“Our one provision against catastrophe and the cataclysm is to reassess it as a genre,” David Thomson writes in his new book: “Thus anxiety can be aestheticised”
scene of “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, Alain Resnais’s and Marguerite Duras’s romantic drama of 1959, radioactive dust falls on the naked limbs of two lovers. At first the residue is thick and grainy; then it becomes soft and shimmering, catching the light on biceps and shoulder blades. David Thomson, a film critic and historian, uses this unsettling evocation of nuclear fallout in the Japanese city on August 6th 1945 as the introduction to, and inspiration behind, his cultural history of catastrophe.
It is a grim subject, but Mr Thomson is a wry, argumentative and darkly humorous guide. His style is consciously filmic, at times cutting between ideas and perspectives at speed and at others allowing digressions to continue at length. He refers to a panoply of disasters both imagined and real, including asteroids, earthquakes, extinctions, covid-19, climate change and political revolution.
The 1960s and 1970s proved a turning-point in the transmogrification of catastrophe to spectacle, Mr Thomson argues, as Hollywood released a tranche of disaster blockbusters. In “Planet of the Apes”, “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno”, cinemagoers could witness destruction on an epic scale—it proved a welcome distraction, he suggests, from the ongoing footage of conflict in Vietnam to which Americans had become numbed.
“Disaster Mon Amour” is an enjoyable, if scattergun, read. It is not a sustained analysis of the origins or psychology of disaster in mass media, opting instead for piquant observations and opinions. The book is made up of loosely structured chapters on a variety of themes; nuggets of cinematic description and analysis are interrupted by less lustrous passages about the experience of living through covid-19.
It is human nature to create art in defiance of tragedy and force majeure. People look to writers, film-makers, poets and artists to salvage meaning out of chaos and to reclassify disaster as a thing of beauty. “Our one provision against catastrophe and the cataclysm is to reassess it as a genre,” he writes: “Thus anxiety can be aestheticised.”
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