Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Invasion of the Marriage Disaster Flicks

So Janet and I saw War of the Worlds last night, a movie we wanted to see precisely because it has no emotional content whatsoever. We were pleased, however, to find out that (and I think I’m paraphrasing a reviewer here, but I can’t remember which one) a brutal alien invasion will get Tom Cruise back in touch with his children (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin). I suppose there’s more to say about the film, particularly about Tim Robbins’s bizarre appearance as himself in Mystic River (apparently he’s now ready to re-enact the child molestation in the basement bit, this time with himself as the molester). But what Janet and I wanted to know, as we left the theater, was how the hell the marriage between Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and Ray Ferrier (Cruise) could ever have happened in the first place. That’s far less plausible than a mass invasion of insect-lizard aliens driving huge tripods around the globe.

As for the closing scene, in which Cruise delivers the kids to Otto (who’s in Boston with her second husband) and Chatwin finally calls him “dad”: what is it with this narrative trope, anyway? There’s a disaster or an invasion or a lethal virus or a mysterious bunch of aliens living in our oceans, and the story ends when the family romance is completed in some way? Quoi? And pourquoi?

I’ve been wondering about this for some time, and even tried to write about it a few years ago, but I don’t really know what to do with it aside from pointing it out. So, dear readers, I cheerily invite you to give it a go. Here are your Texts for Analysis. Please remember to write legibly!

The first example I can think of is The Abyss (1989), in which Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are an estranged couple who become less estranged in the course of leading an expedition to unearth a sunken nuclear sub—and discovering the presence of a city full of ethereal beings on the ocean floor. Never mind those beings, though—the film is over when Harris and Mastrantonio kiss and make up.

But this family-SF-disaster motif didn’t really pick up steam until the mid-1990s. Early on in Outbreak (1995), there’s a curious exchange between Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman, who play high-tech epidemiologists working for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. They’re examining the highly lethal “Motaba” virus, but they’re talking about the broken marriage of Hoffman’s character and that of costar Rene Russo, who’s also a high-tech epidemiologist—which finally prompts Spacey to say, “I can’t believe you’re taking a deadly virus and turning it into a family matter.”

Basically, that’s what the movie does (and that’s what these movies do): no sooner does the film establish the presence of a virus in the Motaba valley than it introduces us to Hoffman’s and Russo’s divorce as they divvy up belongings and hash out competing professional obligations. Russo is moving to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, where she will be working in the Biohazard Level 4 lab. But because the Motaba virus breaks out almost as soon as she arrives at her new job with the CDC, she stays in close touch with Hoffman throughout the film. And when Hoffman eventually obtains the crucial antibodies from the host animal (a small African monkey brought overseas by smugglers), he does so just in time to save Russo’s life—and, in saving her life, he also saves his marriage.

Twister (1996) offers more of the same, only with tornadoes instead of viruses. Bill Paxton is a former tornado-hunter and high-tech meterologist who’s sold out and taken a cushy job as a TV weatherman, for which he is ridiculed by his former crew; Helen Hunt is his ex-wife, and the subplot turns on the question of whether she’ll sign the divorce papers with which he’s presented her. But the attempt to finalize the divorce paradoxically renews the romance (and professional partnership) between Paxton and Hunt. As he’s delivering the divorce decree and heading off to his new life with his fiancée (Jami Gertz, who plays a psychiatrist), he gets caught up in a headlong tornado hunt that eventually leaves him and his ex (rather improbably) clinging for life amidst a ferocious F5 tornado. Along the way, Gertz, disturbed both by the tornadoes and by Paxton’s “wild side,” decides to call off the marriage, declaring that it’s obvious that he belongs with Hunt, chasing tornadoes and living on the edge (with the wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman as the very embodiment of that edge!).

Then there’s Independence Day (also 1996), in which Jeff Goldblum is still wearing his wedding ring after years of separation from his wife (Margaret Colin). He’s a quirky computer jock; she’s the White House Director of Communications. She left him because his ambition didn’t keep up with hers. But when Earth is invaded by hostile aliens, Goldblum and Colin are thrown together once again. He helps to save the planet, and as he does, the script saves his marriage, too. Finally, Goldblum’s character does something to merit his wife’s affection! If only the aliens had invaded a few years earlier!

One exception proves the rule: In Volcano (1997), Tommy Lee Jones is already divorced, and his human drama consists of shepherding his daughter through a volcano and a custody dispute (that is, if you still observe the distinction between natural and cultural disasters). The movie is less concerned with the state of marriage than with race relations in Los Angeles, ending with the profound observation that if we were all covered with ashes we’d all look the same. But let’s not forget that Tommy Lee Jones finds a love interest among the ruins (Anne Hecht), a woman and geologist who’s as skilled at disaster management as he. Volcanos can bring people together, too.

Even Mars Attacks (1996) got into the act in its farcical way, with its Jim Brown - ~~Rosie~~ Pam Grier subplot. And I didn’t bother to see 1998’s pair of would-be blockbusters, Deep Impact and Armageddon. Did any estranged couples reunite in these? Were any new marriages forged as comets and asteroids plunged Earthward?

By contrast, in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Dennis Quaid has to reconcile with his son, Jake Gyllenhaal, whom he’s apparently neglected in the course of becoming a climatologist with a doctorate and all. Bad dad! Bad! The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, Little Boy Blue and the man in the moon! Janet insists that Sela Ward and Dennis Quaid are divorced, too, but I don’t think so.

If anyone can think of more examples, send ‘em in. But what we really need now are explanations. I can’t manage this one myself—I mean, it’s not like I do cultural criticism for a living or anything.

Posted by on 08/10 at 09:43 AM

I have no additions to this list. I’m still steamed that I’m paid dogshit as a grad student when I could be working at Port Elizabeth with Tom Cruise and driving home in my classic Mustang to watch HD movies on my plasma TV.

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:01 AM
Goshdarnit, that movie made me mad. I want one of those handy-dandy camcorders that still work after massive EMP blasts, just so they can show sweet shots of people being vaporized as they run away. One of those could keep every marriage together.

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:04 AM
You’ve of course neglected Bruce Willis and the Die Hard saga, which, I believe, ended rather nebulously concerning his marriage.

Willis also was the star of Armageddon. I believe he was already separated/divorced from his wife from the start. But, in the end, he took one for the planet (what a trooper! sorry if i spoiled it), so that probably sort of redeemed him to his wife.

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:18 AM
There’s probably a lesson to be learned from the Die Hard epoch: If the tragedy doesn’t rise to the level of global annihilation, then it likely won’t save your troubled marriage.

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:20 AM
Those of us who are not relationship-oriented quickly learn to divide movies into relationship movies (most of them) and the movies we want to go to. Family (married-couple) movies are a category of relationship movie, and apparently disaster movies mostly belong to this category.

Almost anything can be turned into a relationship movie. Awhile back I saw one about an FBI agent (F) who was inflitrating a Nazi militia. Of course she falls in love with the Nazi (M), which is unfortunate because she has to shoot him in the end.

I suppose that that was a feminist version of the Rat-Pack / James Bond movie in which sinister naked women are shot, sent to sleep with the fishes, etc.

Posted by Stalin on 08/10 at 11:44 AM
I think that these “the family is saved! whoo-hoo!!” movies may be an indication of the contemporary anxiety that only extraordinary sources can save the traditional family. I say “contemporary” because it seems to me that other works in the adventure genre from earlier times were less concerned with re-uniting mom and dad. (Very random) examples:

Robinson Crusoe (1719): Who needs family when you have locals to exploit?

Gulliver’s Travels (1726): He thinks he wants family but it turns out they are really annoying.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870): They were manly men jetting around the ocean in a cigar-shaped boat, often wearing rubber suits. Who needs Mom?

My point is that there was no escaping the family in these times except through extremes, but now we’ve come to the opposite. Good times!

Posted by Caro on 08/10 at 11:49 AM
Wait, boggling as a slash match up between Jim Brown and Rosie Grier would be, I think you meant PAM Grier in Mars Attacks!.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:03 PM
For a minute, I thought you were talking about the Rosie Grier-Ray Milland guy with two heads thing, given the experiments that occur on the Martian ship with Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker.

As for Spielberg, I think that the only way he can see a family reconciling is to put CHILDREN IN TROUBLE. Over and over and over again.

Posted by norbizness on 08/10 at 12:10 PM
Samantha—oops! Pam Grier it is, of course. Though I’d pay to see that slash matchup, myself.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:10 PM
Armageddon had Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck pining away for each other, with Liv’s daddy, Bruce Willis, opposing it all. Ben proves his worth by helping to save the Earth by blowing up a comet, though, so he’s reconciled at the end.

I’m glad my father-in-law-to-be wasn’t so demanding.

Posted by PZ Myers on 08/10 at 12:12 PM
Hah! Yes, indeed that would be a slash match worth wading through miles of fic. But Ms Pam Grier, far too hot for words. Must give the woman her propers.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:15 PM
There’s a disaster or an invasion or a lethal virus or a mysterious bunch of aliens living in our oceans, and the story ends when the family romance is completed in some way? Quoi? And pourquoi?

That was probably the only way the Spielberg could make his little Hitchcock-like move of slipping in Gene Barry and Ann Robinson (who were in the 1953 version).

But really, take away the special effects and the whole movie is pretty silly.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:16 PM
It is not a big-budget blockbuster-type movie, but the weirdest “family” plotline I can remember was Ron Howard’s The Paper, in which the big dilemma was how Michael Keaton would react to the impending baby about to be delivered by his wife, Marisa Tomei. You see, he’s work-obsessed—as is she, yet she has been on leave and misses being a reporter and isn’t relishing the next three or four years of round-the-clock mothering while hubby pursues his career etc. At the end of the movie she finally has the baby, but by the movie’s stated terms the logical best outcome would have been a miscarriage.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:24 PM
In “Signs,” Mel Gibson plays an Anglican priest estranged from God because of the ‘senseless’ death of his wife in an automobile accident.

The invasion of crop-circle making evil aliens bent on the destruction of humankind begins, and Gibson’s family is threatened.

Reconciliation is made possible when the unlikely conjunction of one child’s asthma, the other child’s half empty water glasses, a brother’s skill with a baseball bat, and Gibson’s wife’s bizarre last words “Tell. . .to swing away,” conjoin to save his family and the world.

Benevolent intelligent design, it seems, was at work afterall; Gibson returns to the church and Republican politics, we presume.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:24 PM
Have you ever seen Zulawski’s Possession? It’s a fascinating, disturbing movie, right up until you figure out the central metaphor, and then it just turns into an exercise in Jungian dream analysis. (It’s still a pretty entertaining exercise, I think.)

Anyhoo (and I think I’m wading in waaaaay over my head with all you literary critics about), one could argue that any disaster flick has a kind of Jungian function for the viewer—the film’s disaster (volcanoe, alien attack, what-have-you) symbolizes whatever personal disaster Joe Sixpack is currently going through as he sits in the theater. “[sniff--]That snake-headed alien reminds me of June when she’s on a tear.”

I think Hollywood is smart enough to recognize the symbolic nature of the destruction shown in disaster movies, but does not trust either the audience or the metaphor enough to think it will get the job done without a little help. And so, the tendency is to include some kind of “relationship” element in action movies in order to literalize the symbolic Siva/Brahma/Vishnu aspect of the disaster genre.

(NB: I’m not a Jungian myself, but I think that it’s a part of Hollywood’s heritage.)

Posted by HP on 08/10 at 12:26 PM
In Jurassic Park, the main couple is fighting over whether to have children and the husband learns he does want them after all, saving their marriage.

Posted by Amanda Marcotte on 08/10 at 12:30 PM
There are few older Hollywood plotlines than the comedy (tragedy? romance?) of remarriage. Under the old Production Code, if you wanted an unmarried couple to clearly have a sexual past, the only way to do so without running afoul of the Breen office was to make them formerly married. But this plotline took on a life of its own and outlived the Code that helped produce it.

Go and study His Girl Friday. The rest is commentary.

(There are clearly more things feeding into these disaster + remarriage movies than this old genre, but the comedy of remarriage should be a part of this discussion.)

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:31 PM
I just realized that I blithely leaped over about 10,000 words’ worth of transition between Possession and Hollywood disaster films. Long story short, Zuwalski plays a troubled relationship against a freaky sci-fi storyline, but there’s no reconciliation at the end. It’s more Orpheus than Oddyseus.

Posted by HP on 08/10 at 12:38 PM
Not a movie, but the most recent season of 24 had this kind of subplot. The woman running the agency office was forced to work with her ex-husband (because the higher-ups thought he was necesary for the particular disaster they were facing), and over the course of the season, they realize they still love each other. This was a particularly annoying instance of the theme: there they were, in the midst of a nuclear crisis and on the verge of an international conflict (that only this one tiny office could prevent) and they’re having hushed conversations about their feelings: “I never wanted it to be this way.” Awful.

Posted by Lee on 08/10 at 12:39 PM
How could you leave out Chuck Heston choosing to drown in the sewer with Liz Taylor in Earthquake? I believe he abjured surviving with his young attractive mistress to die with Liz, who was his ex-wife. Obviously, the character firmly believed he’d get to spend eternity with her as she was when she was young.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:43 PM
Well they weren’t married, but Ted and Elaine get back together after conquering their various demons, and a crashing passenger plane in “Airplane!” - oh, and the inflatable auto pilot flies off into the friendly skies with his girlfriend, a balloon.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:54 PM
In the most recent John Irving novel, there is a polemical subplot about the Hollywood need to trivialize disasters by pasting a human story on the front of it. I’m pretty sure I’m not spoiling anything by saying Irving’s protagonist comes across a rip-off of Titanic that tries to humanize the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbor.

Posted by on 08/10 at 12:59 PM
Forget about theory, it’s really an issue of marketing. Spectacular disaster plays well on the big screen, whether it’s flowing lava, lumbering T-rexes or menacing aliens, but you still need a story people can relate to. Everybody’s got a family, whether they want the one they’ve got or not. And while it’s fun to watch people die in unusual ways (so we can all think, “At least I won’t go like that"), it’s “human” to want to fall in love or get re-united with one’s difficult parent or child. And marketers know how to manipulate that human (and thereby generally shed it of anything human, of course, but that’s another post).

Other examples: Titanic turns the great historical disaster, which was already captured well in a relatively fine docudrama version from 1958 (A Night to Remember, from the Walter Lord book), into romantic slop with Kate and Leo ("I need you to kiss my pretty purpling lips, Rose!"). And then there’s The Poseidon Adventure, one of the grandaddies of the 1970s disaster films (the peculiar sub-genre that was itself an outward manifestation of all the 1960s struggles sublimated by the malaise-filled 1970s), where everyone has a love story, except for twelve-year-old Eric Shea, cause that would have been too kinky. I mean, Gene Hackman fights/loves the lord and gets to sacrifice himself like his role model Jesus, Pamela Sue Martin loves Hackman, but never gets to get her minister freak on, Ernest Borgnine gets to realize how much he loves Stella Stevens (and loses her), Jack Albertson gets to realize how much he loves every pound of Shelley Winters (and loses her), Red Buttons gets to love Carol Lynley, who gets to sing (actually, lip-synch) an Oscar-winning sappy song.

One person’s love is another person’s disaster. If you want to stretch the rules a bit, that great “disaster” film of the 1980s--at least beloved of folks from that generation--The Breakfast Club is sort of a rewrite of The Poseidon Adventure without the death or water. Unlikely cast of misfits is trapped together, bond, fall in love, finally escape. Cue the bad closing theme that will nonetheless become a hit.

Oh, and a quick correction to a post above--it’s Ava Gardner, not Liz Taylor, in Earthquake. And if you want to check out a great analysis of disaster films, be sure to read the chapter about Los Angeles Destroys Itself in Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear.

Posted by George on 08/10 at 01:19 PM
In the second “Jurassic Park,” the main family unit threatened is the adult Ty Rex and its youngster. Capitalists wants to exploit these dinosaurs, but the father/son relationship is saved when the father shows the baby how easy it is to eat the bad guy.

Posted by on 08/10 at 01:22 PM
Let’s not forget the Michael Keaton vehicle “Jack Frost” (not to be confused with the horror film of the same name) in which a car crash and snowman reincarnation is used as a plot device to bring father and son together. Now this is not really a “disaster”, I know.

One thing about these movies I don’t understand is that most of the time, the “bad” dads don’t really seem all that bad at all. In “Jack Frost”, for instance, the eponymous dad does nothing worse than spend a couple of weekends a month playing rock-n-roll Christmas tunes at music festivals throughout the Mountain Time Zone. Now, I think contributing to the horror that is rock n’ roll Christmas music does make one a bad person, but hardly a bad father.

Would it be that difficult to make a film where a physically or sexually-abusive father comes back as a snowman and wants to hang out with his kids? That could work, right? That’d win some awards.

Oh in case you’re wondering: yes, Jack Frost does melt at the end of the film. So the kid gets to see his dad die twice, which I guess is pretty heartwarming.

Posted by on 08/10 at 01:30 PM
I dunno, Michael. Seems to me you’re taking a movie like Twister a bit too seriously. Myself, I’d be afraid that attempting to read more than Summer Action Box Office into Twister would just make me look a fool. Who could seriously argue that the film has any deeper meaning?

Posted by Chris Clarke on 08/10 at 01:52 PM
Hollywood likes to make movies with special effects, which means monsters and explosions. But savvy movie goers need a ‘human angle’ with their special effects. For hollywood producers, who are lacking imagination, this means a love story. Moreover, violence in films must, these days, be tempered with good conservative morality. And even moreover, these movies (and the narrative trope of hooking up in a world shattering context)are basically forms of propaganda: You think you’ve got it bad with your petty squabbles, dreary jobs, difficult teens, and boredom? Hah! Those are puny insignificant miseries compared to those you would suffer if gigantic crab-like aliens came down from like, Mars, and tried to eat your brains! In that context you would realise that what is important is that antiquated property-relationship you entered into with that dreary woman, er, I mean Family and Decency, and Love, and yawn…

Posted by on 08/10 at 02:36 PM
Those Japanese horror films also have the same breakdown-of-family theme. The Ring, Dark Water, and Kourei had it. Kourei is similar to Seance On A Wet Afternoon. I haven’t seen the American version of Dark Water, but I know that the same family-breakdown thing happens in it.

The Relic had a family breakdown thing, too. The lead cop is upset with his ex because he lost custody of their dog.

Posted by The Countess on 08/10 at 02:48 PM
My Husband Was A Weatherman
Transcribed by Chris Vagnini
Lead Vocals by Janie-Bob
----------------------------------
My husband was a weatherman
He was right all the time
He knew when there’d be snow in Toledo
And freezing rain in Niagara Falls

My husband was a weatherman
A seventh sun of a seventh son
On a first name basis with that old groundhog
Yes he was he was the one

Oh he had a reputation
As the master of prognostication
But it wasn’t just the weather that he’d know
Oh no

He’d let me know when we got up
Just how our day would go
This morning we’ll have fun
And then in the afternoon
We’ll have a little argument
But hey don’t worry,
You’ll win

I know when he’d tell me what would be
It was to save me from frustration
Darling lets eat out
Tonight you’ll overcook that trout
I’ve phoned ahead for reservations”

My life no longer seemed my own
He knew more about me than me
He’d say Honey not tonight
You won’t climax, oh no
And we’d only have a fight

I could not take it any more
I packed my bags and at the door
I said I didn’t want to know
How every minute of my life would go
I’ll miss you but I’m going away
Goodbye my love

He said hey
that’s okay
you’ll be back

Posted by on 08/10 at 02:57 PM
The answer to your “why” question lies in marketing, demographics, and who in the household makes decisions about what movies (at the movie theater) are seen.

And increasingly the plotline decisions are made based on the desires of overseas target audiences.

But, in the case of Spielberg specifically, you got a guy who’s used the movie business to work out all of his own “daddy” issues.

Posted by Roxanne on 08/10 at 03:42 PM
What Tim (and others) said. Besides, after the calamity, even though the main characters survive, there’s a lot of visible devastation and misery, so the reconciliation theme is the silver lining. (Movies don’t *have* happy endings, they’re *about* happy endings, as Tim Robbins’ character in “The Player” observes.) More-or-less impersonal suffering is balanced, in this cockeyed formula, by individual redemption.

Posted by on 08/10 at 03:45 PM
I see a future in family counselling through synthesized disaster. A large plasma HDTV replaces one window of the counsellors office. For the first half of the session, it just portrays the scene outside as seen from that window. Then, at the 22 minute mark, after determining what disaster would best bring the family together, Godzilla, Martians, hordes of legally married gays or the apocalypse hit the screen!

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:09 PM
My favorite 1950s domestic-paranoia-SF-horror flick is, of course, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958).

Posted by Sherman on 08/10 at 04:37 PM
I wonder, too, if the “couples” disaster pics have replaced the old formula “buddy” pics as a convenient way to insert female characters into plots.

If they ever remake Soylent Green --and God knows it’s just around the corner-- whoever plays The Hess character is going to have to plant a big ‘ol wet one on whoever plays the Edward G character.

Posted by Roxanne on 08/10 at 04:38 PM
Seems like I kinda sorta remember reading this foreign (furrin!) book, luckily it was translated on the facing pages. Anyway, this guy who’s too full of himself and too smart for his own good has all these adventures while trying to re-unite with his wife; he becomes a little wiser in the process...i think it was called the Odyssey but they may change like, the title? because Bruckheimer’s focus groups found people might be confused by the “odd” in the title. So maybe they’ll change it to “Quest for Home” or something like that…

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:38 PM
Could it be because Death(a close encounter with it) is the ultimate - and I do mean ultimate - aphrodisiac? Ya know, that Eros x Thanatos sort of thing?

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:46 PM
There are many more examples of the “This time it’s personal… and that’s the only thing that makes it interesting” turn in American movies since the 1970s. Especially if you include “lover” and “best buddy”. Fight Club end with a mellow groove as the hero and his girlfriend observe the deaths of thousands of less important people. And on, and on.... The directors and screenwriters who feel soppy about having just had kids are more likely to make the motivator kids. The directors and screenwriters who are pissed off at their fathers (or who have been crappy fathers) are more likely to make the motivator paternal reconciliation. But the motivator is never (as it once could be) democracy, or the public weal, or correcting an injustice, or doing your goddamn job, or anything that’s not purely selfish.

Why has this happened? Well, why support vouchers instead of improved public schools? Why repeal the estate tax? You get my drift. Any concern outside the family circle is considered suspect.

Posted by Ray Davis on 08/10 at 04:47 PM
I don’t remember any of the plot details, because it’s a pretty awful movie, but I’m sure that Deep Impact has some good examples of this sort of thing: End of the world? Whatevs, I’m still unmarried!

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:51 PM
Oops, didn’t realize Michael had mentioned that one.

Posted by on 08/10 at 04:54 PM
This is film school 101, isn’t it? To pitch the film, to get it made, you have to convince the studio that it has a “strong” story. Thus it has a “plot” (aka “story” ) and optionally a “sub-plot” (aka “theme"). (Scare quotes because the jargon here has a limited meaning.)

“Plot” is defined as “conflict”.

“Conflict” is defined as being between characters. You can’t, therefore, have a conflict between Bruce Willis and an asteroid. So you need something else.

The studio execs have no idea what makes a good film or a bad one. But they have this touchstone of whether the story treatment is rigorous, and they will use it to weed out proposals in the early stages. So everyone makes sure their treatments show evidence of a particular structure, even to the extent of self-parody.

This book
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0573699216/qid=1123710553/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-4228573-1514545?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
gives the grisly details, even to the extent of timing in minutes where the plot changes should happen. Enjoy.

Posted by on 08/10 at 05:52 PM
Oops, sorry about the long link which probably won’t work. The book is “Making a Good Script Great” by Linda Seger.

Posted by on 08/10 at 05:55 PM
I think that if people really considered the kinds of disasters that we now know are possible, they would collapse in neurotic exhaustion. But disaster pictures have good visuals. So the repair of the family circle is a mode of reassurance, telling people that everything is all right at the most basic level, their parents are there for them.

Posted by on 08/10 at 08:22 PM
I think the folks who’ve mentioned marketing are dead on.

However, we need to ask why a marketing formula built upon family reconciliation in the midst of overwhelming disaster (or at least, some larger than life event) is such an effective formula.

That is, what psychological buttons are being effectively pushed by the marketing machinery?

I think it just may be the result of competing needs: the need for spectacle and the need for a feeling of safety—or perhaps synthetic hope.

In his version of “War of the Worlds” (which, in my view was simultaneously more polished yet less hardcore—when push came to narrative shove—than the 1953 George Pal film...not to mention H.G. Wells’ novel) Speilberg presents us with the complete destruction of human civilization but bizarrely wraps it all up in a ‘group hug’ bow at the end.

I think this is the result of wanting to give us the spectacle—to put asses in seats—but also ,in opposition to that, make it all better by presenting the reunited family.

Of course, this family must now face a blasted landscape and a wrecked global infrastructure but never mind all that for now, they’re huggung.

This makes these kinds of films visual rollercoasters—all the indications of danger sweetened by the almost certain knowledge nothing bad will happen to you (with “you” in this case being represented by the film’s central characters that survive all sorts of super mayhem).

Posted by Dwayne Monroe on 08/10 at 08:57 PM
I think I should get credit for
(a) being the first person to cite the 1998 Lost in Space, which is really the type specimen, being so family-oriented that it actually stands out even among the competition, and
(b) actual quotes from the script -

WHAT FATHER DOES
VO
Imagine an end to world hunger. What if ample food and clean drinking water were the birthright of all our planet’s children?
This man, professor John Robinson, inventor of the faster than light hyperdrive can make that timeless dream a reality.
From a distant world, the Robinsons will bring back a miracle…
Dimondium can turn even worthless sand to fertile soil. Earth WILL be a garden. A future without hunger. A future without suffering. Heaven on Earth.

WHAT FATHER SHOULD HAVE DONE
PRINCIPAL
The boy is starved for attention. Was there no way his father could have attended the science fair?

THE MISSION IS IMPORTANT
GENERAL
What I am about to tell you is classified. Every schoolchild has been lied to. The recycling technologies have failed. In less than two decades Earth will be unable to support human life.

HOW IMPORTANT?
JOHN
I’m sorry about dinner. I had to work late. The new pilot-.
MAUREEN
What you had to do was prioritize your family over the mission.
JOHN
Maureen. This mission is about our family. So we can stay together

WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN?
JOHN
What was I thinking, bringing us all out here into space?
MAUREEN
The world needed saving. You were the right man for the job.
JOHN
But solving the world’s problems doesn’t leave much time for the people you love, does it?

COULD YOU REPEAT THAT?
JOHN
We can’t get off this planet much less back on course. I don’t have time to…

MAUREEN
John, just listen to him. it doesn’t matter what he’s saying. Just listen. Sometimes, at least in the eyes of their fathers, little boys have to come first.

LUCKILY, BY THE END OF THE SHOW JOHN HAS LEANED HIS LESSON AND SAVES HIS SON AT THE COST OF THE MISSION (AND, ODDLY, THE DEATH OF THE REST OF THE FAMILY)

OLDER WILL
You could have taken the core and left before it was too late. You saved me instead.

JOHN
There wasn’t any choice. I couldn’t let you fall. You’re my boy.

AND OF COURSE IT ALL ENDS HAPPILY EXCEPT FOR THE SPACESHIP NOT GETTING HOME FOR 20 YEARS OR SO.

For Spielberg, though, the difficult bit wasn’t WOW, it was Hook, where he managed to make Barrie’s book about how your parents hate you and want to kill you (the Mr. Darling/Hook doubling) into a paean to good fatherhood.

Going off at a bit of a tangent, why hasn’t anybody made the connection yet between Land of the Dead and the Green Zone?

Posted by Chris B on 08/10 at 09:07 PM
The relation of narrative closure to family romance has a long, long history in American film culture. From Nineteenth century melodrama and its influence on early cinema through the works of Griffith from the amazing Biograph shorts to his features, the relation of narrative closure to family romance is key the creation or re-creation of the Hetrosexual couple is significant, american civil war or french revolution may be the crisis but ends with a focus on family. This continues through the comedies of remarriage as named by Stanley Cavell, where the comedies of chaos work to re-create the couple. Inways closer tot he contempary horror films, the work of Hitchcock is dominant and Raymond Bellour likened American cinema to a couple creating machine.
I see this in earlier horror films sucha sthe original Cat People in which the bad mysterious alluring and frigid cat wife is destroyed and replaced by the good girl office mate. In contemporary films, obviously market pressure and with Spielberg auterist dynamics are significant. But the device seems bared, it seems to be the only way to serve with disaster and it is mechanised not believable. We may want the other kind of closure to War of the Worlds, the attack of the sequel. Of course, it is a remake and like the novel, the Welles radio show and the Pal film, it does not contain a great male hero. In the novel, it also seems random that the narrator and his wife are reunited. But it is Wells’ point that man does not defeat the steel and weapons of the Martians, it is only with germs.
I think we can think of a whole bunch of contemporary films and filmmakers who fro the most part do not use this for simple closure, such as Jarmusch, Malick, Altman, Tim Burton.
As I remember the end of Earthquake, Chuck heston leaves his mistress, Genvieve Bujold to die with his wife, Ava Gardner. Holywood atar dies with Hollywood star leaving French Canadian young not quite star to live.

Posted by on 08/10 at 09:23 PM
We are a risk society, so only large-scale accidents can supply an existential backdrop. We are a privatized society, so only intimate relationships can signify the human.

The disaster-remarriage plot reveals the hole where there used to be the social.

Posted by on 08/10 at 10:43 PM
Well, in Armageddon, Bruce Willis mends his relationship with his daughter by approving of her boyfriend and then killing himself. Does that count?

Posted by julia on 08/10 at 11:08 PM
i’ve worked on some of the movies referenced here, and i’ve certainly sat in on many of the studio meetings. it’s become an akiva goldsman/robert mckee thing these days. two things that make characters filled with “character”:

1. what is the thing you are afraid of, mr. or ms. character? why, in act one, could you be so kind as to tell us? it might almost kill you, this fear, around mid act two climax, but in act three would be willing to overcome it that you might kill the bad guy? there are a googleplex of examples i could cite, but if for some reason you find yourself in A Clockwork Orange you-have-to-watch-it machine (it could happen), Deep Blue Sea has Saffron Burrows afraid of swimming until the end where she swims her way all up that shark’s ass and blows his shit up.
2. if there are two experts on soil drilling/nuclear weaponry/asteroid destruction/marine crypto-zoology/viral load/monkey fucking, and they are both needed to save the world/stop the borg/eat their young, they are ex-lovers/partners/etc. one of them has a fear of something. spiders, maybe. Sphere, one of the worst movies ever ever ever ever ever ever made and one which i managed to dodge, albeit barely (and the only movie which wishes itself away in its last scene, i swear to sagan it does!), has sharon stone and dustin hoffman in as egregious an example of this as has been committed to celluloid.

a propos of nothing, i was once in a meeting with a famous writer and the head of a studio where said studio head averred: “i want the characters, every ten pages, to say what they are going to do in the next ten pages, then have them do whatever it is they said.”

because audiences, you know, are really fucking stupid, i mean barely able to breath unaided.

and don’t forget, we break box office records every year!!!!!

Posted by on 08/10 at 11:15 PM
There are a couple of family stories in “Deep Impact.” There’s Tea Leoni and her father Maxmillian Schell who are estranged for reasons that have left my mind but who join together for the Final Monster Wave on their Maine island or beach or something.

Then there’s the New Family and Hope for the Future represented by two 16-year-olds who Need to Be With Each Other played by Elijah Wood and some blonde.

I live with a special effects movie guy and he once brought home the smarter, interesting script treatment of “Deep Impact” by Michael Tolkin who wrote “The Player,” “The Rapture” and a few interesting novels. There were actually scenes set all over the world, which were all cut. We only do America, which I have heard is also true of the latest Spielberg monstrosity. There was serious alcoholic darkness in the “Deep Impact” script about the imminent end of the world. It was interesting. But the producers and director turned it into a Film About Family Values.

Fundamentally, it’s a Jewish thing, and no, I don’t get it.

Posted by sfmike on 08/11 at 02:35 AM
The people who made the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy decided that a (successful) love story with Arthur and Trillian would be nice to insert. I only read the first in the series, but I don’t remember them making out in it.

Also, I believe the new movie Stealth is about a love triangle between a woman, Jamie Fox and a stealth bomber - I could be wrong though.

Posted by Jeff on 08/11 at 11:43 AM
I’ll give a counter-example: Apollo 13. Clearly a disaster flick, and yes, plenty of shots of worried family members, but there’s nothing to indicate that the families were dysfunctional or required reunification in anything beyond bringing the astronauts safely home.

This was actually one of the things I liked a great deal about Apollo 13 - it kept the focus on the situation facing the astronauts and the engineers at Mission Control. The filmmakers resisted the temptation to throw in spurious “human elements” simply for marketing. Consider how much worse would the film have been if, for instance, Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) responded to his friends’ plight by reuniting with his family and “learning to love again.”

Posted by on 08/11 at 12:41 PM
Call these movies an extension of the Butler/Nussbaum post above. The psychosis of the breakdown of identity categories, literalized in the form of the alien blobs that come down to earth, or up from the ocean(ic), is resisted through the restoration of heteronormativity. Nussbaumian liberal proceduralism defeats Butlerian antinomianism, the identity-anxieties which Nussbaum seeks to repress vanquished at last! The blobby monster still exists. But it doesn’t matter, because thanks to our normative identities we learn to repress it.

And I only went to grad school for two years…

Posted by on 08/11 at 03:08 PM
Isn’t that funny. You head out to the drive-in for some mindless entertainment and wham! One of them movies gets its hooks in ya!

Happened to me and the missus the other week too- I was more scared and excited by the dang thing (WotW) than it had any right to make me. And even though I knew what gets ‘em in the end, it was great to see those Tri-pods come crashing down, and even though we knew it had to happen, it was great to see the family made whole again.

What, you want to know why it works? How odd.

Posted by Liv Pooleside on 08/11 at 04:30 PM
More on Deep Impact—Tea Leoni’s career-girl character feels bad for her mom, who got dumped by her dad in favor of a younger woman. Mom sees that the comet is coming, and she’s depressed anyway, so she kills herself. Career girl sees a coworker with a kid who’s willing to die rather than be separated from her kid. Career girl sees importance of family, tracks down dad, and makes nice with him as the monster wave comes to kill them. Happy memories of childhood and death on the beach; dad wasn’t so terrible after all. Does it make any sense?

Posted by Orange on 08/12 at 08:47 PM
Orange and sfmike - good points about “Deep Impact”, and oh, I’d love to have seen the “smarter, more interesting” DI treatment.

But honestly, I don’t think it is as bad a movie as everybody else does. The main character, Tea Leoni, gets through the entire movie without once being subjected to a sub-plot of a melodramatic love interest, of true happiness cruelly taken away, gone with the ~~wind~~ wave.

Yeah, she reconciles with her father, but hey, his annoying second marriage to a much younger woman got messed up by the impending disaster, and she left him to return to her parents. Dad reports this sadly, but not too self-dramatically. Plus, I can’t take a hard line with Tea for giving dad a break, what with the humongous wave bearing down on them.

And the two teenagers...yeah, cheesy last scene. But the infant they’re holding isn’t theirs. In the big traffic jam trying to evacuate the coast, the girl’s mom (girl is Leelee Sobieski), who’d recently given birth to “an oops! you’re a surprise!” baby, desperately hands the infant off to the kids, and the trio barely escapes on the boy’s moped. That takes away the “Blue Lagoon” odor for me.

Anyway, I think it’s better than “The Day After Tomorrow”, and way better than “Armageddon”.

Posted by on 08/13 at 11:15 AM
Ray Davis - I think you missed a key line in Fight Club, in which one of the hangers-on claims that the buildings that are to be demolished have all been evacuated, and there won’t be anyone in them when they explode.

I’ve always felt that was a copout - after the violence and bloodshed and general nihilism, suddenly we’re worried about a few people getting hurt when we blow up most of downtown. But there you go.

Posted by on 08/14 at 12:23 AM
According to my husband, with whom I pretty much agree, when you strip these things down to the bare essential story, it’s all about (as John noted) redemption of the main character (almost always male in a modern action movie, of which modern disaster movies are a subset). In order for the character to be redeemed, he has to go through a struggle - both epic (the disaster) and personal (the relationship with ex-wife and/or kids). The personal struggle is overcome during the course of the movie, enabling him to complete the epic struggle because he now has “something to live for.” Being estranged allows the male hero to be heroic on an individual basis, without the female supporting character being “in the way,” but still allows for tension to exist without the woman even having to appear unless the plot requires her for the setup and reconciliation process. (He adds that it’s also probably a case of Hollywood writers “writing what they know” in terms of failed relationships, but that’s pure speculation of course...)

Posted by Elayne Riggs on 08/14 at 06:43 AM
I think the go-to academic theorist here is Stanley Cavell. Someone mentioned remarriage as a Holywood theme; Cavell, of course, wrote a book called Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. I must admit I haven’t seen many of the films that you mention, but those I have seen stike me (and actually have struck me before) as almost the opposite of Cavell’s comedies—call them the Action Flicks of Remarriage. They are characterized by a lack of dialogue; rather than being about a woman finding her voice, they are about a woman submitting to the patriarchal authority of her (formerly-estranged) husband, who has proved himself worthy of it through his triumph over disaster/bad guys/whatever (in at least two that I recall—The Abyss and Die Hard—the woman signifies her acceptance by accepting her husband’s last name, explicitly rejected earlier in the film); and so on. For a while now I’ve contemplated a parody of Cavell about three or four of these films—but the audience seemed way too limited.

As for the ‘why’, I agree with what many people have suggested above—with the emphasis that I think that it not only gives the action hero a personal as well as external struggle, but a restoration of order in multiple realms—which, in the family realm, is an explicitly old-fashioned, patriarchal, father-knows-best (or at any rate father-blows-up-things-best) type of order, presented as the ideal, just as the death of the bad guys is the ideal in their realm.

Posted by Stephen Frug on 08/15 at 01:12 AM
Deep Impact was on TV recently and I remember laughing at Tea Leoni’s line, “Dad, you have to get back with mom. Right now. Sorry [name of fiance], it has nothing to do with you.”

Of course, at this time she was the only one in the room to know of the Impending Doom(TM).

So what’s it all about? My feeling is that it’s wishful thinking about our nature as Human Beings. We’re not really interested in what happens when the world ends. We’re interested in redemption. We’re interested in knowing that when the going gets tough, we *will* pull together and get our priorities in order.

Sadly, as the end of Terri Schiavo’s life and the associated bickering among her family members showed, this may be too optimistic an assessment.

Posted by The Witch on 08/15 at 12:08 PM
Incidentally, I thought the most interesting and touching aspect of Deep Impact was the systematic dismantling of hope. Every time there would seem to be a redeeming/hopeful moment, it was snatched away. Morgan Freeman did the best job in running with this theme. Every time he appeared he seemed a little more weary, a little sadder, a little less like a president and more like everybody else…

Posted by The Witch on 08/15 at 12:14 PM
Michael,

I found this post so far after the fact that no living human may ever read this comment. If so, I leave it for the archaelogists of the year 3404.

Whatever. This topic cannot be concluded without referring to the seminal 1950’s sci-fi film “Invaders From Mars,” which used to scare the crap out of me every year when I’d go over to my best friend Louie’s next door to watch it. I was sure the ground was going to swallow me up when I walked back home (which, in our blue-collar neighborhood, was all of about 25 feet away.)

Every kindly adult in the film - eventually including the boy hero’s own parents - is turned into soulless and hateful Martian slaves. They are only freed when the intrepid young lad helps the Army destroy the underground Martian base. Then his parents are themselves again, and everyone loves each other. Just like before - right? He wakes up, realizes it was all a dream, and then ... another light from the sky ...

So like my own childhood and that of my friends. It’s a movie from a deep place within the unformed soul of the young, the place from which so many good memes are born.

Posted by RJ Eskow on 08/17 at 03:15 AM
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Mr and Mrs Smith. Yeah, yeah the premise is nonsense, but after that it’s WONDERFUL. How can you not like a wise-cracking romantic comedy with gunfights, car chases, and blowing shit up? And it has that whole marital reconciliation bit going on too. I’m not going to speculate why (suddenly though I’m thinking of John Dunne’s microcosmic/macrocomic images) because, hey, my Masters is in science. (Okay, Library and Information Science but still.) All I know is my well-traveled rocket scientist and I can no longer say, after an absence, “I missed you,” without cracking up.

Posted by on 08/21 at 01:18 PM
ALL the Jurassic Park films fit the model of bad-relationship-fixed-by-disaster, particularly in JPIII, when Tea Leoni and Bill Macy, divorced parents, band together to find their son.

Posted by on 08/22 at 12:00 AM
Slavoj Zizek has a wonderful little essay, entitled The Thing From Inner Space, where he reads this exact phenomenon in films like Titanic, Deep Impact, and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Very much worth looking at if you want a more systematic analysis of the ideological role of disasters and monsters in Hollywood.

Posted by on 08/25 at 04:06 PM
Thanks plenty to get finding the time in buy to master us upon how one can remedy that matter. I’m sure We should’ve had the method to deal with the subject upon my own ring ring, but someone’s help may be very beneficial around seeing precisely what exactly I was performing as a way to bring concerning the matter.

Posted by nd casino bonus codes on 09/10 at 03:06 AM

Next entry: New miserable experience

Previous entry: Theory Tuesday IV

<< Back to main

Invasion of the Marriage Disaster Flicks

These Comments Are Aware of All Your Sublime and Funky Internet Traditions

Monthly Archives

Most recent entries

Syndicate