Reality Strikes: Simon R. Troon’s Cinematic Encounters with Disaster

Simon R. Troon’s Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene aims to expand and diversify the disaster genre. It challenges the ossified forms of Hollywood narratives, introduces under-appreciated documentary, and defends an expanded realist cinema in contemporary auteurist work that sustains ethical encounter in times of eco-catastrophe. As befits its subject, the book is sober and thorough, distinguishing itself by expanding the scope of disaster cinema beyond conventional Hollywood icons of the genre. Throughout, Troon explores the meaning of “realism,” insisting upon its plurality as “realisms” and probing its ethical ramifications. He asks, what would be an adequate realist cinema for eco-catastrophe? 

Troon’s theoretical touchstones are a mixture of classical realist film theorists like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer alongside post-structuralist thinkers like Donna Haraway and Deborah Bird Rose. Troon ties the way cinematic realism presents immersive, visceral environments and challenges the spectacular heroics of conventional disaster movies with the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas emphasised the face-to-face encounter as a site of exposure to the Other, a confrontation which establishes an absolute obligation. Troon contends that cinema can bring us face-to-face not only with the human suffering of eco-catastrophe, but with eco-catastrophe itself, in its elemental forms.

Cinematic Encounters is book-ended by personal reflections on living in unstable times – literally unstable, as in Troon’s witnessing from afar the earthquake in his home town of Christchurch in 2011 (p. 2). He concludes by reflecting on the experience of viewing empty streets through a screen during COVID lockdowns in Melbourne (p. 174). The screen-mediated nature of these experiences, both personal and also public, is reflective of Troon’s approach to realism. Troon describes how seeing empty New York streets recalls I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), despite the conventional narrative and apocalyptic spectacle. The spectacle “functioned to structure my imagination of what a viral disaster could look and feel like” (p. 175). It is less that spectacle is appropriate to disaster, and thus realist, and more that our experience of reality is so mediated by spectacle that spectacle confirms and reflects our experience, hence appears realist.

Although this is not exactly Troon’s argument, the book troubles classical realism even as it measures its analysis against it. One caveat is that, given the mediating screen, there are disasters “we are yet to fully experience or understand” (p. 2). For Troon, the break in experience is signified by trauma (p. 6) or “disaster-consciousness” (p. 10). Cinema takes up this not to make sense, but instead, it seems, to transfer the traumatic effects as an ethical injunction (pp. 9-11). Part of the link between trauma and cinema can be found in the origins of realism, as a “film-aesthetic response to history” (p. 19). Troon’s initial description of realist style hews closely to Bazin and Kracauer; it “seek[s] authenticity and honesty in [the] conveyance of the material world and historical events” (idem). But realism must also reveal the unseen (p. 21), often more-than-human, and at the same time privilege memory over narrative (pp. 26-27). The intercutting of subjective and objective realities is one of realism’s signature problems, as the camera’s eye stands in for both the human eye and the eye of an objective account of history.

Troon’s conception of realism even makes space for the spectacular blockbuster disasters of Hollywood, although he argues that their narratives consistently avoid the ethical implications of the encounter. The sequence of disaster cycles over the post-war period, “recursions” (p. 35) that both repeat and intensify the spectacular dimensions (p. 36), refines a formula of the heroic confrontation with a disaster that threatens an old (sometimes morally corrupt) world (p. 95). The hero – think Charlton Heston (pp. 42-43), or later Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (p. 62) – musters old world moral rectitude and alignment with the forces of order with new world expertise and technological skill. As Troon summarises, conventional disaster cinema is characterised by a “masculinist heroic subjectivity that masters both nature and technology to overcome death” (p. 48), at least for a chosen few often centred on the nuclear family unit.

As Troon seeks to expand the disaster cinema genre, it becomes possible to ask whether the “disaster” frame can be applied more broadly to action and science fiction movies, and also how non-disaster films participate in the disaster genre by their refusal of certain tropes, intentional or unintentional. World annihilation is the standard way to level up the stakes of a franchise, from Transformers or Avengers to Star Wars – as if saving the world depends on the financial survival of the franchise. Against the spectacular catastrophe, Troon surveys the approach taken in independent cinema. Films such as Robert Altman’s sprawling Short Cuts (1993), Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) and Southland Tales (2006) avoid spectacle for a more indirect disaster, often in the background of the narrative. They voice a suburban ennui that emerges in environments of ambient toxicity (pp. 73-75). Although varied in their approaches, these independent films introduce a “strange” element to the disaster (p. 71), something foreboding, not necessarily known, and where known, not ordinary or natural. Troon does not emphasise the ethical potential of these films, but instead searches them for the traces of other disasters, often historical ones that indirectly haunt or confront the characters. While Troon avoids psychoanalytic readings, the first Part of the book suggests broadly symptomatic readings of Hollywood and independent cinema. In the second Part of the book, the analysis follows a trajectory from detached, “view from above” perspectives on disaster, to more grounded and immediate ones (p. 90).

The second Part of Cinematic Encounters turns toward documentary, comparing this “view from above” redolent of Hollywood, celebrity-fronted climate change documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), with “a view from the body.” An Inconvenient Truth epitomises the detached, abstracted perspective, using Al Gore’s scientistic sermonising as a lens on a “world” represented by models and graphs (pp. 103-104). Similarly, Before the Flood (Fisher Stevens, 2016), a documentary fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio, employs the didactic form (p. 116) to reach a kind of stitched-up realism. Despite DiCaprio’s less authoritative role in delivering knowledge, the film itself traverses locales as automatically accessible and available to the Western gaze via a celebrity stand-in (pp. 111-115). Interestingly, Troon points out that both documentaries summon the threat of climate catastrophe via the loss of a nostalgic American childhood of the celebrity (pp. 106-107; 111). Importantly, despite their documentary form, both films abrogate the ethical charge of realism and reassert a (white, male) human perspective threatened by the oceanic other (p. 102) as it sinks distant islands (p. 109).

By contrast, Troon excavates films from the “green wave” (p. 103) to contrast these monolithic perspectives. There Once Was an Island (Briar March, 2010) opens from within the water, formally re-orienting the viewer within the environment. On an Unknown Beach (Summer Agnew and Adam Luxton, 2016) also dis-orients viewers in the aftermath of disaster. Troon pairs the films for their contemplative (p. 119) and “slow, observational style” (p. 126), as well as insisting on “incompleteness and uncertainty” (p. 121) in their narrative trajectory. As features of realist style, Troon argues that they cultivate an ethical charge tied to embodied engagement (p. 129) and immediacy (p. 120). Moreover, the re-frame the environments we inhabit by staging encounters with the more-than-human world, such as the way “prolonged unstable camera movement grants On an Unknown Beach a realism specific to the marine and tectonic disasters it documents” (p. 131).

These documentaries share with auteur cinema, to which Troon turns in the third Part, these features of realist style: slowness (p. 148), narrative uncertainty or drift, and long takes (p. 153). Grouping Michael Haneke’s Le temps du loup (Time of the Wolf, 2003), Abbas Kiarostami’s Zendegi va digar hich (And Life goes On, 1992) and Lav Diaz’s Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos, 2007), Troon comes closest in this part to linking realism as a style of film-making with an ethical approach to disaster. Yet the “realist” (even “neorealist”) category is being stretched here to include such unspecified disasters as Haneke’s Time of the Wolf. Moreover, Troon reads these films as developing “ideas and arguments” that can be brought to bear on eco-catastrophe (p. 143). If, as Kiarostami suggests, the role of cinema is “not to express a solution to problems but to express the problems themselves” (quoted in Troon, p. 155), then the problem addressed by cinema is not disaster as such but “seeking an adequate way of looking at a world reconstituted by the eruption of death” (p. 151). This problem or task links the realisms of Rossellini and the immediate aftermath of World War II with these auteurs at the end of the century (p. 168), working under quite different industrial conditions (p. 144).

The realisms Troon aims to distil in Cinematic Encounters with Disasters are directly opposed to the spectacular visions of Hollywood cinema, counter-proposals that focus on acts of looking (p. 171) rather than heroically overcoming disaster through action (pp. 164-165). Cinema acts, perhaps, by forestalling action and introducing a mediating screen, turning to confront and encounter the other rather than running at high speed from the reality of death, as our action heroes do. The ethical capacity of cinema is often extolled in terms of its efficacy, and yet the appropriate response to disaster is not one measured in terms of efficacy. Further, it is almost paradoxical that the slowness and lingering of realist style also produces an affective “immediacy” often linked to an ethical response. Further still, the realist screen takes on a substantial dimension, protruding almost with its colour and tone in what in one place is called a ‘“nocturnal mass”’ (p. 156). This stands out to me as congruent with Levinas’ ethics that lightly threads the book, insofar as both rely on a substantialised “otherness” that overcomes the viewer or subject. Troon even includes a brief reflection on “VR” environmental experiences, mixing “illusion” and “embodiment” with “an obviously ethical dynamic” (p. 129), though the point is not fully developed. The risk is that the more “realist” cinema becomes, the less cinematic – that is, the less it relies on the specific medium of cinema and more on reaching beyond the screen into non-aesthetic substances.

So be it, perhaps. Troon’s conclusion gestures beyond the institutional boundaries of cinema to YouTube videos and informal recordings. Troon considers William Basinski’s near-incidental Disintegration Loop 1.1 (2004) as part of the logical progression of realist style. A sort of Todesfuge of a post-9/11 New York skyline as the sun sets – “strike the violin darker then rise as smoke in the air / then a grave in the clouds there is so much more room”¹ – smoke billows oppressively from an unseen ground zero. It is a detached view whose proximity seeps through in the extended length. There is an irony in the way the act of looking, so slow and laborious, also returns to the centre of Hollywood’s spectacular disaster imaginary: New York. Basinski’s “film” turns the specific location into an abstract disaster, while Hollywood turns it into a metonym for civilisation as such. One wonders whether even the spectacles of Hollywood disaster are capable of such resignification under pressure from mounting catastrophe. Art, Theodor Adorno wrote, “today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates apocalypse.”² 

Space and time are capable of transformations even in the realist cinema that consists in a single static long-take. The way space is described in Diaz’s Death in the Land of Encantos as defined by the time it takes to traverse (p. 150), as if it remains a static territory awaiting human movement, ignores the way the space changes in relation to time. Even the darkness of Time of the Wolf changes its nature depending on the time we spend immersed in it. My point is that the reality represented by realism is subject to transformation. One way to theorise this transformation is as a way of exceeding the human perspective, recalling the aspirations of cinema form as far back as Vertov’s Kino-Eye. Cinema affects us because it is the product of a non-human eye, and yet it is shaped by human, aesthetic intentions. Troon’s theoretical sources lean towards the post-human, yet his interpretations remain grounded in a human perspective. Cinematic realism in Troon’s book becomes a container for the tension between these perspectives, as well as a stage for the encounter between the human and the more-than-human.

Simon R. Troon, Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

Endnotes