CELLULOID MORTALITY - Oxford Forum [Issue Two]

WHAT A VAIN piece of work film is. The world might yet end with a bang rather than a whimper, but mankind will almost certainly expire with the latter. The recent tsunami that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of humans in Asia was one of the most appalling natural disasters in recent memory. The following is not written in any way to belittle this cataclysm, but merely to reflect the vanity of man and his belief in his own greatness.
    Apocalyptic films followed shortly after cinema’s inception, for its first century was also the century of the Great War, the Holocaust, Dresden and Nagasaki. Film’s infancy and young adulthood was accompanied by mass destruction; it seems natural that films should therefore depict mass destruction. I find it distressing that the moniker ‘World War II’ is a tacit admission that such events are normal and inevitable for humans, as if WWII were simply the next in a line of World Wars; I am also baffled that people do not openly find the Nagasaki bombing equally or more distressing than the Hiroshima bombing – as if it were too much effort to mention them both.
    In addition to man’s self-immolation, film has also often depicted man at the mercy of external phenomena: natural disasters, disease, asteroids and alien invaders – the latter being an imaginative result of understanding our own insignificance in an infinite universe; I wonder sometimes whether the universe is in fact much smaller than people imagine.
    It stands to reason that some of these disasters would be magnificent. For example, an alien life form capable of reaching Earth would have to be technologically more advanced than us and therefore mightier than us – otherwise we would have reached them first. Similarly, planets are ‘destroyed’ – in the sense that they no longer exist as previously they had been every day (however long a day is in this poor planet’s particular solar system). It could be even worse: we could end up in a gamma-ray burst, a documented cosmic explosion so violent that it emits the energy of 100 million billion Suns. It may be that the current Manhattan Project team is looking into harnessing such power, but one thing is certain: I’d like to see that on film.
    But whilst these possibilities are at the very least conceivable, if not wholly feasible, man does love to exaggerate his own mortality. Unless, as I secretly believe, sci-fi films about alien invasions are made to condition us into accepting the forthcoming advance of the little green men, (we have not discovered any alien life forms as yet, except the ones we are holding prisoner in Nevada – their being captured proving that they are not that great).
    Nor has an asteroid come along to destroy the Earth recently. One might contend that a meteorite impact caused the demise of the dinosaur and that it could equally cause mankind – or should it be man cruel? – to come to a sticky end. Yes, it is possible. But the last impact (assuming it happened) did not end the world; the world is still here and our existence is proof of the matter.
    An interesting delusion: we humans love to believe that the end of us is the end of the world – that somehow we are the world, an equation that goes against our usual stance that we (humans) are in permanent conflict with the world (nature). The meteorite collision, should it ever happen (and I suppose inevitably it must occur if we have a long-sighted enough viewpoint), does not presuppose the end of mankind and certainly not the end of life or of the world. But whilst this vaguely depressing prospect is perhaps an inevitability, this is not my point.
    My point is that whilst a meteorite could certainly in theory wipe us all out, the chances are that we will have already offed ourselves in a much more banal manner, the collective recipients of a species-wide ‘Darwin Award’.
    In a film like Outbreak, we see a terrible disease vaguely similar to Ebola wiping out most of a city. Similarly,28 Days Later… sees a load of tree-huggers cause many people’s deaths by liberating ‘Rage’-infected monkeys. In both films, the ‘end of the world’ is averted by quarantines. This is all well and good, but to defeat a mega-disease in a fiction film is a revelation of man’s vanity when we cannot (or, to evoke the conspiracies again, will not) find a cure for the common cold and influenza, the latter of which possesses strains that are decimating human populations as you read.
    Of course, in The Day After Tomorrow an enormous tsunami brings New York to its knees (and the rapid onset of a new ice age wipes out the rest of the Northern Hemisphere). This recalls the mega-tsunami at the end of Deep Impact, or indeed the one that aliens control at the end of the director’s cut of The Abyss.
    In our minds, it would take a wave the size of the Statue of Liberty (the symbolism is wonderfully ironic) to destroy man. In reality, it takes a tsunami that is significantly smaller to terminate hundreds of thousands of people.
    I have overheard people watching footage of the Asian tsunami express their disappointment at its size and implore the dying humans onscreen just to swim to safety. It is hard to get our heads around it, but quite simply it does not take much for us to die – as every person who falls from a ladder or drowns in a bath should, but somehow fails, to remind us.
    In the case of December’s tsunami, the number of the dead impresses us, not the manner of death itself. Perhaps we also over hystericise the Holocaust in this sense: in the popular imagination, Pure Evil walked the paths of Auschwitz and Belsen. Pure Evil did walk there, but Pure Evil looks and talks like us and is quite a boring bloke to boot. Vainly we expect that only a diabolical monster, a mega-disaster or a super-disease will kill us; in reality it takes normal but misguided people, water and a cold. Our bodies are not as able as our minds think.
    To cower for fear of dying at all moments is pointless: what kind of life would that be? To feel for the victims of and to seek not to repeat natural or human-induced disasters is, of course, right. But let us also remember that, real though the movies look, life is ultimately very different from film.

Will Brown is studying for a D.Phil in Cinemtography at Magdalen College, Oxford

[Illustration Gareth Lloyd]

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