2012, dir. Roland Emmerich (2009)

In an interview with USA Today, Roland Emmerich announced that 2012 would be his last disaster movie. “I said to myself that I’ll do one more disaster movie,” he explained. “But it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in.” The film is meant to serve not only as the end of the world, but as the end of a genre and the end of a chapter in Emmerich’s career.

What’s bizarre about 2012 is that the scope of the disaster is so immense and the characters are so close to death that the necessities of the genre itself become all that matters. There are pretenses here, to be sure—but the only logic is the logic of Hollywood itself. As Woody Harrelson says in the film, “This is a plot that only could have been hatched in Hollywood.”

Disaster movies aren’t about humanity’s pride before the fall (the moments before our demise) or about the complexities of survival after a disaster. They’re only about the period of disaster—the pleasure we take from watching our own destruction. “Mankind,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “Which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” The pleasure Benjamin so keenly tied with Fascist aesthetics has become just another weekend at the movies.<

Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) manages to recue his wife and kids (and her husband[i]) in a limousine; they drive though Los Angeles as the pavement cracks beneath them to reveal a hell-pit of fire, as the freeway crumbles and buildings collapse beside them. What becomes frustrating and uncomfortable about watching the film is that they should die. Unlike in other Emmerich films, like Independence Day or The Day After Tomorrow, where the characters’ survival remained plausible, in 2012 you become immediately aware of the mechanism keeping the characters alive: the film itself. There is no more earth—Los Angeles is falling into the Pacific Ocean. They pilot a plane to Yosemite, which blows into a three mushroom cloud explosion and a rapidly advancing blanket of darkness. Cusack manages to run onto the plane at the final instant, they take off. They survive, they’re always surviving, the film is making them survive and you begin to wonder why.

Keeping the characters alive is necessary because they’re our proxy to the destruction of the world. Yet Cusack and his family not only guide us through our pleasure, they share it. They race through collapsing L.A. they look out their windows at the slow motion figures falling out of buildings, still on their laptops, clinging to whatever they can. They fly over Hawaii, which is just a mass of fire in the middle of the ocean. Their awe is our awe.

The US government has been aware of the Earth’s demise since 2009, and they’ve been planning for survival by building super-modern arks in China. The film makes it clear that “only the Chinese” could have pulled it off, which certainly reminds you to whom we owe our treasury department. Oliver Platt, deliciously hateable as the American President’s Chief of Staff, makes it clear that his job is to make sure that some form of government survives the end of the world. Tickets, of course, cost at least a billion Euros. At a time when there people don’t even trust the government to run national heath care, the film reminds you that you might not want to trust them when the world ends, either.

The ark ships themselves are designed to allow for the perfect centralized police state. There are cameras everywhere, allowing the crew to watch when Cusack and his family sneak on board and, eventually, are tasked with making some last-minute repairs to ensure that the ship functions properly. It’s as if the only thing standing in the way of a perfect state were the Earth itself, and now that it’s been destroyed the government can finally run everything as efficiently as possible in an environment of their own creation.

What Emmerich hasn’t realized here, though, is that—in the films he’s making—there don’t have to be any characters. I’d hoped the film would eschew the pretense of a character driven film and simply display destruction after destruction after destruction, with no one holding our hand but the camera—a kind of Man with the Movie Camera at the end of the world. Until then, I doubt the genre will reach its apex. As such, the film still contains all the saccharine comfort we’ve come to expect from films about the end of the world, despite its mistrust of the government. Just as Cusack’s awe is our awe, his survival is our survival. The film is still telling us what every other disaster film has ever told us. Flying over the Pacific, Cusack and his family pass through a rough patch. They set their kids up with life preservers, just in case. His daughter is frightened. She asks her mother if they’re going to die, and her mother says no, we’re not going to die. Even in the event of your death you are never, ever going to die.

[i] Eventually he dies, which ensures that the film contains a subtext about the reunification of the American nuclear family.