Apocalypse Now

he reaction became an instant clichZ: "It was all so unreal, like special effects in a movie." Few could find a good way to say it otherwise--but at a time when words were failing, the triteness of this particular clichZ was forgivable.

It was, after all, forged in large part from a fundamental modern American truth: Film, the dominant cultural medium of the 20th century, has shaped our understanding of reality. Indeed, virtually unharmed for half a century, we have learned most of what we know about danger from the movies. We think in terms of the gruff, honorable cop, the accented bad guy, his ticking bomb and defenseless, huddled masses.

In this time of introspection, the question of exactly where this perverse hunger for catastrophe comes from, and what it says about our culture, is very important. America can learn about itself from its fantasies, especially now that the gap between fantasy and reality has been so suddenly bridged.

The critical and intellectual elite have always groaned about the irrepressible, sadistic tendency toward the calamitous. Hare-brained man-with-bomb plots of the O90s have been skewered like the hare-brained natural disaster films of the O70s before them, and like the hare-brained city-devouring monster films of the O50s before them. The pulpy disaster film is exploitative, cheap (despite its big budget) and (according to its critics) desensitizing in its unrealistic and sensationalistic fantasy.

And yet, it's also one of the most successful. Independence Day, whose shots of Manhattanites fleeing down streets with a billowing cloud in close pursuit, undoubtedly inspired a sick dZja vu among millions in the past weeks, broke box office records almost solely through savvy marketing of an exploding White House. Armageddon and Pearl Harbor were both as widely attended as they were bloated and wasteful. The entire country turned out to see them with little hesitation, as if the very gravity of their titles made it a social imperative.

Of course, when it was released last summer, Pearl Harbor was only offensive to anyone with a modicum of cinematic sensibility or a sharply tuned knowledge of history. Now, after that defining American moment has been conjured up in comparison to Sept. 11, such a trivialization of national tragedy appears even more disrespectful than ever. To be sure, after exposure to the real thing, it seems incredible that we could ever have been wowed by such sensational bloodshed, such aestheticization of tragedy.

However, it would be wrong to say that exploitation of the taste for disaster is a tendency unique to Hollywood--much less that this taste is particular to modern-day American audiences. It is a deeply imbedded part of the Western cultural subconscious--only now, after reality smacked us upside the head with our own death wish, it happens to be painfully obvious.

In fact, the bar for large-scale blockbusters was set thousands of years before the birth of film.

Eventually, movies came around to address the nuclear threat more directly. Long after the specter of the atomic bomb had first come over the Western world, but only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, two films came out back to back that looked the nuclear threat right in the eye. Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove shared virtually the same premise: Standard operating procedures go wrong, and the government is powerless to stop the ensuing holocaust. Kubrick's film was a biting satire where Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, was a more somber assessment of the nuclear reality, but both looked honestly at a very real-world apocalyptic scenario. Considered together, the two demonstrate a remarkable capability for depth in film--when it finally comes around to taking its own fantasies seriously.

What we are experiencing now, something that was perhaps absent even after Pearl Harbor, is a culture shock unique in history to this moment. For all the killer UFOs and Godzillas, and all the Biblical apocalypses imagined in centuries past, perhaps never before has a culture's most feared scenario actually come to life before its eyes.

Since the fall of the USSR, movies have sorely lacked a monolithic source of evil and have turned to the chaotic threat of men-with-bombs in buildings, buses, trains and planes. And yet, for all the surprise and fear that has erupted across the country, it may as well have been Mothra himself who leveled the towers. Now, the sense of unease with our own violent media culture almost resembles guilt--as if our perverse imagining of tragedy has willed it into existence like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man.

Surely, movie culture will be fundamentally altered by this. After all, the job of movies is to show the unimaginable, and one of their best tricks was just stolen by reality. Predictably, the big-budget actioners are being pushed back, if not canceled outright. For the immediate future, it is probably safe to expect lots of romantic comedies and uplifting manipulations with Kevin Spacey or Tom Hanks.

Eventually, the culture shock will work its way to the core and, if history is any key, will produce art of great vision and profundity. It took a while before Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were able to be made, and the same is true for the great Vietnam films that came out decades after the fact. After the fact, though, is when movies are best at coping with grief and finding hope: Out of horrible war devastation in Italy came The Bicycle Thief, a cinematic masterpiece that addresses the very depths of human love and despair without a single explosion or gunshot.

But the question remains: We are a movie-bred culture--how will that breeding affect us now? As A.O. Scott noted in The New York Times' wonderful Sept. 13 collection of essays entitled "The Expression of Grief and the Power of Art," we have developed a "yearning for narrative coherence--for the happy ending supplied by forceful, unambiguous vengeance" that is at this very moment feeding the fires of war. We're accustomed to the plot lines being wrapped up neatly in the final minutes--we have faith that whatever risky scheme the good guy comes up with, it will invariably save the day. Hopefully, the American people and its leaders do indeed know, as Scott asserts, "that such satisfaction is illusory."

On the other hand, the impulse to search for a happy ending is not necessarily such a bad thing. My heart will go on, right? For all their shallowness and shmaltz, movies teach us how to hope. We have learned how to find, amidst the smoking rubble of the towers, the brave stories of the passengers of the plane grounded in Philadelphia, who sacrificed their lives to crash the flight prematurely. We tearfully make heroes of the firefighters and police officers who died while helping to save others. We instinctively make distinctions between good and evil. Hopefully, most of us then try to be conscious of which side our own actions fall under. In these and other small ways that perhaps aren't even noticeable, our fantasies have provided comfort in the face of the unimaginable, giving us fortitude and solace when we no longer see a happy ending in sight.