Maybe We're All to Blame for 'Disaster Porn'

Professional "script doctor" (New York Magazine's words, not mine) Damon Lindelof made some waves this week when he spoke of Hollywood's suddenly insatiable desire to put the world on the brink of disaster and then have it be saved by a hero or group of heroes. Lindelof's words "made waves" because they were honest, not because they told us anything we didn't already know. In that vein, perhaps it's time we, the moviegoing public, are honest with ourselves and with everyone else, too. After all, Hollywood, even with its Lone Rangers and John Carters and other non-Disney-funded financial disasters, has proven pretty adept at making money over the years. And they've done so mostly by appealing to what we -- the moviegoing public! -- say we like with the dollars in our pocket. It's a two-way street is what I'm saying, folks. But, first, some context in the form of Lindelof's actual words to New York Magazine:

“We live in a commercial world, where you’ve gotta come up with ‘trailer moments’ and make the thing feel big and impressive and satisfying, especially in that summer-movie-theater construct,” says Lindelof. “But ultimately I do feel—even as a purveyor of it—slightly turned off by this destruction porn that has emerged and become very bold-faced this past summer. And again, guilty as charged. It’s hard not to do it, especially because a movie, if properly executed, feels like it’s escalating.” ...

“Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world,” explains Lindelof. “And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world—you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it and, again, I make no excuses, I’m just saying you kind of have to start there. In the old days, it was just as satisfying that all Superman has to do was basically save Lois from this earthquake in California. The stakes in that movie are that the San Andreas Fault line opens up and half of California is going to fall in the ocean. That felt big enough, but there is a sense of bigger, better, faster, seen it before, done that.”

“It sounds sort of hacky and defensive to say, [but it’s] almost inescapable,” he continues. “It’s almost impossible to, for example, not have a final set piece where the fate of the free world is at stake. You basically work your way backward and say, ‘Well, the Avengers aren’t going to save Guam, they’ve got to save the world.’ Did Star Trek Into Darkness need to have a gigantic starship crashing into San ­Francisco? I’ll never know. But it sure felt like it did.”

Distill this down to one concrete thought and here is what I think you arrive at: "mass appeal" is harder to identify, define and target in a simple fashion than it has ever been. I see two primary reasons for this fact. The first is globalization. Much ink has been spilled, even in these parts, on the skewed effect that the global success of movies can have on its overall financial fate. It's changed the definition of -- there's that term again -- the moviegoing public.

In short, the "Great American Movie" doesn't matter to anyone but film buffs like myself anymore when, y'know, there is a massive audience in, say, China just waiting to be cultivated. It's why Pacific Rim, despite flopping here, is going to get a sequel, but films like Lincoln will get harder and harder to make. That's not a xenophobic complaint, by the way, though I can see how it would come across that way, more just a fact of the matter.

Your "mass appeal" has to be a lot more basic when it's going worldwide than when you're only considering a domestic audience. The second is a lot more nebulous and anecdotal, but no less important in my view. When you have HD television and Netflix and a DVR and a myriad of on-demand options and, oh, maybe a family too, it's going to take an event to actually get you to the movie theater, especially in the middle of the summer when, y'know, the weather is nice and such.

When you think in event terms, it becomes easy to understand the pressure that piles up on the people trying to make a tentpole film. If it's going to take something more than just a great piece of art to make your film viable financially, you can begin to understand how the scale and scope can spiral out of control rapidly. To quote New York Magazine and Lindelof, "Hollywood’s gigantism ... is practically algorithmic—and the effect tendrils all the way down to the storytelling level."

It certainly explains my lack of patience with the mostly fine Star Trek Into Darkness and Man of Steel. So, what can we do to stop this? Well, probably nothing, or at least not very much. The toothpaste isn't going back into the globalization tube that's for sure. It's not going to get any easier to pry a family of four off of their couch either. Mostly, it's going to take a healthy dose of patience. I do think VOD (video on-demand) is a potential game-changer.

Netflix, for all its false starts, has shown the way with House of Cards, Arrested Development and Orange Is the New Black. It's not hard to make the mental leap from hit, Emmy-nominated Internet television show to runaway VOD Oscar contender, even if it seems abstract at this exact moment. It's not so much that the event movie will become obsolete in this hypothetical, it's more that it won't seem like such a hindrance to movies that don't want or need to be an event. That would amount to significant progress in my book.