Paper short abstract:

The spectre of urban catastrophe looms large in visual cultural histories. Contemporary disaster films envision utopian and dystopian futures. Hybrid mediascapes, situated between imagination and experience, offer discursive and affective possibilities for collective survival in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Susan Sontag argues, "The imagery of disaster in science fiction [film] is… the emblem… of the inadequacy of most people's response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness…." (Sontag 1965) She asserts that the cinematic aesthetics of destruction and the pleasures of spectacle simultaneously entertain, distract, and make viewers apathetic. Conversely disaster films confront viewers with the somber impossibility of their own demise and reflect and reinforce cultural anxieties of invasion, fragmentation, and extinction. Catastrophic imagery onscreen act as social pressure valves and engender contradictory spaces of escapist refuge and collective catharsis. Historically visual and literary representation of urban cataclysms have provoked no less visceral, visible, problematic and paradoxical visions: Ragnarok in the Norse edda, Noah's flood in Chartres Cathedral's stained glass windows, and the Great Fire of London in anonymous seventeenth-century paintings. Such renderings variously served as salvatory promise, ideological screed, apotropaic ritual, philosophical meditation, earnest recordkeeping, communal mourning, dire warning, or ocular or aural pleasure. Current media—cinematic, cyber, or otherwise virtual--exploring and exploiting the disaster trope play similar roles: as technophilic market places, dystopian hurt lockers, or impossible Utopian escapes. Like the bygone neofuturist, humanist and pluralist city visions of Archigram and Metabolism, however, contemporary hybrid mediascapes may offer meaningful narratives to build more resilient social infrastructures. The convergence of virtual imaginaries with material landscapes creates critical discursive and affective tools for survival: to both imagine and respond to the unimaginable in the coming age of ecological collapse and social chaos the Anthropocene portends.