Up-close and personal: millennial screen trauma and the 2004 Tsunami’s spectacle of the real
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/screen/hjac044
ISSN1460-2474
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoOn 25 December 2012, eight years after a massive tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people in and around the Indian Ocean, a promotional trailer for the film The Impossible (J. A. Bayona, 2012) created outrage in the UK. Programmed ahead of holiday screenings of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012), the trailer caught many in the audience off guard, especially those who were survivors or had lost relatives in the 2004 disaster. ‘There were scenes of people drowning and bodies floating about, and it brought it all back so hard’, one of the viewers reported.1 Whereas some commentators attributed the traumatizing effect to the film’s ‘faithful rendition of the wave’, others compared it to an ‘ambush in surround sound and 3D’.2 Although informed by the technological undercurrents of the new millennium, this episode highlights a dynamic of spectacular affect and reality-effect that is baked into cinema’s legendary foundations: the reported eruption of terror in response to the image of an oncoming train during the Lumières’ first projected screening in 1895. However, as Tom Gunning has argued, that turn-of-the-century audience’s physical reaction is less a sign of their naive belief in the reality of the image than it is an acknowledgement of the new medium’s unique ability to produce an astonishing illusion of reality.3 Gunning’s reading of early cinema’s inaugural scene provides an important entry point to my examination of the 2004 Tsunami’s popular cinematic aftermath, in that it steers questions about the relationship between realism, spectacle and technology towards broader considerations of cultural trauma. Early cinema’s ability to articulate experiences of vast epistemic change endured after the consolidation of narrative conventions in the late 1910s, and manifested with new urgency at the onset of the 21st century.4 Accompanied by significant geopolitical, technological and socio-economic shifts, millennial screen culture confronted spectators with a traumatic infrastructure that differed notably from the utopian optimism that had animated consumers’ relationship to film and media technology in earlier decades. Zygmunt Bauman has coined the apt expression ‘liquid modernity’ to describe an age in which technology no longer accelerates towards the prospect of a better, more viable future, but instead generates living conditions that are inherently unstable, inhospitable and unpredictable.5
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