A Paradise Built in Hell (20 page)

The setting is Washington, D.C., 1998: a young journalist starts to investigate why a member of the president’s cabinet has resigned, suspects a scandal when she hears he was always talking about a presumed mistress named “Ellie,” does some online research and realizes that it’s actually an ELE—“extinction-level event.” A six-mile-wide meteor is headed for the earth and may wipe out our species and a lot of others, but before she can tell anyone about it, she is kidnapped by government agents for a clandestine meeting with the president. The administration, of course, does not want to tell the public, lest there be panic in the streets, but she forces their hand and they strike a deal with her: if she holds the story until they’re ready, she’ll get the first question at the press conference. So she bargains away the right of the people to know the fate of the earth for a career boost on a probably doomed planet, and everything endorses her choice. After all, panic and mob behavior do follow, and we’re shown it on the TV news shown on the small screens inside the big screen of the blockbuster movie
Deep Impact:
the mob justice of a crowd killing a back-hoe operator extorting huge sums to dig shelters, looters setting fires to abandoned stores, Moscow crowds rioting over food and fuel shortages.

We all know about the virtually interchangeable phenomena of panic and mobs. We’ve seen them milling and shoving and stampeding and trampling and generally taking leave of their senses, again and again, at least in movies. Most people believe that Le Bon’s fears about crowds will come true during disasters, though he believed that crowds infected themselves with regressive appetite and we mostly tend to believe that mobs accrete into a seething mass through lots of individual irrational fear, selfish reaction, and hastily unwise action—the behavior we call panic. The basic notion is of people so overwhelmed by fear and selfish desire to survive that their judgment, their social bonds, even their humanity are overwhelmed, and that this can happen almost instantly when things go wrong—the old notion of reversion to brute nature, though out of fear rather than inherent malice. It presumes that we are all easily activated antisocial bombs waiting to go off. Belief in panic provides a premise for treating the public as a problem to be shut out or controlled by the military. Hollywood eagerly feeds those beliefs. Sociologists, however, do not.

Charles Fritz’s colleague Enrico Quarantelli recalls that in 1954, “I wrote a master’s thesis on panic, expecting to find a lot of it, and after a while I said, ‘My God, I’m trying to write a thesis about panic and I can’t find any instances of it.’ That’s an overstatement, but . . . it took a little while to learn that, wait a second, the situation is much better here” than anyone had thought. He defines panic as extreme and unreasonable fear and flight behavior. Flight behavior, however, is not necessarily panic: he points out that what can look chaotic from outside—people moving as fast as they can in all directions—is often the most reasonable response to an urgent threat. The thesis was another landmark in the study of human reaction to disaster, another piece of the news that chipped away at the old myths. Quarantelli, even more than Fritz, went on to become a dynastic head of disaster studies, working with Fritz early on, then becoming a professor and founding the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University that is now at the University of Delaware.

Fifty-three years after the thesis without panic, Quarantelli added, “In fact, most of the disaster funding, even to this day, is based on the notion of how can we prevent people from panicking or engaging in antisocial behavior. So in the early days of disaster studies that was the reason for funding. They just assumed the real problem was the citizens and the people at large, even though the studies from the beginning argued against that.” He added, “If by panic one means people being very frightened, that probably is a very correct perception of what occurs at the time of a disaster. Most people in contact with reality get frightened and in fact should get frightened unless they’ve lost their contact with reality at the time of the disaster. On the other hand it doesn’t mean that if people are frightened, they cannot act appropriately.” Studies of people in urgently terrifying situations have demonstrated—as Quarantelli puts it in the dry language of his field—that “instead of ruthless competition, the social order did not break down,” and that there was “cooperative rather than selfish behavior predominating.” Quarantelli states that more than seven hundred studies of disasters demonstrate that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon. Subsequent researchers have combed the evidence as meticulously—in one case examining the behavior of two thousand people in more than nine hundred fires—and concluded that the behavior was mostly rational, sometimes altruistic, and never about the beast within when the thin veneer of civilization is peeled off. Except in the movies and the popular imagination. And in the media. And in some remaining disaster plans. A different worldview could emerge from this.

Heroes are necessary because the rest of us are awful—selfish or malicious or boiling over with emotion and utterly unclear on what to do or too frightened to do it. Our awfulness requires and produces their won derfulness, a dull, drab background against which they shine. Or so it goes in the movies. They themselves need heroes. It’s almost a technical challenge: you need close-ups, you need story lines, individuals to follow, a star to attract audiences—even the ensemble disaster movies have multiple heroes who assume leadership, like
Towering Inferno
’s Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. The camera doesn’t have the same fun with a large group of people behaving well, and Hollywood feeds on stars. And conventions: they are unwilling, generally, to make the Asian grandmother a leading hero of the disaster, though she might get a cameo. These films are deeply reassuring—for those who want to believe that no matter what happens to their city or world the old status quo of gender and power and individual initiative remains intact.

You’d think with the building on fire or the earth shaking or the meteor arriving, you’d have dramatic tension already, but the real conflicts in these movies are often between good and bad protagonists, along with the altruism in the foreground and the selfish and scared backdrop of humanity at large. Generally a romance builds and a personal conflict gets resolved: people in disaster movies are not distracted from personal business by imminent destruction, and so they busy themselves with the resolution and evolution of fraught particular relationships rather than embarking on the blanket empathy and solidarity real disaster often produces. Conventional disaster movies are fascinating and depressing for many reasons, not least being the tidy division of the world into us and them. The them that is humanity in the aggregate, the extras, panics, mobs, swarms, and fails. Also failures are the other nonprotagonist authority figures—the head geologist in
Dante’s Peak
, the chief seismolo gist in
Earthquake
, the developer who used shoddy materials in
Towering Inferno
, the upper-echelon decision makers during the ebolalike epidemic in 1995’s deadly-new-virus-drama
Outbreak
—who are complacent in their power and wrong in their outlook, and not very attractive to boot, the them who will be proven wrong, over whom the hero representing up-and-coming authority and us must triumph. And does. The movies are not antiauthoritarian so much as anti authorities other than us; it’s a matter of getting the right guy in charge, the one we can identify with.

The problem with bureaucrats during crises may be the only thing disaster movies get right. Quarantelli remarks that the organizations rather than individuals are most prone to create problems during a natural disaster. “Bureaucracy depends on routine and schedules and paperwork and etc. If done right—in fact, the modern world could not exist without bureaucracy. The only trouble with that is that the bureaucratic framework is one of the worst things to have at the time of disasters when you need innovations and doing things differently. In fact the better they operate during nondisaster times, the less likely they are to operate well. They can’t maneuver, they can’t integrate, etc. On the other hand, human beings, and this cuts across all societies . . . rise to the occasion. Again, not everyone does, just like not all organizations react badly. But in terms of human beings they rise to the occasion whereas organizations, in a sense, fall down.”

In
Deep Impact
, the conflict is only between the great wisdom and technological savvy of the federal government and the pretty young reporter who must be brought in line with its agenda. When Quarantelli wrote about disaster movies, he cited an unpublished colleague who wrote that they “reinforce our cultural belief in individualism and individualistic solitions to social problems.” He adds, “Disaster movies . . . usually portray the problem as resulting from the human beings involved rather than the social systems in which they operate.”

All these movies reaffirm traditional gender roles too, or rather the helplessness of women is part of what sets the male hero in motion. In the relatively liberal
Dante’s Peak
, Linda Hamilton as the small-town mayor and Pierce Brosnan’s love interest doesn’t scream, doesn’t do anything dumb, but doesn’t do anything else either. Though only a few years earlier she was contending with the Terminator and flexing some quite remarkable muscles, in this one she doesn’t leap, or lead, or hot-wire the truck, or paddle the boat, or lead the rescue of her own children. She’s just along for the ride. And she’s the best-case example; the others scream, panic, are frozen with fear while some rugged lug rescues and quite often literally carries them. Ava Gardner as Heston’s unhappy wife in
Earthquake
literally drags her husband down the drain. A movie like
The China Syndrome
, in which a nuclear power plant begins to melt down and the media expose the arrogant negligence and information suppression of the plant management and government, stands all this on its head, particularly since Jane Fonda plays a lead reporter and an active heroine.

The China Syndrome
is a maverick among disaster movies in other respects, championing the public and the media against insiders, elites, and experts. Its worldview was buttressed by the near-meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant thirteen days after the movie was released. Usually in the movies, big technological fixes tend to save the day. In the 1990s films
Armageddon
and
Deep Impact
, as in the contemporaneous science-fiction romp
Independence Day
, nuclear weapons deflect the evil that comes from outer space, be it meteors or aliens. In
The China Syndrome
, nuclear technology is the problem, not the solution.

Disaster movies represent many kinds of fantasy. They entertain our worst fears and then allay them—if our worst fear is of chaos, and our confidence comes from traditional sources of authority triumphing, for triumph they do, again and again, all those rugged men and powerful leaders and advanced technologies. Even on the brink of annihilation, this world is more comforting and reliable than our world. There’s a subplot in
Earthquake
whereby Jody, the National Guardsman, abuses his power during the crisis to shoot down his jeering roommates, nearly rape a young woman, and generally abuse his new power. But he’s portrayed as a long-haired martial-arts-obsessed nut—he’s freaky them, not trustworthy us, even in a military uniform. The bleary, hard-drinking old-school cop played by George Kennedy blows him away in one of those classic Hollywood moments when killing is deeply satisfying, entirely justified, and neatly done. Of course the National Guard was out to prevent looting and civil disturbances—the rarity of looting in almost all disasters is another thing the methodical research of the disaster scholars demonstrates but the movies didn’t absorb.

In fact Hollywood movies are to actual disasters as described by sociologists something of a looking-glass world. Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney, who directs the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, gave a riveting talk at the University of California, Berkeley, for the centennial of the 1906 earthquake in which she stated, “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” She reversed the image of a panicking public and a heroic minority to describe what she called “elite panic.” She itemized its ingredients as “fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.” In other words, it is the few who behave badly and the many who rise to the occasion. And those few behave badly not because of facts but of beliefs: they believe the rest of us are about to panic or become a mob or upend property relations, and in their fear they act out to prevent something that may have only existed in their imaginations. Thus the myth of malevolent disaster behavior becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Elsewhere she adds, “The media emphasis on lawlessness and the need for strict social control both reflects and reinforces political discourse calling for a greater role for the military in disaster management. Such policy positions are indicators of the strength of militarism as an ideology in the United States.”

From their decades of meticulous research, most of the disaster sociologists have delineated a worldview in which civil society triumphs and existing institutions often fail during disaster. They quietly endorse much of what anarchists like Kropotkin have long claimed, though they do so from a studiedly neutral position buttressed by quantities of statistics and carefully avoid prescriptions and conclusions about the larger social order. And yet, they are clear enough that in disaster we need an open society based on trust in which people are free to exercise their capacities for improvisation, altruism, and solidarity. In fact, we need it all the time, only most urgently in disaster.