I’ll return to something from last week’s column. I argued that there was a seismic and clear shift in the way films about disaster were approached from the 1950s to the 70s, how the forced comfortability in the American psyche was blown apart with Kennedy’s skull. I think this is true, and that the films reflect this change through their respective embraces of either optimism or apocalypse. However, there’s one trope in both that deserves note: the panic.
Mass panics aren’t seen very often in American films anymore, at least not with the prevalence that they once had in genre cinema. Perhaps it became as passé as the disaster movie itself, with Airplane! (1980) putting an end to The High and the Mighty (1954) rip-offs with its parody, and public panics where the social order is suddenly turned on its head in the likes of John Waters films (which they also don’t make anymore). In disaster films on either side of the 1960s, there’s a view that the public is largely stupid and in need of saving. The difference is that in the 1950s there were shepherds, in the 70s the view was that the supposed heroes will not actually save anyone. And it’s not like that idea was a post-war invention.
In S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939), a corrupt mayoral candidate tries to whip the city into a frenzy after a scandal he’s involved in is exposed to the public on live TV. His team takes over a rival station and broadcasts clips of New York destroyed by a tidal wave, saying that it's heading for their city next to get everyone to run out of the polls and stop voting against him. S.O.S. is an early anti-TV news film that sets a precedent, not just through its argument about broadcast images power over the public, but also because the movie isn’t very good. My problem with these films is they’re largely patronizing, giving in to a misanthropy that I fundamentally don’t agree with. Publics are misinformed by mass media, but I don’t agree with a Hobbesian view of salvation. I think societies have their foundations in political dialogues among the people, whether or not systems of power are designed to enable that towards their actual governance.
The movie footage cut to create a panic in S.O.S. comes from the 1933 film Deluge, which is mostly remembered for the sequence towards the beginning where the entirety of New York City is swept into the sea in a dramatic display of special effects involving miniatures and spliced footage of actors running and being violently buried in the destruction. However, this happens barely a third of the way into the film. Most of Deluge is concerned with what happens after the flood, how societies recreate themselves from the state of nature.
Deluge is based on the 1928 novel of the same name by S. Fowler Wright, a conservative activist and writer. Fowler’s novel acts as a reaction against the optimistic futurism of the likes of H.G. Wells, taking the primitivist view that societies function better on smaller scales. This is a classic (and misguided) presumption about how prehistoric societies may have worked, and it’s an idea that has once again taken hold among reactionaries, be that “RETVRN” types or straight-up accelerationists. It’s funny because, like modern counterparts, Fowler thinks that social constructions are naturally going to lead themselves back into patriarchal structures.
The film Deluge runs very loosely on Fowler’s novel, changing the focus from the man who thinks he lost his family in the flood to the woman he runs into and forms a new relationship with. She defies gender roles, dressing identically to her post-apocalyptic male companion. But when they finally find the new vestiges of civilization, a frontier-type town, the man’s reunited with his wife and kids, and the liberated woman must wander back off to the sea. Fowler’s novel finds some place for both women in the man’s life, but the film sees an impossibility. In both, society falls back onto patriarchal structures, but in the film the Americans decide that they want to recreate the world just as it was, nuclear families and all.
There’s a brief, anarchic soup that everyone gets to live in after the world ends. A moment for reinvention, yet people decide to go back—not to a primitive form, but the modern one they were briefly liberated from. It’s the opposite of Fowler’s book directionally, people don’t realize their new possibilities and instead reach for comfort of what they know. It’s a sad, depressing conclusion, and a specifically American take on a work by a British author: instead of being a work of utopian speculation, it's a Western.