Popular Culture and Disasters
How art, literature, cinema, and news will influence our survival on the planet
Human civilization has never experienced something like the COVID-19 outbreak that has now not only crippled the global economy but “paused” normal life as we know it, extending to all domains; social, cultural, psychological, financial, and ecological. The only close precedent is the wrongly named Spanish Flu or Influenza outbreak of 1918–19 that wiped out around 39.3 million people worldwide in the aftermath of World War I about 0.5% of the world population. World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30th January 2020, some of the required steps to arrest spread being social distancing and travel restrictions. Soon afterward, the “Namaste Trump” event hosted by Prime Minister Modi to welcome US President Donald Trump happened on February 24th in a packed Motera Stadium in Gujarat. By March 11th the outbreak was declared a pandemic by the WHO. India declared a total lockdown and complete travel restrictions on March 23rd. In a couple of days, India witnessed one of the greatest exoduses after partition with migrant labourers from cities walking back to their homes in villages, with many collapsing from starvation and exhaustion and dying. How did this eventuality escape the attention of the public and decision-makers despite the numerical superiority of the working class in our country? How did we remain complacent about the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis until it was too late? Are these outbreaks just isolated “acts of nature” or are they manifestations of our larger inability to deal with a major crisis? This prompts the question. Does the inadequate and erroneous portrayal of disasters in popular culture cause governments, society, and businesses to neglect preparedness to combat these in a holistic manner? Research shows that it does.
The inadequate representation of disasters and existential threats is starkest in literature. As Amitav Ghosh claims in his essay The Great Derangement, “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than even within the public arena” (Ghosh 7). To prove the scarcity of its portrayal Ghosh cites entries in major literary journals and book reviews like The New York Times Review where climate change occurs more in connection with non-fiction than fiction. He reasons that the hesitation to base fiction on climate change and other environmental crises could be because of the lack of immediacy of their effects on most writers and readers. Ghosh himself recognized its significance after hearing older relatives recount how his family’s displacement by a Padma river flood shaped their family history. It can also be attributed to the “complexities of technical language which forms our window to climate change” (Ghosh 9). He cites Arundhati Roy and Paul Kingsnorth as examples of authors who are deeply passionate about environmental issues but have restricted their writings on climate to non-fiction.
But why is the portrayal in the fiction genre significant? Isn’t scientific and other non-fiction material sufficient? Fiction is significant because popular culture “generates and sustains our desires for vehicles, appliances, food, and certain kind of dwellings and gardens which are primary drivers of the carbon economy” (Ghosh 10). Amitav Ghosh uses the example of a speeding automobile to drive home the point. The vast majority of us desire and purchase it not out of “love for metal or chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering” (Ghosh 10) but because we associate it with a kind of freedom, mobility, adventure and prestige that popular culture including literature and movies portray, normalize and glorify.
What about depiction in media? Media includes print, television, and with the recent explosion in smartphone ownership, even social media. Jason Thistlethwaite and Daniel Henstra in their paper Leveraging Media Coverage of Disasters to Support Disaster Risk Reduction, explore the possibility of media playing a positive role in disaster risk reduction by analyzing existing research on news media’s role in disaster policy. One of their findings is that “stories that frame disaster risk as urgent and solvable through policy intervention increase the likelihood of policy change because they counter the often prevailing perception that disaster impacts are the inevitable result of living with nature” (Thistlethwaite & Henstra 4). But their research did not find encouraging trends. Focussing on newspaper coverage of two significant floods in Canada, they found that reportage mostly covered short term impacts of the hazard rather than disseminating policy issues related to flood risk and the possibility of holistic long term mitigation. (Thistlethwaite & Henstra 1)
Films are another influential medium. As Sayantani Satpathi and Jaime N. Smith explain in their paper, in the absence of any real-life experience with natural disasters, cinema audiences frame their own social and political risk-perception based on the construction of risk within cinema’s narrative. They also explain how scientific understanding of disasters is often framed through “massive amounts of technical material” (Smith & Satpathi 2) which leads to a chasm in the understanding of risk and preferred policy response between public and technical experts. “Culture provides socially constructed myths which form the foundation for a socially constructed risk perception” (Smith & Satpathi 3). As a result, the cultural hegemony of the middle and prosperous classes ensures that socially formed perceptions of risk center around perspectives of these classes. To take the example of a mainstream Bollywood movie, Tum Mile (2009) portrays how the struggle to survive amidst the 2005 Mumbai floods, creates the emotional trigger for a separated couple to reunite. While the director claims that the film does depict the role of governmental laxity, the fact remains that disaster and its true socio-economic and ecological realities form just a backdrop in most movies, becoming merely a narrative device or a tension generating special effect. This is not to rule out exceptions. Contagion (2011) is a disturbingly accurate premonition of the COVID-19 crisis and attempted to throw light on the unprepared government response that follows a pandemic outbreak, but even there, the chosen perspective was unsurprisingly middle class, struggling with containment in spacious apartments and ruing separation from their beloved. It is also rare that mainstream cinema connects recurring disasters to climate change.
The effect of this cultural construction of our risk perception is more far-reaching than we fathom. Isn’t it jarring that as extreme climate events like the Australian bushfire and annually recurring Kerala floods announce the immediacy of climate change, public policy still prioritizes military budgets over the environment, agriculture and health? The currency of terms like “work from home” and “stay home-stay safe” on Indian social media right before the migrant labour exodus shows how mainstream middle-class imagination fails to acknowledge the deprivation of dwelling space, stable income, hygiene, clean drinking water and food among India’s vast daily wage workforce. It is time for a collective reflection on the inclusivity of our imagination and risk perception, and what we prioritize as a species. Is it okay that the military budgets of some countries exceed the healthcare spending of entire continents? Disasters like the COVID-19 that cut across socio-economic barriers in their spread can hopefully serve as reminders that our collective consciousness and imagination must now include the concerns of all, and concerns informed by proper scientific understanding of the looming environmental catastrophe.
Read The Personal Is Pandemic by Arjun Bhatia
Works Cited
- Ghosh, Amitav. The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Penguin UK, 2018.
- Hindustan Times. “Tum Mile: a love story amid Mumbai deluge”. Hindustan Times, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/tum-mile-a-love-story-amid-mumbai-deluge/story-0RjpvA0fDJevwIkljw5WoO.html. Accessed 14th May 2020.
- Petersen, Hannah-Ellis. “‘Namaste Trump’: India welcomes US president at Modi rally”. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/24/namaste-donald-trump-india-welcomes-us-president-narendra-modi-rally. Accessed 5th April 2020.
- Roser, Max. “The Spanish flu (1918–20): The global impact of the largest influenza pandemic in history” Our World Data, https://ourworldindata.org/spanish-flu-largest-influenza-pandemic-in-history. Accessed 14th May 2020.
- Satpathi, Sayantani, and Jamie Smith. “Understanding the Impact of Disaster Movies on the Social Construction of Risk Perception.”
- Thistlethwaite, Jason, and Daniel Henstra. “Leveraging Media Coverage of Disasters to Support Disaster Risk Reduction.” Centre for International Governance Innovation, November 2019.
- World Health Organisation. “WHO Timeline-COVID 19”. World Health Organisation, https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19. Accessed 5th April 2020.
- Tum Mile. Directed by Kunal Deshmukh, performances by Emran Hashmi, Soha Ali Khan, Sachin Khedekar, Sony Music, Vishesh Films, 2009.
- Contagion. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, performances by Marrion Cotillard, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Warner Bros, 2008.
About the author: Ashwin Sreekumar is an Electrical Engineer by profession, who had a change of heart and decided to pursue civil services preparation due to his interest in policy, governance, and economics which led him to be selected for the Young India Fellowship in 2019. He seeks to use his writing, creative, and managerial skills to create positive change in the social development sector through innovative interventions and ventures. In his free time, he can be found reading about military history or pencil sketching. He is fond of dogs, monsoons, and cutting chai.
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