The End of the World As We Know It

New York on September 11, 2001. Aceh on December 26, 2005. New Orleans during Katrina. Mumbai on November 26-29, 2008. Haiti this past January. Chile last weekend. This is the era in which it became possible for millions of people to watch the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other people in real time. Disaster was professionalized, with corps of rescue and relief workers, trauma specialists, and "first responders" addressing the suffering of victims and corps of reporters and cameramen bringing the news of that suffering to distant audiences. (Though someone might ask what happens to that news as traditional news outlets continue to disappear.)

Is this almost instantaneous exposure to catastrophe deadening or sensitizing? Does it turn us into the brutalized spectators of history or does it-- in conjunction with new technologies for amassing and delivering aid-- allow us to respond to that suffering more swiftly and effectively than any generation before ours?

This question and its variations will be the topic of the symposium "Between Hope & History: When Disaster Strikes," sponsored by the New York Institute of the Humanities, on March 13, 2010, at the Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street in New York City.

I'll be one of the panelists. Others include Leon Botstein, Philip Gourevitch, Lewis Lapham, Francine Prose, David Rieff, Kevin Rozario, and Jonathan Schell.

“And amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, o and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.




“Instead of the meaningless chatter for which the world ordinarily furnished material aplenty at teatime, people now recounted cases of inconceivable heroism; they spoke of individuals who in the past had been but little respected in society who rose to the grandeur of ancient Romans; countless examples were given of fearlessness, of cheerful recklessness in the face of danger, of self-denial and godly self-sacrifice, of the unflinching abandonment of life as though it were the most worthless possession, which one was likely to find again round the next bend. Indeed, seeing as there was not a soul to whom something stirring had not happened on that day or who had not himself performed some magnanimous deed, the bitter pain in every human heart was mixed with the sweetest sense of gratification, so much so that it was impossible to assess whether the sum total of general well-being had not increased just as much as it had diminished.”
--“The Earthquake in Chile,” Heinrich von Kleist



 

I Don't Know What's Good for Me

If it weren’t for their characteristic shadow-infatuated cinematography, you might not recognize the first two clips as coming from the same movie, Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957). The first episode represents the classic postwar Monster Movie of the kind the Japanese perfected. Except Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan were products of the rogue technology of the atomic age, while the fire demon below is a lot older—as old as Hell, actually--and summoned with runes written on parchment.



But in both cases, the monster is the point of the movie. Everything prior to its appearance is just a buildup to that appearance, a lengthy buildup being necessary to distract viewers from the shoddiness of the actual spectacle. If not for the creepy bat-like chittering that heralds its arrival and the way it unfurls from a ball of glowing smoke like a Sea Monkey dropped into a glass of water, the fire demon might be a stuffed animal. A big stuffed animal with a mobile tongue and an upper lip that curls like Elvis’s.

The demon appears only twice in the movie, once early on and then at its climax. More than an hour passes between those moments. This isn't a lot of monster. If I’d seen Curse when I was eight, I would have been bored shitless.

And, shamefully, I would probably have been even more bored if the great Tourneur had retained control of his picture. That fire demon wasn’t his idea. The asshole producer insisted on sticking it in.

In his earlier films Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man (1943), Tourneur—then working with producer Val Lewton-- developed a style that was pure suggestion, all lurking shadow and disembodied sound. You never knew if Simone Simon really turned into a giant, man-eating cat or was just ‘neurotic’.

Tourneur originally made Curse of the Demon with the same suave ambiguity. There are plenty of indications that the film’s gloating, goateed villain traffics with real devils. But at other times he seems to be exactly the charlatan Dana Andrews’s ill-mannered scientist accuses him of being, a tournament-level mind-gamer who scares the marks to death with threats and scraps of paper.

The tension between real and pretend menace is most excruciating during the séance scene. Does evil reside in the darkness outside the house or in the (relative) light inside it? How seriously should you take a fubsy medium who frets that “the spirits sometimes resent previous knowledge”? And how can you keep a straight face when those spirits are called up by ladies singing “Cherry Ripe” at the top of their lungs? Check out the guilelessness of the singers’ mouths, which open as wide as Muppets'.



If the medium’s cry, “It’s in the trees. . . . It’s coming!” sounds familiar, it’s because Kate Bush sampled it for her 1985 hit “Hounds of Love.” And in the video below, Robb McCaffree mixes, shreds, and purees snippets of Tourneur’s film, Bush’s song and her original music video into a fantasmagoria of dread and longing that’s an object lesson in the power of what remains unseen, either because it's not there or because you don't dare turn to look at it.

You're too busy running.

You're tearing me apart!

The United States is an adolescent nation. I remember feeling offended when I first read this, probably back in the 1960s in one of my parents’ news magazines, LIFE or Time or Newsweek.

But of course we’re adolescent.