Disaster porn and Pompeii

Dana Stevens, TV and pop culture blogger at Slate, shares some interesting thoughts about the Discovery Channel's special Pompeii: The Last Day:

In the recent (and excellent) documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, the director and film scholar Thom Andersen makes the argument that disaster movies tend to appear at moments when a culture is in crisis about the legitimacy of authority (hence the burgeoning of the genre in the post-Watergate years). Representations of natural destruction on a massive scale—fires, floods, earthquakes—must be somehow paradoxically comforting, he theorizes, perhaps because they allow us to imagine the worst fate the gods can visit upon us, while still allowing us, the viewers, to survive.

I wonder what it says about the current cultural moment that this weekend there will be a golden opportunity to ponder the wrath of nature on television. The Discovery Channel special Pompeii: The Last Day, premiering Sunday night (9 p.m. ET), combines science documentary and historical fiction to create a variant on the genre the writer Paul Lukas once dubbed "weather porn." Pompeii is natural-disaster porn; it may rely on impeccable historical research and painstaking dramatic reconstruction, but its real reason for existence is the money shots, spectacular sequences of mass chaos and suffering that, as Lukas writes, "leave you staring slack-jawed at the screen, mumbling, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God' and 'Holy s**t, holy ****ing s**t.'"

Read the rest of her post here.