Going Out With a Bang

Ah, summertime ... when the living is easy, fish go jumpin', and everything blows sky high. 'Tis the season of explosions, and if you'd like to see some evidence, simply trot down to your local multiplex; chances are you will see all matter of things go boom -- cars, buildings, brains, etc. People love explosions.

The tradition of summer blockbusters has been established for a while, and every week from June to September you can almost guarantee that stuff will blow up good, whether, as in Michael Bay's Transformers, it is narrative sense that gets shattered into a million tiny pieces, or in Live Free or Die Hard, where it's political correctness that goes up in a mighty fireball.

After watching these films, your brain might feel like it's been taken apart and reassembled by a demented 10-year-old. But even outside of the movie theatre, everyone loves explosions. How else to account for the mass exodus to and from the "Celebration of Light" fireworks in Vancouver, where the sheer effort of making your way to the beach to watch some 20 minutes of pretty pops before you truck your complaining kids all the way back to Surrey, beggars explanation.

So, what is it exactly that draws the people like flies? Is it simply the love of spectacle and power, an innate sense of nihilism, a love of destruction, the need for light and noise? While summer movies are arguably made for the teenage boy demographic, the metaphor of explosions attracts all types.

'Auteur' explosions

The thrill of blowing stuff up doesn't only belong to the Michael Bays of this world, even serious auteurs like to see stuff spontaneously combust. Before Michelangelo Antonioni went up in a dry puff of smoke this week, he made one of the all-time greatest cinematic explosions. His film Zabriskie Point (1970) is largely insane. Filled with lots of naked hippies humping madly in the desert and Pink Floyd music, it's mostly memorable for its final sequence, during which an elaborate house, perched on a cliff, suddenly explodes. The detonation is captured from multiple angles, one after the other, like the finale of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in visual form.

After the exploding house, the film ends with a bang, a series of bangs actually, as other random stuff is blown up, seemingly just for the thrill of it. A fridge explodes, food flies through the air, a cooked chicken spreads its naked wings, as if it has learned to fly once more. Books open themselves in an almost pornographic fashion, fluttering their pages like cancan dancers. Shattered bits of stuff glitter and fall in stately slow motion. And it is all oddly, deeply beautiful. Stuff is liberated from all usefulness, made free through destruction. Although the final scene of a plane skywriting "Fuck You, America" was supposedly cut from the film by MGM president Louis F. Polk, the sentiment was already pretty clear.

In the beginning, there was nothing except silence and darkness and then ... an almighty rupture of light and noise -- the Big Bang! In the ultimate cosmic orgasm, one enormous spurt of energy and light, the universe was born. If the universe began in the biggest boom of all time, our appreciation of explosions might be a genetic memory coded into the very molecules of life. If so, it makes absolute and perfect sense that we would be drawn to them, metaphor or no.

Personally, I think our love of explosions probably has much to do with the sun, since its ongoing combustion is what keeps us in light and flowers. In the case of director Danny Boyle's summer outing Sunshine, the entire premise of the film rests upon the fact that the sun has stopped exploding properly, and must be re-ignited by a pack of pretty scientists in a needle-nosed spacecraft. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Boyle explained how he instilled a proper sense of solar awe in his actors: "I'd say things like, 'Every bit of you is just a bit of exploded star.'" It's a nice bit of sentiment; too bad the film is less than stellar.

Harm(less) fun

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt, and in the case of summer blockbusters, the constant acceleration of explosive cartoon violence is so silly it couldn't possibly harm anyone. Could it? Battling the Hard Man: Notes on addiction to the pornography of violence, an essay by Benjamin DeMott published posthumously by Harper's Magazine, is not about the love of explosions, but the fact that violence can invade your mind in the most insidious fashion, often in the form of movies.

DeMott singles out Steven Spielberg (the producer of Michael Bay's Transformers) for special notice: "At the summit of the murder of the mind and feeling in our day stand the Spielberg monuments -- fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes and more of soul-crushing flesh-rending savored human destruction." DeMott's writes about his own struggles with the creeping "hard man" inside his head, a figure who relishes the replay of explosions and casualties on the nightly news.

The piece is more than a personal exploration, however, as DeMott examines this process of benumbing on a cultural level. Fostering this appetite for destruction begins very young and you only need to visit a movie theatre to see this process in action, literally, in action. DeMott quotes from George W.S. Trow, another writer who was similarly concerned with the disintegration of modern culture. Trow's most famous work "Within the Context of No Context" dealt with the effects of mass media (namely television). The book is an extended rant about the decline and fall of American culture, and Trow's theories often appear to be eerily prescient -- he predicted the rise of celebrity worship, the loss of adult discourse, and the triumph of mass media, summed up as: "The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it." -- to wit Paris Hilton echoing in the empty void of popular culture.

'Crash and burn brain pathways'

Many of Trow's ideas apply equally well to film, especially the creation of what he called, "crash-and-burn brain pathways energized and activated" in the brains of almost all children. Even if life began with a big explosion, creation from destruction, most movie bombs are doing exactly the opposite. These are not often celebratory bursts of light and colour, designed to make people feel happy; they're supposed to be doing the opposite -- killing everything in their path. Michael Bay's Transformers, ostensibly a kid's movie, since it was based on a line of plastic toys, might give you a bit of a sinking feeling.

Once you've been trained to believe that destruction equals fun, there is no turning back. The thin separation between movies and reality makes the continued lust for explosions not simply symptomatic of lingering adolescent taste, but maybe even questionable on a moral level. The prevalence of real death, real explosions and real bombs attacks hasn't diminished any interest in their fictional recreations, seemingly the opposite. Everyday in Baghdad, people are blown to pieces, while New York, a city that suffered the effects of its own massive explosion, seems eager to relive the experience in fictive versions. A recent study calculated the loss of human life in the top blockbusters of all time, and came up with a figure close to nine billion people.

Since movies are straining as hard as possible for sensation, after a while it becomes all about the boom. But sensation without narrative is basically porn, and there is a level of pornification in recent action films, a reduction to the main event, like a series of money-shots cut rapidly together, narrative only there to hang the action bits together. Story telling is the basic lingua franca of almost all culture. And if, as my mother asserts, all story telling is about the creation and recreation of family and relationships, then perhaps you can extrapolate along the lines of Martin Amis' line about pornography being the death of empathy and argue that the pornography of violence is the death of culture.

Seems we're going out with a bang, and a whimper.

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