Air travel still might be safe, relative to the death-driven highways that scar the American landscape, but it sure feels like the corporate monopolies are reaching the breaking points of the profit-driven stressors we put on them. Disaster’s around the door, in a way the public probably hasn’t imagined since the Soviet Union collapsed. The Doomsday Clock is at a comically small margin, the asteroid is getting more and more likely to hit us in the 2030s. The floods, the fires—they’re already here. What we don’t have at this moment is a broadly reflexive pop culture machine that tries to speak to it. This is an issue that my friend (and one of the editors at Splice Today) Nicky Otis Smith faults the modern film industry for—nothing speaks to the present anymore. Everything’s afraid of being immediately outdated, and few have found ways to visualize Covid or even smart phones the way they were for the emerging crises and technology of the last 100 years. Perhaps there’s solace in our interconnected digital world in that we can go back and see how others on the verge of disaster thought about their times.
John Wayne has a surprising number of pilot films. Eight or nine by my count, depending on whether you think an uncredited role in Central Airport (1933) or B-serials should be included. One of these pictures is famous for being—what Wayne considered—his worst movie: Jet Pilot (1957), a von Sternberg-directed picture that’s really more of a Howard Hughes production. It’s rife with obsession. For fast planes, sexually intimidating women; the Hughesian works. It’s easy to see why Wayne would hate it. Its melodrama bursts at the seams, it’s practically camp. And beautiful camp. Lovers from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain dance around each other at hundreds of miles an hour through cloudscapes. They say the cheesiest things at every moment possible, and its portraits of Russians seem to be written by someone that has only read Stars and Stripes. It’s a great film, a product of its time.
The aviation film he’s most famous for (which, unfortunately, isn’t the John Ford masterpiece The Wings of Eagles [1957]) is The High and the Mighty (1954), which is most remembered as both the prototypical disaster film that so much of 1970s cinema would model itself on and the chief satirical target of Airplane! (1980). The High and the Mighty isn’t a good movie, nor is the other flying film Wayne did with director William A. Wellman the year before, Island in the Sky. But both are interesting films insofar as they highlight the fundamental (if forced) optimism of the times: both arial near-disasters are, at the end, saved from catastrophe. In Island in the Sky, the stranded, freezing-to-death C-47 crew of course get rescued at the last moment, it’s American airmen out there looking for them after all—they won’t give up, and they won’t fail. In The High and the Mighty, the engine failure that all but dooms the commercial flight to the icy, infinite Pacific is no match for Wayne’s prowess as a pilot.
But it’s not just the simple saviors, it’s the fundamental trust in the systems that’s so alien. When the plane’s in trouble, many more are mobilized to their rescue. Everyone’s on the radio and rooting for them. This is a film that can’t be made anymore without cynicism, nor should it be—even Clint Eastwood’s most outright heroic film, Sully (2016), is a story of a man who did everything right, of a perfect response from a government and private citizens alike, and is haunted by all that could have gone wrong, of the doubt that they did do something wrong. The disasters of the 1970s perhaps take it too far, and are too obsessed with the spectacle of the world’s rapid destruction. This is a societal ritual, though, one of a people who were psychologically uprooted and permanently disillusioned by the Kennedy assassination (much as America would suffer another traumatic brain injury from 9/11). Take my beloved Two-Minute Warning (1976), a film I stumbled onto on AMC some afternoon when I was 11. A sniper is in the L.A. Coliseum at the royalty-free Super Bowl. The police know he’s there, but they’re not sure if they should move, lest he start shooting and trigger a mass-panic event. They wait and wait, but it’s too late. The two-minute warning comes on, and he lets loose, killing and maiming so many of the characters we’ve gotten to know since the start of the film’s runtime. It’s a disaster. People are getting shot and running and jumping and trampling and dying. The world can never be the same after this. And to boot, the shooter dies before the police (or the audience) can ever get an answer as to why this happened. It’s just random violence.
In 1950s America, Korea wasn’t real. It was a place people went and came back from. Nothing happened in Korea, the world kept spinning as usual, and the millions of bodies piling up in the mountains was a mirage made by Maoist brainwashing—nothing could really be happening in Korea, because the suburbs were still there in Youngstown, Ohio, in Pittsburgh, in Upstate New York, in Dallas. The planes never really went down, they were saved at the last moment. Then JFK’s brains are laid out in the back of the limo and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, everyone’s dying in Vietnam and there’re riots in the streets and a shooter at the Super Bowl and the Poseidon is upside down. Nobody will save the president, nobody will save you. In fact, they just might kill you too. Nothing was ever fine, but in 1963 people finally realized it, and by ‘73 people could hardly imagine that American Graffiti took place barely more than a decade ago. All of that seems so far from us now, but it was only a couple of years ago that Dylan was singing about that shift, and the appearance of disaster—or the imagination that it will happen—is more prevalent than ever.