As Jeff Goldblum once said, ‘A toast, to the end of the world.’
Well, okay, not the end of the world perhaps. But let’s be honest, the recent sky lockdown saw the world collectively stare in to the ashen face of a perfect disaster movie set up. You see rolling 24-hour news of grounded planes, rotting food and stranded coach parties; we see the sort of apocalypse that only Will Smith, a tonne of dynamite and an arsenal of unfeasibly large guns can prevent.
Alas, we are children of the cable generation. Disaster films are as embedded in our consciousness as love stories, hot teachers and cute dogs. In a perfect quirk of postmodernism, the ‘real’ story of TV news has become supplanted in the collective consciousness by the ‘pretend’ narrative of end-of-the-world movies. When the BBC show footage of a volcanic fall out, it’s hard not to instantly start looking for the draw-back lake, hiding Blofeld and the rest of the SPECTRE empire. For what is a natural disaster, if not potential leverage in the world’s greatest ransom? As the international terrorist mastermind and cat-fancier himself put it: ‘The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It’s the last program you’re likely to see.’
The Eyjafjallajökull volcano on 27 March 2010 (Henrik Thorburn/Some rights reserved)
As the Eyjafjallajökull volcano rumbles and thuds away in Iceland, belching plumes of potentially hazardous ash in to the atmosphere and talk turns to the increasingly dangerous effects of climate change, are we the only ones wondering what Jake Gyllenhaal would do? How Bruce Willis would cope with being stranded in Prague, six days in to the worst stag weekend come down of his life? What Will Smith would do on that £500 taxi journey across Belgium? Whether Pierce Brosnan would risk his life and lunch on the ‘vomit comet’ back from Ireland, or if he’d sit in Knock airport for 10 days sipping on his Guinness and waiting for Ryan Air?
What this natural disaster needs is some heroes. Men in grubby vests; men with shaved heads; men who are happy to run through control rooms in crumpled linen shirts, brandishing computer printouts showing The Solution. We need a Labrador to jump through pipelines ahead of fireballs. We need someone to growl ‘I’ve always been better at feeling out volcanoes than people and politics.’ We need some sort of exotic mystic to stare across the horizon and ring the bell of Armageddon. This is a time for heroic oratory and dazzling understatement.
Otherwise it’s just an aeronautical upset. And frankly, that’s not going to sell much popcorn.
