Heroes are necessary because the rest of us are awful—selfish or malicious or boiling over with emotion and utterly unclear on what to do or too frightened to do it. Our awfulness requires and produces their won derfulness, a dull, drab background against which they shine. Or so it goes in the movies. They themselves need heroes. It’s almost a technical challenge: you need close-ups, you need story lines, individuals to follow, a star to attract audiences—even the ensemble disaster movies have multiple heroes who assume leadership, like Towering Inferno’s Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. The camera doesn’t have the same fun with a large group of people behaving well, and Hollywood feeds on stars. And conventions: they are unwilling, generally, to make the Asian grandmother a leading hero of the disaster, though she might get a cameo. These films are deeply reassuring—for those who want to believe that no matter what happens to their city or world the old status quo of gender and power and individual initiative remains intact.
You’d think with the building on fire or the earth shaking or the meteor arriving, you’d have dramatic tension already, but the real conflicts in these movies are often between good and bad protagonists, along with the altruism in the foreground and the selfish and scared backdrop of humanity at large. Generally a romance builds and a personal conflict gets resolved: people in disaster movies are not distracted from personal business by imminent destruction, and so they busy themselves with the resolution and evolution of fraught particular relationships rather than embarking on the blanket empathy and solidarity real disaster often produces. Conventional disaster movies are fascinating and depressing for many reasons, not least being the tidy division of the world into us and them. The them that is humanity in the aggregate, the extras, panics, mobs, swarms, and fails. Also failures are the other nonprotagonist authority figures—the head geologist in Dante’s Peak, the chief seismolo gist in Earthquake, the developer who used shoddy materials in Towering Inferno, the upper-echelon decision makers during the ebolalike epidemic in 1995’s deadly-new-virus-drama Outbreak—who are complacent in their power and wrong in their outlook, and not very attractive to boot, the them who will be proven wrong, over whom the hero representing up-and-coming authority and us must triumph. And does. The movies are not antiauthoritarian so much as anti authorities other than us; it’s a matter of getting the right guy in charge, the one we can identify with.
The problem with bureaucrats during crises may be the only thing disaster movies get right. Quarantelli remarks that the organizations rather than individuals are most prone to create problems during a natural disaster. “Bureaucracy depends on routine and schedules and paperwork and etc. If done right—in fact, the modern world could not exist without bureaucracy. The only trouble with that is that the bureaucratic framework is one of the worst things to have at the time of disasters when you need innovations and doing things differently. In fact the better they operate during nondisaster times, the less likely they are to operate well. They can’t maneuver, they can’t integrate, etc. On the other hand, human beings, and this cuts across all societies . . . rise to the occasion. Again, not everyone does, just like not all organizations react badly. But in terms of human beings they rise to the occasion whereas organizations, in a sense, fall down.”
In Deep Impact, the conflict is only between the great wisdom and technological savvy of the federal government and the pretty young reporter who must be brought in line with its agenda. When Quarantelli wrote about disaster movies, he cited an unpublished colleague who wrote that they “reinforce our cultural belief in individualism and individualistic solitions to social problems.” He adds, “Disaster movies . . . usually portray the problem as resulting from the human beings involved rather than the social systems in which they operate.”
All these movies reaffirm traditional gender roles too, or rather the helplessness of women is part of what sets the male hero in motion. In the relatively liberal Dante’s Peak, Linda Hamilton as the small-town mayor and Pierce Brosnan’s love interest doesn’t scream, doesn’t do anything dumb, but doesn’t do anything else either. Though only a few years earlier she was contending with the Terminator and flexing some quite remarkable muscles, in this one she doesn’t leap, or lead, or hot-wire the truck, or paddle the boat, or lead the rescue of her own children. She’s just along for the ride. And she’s the best-case example; the others scream, panic, are frozen with fear while some rugged lug rescues and quite often literally carries them. Ava Gardner as Heston’s unhappy wife in Earthquake literally drags her husband down the drain. A movie like The China Syndrome , in which a nuclear power plant begins to melt down and the media expose the arrogant negligence and information suppression of the plant management and government, stands all this on its head, particularly since Jane Fonda plays a lead reporter and an active heroine.
The China Syndrome is a maverick among disaster movies in other respects, championing the public and the media against insiders, elites, and experts. Its worldview was buttressed by the near-meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant thirteen days after the movie was released. Usually in the movies, big technological fixes tend to save the day. In the 1990s films Armageddon and Deep Impact, as in the contemporaneous science-fiction romp Independence Day, nuclear weapons deflect the evil that comes from outer space, be it meteors or aliens. In The China Syndrome, nuclear technology is the problem, not the solution.
Fear at the Top
Disaster movies represent many kinds of fantasy. They entertain our worst fears and then allay them—if our worst fear is of chaos, and our confidence comes from traditional sources of authority triumphing, for triumph they do, again and again, all those rugged men and powerful leaders and advanced technologies. Even on the brink of annihilation, this world is more comforting and reliable than our world. There’s a subplot in Earthquake whereby Jody, the National Guardsman, abuses his power during the crisis to shoot down his jeering roommates, nearly rape a young woman, and generally abuse his new power. But he’s portrayed as a long-haired martial-arts-obsessed nut—he’s freaky them, not trustworthy us, even in a military uniform. The bleary, hard-drinking old-school cop played by George Kennedy blows him away in one of those classic Hollywood moments when killing is deeply satisfying, entirely justified, and neatly done. Of course the National Guard was out to prevent looting and civil disturbances—the rarity of looting in almost all disasters is another thing the methodical research of the disaster scholars demonstrates but the movies didn’t absorb.
In fact Hollywood movies are to actual disasters as described by sociologists something of a looking-glass world. Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney, who directs the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, gave a riveting talk at the University of California, Berkeley, for the centennial of the 1906 earthquake in which she stated, “Elites fear disruption of the social order, challenges to their legitimacy.” She reversed the image of a panicking public and a heroic minority to describe what she called “elite panic.” She itemized its ingredients as “fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.” In other words, it is the few who behave badly and the many who rise to the occasion. And those few behave badly not because of facts but of beliefs: they believe the rest of us are about to panic or become a mob or upend property relations, and in their fear they act out to prevent something that may have only existed in their imaginations. Thus the myth of malevolent disaster behavior becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Elsewhere she adds, “The media emphasis on lawlessness and the need for strict social control both reflects and reinforces political discourse calling for a greater role for the military in disaster management. Such policy positions are indicators of the strength of militarism as an ideology in the United States.”
From their decades of meticulous research, most of the disaster sociologists have delineated a worldview in which civil
society triumphs and existing institutions often fail during disaster. They quietly endorse much of what anarchists like Kropotkin have long claimed, though they do so from a studiedly neutral position buttressed by quantities of statistics and carefully avoid prescriptions and conclusions about the larger social order. And yet, they are clear enough that in disaster we need an open society based on trust in which people are free to exercise their capacities for improvisation, altruism, and solidarity. In fact, we need it all the time, only most urgently in disaster.
Medical historian Judith Leavitt points to two smallpox outbreak cases to demonstrate the way that behavior of those in power shapes a crisis and the value of an open society. One, in Milwaukee in 1894, was made far worse by a public health officer who allowed middle-class and upper-class people to quarantine themselves, “whereas, in the poor immigrant sections of the city, he used forcible removal to the isolation hospital. And you can imagine that discrimination there was not helping, so the smallpox . . . spread citywide. There was this phrase, ‘the scum of Milwaukee’ in the newspapers quite a bit, and the people who lived on the south side of Milwaukee felt that that’s the way the rest of the city viewed them, as the ‘scum of Milwaukee’ and, therefore, it didn’t matter what you did to them, so there was definite unequal application of the policy. And the immigrants responded by not reporting cases of smallpox, by hiding them when people came to the door. And ultimately, by rioting against forcible removal, and against vaccination.” Suspicion of the vaccination’s safety and effectiveness was the other unfortunate factor, along with class conflict and elite panic.
In 1947, smallpox came to New York City very much the way that bubonic plague came to New Orleans in Panic in the Streets, but the institutional response was utterly different. The public was treated as an ally. Leavitt recounts, “There were signs and buttons around everywhere, ‘Be safe. Be sure. Get vaccinated.’ There were multiple daily press conferences and radio shows about the diagnosis when it finally came, the spread of it, every case was announced, and there was a perception, and I would argue also a reality of honesty and justice from the Health Department and from the city government at this time, because people felt they were being informed as things were unfolding. In two weeks, five million New Yorkers were vaccinated.” Coercion was used elsewhere: “The drug companies were a little less cooperative until Mayor O’Dwyer locked them into City Hall and said you are going to produce more vaccine, and you’re going to do it very quickly, or you’re not leaving this building, and they surprisingly agreed. . . . It was a voluntary vaccination program so those people standing in line were there in a voluntary fashion. Public compliance was incredibly high. Now I don’t have to remind you that this is immediately post-World War II, and that did have something to do also with the level of organization in the city and the cooperative effort.”
Even so, in 2005, federal officials in the United States from the president to the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speculated that a militarily enforced quarantine would be required were a new epidemic to break out: they were planning to go the route of Milwaukee, not New York City. And when the Indiana National Guard decided to simulate a radioactive disaster in a 2007 training exercise, they hired civilians to play rioters and looters charging at medical personnel and even stealing stretchers. (“It’ll make a good snowboard” one stretcher thief remarked unconvincingly, apparently trying to rationalize his puzzling role.) Elite panic and the mindset behind it are hard to eradicate. They were half the disaster that San Francisco faced in 1906 and that New Orleans faced in 2005.
Quarantelli was Tierney’s professor, but the phrase “elite panic” was coined by her peers, Rutgers University professors Caron Chess and Lee Clarke. Clarke told me, “Caron said: to heck with this idea about regular people panicking; it’s the elites that we see panicking. The distinguishing thing about elite panic as compared to regular-people panic, is that what elites will panic about is the possibility that we will panic. It is simply, more prosaically more important when they panic because they’re in positions of influence, positions of power. They’re in positions where they can move resources around so they can keep information close to the vest. It’s a very paternalistic orientation to governance. It’s how you might treat a child. If you’re the mayor of a city and you get bad news about something that might be coming your way and you’re worried that people might behave like little children, you don’t tell them. You presume instead that the police are going to maintain order, if the thing actually comes: a dirty bomb, a tornado, a hurricane into lower Manhattan. As we define it, elite panic, as does general panic, involves the breaking of social bonds. In the case of elite panic it involves the breaking of social bonds between people in positions that are higher than we are. . . . So there is some breaking of the social bond, and the person in the elite position does something that creates greater danger.
“In Three Mile Island, there was an evacuation of nearly 150,000 people. It was mainly a self-directed evacuation. The officials weren’t in charge of it. By all accounts it was quite orderly.” Yet Clarke is often asked, “‘Well, what about the panic at Three Mile Island?’ That wasn’t panic, the elites panicked there. They didn’t know what was going on inside the reactor, [neither] the people on-site nor Governor Thornburg. And finally the governor issued a declaration and he advised women, especially of child-bearing age, and children to evacuate. Scientifically for good reason, their bones and fetuses are more vulnerable, but all those other people who are not those things said, “hey, I’m going to go too. It seems to make good sense to me.” And we later discover that the reactor was perhaps thirty minutes away from breeching containment, half of the thing melting down. So what happens? The elites in that case, they’re afraid people are going to panic so they hold the information close to the vest about how much trouble the reactor is in.” Imagining that the public is a danger, they endanger that public.
Praising Tierney’s work, Clarke wrote, “Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones currently in vogue. The chief prescription is, she notes, that the best way to prepare for disasters is by following the command and control model, the embodiment of which is the federal Department of Homeland Security. Thus do panic myths reinforce particular institutional interests. But it is not bureaucrats who will be the first-responders when the next disaster, whether brought by terrorists or some other agent, comes. It won’t even be the police or firefighters. It will be our neighbors, it will be the strangers in the next car, it will be our family members. The effectiveness of disaster response is thus diminished to the degree that we overrely on command and control. This is another case where political ideology trumps good scientific knowledge about how the world works.”
Tierney moderates her critique of institutions to say that the United States at least has civilian systems of response, relief, and recovery. This, she adds, is an advance upon the era when recovery was considered to be a job for private philanthropy, while emergency response in other countries is often still delegated to the military (as it ultimately was in Hurricane Katrina in the United States). She approves, too, of the growing ranks of trained emergency managers. Many disaster scholars concur that if public awareness on disaster behavior is lagging, institutional planning is changing for the better. And it’s important to break up the monolith of the state into the various departments with various responses that constitute institutional behavior in any disaster: in 1906 San Francisco, the police conducted themselves far more reasonably, perhaps because they were rooted in the communities they served; in Halifax, most agencies behaved well; on the morning of 9/11 the Centers for Disease Control responded rapidly and appropriately; in Hurricane Katrina the Coast Guard distinguished itself for performing a maximum of rescues with a minimum of fuss and fear. Responses vary.
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Asked how decades of studying disaster had influenced her political beliefs, Tierney responded, “It has made me far more interested in people’s own capacity for self-organizing and for improvising. You come to realize that people often do best when they’re not following a script or a score but when they’re improvising and coming up with new riffs, and I see this tremendous creativity in disaster responses both on the part of community residents and on the part of good emergency personnel—seeing them become more flexible, seeing them break rules, seeing them use their ingenuity in the moment to help restore the community and to protect life, human life, and care for victims. It is when people deviate from the script that exciting things happen.”
Her trust in human beings in the absence of governance is at odds with that of most who govern. After all, the elites of Britain before World War II anticipated that the citizenry would fall apart, while the American leaders plotting nuclear wars astonishingly concluded that the survivors posed more of a threat than the bombs themselves. My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image. In a society based on competition, the least altruistic often rise highest. In staying there, they play out a drama far more akin to the scenarios of Social Darwinism than anything Kropotkin found in Siberia. Those in power themselves are often capable of being as savage and self-serving as the mobs of their worst fears. They also believe that they are preventing crime when they commit it. General Funston having citizens shot as looters believed he was somehow saving the city, and the officials and vigilantes in Hurricane Katrina unloosed even more savage attacks on the public because that public was portrayed as a monster out of control—a collective King Kong or Godzilla, as we shall see. At large in disaster are two populations: a great majority that tends toward altruism and mutual aid and a minority whose callousness and self-interest often become a second disaster. The majority often act against their own presumptive beliefs in selfishness and competition, but the minority sticks to its ideology. Disaster cannot liberate them, even while many others find themselves in an unfamiliar world playing unfamiliar roles. Certainly it was so in San Francisco in 1906, in the big Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But in Mexico, the majority mattered most, with extraordinary consequences.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 16
