White House Down?

344In 2012–2013 alone, Hollywood released two films featuring the annihilation of the U.S. capital in Olympus Has Fallen (2012) and White House Down (2013), as well as a string of disaster, apocalyptic, and postapocalyptic movies, including Dredd (2012), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Elysium (2013), The Hunger Games (2012) and its sequel, Catching Fire (2013), Oblivion (2013), After Earth (2013), Pacific Rim (2013), and World War Z (2013). Romances and comedies cashed in on the doomsday craze in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012), This Is the End (2013), The World’s End (2013), and the teen romance How I Live Now (2013). Dubbing the trend “Cinema Apocalyptica,” the New York Times noted, “We have placed our modern anxieties inside the particle accelerator of block-buster Hollywood with contemporary computer effects to contemplate the obliteration of the universe on the big screen” in films that “have the scope and prestige of a maturing genre.” ¹ Despite this trend and the renewed popularity of the study of genre films, the disaster film genre, including the “maturing” apocalyptic films under its wide umbrella, has received relatively little critical attention. The political implications of the genre have been even less thoroughly considered. Yet the coincidence of recent American federal government dys-function, shifting American military deployments abroad, the disaster-apocalyptic movie resurgence, and the topical intersections these phenomena share together point to a film genre hardly indifferent to matters of politics and government. Recognizing that confluence, this chapter looks at popular disaster genre films in the political context of their times to consider how they translate political discourse into cinematic language. ²