"It's like a scene from a disaster movie," said Sendai resident Kumi Onodera in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated eastern Japan last month. She was far from alone in making this comparison - although Japanese people are used to living with earthquakes few had experienced anything like this before. Increasingly, when we find ourselves in extreme situations, we look to films to help us make sense of them. In films, stories like this are far more common than in reality. They may not be realistically represented but the moral values they attach to human behaviour in extremis, together with narratives that try to make sense out of arbitrary events, can provide traumatised people with a framework that helps them reconnect with day to day life.
It didn't take long, in the aftermath of the Japanese catastrophe, for people elsewhere to start wondering how they might cope in a similar situation. The London Evening Standard featured a lurid double page spread of a sunken London with Big Ben protruding from remarkably clean looking waters. Many will find this kind of thing ghoulish, yet it taps into an important part of the human psyche. Major disasters are frightening for all of us, whether or not we're caught up in them directly. Rehearsing our responses to disasters, whether in conversation, in art or in dreams, helps us to feel secure.
Recent research has shown that around a third of the average person's dreams contain threatening elements. These are not necessarily nightmares but, rather, they present challenges that the dreamer has to deal with. They're more common in children, who need to experience a safe environment for some years before they adapt to it emotionally, and they're more common in people of all ages who have experienced trauma. But rather than being a problem, these dreams can be seen as a healthy thing, part of the readjustment process. Many trauma counsellors believe that the process works all the better when the dreams, and waking fantasies, are talked about with others.
Disaster movies create stories like this which everybody can share. At their best, they provide us with a language for addressing trauma that spans locations and cultures. And they're part of a long tradition. When the brutality of the First World War took soldiers across Europe by surprise, there was a massive surge in the popularity of fantasy stories - among them The Lord Of The Rings - that helped make a sort of narrative sense out of experiences it was otherwise difficult to reconcile with the realities of life in peacetime.
Now some traumatised soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are being offered virtual reality therapy as part of the counselling aimed at helping them recover. This involves using goggles and computer-generated scenarios to help them return to situations like those they saw when at war, so that they can face their traumas again in a safe setting with a trained professional there to talk them through it. But even without professional help, an approach like this can be valuable. A recent study has shown that soldiers who play video games involving combat - even if it's not very realistic - cope better emotionally with the real thing. Contrary to the popular notion that video games can make players more distant from reality, these soldiers seem to be better at readjusting to real life outside the combat zone.
So where does this leave films? Watching films about disaster and war can help survivors re-evaluate their own experiences and fit them into a chain of logic that also makes sense to those who have never gone through that sort of trauma. These films can thereby help to bridge the gap and make it easier for people to talk to unscathed friends and relatives. Of course, not every such film gets it right, and some can feel insulting, but not always in ways you'd expect. Whilst Westerners were shy about referencing Godzilla in the aftermath of the Sendai tsunami, doing so only to scandalise each other, these references started coming from Japanese people almost immediately. Godzilla, after all, is an important symbol of Japan's relationship with disaster and has enabled filmmakers to address symbolically issues which it was much more difficult for them to talk about in a straightforward, realistic way. Where films like the recent Hereafter, which takes an imaginative look at the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, may strike a raw nerve or be considered exploitative (Clint Eastwood pulled the film from screening in Japan), the image of a giant reptile stamping cities underfoot offends nobody and is equally effective at enabling dialogue.
Films which take this approach have to be culturally specific in order to succeed. This is why we've seen such a range of different approaches to America's 9/11 disaster - from the ensemble heroics of World Trade Center to the repressed anger of 25th Hour - as a country which has experienced few such calamities is only now finding its voice within the genre. Previous US disaster film hits have either drawn on events few living people now remember, such as the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, or have taken disasters occurring elsewhere in the world and transferred them to US soil, as in 2012, which did its best to incorporate just about all of them. Lacking authenticity, these films can't reach survivors in the same way as, say, the emerging genre of war documentaries compiled from soldiers' own footage, but their very lack of realism can itself be reassuring when former viewers find themselves plunged into unexpected situations.
So what next for the disaster genre? The more comfortable our day to day lives, the less we are exposed to dramatic narratives of our own. Disasters and wars are rich in powerful human stories and will thus always be attractive to filmmakers, no matter how difficult they may be politically. Many people criticise such filmmakers as vultures, exploiting the suffering of others for their own profit, but it's worth bearing in mind that, whatever their motives, they may also be helping survivors. There are times when, faced with terrifying real life situations, it's helpful to be able to tell oneself "It's only a movie."
