'In modern America, no nightmare is forbidden'
JG Ballard reveals what the Hollywood disaster movie says about the US
psyche
JG Ballard
Friday May 14, 2004
The Guardian
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1215833,00.html
The Unconscious will always expose itself. If the British tabloid press
shows the nation's unconscious mind at work - a bubbling pit of prurience
and anxiety - then the Hollywood block-buster reveals the deepest fantasies
and paranoia of the American psyche. Either way, it's probably better to
have our monsters oozing towards us across the sitting-room floor than
bottled up in the basements of our minds.
Writing 50 years ago in War, Sadism and Pacifism, the English psychoanalyst
Edward Glover commented: "The most cursory study of the dream-life and
fantasies of the insane shows that ideas of world destruction are latent in
the unconscious mind." But it's clear that in today's America these
fantasies are no longer latent. The British are still reticent about their
deepest fears - class war, a reversion to economic feudalism, the spectre of
an all-dominant and all-vapid consumer society. But in modern America, there
are no suppressed dreams, no forbidden nightmares.
Every American fear and paranoid anxiety is out in the open, from the
ranting of ultra-right shockjocks to The Day after Tomorrow, Hollywood's
latest attempt to traumatise us with fears of climate change. Here, global
warming melts the polar ice-caps, flooding our planet and plunging us into a
global catastrophe. The computerised special effects are more real than
reality itself, bypassing many areas of the brain and posing problems for
philosophers and neuro-psychologists alike, hinting at a future where the
human race abandons "old" reality in the same way that Americans abandoned
old Europe.
We might think that the US had enough problems coping with Iraq, where the
abuse of prisoners has given a spin of sexual perversion to its drive
towards world domination, something the British Empire, with its croquet and
memsahibs, never achieved, alas. But disaster movies have been a Hollywood
staple for decades. Earthquakes and tsunamis, asteroids and volcanoes, alien
invasions and deranged machines have destroyed and re-destroyed the planet,
analogues perhaps of all-out nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Or, more
likely I suspect, a thinly veiled glimpse of the self-destructive urges
lurking alongside the hamburger and comic-book culture we all admire. As the
nation infantilises itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned
infant has nothing to do except break up its cot.
Unsettling as our own tabloids may be, the British psyche and its problems
hardly matter to the wider world. But the turmoils of the American psyche
have vast ramifications. Are films like The Day after Tomorrow, Armageddon
and Independence Day a warning signal to the rest of us? Since Hiroshima and
Nagasaki displayed the vast reach of US power, the greatest danger is that
Americans will believe their own myths. Is the gulf stream faltering? Is the
equator moving northwards? Without doubt an alien, and possibly European
plot, to be countered by the greatest display of "shock and awe" its
super-technologies can muster.
Americans, rightly, mourned the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. The
destruction of the twin towers seemed to spring straight from a national
memory bank stocked by Hollywood, and the horrific newsreels are effectively
the greatest disaster movie to date. We can all probably cope with The Day
after Tomorrow, but my fear is that in due course the "remake" of 9/11, with
the ultimate in special effects, will inspire Americans to more than
revenge.

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