秋分

昨天在去接安宝儿的路上听NPR，车堵在17街上的时候，正好是一个低沉男声出来，在评灾难片与生活里的真灾难。
时间也掐得刚刚好，我快抵达FDIC楼门口的时候，他说完了。
当时忙乱，不过对他最后那句，“The movie doesn’t have to show you how long the tunnel is. You see the light, the credits roll, and you know that either the hero or whoever the hero was trying to save will be OK.
And the next 30, 50 or 100 years? That’s left for the sequel that never gets made.”印象十分深刻，甚至回家以后，依然有这个人的声音在脑子里转。
早上来上班又想起这个来，网上一搜（感谢伟大的互联网，咨询交换分秒必达），就搜出来了。
原来是那位著名的Bob Mondello出品。
先把全文收录，供稍后翻译。
另外，说到灾难片，以前有一次想起，忽然发现大多灾难片有以下共同点：
1，男猪脚大都婚姻失败（2012, The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds)，有孩子，影片开头必然要让他跟前妻见面，然后对比前妻现在的衣食无忧好生活。
2，但凡逃难，必要跟孩子一起，发挥之前未能发挥的父爱。
3，最后前妻总要发现前头人总是最好。
这么看来，好莱坞蛮传统的嘛，就是借灾难片的壳，行破镜重圆的实。然而灾难毕竟万年一遇，当然共同经过山崩地裂以后有革命情谊，可是生活里还是鸡毛蒜皮的琐碎，共得大苦，未必能同小甘。
闲话不说，还是上美文

Disasters In Reel Life: It’s About Time (And Suspense)
by Bob Mondello

We’ve been through a lot in the past year or so. We’ve been shaken by earthquakes, pummeled by boulders the size of houses, chased by lava, smothered by ash clouds, battered by tidal waves — and that was all in the movie 2012. Let’s not even talk about The Road or The Book of Eli.

Now, all those cataclysms were perfectly persuasive; in fact, Hollywood’s gotten so good at making them persuasive that disaster movies are almost always cited these days for their “realism.”

So how come when a real disaster strikes, it feels so different?

The most obvious disconnect is how long it takes. If the Gulf oil spill were happening in a film, you’d see oil-covered polar bears within hours of the Deepwater Horizon’s demise. Never mind that in real life, disasters mostly roll out slowly and with scattered effects: In films, they obey the classic Aristotelian unities — one big catastrophe, taking place really quickly. No thousands of years for global warming to create an ice age; in The Day After Tomorrow, it takes 48 hours.

There are lots of other differences, of course. Disaster movies have characters; real disasters have casualties. Disaster movies are exciting; real disasters are agonizing.

And things happen in a different order — something else you can blame on Aristotle. His rules for effective drama call for rising action leading to a climax, and across two millennia we’ve gotten so used to that formula that now we see it in real life. Election cycles, sports tournaments, childbirth, Thanksgiving dinners — they all feature slow buildups to a climactic event.

Disasters are disasters, in fact, because they don’t follow that dramatic arc. Disasters happen, and then we have to deal with them — sometimes for decades.

Disaster fiction won’t work that way: If you start with your catastrophe, you’ve got nowhere to go except cleanup, and where’s the fun in that? So directors start by introducing victims we’d normally meet only after they’ve been dodging tidal waves or meteors or whatever. Screenwriters put warning signs everywhere — temperature dials, radiation meters, whatever’s appropriate to the coming apocalypse, anything that can be ignored or misjudged or gazed at uncomprehendingly by the folks on screen.

This has to do with what Alfred Hitchcock said about how suspense is the audience knowing something the characters don’t. In real life, nobody knows anything, so suspense isn’t really the issue.

Prior to 9/11, if you’d asked most people what would happen if a jumbo jet crashed into a skyscraper, they’d have guessed the building would either stay standing or get knocked over sideways. The reality, now seared into a generation’s consciousness, seems obvious after the fact. Even as it happened, you understood why it was happening — how each floor’s collapse was putting more weight on the floor below — but the building’s vertical fall wasn’t what you expected. Nor was that enormous cloud of ash — a visual that now shows up in all sorts of movies, but one that no one had considered until we were all horrified by it in real life.

And that points to the biggest difference between disasters cinematic and disasters authentic: In real life, catastrophes are just catastrophes. In films, something good almost always comes of them — a last-minute rescue, a family unified, a disgraced scientist vindicated — some kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

The movie doesn’t have to show you how long the tunnel is. You see the light, the credits roll, and you know that either the hero or whoever the hero was trying to save will be OK.

And the next 30, 50 or 100 years? That’s left for the sequel that never gets made.