Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., a refreshingly under-commercialized holiday set aside to acknowledge the many things in life for which we’re grateful. I’m home in Colorado with my family, doing the traditional activities: stuffing a turkey, setting a table, and wondering how many minor celebrities they can squeeze into one Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
At the same time, I’m doing research for a movie I may be writing soon, which involves a Very Bad Thing happening to the planet, and its aftermath. You’d think it would be hard to find scholarly (i.e. non-religious) books on the subject, but it’s not. Go into any bookstore and you find whole shelves of hardcovers that chart with considerable detail just how the world will end. Call it Pessimism Porn.
These doom-saying books tend to be bleak. What’s interesting is that movies based on the same ideas tend to have one extra element: hope.
Consider War of the Worlds, or Armageddon, or The Day After Tomorrow. In all three, Very Bad Things happen to the good people of Earth. Cities are destroyed; people are vaporized. Just like we seem hard-wired to love puppies and fear snakes, we want to see the Eiffel tower melt.
For up to 100 minutes of a movie, the entire world and everyone on it can be blown to smithereens. Even in a PG-13 movie, things can get really, really bleak — as long as by the end, things are okay again. Even Deep Impact, which had the balls to actually let the comet hit, still found ways to reassure us that civilization would bounce right back.
Just like a roller-coaster ride, we want the world to spin deliriously out of control, before coming to a safe landing right where we started. Whee! That was fun. Let’s do it again.
Anyone who has read the aforementioned Pessimism Porn recognizes the danger of these movies: most of the things that would destroy us can’t be solved by a courageous hero, a team of dedicated scientists, or a whiz-kid hacker who got beat up in school. Just like we’re more likely to die of heart disease than terrorism, the Very Bad Things that may do us in as a planet tend to be quiet and slow.
So that’s what I’m wrestling with as I think about this movie I may or may not write. How do you dramatize a situation that in real life would end pretty bleakly, but still make a movie that people want to see on a Friday night?
Anyway. I’m thankful to have a job that lets me think about stuff like that.