Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
First we have to distinguish two kinds of disaster: the first is visible and easy to understand; the second is invisible and hard to fathom. The shark in Jaws exemplifies the first: ferocious and brutal, it threatens everyone’s life, and everyone knows it is a threat. The second is exemplified by The Mist, the film adapted from Stephen King’s novella. In this kind of disaster, everyone’s life is still threatened, but we cannot attribute that threat to any single figure like the shark. The danger of the mist does not come solely from the mist itself: it also comes from the monsters within it, what is in people’s hearts, and other invisible enemies.
These two kinds of disaster are by no means simple opposites. The latter is the truth of the former. In Jaws, the shark is the answer to all our problems. In the form of an absolute problem, it solves all the other problems. In The Mist, by contrast, the mist brings out all the problems. In other words, the mist is a fantasy-frame: it is the way we see the world. We see the mist drive person after person mad, but we do not immediately think the mist is to blame. Instead: “So that’s what he’s like. I’d been wrong about him all along.” The mist has made him show his “true colors.”
Still not clear enough? The shark—or Godzilla—is a disaster that is not what it seems, a disaster we can unite to fight. But the mist itself cannot be eliminated; there is not even any need to eliminate it. It is an absolute disaster: in the face of this disaster, elimination itself has already been eliminated.
To make this clearer, we need a worn-out scenario: the end of the world. Of course, we mean an irreversible end of the world, not an asteroid that can be blown up or anything of the sort. Faced with this end of the world, people will not unite—or at least they will not be very united—because they are not facing an enemy they can defeat. But if your enemy is just Godzilla, then we can still unite to some degree. The end of the world is the mist, the fantasy-frame we have been talking about. Through this frame, we organize everything in our lives. But this frame itself cannot be removed. Godzilla (the shark) is likewise a fantasy-frame. Through this frame, we direct everything toward Godzilla (the shark). Every problem has the same answer: “All we have to do is kill Godzilla.” At the end of the world, however, what confronts us is: “Since the world is already ending, I have to do this, that, and the other…” Here we face a long list, and it cannot solve the real problem.
The first kind of disaster is not a disaster at all; to some extent, it is already a form of rescue. Because of Godzilla, I can forget my irritating job for a while, make up with a friend I had fallen out with… Then all that remains is to defeat Godzilla. This is a typical imaginary resolution of a real-world impasse.
So the temptation we must reject is that of hasty metaphorical readings: they merely play straight into ideology’s hands. This is also why metaphorical readings of Godzilla ultimately remain bound to naïve hermeneutics. Godzilla can symbolize many things: it can symbolize the US military, nuclear power stations, the ghosts of Japanese soldiers from World War II. But when we say, “What it essentially symbolizes is xxx,” we fall into the trap, because the essence of xxx is not xxx itself. Fredric Jameson’s excellent reading of Jaws tells us that the shark can symbolize many things only because it is already no longer itself. It is not only a stand-in for environmentalism, feminism, and opposition to war; it is also a stand-in for itself. In other words, it does not coincide with itself.1
Whenever disaster appears as a gigantic, absolutely visible figure, we need to be careful. Real disaster cannot be seen and has always already happened. This is precisely what makes The Mist interesting: it directly shows us the ideological framework. The mist makes us “look awry” and see what those people “were like all along.”2
Many films today try to show us a directly visible image of disaster, from Godzilla to the shark in Jaws, including the natural disasters that can be “suppressed” in Makoto Shinkai’s films. Yet the real crisis in contemporary society lies in a fundamental opacity: we are unsure just what our activity inside a mass of complex machinery will bring about, which is why people are always talking about the butterfly effect. The basic ideology of disaster, in these circumstances, consists in giving me a cognitive map—letting me escape the so-called “hysterical sublime” (space that cannot be located after time has collapsed) and locate everything around me anew.3 So Godzilla has to be remade again and again, aliens have to invade Earth again and again, and a great flood has to come along now and then, so that we can map out relations between countries anew in 2012.