In "Godzilla," the monster fights off what looks like the
entire U.S. military while he flattens both Honolulu and San Francisco. And in
the new Tom Cruise film, "Edge of Tomorrow," opening Friday, Paris is
left underwater after an alien attack, and a futuristic D-Day-like invasion
leaves a French beach strewn with dead bodies and smoldering war materiel.
There's plenty more mayhem to come as this
season's glut of blow-'em-up flicks rolls out: "Transformers: Age of Extinction" (aliens drop a
cruise liner on a city), "Guardians
of the Galaxy" (outer space vehicles liquefied by the dozens), "Hercules" (the title character fights off lions,
sea monsters and a whole army of bad guys) and "The Expendables 3" (Sly Stallone and gang; train
rams into prison).
Entertainment Weekly recently referred to it
as "the summer of destruction."
But let's call it what it is: destruction
porn.
Like real porn, these movies play to our most
atavistic instincts. They all include some sort of buildup, the titillation of
expectation that really bad, but cool, things are about to happen. They
generally climax -- pun intended -- with a massive set piece of CGI carnage.
And like real porn, afterwards we're supposed to feel deliriously fulfilled and
exhausted.
Fact is, we should hate ourselves for feeling
this way, as if we'd just had really bad sex. But that's not the reaction
destruction porn elicits. Even worse, we're exporting this American blood-lust
globally, giving outsiders the impression of a country that has totally gone
over to the Dark Side.
It's not as if there hasn't been massive
carnage in the movies before this. Hollywood has produced plenty of war films,
ecological disaster flicks and alien invasion epics in the past. But the sheer
frequency of destruction porn these days -- at least 11 movies of this type in
summer 2012 ("The Avengers," The Dark Knight Rises," etc.) and
12 during the same season last year ("White House Down," "World
War Z," etc.) -- and our delight in seeing things blown up, should make us
worry about the mental health of society.
Movies have always reflected the anxieties of
their age. In the 1950s, we had plenty of nuclear paranoia films,often
featuring mutated life forms. (Can you say "Godzilla"?) The '60s and
'70s brought us ecological and bio-terror themes in films such as "The
Omega Man" and "Silent Running."And later films, like "The
Road Warrior," reflect an apocalyptic mindset.
But the recent spate of films seem to reflect
a collective psychic collapse. Sure, there are reasons for this: fear of
terrorism, the insecurity created by all those mass murders, like the recent
episode in Santa Barbara. We feel that world has gotten even more chaotic. That
there's too much of everything. That society has gotten way too complicated,
with too many people, too much technology, too many opposing ideologies
clashing against each other.
It recalls the classic 1959 dystopian novel
"A Canticle For Leibowitz," by Walter Miller Jr., in which the end of
industrial civilization is referred to as "the Simplification." It's
as if we're preparing for a global meltdown.
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