. Nor is this a modern phenomenon; the floods that are the central theme to both the story of Noah and the epic of Gilgamesh serve as the settings against which the narrations take place.

Some of this can be explained by the odd fact that while disaster brings out the worst in some people, in many more it inspires compassion, support, acts of kindness, selflessness, and in not a few instances, outright heroism. Few things stir up the passions of admiration and emulation more than the imagery of men and women laying down their very lives for those they love, for their country, or for that amorphous and indistinct conglomeration, Mankind. In an earlier column, I quoted the words of Jesus from the Gospel According to John, and I think they are relevant again here: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” You don’t have to be a Christian for that sentiment to strike a chord deep within you. There is something in the collective subconscious of Mankind that responds to this idea, so much so that we find it repeated time and again in various ways throughout the religions and belief systems of the world. Hollywood knows this, and indeed relies on this and other strong emotional responses. There is nothing wrong with this; in any artistic endeavor, the object of the artist is to evoke an emotional response. If he or she fails to do so, whatever it is that has been created cannot be said to be art. (One exception to this: provoking disgust does not mean that what has been created is art. A rotting animal corpse can provoke disgust, but that does not make decay an art form.) Movies that fail to stir emotional responses of one sort or another (or perhaps a full spectrum of them) don’t make it very far at the box office.

I hope when movies are made about Hurricane Katrina that they can capture some portion of the destruction and human suffering that resulted, to help bring a greater understanding of the magnitude of the disaster. But even more, I hope that they will portray the acts of heroism, the outpouring of compassion, the help for and the welcoming of those displaced by the hurricane and its aftermath. New Orleans will be rebuilt, along with the other areas of the Gulf Coast that were destroyed, and that rebuilding in itself will generate a multitude of stories and backdrops for stories to be told.