Flasz On Film

In March 2020, when the world was locking down and when we were all being asked to hunker down and brace for impact of the invisible microbe, many of us immediately noticed how Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion eerily reflected the reality of pandemic life. A little bit later, some have noticed that our political leaders behaved a little (or in some cases – a lot) like mayor Vaughn in Jaws. Confined to our quarters, we battled for the last remaining rolls of toilet paper, we baked, we home-schooled our kids and we moved our professional activities online, at least those of us who could. After all, as Contagion indicated, there would be a silver lining to all this and eventually the lockdowns would lift. We had no idea we should have been watching a different movie to prepare us for what was going to happen next.  

What we should have been watching was Roland Emmerich’s 2012.  

Released in 2009, just a short while after the financial crisis rocked the world, Roland Emmerich’s 2012 came out to a chorus of negative critical reception, though some prominent voices, like Roger Ebert and others, understood a bit better that an Emmerich disaster piece is to be consumed in a particular way and that paying too much attention to how flat the characters are or how a lot of the storytelling is accomplished with flashcard clichés is totally detrimental to the experience. Nevertheless, the movie made money and – if I were to write another essay about its place in the canon of disaster movies; which I might, actually – it became a culmination of the genre, a best-of album of sorts, with its frequent nods to many other movies from the past and the simple fact it was not confined to one particular archetype of natural disaster and instead opted for a medley of them; it was a symphony of destruction, if you catch my drift. 

In fact, the movie was supposedly capitalizing on the, at the time, popular doomsday trend professing that the world would end in 2012. Remember that? I do. Mainstream and online media were full of clickbait think pieces about how the Mayans apparently had a calendar that suggested in 2012, on the 21^st of December no less (it would have made more sense for the date to be the 20^th – you know, 20/12/2012… but what do I know?) the world would come to an end. Doomsday preppers were busy building bunkers, listicle journalists were tappity-tap-tap-tapping with glee about the many pseudoscientific ways the world could end if indeed it was going to, while the rest of the world was trying to stay alive in the aftermath of an actual financial crisis that brought disrepair to their lives, ruined their livelihoods, took their jobs, homes and hopes for the future.  

It didn’t matter that the 2012 phenomenon made absolutely no sense with its many theories concerning the magnetic pole reversal, detachment of tectonic plates or the simple fact that the Mayans had access to some secretly divine mathematics that allowed them to calculate the precise time when the catastrophe would occur. It made for great fodder for a disaster movie, that’s for sure, because 2012 – for all its many flaws that all those negative reviews so successfully pinpointed – remains a perennially fun piece of blockbuster entertainment. A disaster spectacle to end all disaster spectacles that took nearly all tropes of the genre (minus any and all tropes involving meteors or comets hurtling towards the Earth) and mashed them into one massive blockbuster burger patty, seasoned generously with Emmerichian flair and added a few pinches of the requisite Cameronian character focus that allowed the viewer to traverse the landscape of overwhelming destruction with incredible ease because of the story being written around a scaled-down cast of characters and their travails.  

But that’s not all. 2012 was not merely an expression (perhaps of the ultimate kind) of the genre dating back to Airport and The Towering Inferno, nor a purely entertaining encapsulation of many of its most prominent ideas. It wasn’t only an Easter Egg hunt for movie hounds replete with nods to such classics as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, Volcano or even Emmerich’s own The Day After Tomorrow. 2012 was a cinematic premonition, a prophetic warning of what’s to come. But we were too far away from it happening to even conceptualize how this movie was going to reflect what has now become a reality to even begin preparing for it in earnest. Because, how on Earth are you supposed to brace yourself for an impending cost-of-living crisis that would emerge in the wake of a global pandemic?  

You can’t. Therefore, 2012 is not a doomsday prepper’s manual to survive the post-pandemic rise in inflation, the energy crisis and the war brewing in the Middle East. It’s just an anticipatory reflection of what’s going to happen soon and how it will impact that Gaussian bulge area under the curve of Western demographics – the working middle class, as embodied by John Cusack’s family.  

Understandably, it doesn’t take much to see how exactly the movie made more than 700 million dollars at the box office, because on top of the absolutely mind-shattering destruction porn courtesy of top-notch special effects, 2012 was equally an extremely relatable dramatic dash about a guy trying to save his family. A regular guy who’s down on his luck. A guy who once dreamed of making it big as a creative but who now drives a limo for a rich Russian billionaire to make ends meet. A guy who once had a family but – for some reason, perhaps due to his own stubborn persistence in trying to make it in the shark tank that is the freelance gig economy – now has only fortnightly access to his kids and whose ex-wife has remarried and lives with an annoyingly successful plastic surgeon who drives a Porsche and flies single-engine planes on weekends. You get the picture. I think many of us can relate to at least some aspects of the Emmerichian middle-class archetype that is weirdly all-encompassing – the visualization of who generates the bulk of the GDP in the first-world economies. 

Now, as the COVID pandemic made landfall and governments worldwide (at least in the parts of the world that could afford to be compassionate, that is) scrambled to pump immense amounts of capital into the markets usually by way of giving people one-off handouts or furloughing their workforce wholesale, only a handful of Cassandras put two and two together and anticipated that injecting large amounts of money into the system would have inflationary effects. Moreover, even fewer had the audacity to suggest that whatever money governments give their citizens will eventually percolate to the top of the food chain because billionaires don’t have to spend money to survive. They generate more than they could possibly spend. So, in the aftermath of the pandemic, the rich got richer. Massive companies quadrupled their profits after brief periods of instability. And when Putin decided it was a good idea for him to launch a land war in Europe, energy producers found the perfect excuse to supercharge their rocket-and-feather pricing strategy and took gas prices into the stratosphere, thus rendering poor people completely destitute… and the middle class, who was just about getting by and keeping the world economy afloat by working their assess off, got left in the lurch. And 2012 is a de facto metaphorical study of that process.  

As embodied by a singular American family, we get to see how the middle class is struggling to outrun the impending catastrophe that the rich could just afford to survive. That obnoxious nouveau-riche Russian oligarch just paid a billion euro to save his backside and it didn’t matter that he wouldn’t necessarily contribute much to the genetic pool of the reshaped global landscape. He wasn’t a genius. He never contributed anything to the advancement of humanity. He made a few good deals in his life and was friends with powerful enough people. That was it. So, he didn’t have to worry about the world ending because he’d be safely watching it unfold from his cabin on one of the arks built in the Himalayas. He was fine.

Cusack and his folks, on the other hand, end up going on a neck-breaking sprint to escape what seems like completely unavoidable catastrophe. We see them literally evade death as the ground is shifting beneath their feet and fireballs of hot lava and smoke bombard their surroundings. However, they are undeterred. Inveterate. They are hoping that somehow they’d find a way. That maybe they will save enough money and tighten their belts enough to make the pendulum swing and to avoid slipping irreversibly down the spiral of abject poverty. Thus, the movie becomes a portrayal of economic anxiety of the middle class clinging to a desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, they would get a chance to have a stable life and to provide a future for themselves and their children.  

Who we never see, let alone pay attention to, in the movie are the poor. They are the CGI crowds of victims smashed by boulders, burnt to cinders by supervolcanoes and swept by gargantuan tsunamis. They never stand a chance and – historically speaking – such people never get attention in any other disaster movie. Maybe you’ll remember one or two when their deaths are turned into a pun, like that guy who smashes into the propeller in Titanic, or when a random person gets hit by a meteor in the opening seconds of Armageddon. The poor are reduced to a joke at best and typically to just a background to spectacular destruction. This isn’t a detractor to the movie itself, by the way, but rather a reflection of the world we live in, which maps pretty well on the post-pandemic experience as well. The poor were always expendable in the eyes of the rich and the powerful.  

Finally, the dust shall settle one day. The crisis will end, and a new world will emerge where those rich fatcats in their arks will be tasked with repopulating the planet and rebuilding what was destroyed. What’s quite interesting here is that the ending of the film feels quite hopeful, as God’s Wrath recedes, and a new day arrives. The decks open and all those people – mostly billionaires, politicians and people with good enough connections – emerge to greet the rejigged world. Ironically, this is a world where Africa – a continent rich in natural resources and ample in space – was mostly left unperturbed by the seemingly worldwide calamity. The survivors set sail for it, and we leave them with a salute… not fully realizing they are all setting their sights on a new land to colonize, subjugate and leech from. Because that’s what those people are best at doing. Those who effectively contributed to the disaster or at the very least failed to ensure others would survive as well, will be left in charge of the world once the air clears and the bodies are counted.  

Apply this filter and 2012 shall become a harrowing document. A premonition of what is currently unfolding across the globe, because last time I checked, my shopping bills were getting steeper, and my paycheck was still failing to catch up. And seeing what I do for a living and how much money I bring home, I can only imagine what it must be like for those less fortunate than me. I, like John Cusack, remain hopeful that somehow – by hook or by crook – I might get to safety, even if the chances of ever succeeding are slim at best. After all, life is not a movie, and I don’t think I can count on stars aligning in my favour as much as they did for his family.  

For most, however, the future is bleak or there is no future at all.