http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZxBYItj2sM
Look out behind you!
Disaster movies, like Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (debuting this week), always feature our protagonists speeding away from some onrushing threat. Whether a giant monster, a geological phenomenon, a torrent of lasers, or a terrifying combination of the above, the margin between life and death is measured in miles per hour.
Hurry up! Run!
The chase says so much about the genre and humanity’s relation to it. It’s man vs. nature writ large. Nature goes from indifferent to cruel, targeting our heroes with falling debris, obscuring smoke and other unfortunate people who just weren’t fast enough.
It’s gaining on us! Step on it!
The panel of Overthinkers sprinted to safety this week and, while catching their breath and staring at the wreckage of a major American metropolis, debated on what was the Greatest Escape in a Disaster Movie. Read our verdicts and weigh in by voting in our poll.
And make sure you read all the way to the end for our Mystery Guest Judge!
Twister – Fenzel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERmcJQnvEmM
(All of it is good, but the climax begins about 8 minutes in)
The 1996 disaster movie Twister is a populist fable about an estranged couple, alienated from each other by the pressures of modern scientific life, finding reasons to stay married and setting up a legacy in the American heartland. It is also, somewhat peripherally, about tornadoes.
Okay, fine, it’s 60% about tornadoes and 40% about relationships – maybe 75/25 (maybe 90/10). But it’s loaded with symbolism, and its final escape scene is a poetic, if unfashionably heteronormative, take on man, woman, and nature.
See, the tornado is the ultimate symbol of perverted and dysfunctional libido. It is a literally twisted combination of male and female sexuality – a maw of insatiable hunger bound up in a rampant shaft carving a path of indiscriminate destruction. When male and female sexuality fail to work together harmoniously, it literally tears houses apart (note the shattered picket fence in the video). And when it comes upon the unsuspecting and placid midwestern farmsteads, you’d better hide in the storm cellar, or this homewrecker will fling you from the earth to your death.
The Twister prequel was much lower-budget.
Odysseus faced a similar irresistible force once – though in a more singular battle of masculine continence versus feminine allure. When sailing past the deadly sirens, he ordered his crewmen to bind him to the mast, and not to release him no matter how much he pleaded. Thus, he survived their song.
In Twister, a very similar scene plays out, except it is the positive, nurturing, supporting, grounded combination of male and female that triumphs over its torrid, destructive, voracious pursuer. Chased by the Finger of God itself (the dreaded F5 tornado!), Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt flee the unhelpful assistance of their motor vehicle for the symbolic refuge of a nearby farm, where they find the ultimate symbol of the proper communion of male and female – a sturdy pipe, flowing with water, buried “at least 30 feet” into the rich, deep, fertile Kansas earth.
The earth grounds and anchors the pipe, and the pipe nourishes the field. Without the earth, the pipe would not be strong enough, and without the pipe, the earth would not be strong enough. Together, they produce growth, and they do so in quiet, homebound contentment. Like Odysseus and his crewmen, Bill Paxton takes leather straps and binds the couple to the pipe – first his wife, then himself – in a symbol of the bonds of faith he still has in his own marriage and their connection with one another.
In a scene that is oddly suggestive of an expressonistic sexual ballet, Bill and Helen (Jo in the movie) are surrounded and assaulted by the full force of the tornado, seeing at once its central shaft and thunderous climax and the revelation of the blue sky to be found at its conclusion. They become weightless, they are lifted from their feet, but the pipe holds them, their hands hold them, and the sturdy earth of Kansas holds them, saving their lives and completing their escape from the clutches of the F5. After an orgasmic swell of music, the tornado dissipates.
Bill and Helen/Jo have found each other, found their place in nature, and successfully outlasted, what $70 million-$80 million or so in CGI special effects. Truly the lesson is that sometimes, to escape, you have to go back home.
Also, in Kansas, they should apparently make the whole barn out of leather straps.
It’s one thing to run away from the cold.
It’s another thing to look over your shoulder, as if you expect to see the cold chasing you.
It’s yet another thing to look over your shoulder and discover that yes, you can actually see the cold chasing you.
And it’s the icing on the cake when you include a couple shots from the point of view of the cold.
The Day After Tomorrow is about (trendy trendy!) eco-disaster, which most memorably takes the form of a giant tidal wave hitting Manhattan. (By the way, the movie was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed 2012, which I believe also features a giant tidal wave.) But that set piece comes relatively early in the film. The movie needs another threat for the characters to run away from.
The movie follows up the wave with maybe my second-favorite escape in a disaster movie: Jake Gyllenhaal fleeing a pair of hungry timber wolves, escaped from the Central Park Zoo. It’s both incredibly contrived and incredibly anti-climatic, considering we’ve just seen a good chunk of the world’s population wiped out. And if that was the most ridiculous escape in the movie, dayenu.
But TDAT still has its trump card: a massive hurricane with air a hundred degrees below zero. And the really novel thing about this mother of all cold fronts is you can literally see it coming. The temperature differential is so great that it shatters windows as it passes. When it gets closer, you can even see the ice racing along the ground towards you.
That’s the set up for the greatest (i.e. silliest) disaster movie escape of all time, as Jake flees back to his shelter, located in the main branch of the New York Public Library. Yes, the one with the ghost in the basement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzd9G9h27hc
I think what makes this genius is when Jake screams, “Close the door!” And then his friend just barely slams it before the cold can get in. It’s like the very air is a b-movie serial killer, stalking them with a frosty chainsaw.
The Great Flood – McNeil
As we learned in 10th grade, the first human civilization grew up in Sumeria, which the Greeks called Mesopotamia, meaning “between the rivers.” Those rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, provided the fertile soil that made the whole farming bit feasible. Unfortunately, a heavy snowmelt and a bad storm in the headwaters of those rivers could send down an inexplicable flood that drowned crops, livestock, and people, and melted the earthen bricks upon which society was quite literally built. This happened a lot.
So one day, a Sumerian storyteller was looking to give his audience a scare. He’d been telling a lot of man vs man and man vs self stories lately, so he decided to trot out nature as the villain. The scariest thing in nature: floods. And so began a really fantastic tale of a great flood, the one man who saw it coming and how his ingenuity saved the day. This man, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim, or Noah would go on to be played by Jeff Goldblum in the remake, Independence Day.
In the original story, which inspired or was completely unrelated to similar tales in Babylon, Judea, China, Greece, Finland, Australia, India, and the New World, the hero is such a nice guy that when the gods choose to end the horrible sins of the world* with a deluge, they give him a heads-up and instructions to build a boat.
“And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man.” Doesn't this mean that fish are still evil?
One interesting point: nowhere in Genesis does Noah attempt to let anyone else know about the flood. He tells his family and, presumably, many animals, but nowhere does he give anyone else any warning. The modern image that we have of Noah as Cassandra, trying futilely to save others isn’t there, though it makes him a much more sympathetic character. Jeff Goldblum never would have left everyone else to die without so much as a “Hey, guess what?”
“You’d all be dead if it wasn’t for my David.”
This may not be your typical heart-pounding, slow-motion-running-in-front-of-an-explosion type of escape. When you think “action-hero” you rarely think “shipwright.” But when you get right down to it, other heroes may be saving themselves, but the ship-building heroes of the flood story are saving the human race. They may take a little longer, but how embarrassing would it be if the ark on which all animal life on the planet depends capsizes because you forgot to caulk it appropriately?
Well, to be honest, we mostly just take the kids out tubing.
Finally, just because I find this fascinating – did you know that “clean animals” got to come on board the ark in sevens? Why? So that Noah would have something to sacrifice to God when they landed. Also, there were dinosaurs.
Unlike alien invasion, global warming, earthquakes, volcanoes and the mighty F5 tornado, we never have to worry about floods again, because God said, “I do set my [rain]bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth… And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
Well, that’s a load off.
And now, for good flood/ark footage, I present a music video made up of clips from Evan Almighty and The Crow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJmvTxjAqkk
* Or relatively minor political corruption on the part of John Goodman.
I Am Legend – Lee
My pick is the New York City evacuation/escape scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IFabwB-b14&start=90
Here’s why I like this scene. The “disaster” of the movie essentially plays in reverse. Because of the flashback-based nature of the storytelling, we already know what happens to everyone desperately trying to get out of New York (they either die or turn into bad CGI vampire/zombies). They’re all doomed, yet they’re all trying to make their escape.
But despite the sense of defeatism, we still care about the escape and the people involved. We feel the unfairness that a select, chosen few are allowed to evacuate while the unfortunate masses cluster hopelessly outside the evacuation point. We feel the fear–and subsequent relief–that Dr. Neville feels when his wife fails, then passes, the infection screening. They’re going to make it! They’re getting into the helicopter!
And then, this happens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV2xOY2K3Ys
An “escape” from a “disaster” turns into an unpredictable, chaotic end for Dr. Neville’s family. This is I Am Legend at its best (and at the other extreme of the schlocky “Will saves the day” ending): a story of the arbitrary and cruel nature of life and survival.
Whew! That’s a whole lot of disasters. Time for you, our loyal Overthinking It readers, to cast your vote and decide which is the Greatest Disaster Movie Escape.
But first, a word from our Celebrity Guest Judge – ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Johnny Cash!
You heard the Man, folks—the whirlwind is in the thorn tree. But where is your whirlwind landing? Cast your vote and let us know!
