'In modern America, no nightmare is forbidden'
JG Ballard reveals what the Hollywood disaster movie says about the US psyche
Friday May 14, 2004 The Guardian
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.