How We Imagine Disasters - And Why It's Often Wrong

Mitch Stripling (: 00:00

when we were all stuck at home during the early COVID lockdowns and we were trying to take care of our kids and watching television and working from home and endless hours, you know, stretched in front of us contemplating existence, definitely the first thing I thought about doing was buying a gun. I mean, I don't know about you, but like that was right at the top of

million guns in: 2020

I know, right? It's super weird because you can understand why people might think they need to arm, right? We have a long history of people thinking they need to arm themselves in other kinds of disasters, but the COVID -19 pandemic, we were pretty much in pajama pants and then occasionally buying toilet paper. You can't shoot a virus. I mean, well, you would need a tiny laser. Well, Trump thought you could. Sure. So, you know, there was that. But is there something about how we think about disasters that's causing that, do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that we have a way of imagining what a disaster is, and that way of imagining what a disaster is requires you to, you know, arm up and get yourself ready like Bruce Willis to go out there and fight some, I don't know, disasters, some earthquakes, some viruses, some floods, right? So what we're going to talk about in this episode is the way in which we imagine disasters and the tools we use to shape those imaginations. This means we get to talk about disaster movies.

and video games. I know, right? And occasionally other cultural forms like the novel, right? I'll eyebrow of you. I know,

We're so excited for this conversation because we've never gotten to delve this far into such ridiculousness as the ideas of disasters that come through in all kinds of American cultural products, whether that's fiction projects like movies or the kind of storytelling inherent in preparedness itself. Anyway, we've got two great guests. John Carr is an emergency management analyst from the Argonne National Laboratory and the author of several papers by himself and with Samantha Montano.

on disaster movies and their relevance to disaster response. And also we've got Lindsay Thomas, who's an associate professor of literature at Cornell University and the author of a great book, Training for Catastrophe, Fictions of National Security After 9 -11, which talks about how we use storytelling in our national security apparatus. So let's get to it.

Mitch Stripling (: 03:04

you all for jumping into the ring with Jordan and I. We really appreciate it.

Lindsay Thomas (: 03:10

Thanks for having me.

John Carr (: 03:10

Thanks so much.

Mitch Stripling (: 03:12

I guess I want to know because we're going to start talking about preparedness and the construction of preparedness. Does Titanic count as a disaster movie? John, do you actually know? Is there an answer to that question?

John Carr (: 03:26

I mean, it all depends on how you define it. And that's something that was a big challenge for a lot of our work early on is how in the world do you start with that? The film and the literature community has a whole subsection that just talks about how to define genre, how to start with that topic. And so for us, we go back to Quarantelli, back to the 1970s, how he defined it. So, you know, it's, you know, the disaster itself has to be the driving plot point.

It has to be that it's a movie, not a mini series, that kind of thing. And so that's how he defines a disaster movie. So for Dr. Montano and I that we do this type of research, we'd say yes. And it absolutely had an effect on real world disasters. That was something that it affected 9 -11 and a couple other things.

Mitch Stripling (: 04:16

So having done that study, and I love first of all that Quarantelli defined disaster movies for us as well as everything else in the world. Do you have a favorite disaster movie?

John Carr (: 04:23

Yeah.

Yeah, my personal favorite would probably be only the brave about the yarn. I'll Hill fire. Yeah, it's just, I mean, for the, for starters, it's just a beautiful movie. It's really good. It's really compelling. And then from, you know, a professional standpoint, it's really well done. There's a lot of people, you know, Jim Whittington on Twitter, if, if you're a big follower of him doing wildfire, PIO work, he's had a lot of, good threads talking about how that's a pretty accurate movie.

Mitch Stripling (: 04:35

All right.

John Carr (: 04:57

And yeah, it's one of my favorites, it's great.

Mitch Stripling (: 05:01

Alright, Lindsay, what about you? You're jumping into the world here. What do you think?

Lindsay Thomas (: 05:06

This, so you told us you were gonna ask this question and I have thought about this all day, struggling to understand what is my favorite disaster movie. I think anytime you ask an English professor, what's your favorite novel, what's your favorite movie, you're gonna get a lot more than you bargained for with that question. However, I tried to narrow it down and I think I can answer and say my favorite disaster film, although I'm not sure now that this would fit the definition that John has just laid out is The Night of the Living Dead and then any.

any zombie movie. I'm a big fan of the zombie genre. I tend to like disaster movies that tilt more in the horror direction. And so those tend to be my favorite.

Mitch Stripling (: 05:46

Alright, Jordan, you're up. Zombies, fire, what's your disaster? Fire zombies?

Lindsay Thomas (: 05:50

you

Jordan Pascoe (: 05:53

Yeah, definitely Fire Zombies. You know, I love The Day After Tomorrow largely for the frozen New York City library scene. Like I'm here for any movie that wants to take on the New York City public library. And that was one of the sort of first disaster movies I remember seeing as a teenager. That and Twister, which is a perfect film. You can't argue me out of that position. It's perfect.

Lindsay Thomas (: 06:23

Yeah, Twister is really up there for me too. I considered answering Twister. That's yeah, formative to childhood. Yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 06:24

I love the dick.

John Carr (: 06:28

Mm -hmm.

Mitch Stripling (: 06:28

One of the best soundtracks of any disaster movie also and a key Philip Seymour Hoffman performance in the early years, right? So I love it. Twisters has a lot to live up to. And The Day After Tomorrow, I remember that so vividly because it's the only film I've ever seen where the ice chases someone down a hallway. You know, he's literally being chased by ice. I was shocked that my favorite...

Jordan Pascoe (: 06:30

Thank you.

John Carr (: 06:37

yes absolutely

Mitch Stripling (: 06:58

My favorite disaster movie is either Armageddon or Deep Impact, depending on my mood that day. And I was really shocked, John, looking at IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes that both Sharknado 1 and Sharknado 2 are both better reviewed than either Armageddon or Deep Impact. That seems like a cruel twist of fate.

John Carr (: 07:17

There's no explanation for it. No, that's that's one of those where I mean, it's I mean, you've got something that if it's created for everybody, it's not created for anybody, you know, and so everybody has a different taste. And it is what it is. I think even, you know, Sam and I are top list of, you know, the top five movies are very different between the two of us. She loves invasion of the body snatchers. And, you know, I'm with you. I've got deep impact. And, you know, that's

Different taste for different folks. That's fine.

Mitch Stripling (: 07:49

So give us the rundown just to get us in. You know, we spend a lot of energy on disaster movies, right? There are a lot of them out there. What's the deal? Where does that come from? What are these? How do you break down disaster movies? You know, what do you think about them?

John Carr (: 07:55

Mm -hmm.

So I think, you know, from a, from a experiential standpoint, a lot of it is us wanting to experience something that we can't experience, no different than a roller coaster or, you know, going and looking at paintings. It's something where we want to have some sensory experience of something that isn't in our daily life. So we go and we watch Jaws because it gets our heart racing, you know, our hair stand up.

we get to experience that fear, even if I'm sitting here in Missouri, you know, thousands away, thousands of miles away from, from all of that. it's just something that we want to experience. And it's also escapism where we know that we are far from it. It's not something where I'm, I'm constantly under threat of tornado here in Missouri. It happens once in a while. but I can watch Twister and not worry about, you know, the next three days, if there's going to be a tornado every single day. so that element of escapism as well.

is something that people go for. And then to add to that, you know, just the standard movie set up of we want something that we see and experience and that resembles the things that are in our daily lives where, you know, I'm not the rock, but I definitely know some of the feelings of, you know, trying to protect my family, worrying about if they're going to be okay, you know, missing loved ones, those types of things I can connect with. And so it's one of those where

the filmmakers are trying to give us things that we can relate to while also giving us things that are that element of escapism. And by packaging all of that up, that's what we really buy into. And that's specific to disaster movies, but I mean, every genre has those same types of elements of what we're looking for and why we show up for that particular film. Everybody has their different things and why they go to their specific movies.

Mitch Stripling (: 09:53

You know, we're going to talk a lot about what's happened since 9 -11. Y 'all studied sort of disaster movies in that period. Have they changed since then? Are there different trends that people have focused on in that time?

John Carr (: 10:00

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, different researchers will tell you different things, but you can definitely see that there are, there's echoes of different events as you follow up, you know, within the six or 10 years after some of those big events. So you look at, I think it was Cloverfield was one that, I mean, it is a alien monster movie, but I think in that one, they actually say something like, is this a terrorist? I think they actually quote that exactly. and it's one of those where the filmmakers were saying,

you know, we're just dealing with the reality where everybody in that, you know, me as a high schooler during that era, if there's a big puff of smoke in Kansas city, that's the first thing that comes to your brain. And so that's the reality that they're showing in that film. And the same thing goes for any of those other films in that era. They are showing that same types of the same type of stuff, even if it is a Marvel movie or a war movie or some of those other things there.

again, trying to show things that the viewer can relate to. And so you see that there, you go back further and you see those same echoes in the civil defense era, where you look at another one of my favorites, Dr. Strange Love, where, you know, now it's very funny because we're so far distanced from that. But at the time, you know, they're dealing with very serious stuff and how insane this reactivity is to that particular scenario. And, and

That's the type of stuff that we're looking at where we see those echoes of something where you have an event, things cool down, and then that starts to echo through. You also have the production lag of 9 -11 happens, and then at a minimum it takes three to six years for something to actually be written, approved, paid for, filmed, and then the final cut makes it out there. So there's a little bit of that as well.

Mitch Stripling (: 11:53

Soon the AIs will really shorten that lag time, I think. It'll be two, three weeks before the movie of the week comes out, but Jake Gyllenhaal will hopefully still be in that movie when it happens. It's like so much societal energy we're putting into that. And Jordan, that's one of the things we wrote about in the chapter. What do you think is happening there? Why do you think we're putting all of this effort into constructing these disasters for our silly little selves to watch?

John Carr (: 11:57

Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Lindsay Thomas (: 12:00

you

John Carr (: 12:03

Right.

Jordan Pascoe (: 12:22

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think that's right that it's a kind of escapism. But I think that there's this, you know, there is this way in which it's escapism, it's pulling us out of our...

Lindsay Thomas (: 12:24

you

Jordan Pascoe (: 12:39

I think that's right, it's like a participatory phenomenon, right? Like one of my favorite pieces of research here was thinking about the relationship between the rise of roller coasters and the 1906 earthquake, right? That like one of the reasons why roller coasters became popular in that period was this kind of like desire to experience the earth like.

very popular in the winter of: 2002

So, you know, I think there's this tension between on the one hand, this disaster escapism that gives us a way of coding what's happening in these sort of exceptional moments. But Lindsay, you write really persuasively about the way that they also normalize and de -politicize disaster and prepare us to experience disaster in those ways. And I think that's really important.

Mitch Stripling (: 13:52

So yeah, maybe Lindsay, let's take a step. I'm going to just highlight the book again because it's also vibrant and it looks like a warning manual. For those of you just on the podcast, imagine sort of a bright yellow daisy but evil a little bit. That's how I think, you know what I mean? So it's like the kind of warning that keeps you away from a nuclear site. Talk us through the construction. I mean, you write a whole narrative, almost a novelistic story about the construction of preparedness after 9 -11. Talk us through it, how it happens, what tools are used.

Lindsay Thomas (: 14:03

You

Jordan Pascoe (: 14:06

You

Lindsay Thomas (: 14:22

Yeah, I mean, it's a long story. It doesn't just begin with 9 -11. I think that's the first important point is that 9 -11, I talk about in the book, is a moment of coalescence rather than creation, right? And so preparedness as a strategy of emergency management and particularly sort of militaristic strategy of emergency management goes back at least to World War II and sometimes we even dated it back to World War I. And so it has a long history.

And that becomes named in the: 1970

e to be created so quickly by: 2002

pre -existed 9 -11, we're already working in various capacities for the federal government and DHS and 9 -11 was kind of this moment of coalescing coming together, right? So that's the first thing is that has a long history and 9 -11 is a impetus toward creating things like DHS, but it doesn't create preparedness per se or even the sort of paradigm of preparedness that dominates federal responses to emergencies after 9 -11. So

That's the first thing. The second thing I would say is, along with what John and Jordan have already touched on, one thing that at least I talked a lot about in the book and that I saw a lot in a lot of the preparedness materials that I looked at is a sort of standardization of approach, right? And the standardization of disaster and a way of thinking about disasters as fundamentally generic.

which is to say a terrorist attack is the same thing in terms of response and mitigation as a pandemic is the same thing in terms of response and mitigation and resource allegation as a earthquake, et cetera. So a kind of lumping of all different kinds of disasters, mass shooter events, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, chemical spills under one umbrella, right? And so that leads to a kind of standardization of approach.

of technique and a standardization I go on to argue in the book of just even thinking about disaster and thinking about how one might approach responding to disaster, which gets into the ultimate, one of the larger arguments in making the book about the normalization of disaster that happens under a preparedness paradigm.

Mitch Stripling (: 17:31

So let's get into it. And I mean, I think now is when we can kind of open this up. And I'm hoping there are going to be different perspectives actually between y 'all as we get in, because this is a hard problem. And I'm just going to put on my emergency manager hat, right, and say part of the reason you try to standardize is because there are certain capabilities, right? And you're trying to grow those capabilities and use them differently in different scenarios. The part I think is so important though is what you write about the imaginative fiction of preparedness.

So I wonder if you can kind of lay that out so we can grow, not just in disaster movies, but in all these other ways. Maybe talk about what you say about how we use fiction to imagine disasters and what that sort of does to our imagination.

Lindsay Thomas (: 18:14

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think the thing that has fascinated me from the beginning since I started working on this project as my dissertation is the fact that training exercises, disaster scenarios that emergency managers and federal officials, for example, use in emergency management are fundamentally fictional narratives. And so the field of preparedness in emergency management is a field in which is very interesting to me as someone who cares a lot about fiction.

and a lot about imagined narratives as a scholar of literature, but as one in which scholars of literature don't really think about as being germane to our work because you're not dealing with published fictions, right? Like a novel or even like a film or something like that or a short story collection, right? And so I was fascinated from the start because it was a context and a domain in which fiction is very important. And I think one of the things that

is so interesting to me is that emergency management and preparedness shares with the field of English, with the field of literary studies, a real investment in the power of fiction to help us learn about the world, right? To teach us things about the world, about the real world, right? And that is super interesting to me. And I'm very cognizant of the fact that I'm sitting in this virtual room with people who actually...

do this and I understand I'm not somebody who actually does emergency management. And so I'm aware of that very much. But I think what ties our two fields together, my field of literary studies and your field of emergency management, is an investment in the power of fiction and the power of imagination, the power of narrative. Because again, these

you know, when you have a training exercise, let's say about a hurricane, for example, a category three hurricane that hits the eastern seaboard, that's a made up thing, right? Even though it might be based on actual hurricanes that have happened, it's gonna be based on what we know about what happens when hurricanes hit particular areas, it could be based on all this real world information and data, fundamentally, it's a made up story, right? And what's so interesting to me is how the training exercises

do things like produce scripts, like you see in films. You produce filmed narratives sometimes in some cases, and induce people to play roles, to act in roles, to place themselves into fictional narratives. So that to me is what has always been fascinating to me about preparedness from the get -go.

Mitch Stripling (: 20:59

So I actually remember before I ever worked in preparedness, I was in an exercise where I got mulodged and I got put on a bus like I was bleeding from a radiation incident with my children at the time who were very, very tiny. And in the exercise, they separated me from the children because they ran us through two different decon zones. And I was like, no, you don't. Your fiction that you have created is not aligned with my reality. Like you are not taking my children.

away from me. And so here's the other question I told you all I would ask, which is what's your favorite preparedness artifact like this? What's the favorite thing that you know of where we've created this kind of preparedness world? Anybody, go for it. I prepped you. I promise.

John Carr (: 21:46

So I think for me, it'd probably be the Sigma project. I think that's, I know that's referenced in a couple of different spots and Lindsay, sorry if I'm taking any of that from you, but just this mindset of, you know, to Lindsay's points, the idea that fiction in many ways can be ahead of the curve from the people that are trying to track down fact that a lot of times in emergency management, we say that we prepare for the last disaster.

We're preparing for, you know, something that's already happened that may be a wildfire that's smaller than the next one that's going to happen, a hurricane that had a smaller storm surge. And with the Sigma project, it was looking at trying to... Lindsay might actually be a better person to talk about that. Lindsay, do you feel comfortable kind of giving us a rundown of it? Yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 22:29

Tell us what it is, yet give us a little broader context on it if you don't know.

Love it.

Lindsay Thomas (: 22:39

Sure, yeah, the Sigma project, I mean, as far as I'm aware, is a sort of science fictional think tank is how they describe themselves and a group of science fiction writers who are kind of often contracts, or at least in the past, contracted with the federal government to produce the sort of written parts of disaster training exercises, the scenarios, the injects that might, that,

participants might use within an exercise like a little narrative snippet that tells them information about the event or tells them information about their role in the exercise. And so Sigma was a group of professional sci -fi writers who spent part of their time contracting with the federal government to create these scenarios.

John Carr (: 23:27

And it was, and it was these, you know, kind of a pulp fiction paperback science fiction authors that, you know, a league of extraordinary people that just got together and it was the opposite of the suits and brass uniforms that you would see. And I know that the story that I was reading through was, you know, in one of these circles, these, these people were kind of laughed out of the room saying this is ridiculous. And then they were talking about the

ridiculous idea of micro bots. And then, you know, just a few years later we hear, they're actually in development. They've got, you know, prototypes that are actually working and then they're, you know, welcomed in. And so we have a meeting where we have the emergency management and the military and the other officials on one side, and you have the authors on the other side and they're given kind of the, the skeleton scripts of here's things that we think may happen kind of the

the thousand foot level, this is what it looks like. We want you to go out into these rooms and flesh out what these ideas look like. Really give us the, again, the pulp fiction paperback version of what this looks like. Tell us what the characters are experiencing for this, you know, military platoon that's out here in the woods. What are they going to be going through for this firefighter? What are they experiencing? And by doing that, again, looking through that fiction, they're creating all these different narratives that are showing

the capacities that people need, the resources that they need, the scenarios that are occurring within this environment. And because you've got both the visionaries and the operations, execution end of things, you're able to verify, validate, and move forward with this and have all of that in one room at one time and really quickly move through and kind of have a vision for what this may look like.

Jordan Pascoe (: 25:10

This would make an amazing television show. Like it's, you know, that would really like.

Mitch Stripling (: 25:13

So.

John Carr (: 25:14

Absolutely. Yeah. And, and again, it's, it's one of the weirder things that Lindsay, maybe you had this similar experience. I found, you know, breadcrumbs of this in different writings, but I had to, I I've got it on my shelf over here somewhere, but it was like a science fiction paper magazine from like 1995 that I had to purchase on eBay. That was the only place I could find more than a page about this. And I, you know, I need to go back through and refresh myself on it, but that was it. And it's like, this is a very, very important thing.

and something that we should still be using, especially in the era of cybersecurity and the weird, crazy things that it can be doing with our critical infrastructure. That's something we really need to be thinking through and the sci -fi people are gonna be the ones that really have a strong idea of how this stuff works. Put them in a room with some of the private sector people and that's where some of that visioning can occur. Absolutely.

Mitch Stripling (: 26:08

So this is where, so I'm going to call this my, I get to drink two beers during these nights. Okay. So this is my second beer question, which is to Dr. Pasco over here, because I love this, right? This idea, this is actually part of the reason I got into emergency management. You're creating this imaginative world, right? You're imagining what a crisis can do and it's like, it's exciting and it's like romantic. And I'm going to rely on you as a philosopher and an epistemologist to like,

shatter my allusions here, you know, as we work through in the book. What's the issue with creating that kind of an imaginary form of a crisis or what are some of the possible issues that you hit?

Jordan Pascoe (: 26:50

Well, I mean, I think part of what we were interested in working out here is the way in which having these, and I think Lindsay is exactly right, these sorts of generic imaginaries, they operate to sort of rewire or reorient us in a moment where we might be experiencing the world in a radically new way, right? Like, John, you have this article, you and Sam, which opens with like the...

the stunning kind of like increase in interest in the movie Contagion, right, in the months leading up to the pandemic. And I think that's a really good example of like this pandemic is coming, people are getting scared and the end in but instead of

I mean, you know, of course you go to a movie, right? You go to something that will make it feel real, that allows you to vicariously experience it so you sort of know and understand what's coming, right? But it means that there's a sense in which that fiction becomes reality because so many people are then collectively imagining this in the same way, in the same key, you could say. So rather than having kind of hyper local experiences unfolding where

different people are, you know, it's like Quaranteli and the elephant, right? We're different people in different parts of the elephant and experiencing radically different things. One of the things that these imaginaries are doing is that they're short -circuiting those moments of perceptual shift. And they're giving people a kind of common language, a common set of tools to interpret this.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's useful to have a common language. It's useful to have something to sort of keynote when we're uncertain or we're in rupture and we're not sure what's going on. But I think one thing we haven't talked about yet is the fact that many of these discourses offer a very particular kind of narrative about disaster that train people to perceive the world in particular kinds of ways. And in the book,

When we talk about this, we look in particular at the stories, the early reporting from Hurricane Katrina, right? There's that famous Oprah Winfrey episode, right? Where she's got the mayor talking about all the violence at the Superdome and the chief of police talking about all the violence at the Superdome. And those stories were totally untrue. But what's wild about them is that they seemed true. They seemed true enough that they got reported on Oprah, they got disseminated widely, and so on and so forth.

And it's not just that they seemed true and so they got this uptake and were later discredited. It's then within the context of the disaster, there are senses in which they became true because responders across the city were hearing these reports and then they were behaving as if that were true, right? And so for example, right, we link together.

that reporting about the Superdome, for example, with the euthanizing of patients at Memorial Hospital, right, which Sherry Fink has written really compellingly about, you know, where it's partly because the doctors are hearing these stories about the Superdome that they understand themselves to be in this level of a desperate situation. And so that's part of what leads them to euthanize these patients.

So I think that it's also important to think about what kinds of stories, disaster movies and these preparedness documents and this sort of whole cluster of, you know, I wanna make sure we get to talk about video games too, right? This whole cluster of cultural artifacts are giving us.

Mitch Stripling (: 30:32

before I want to go deeper into the imagination, before that, let's just do a little analysis at the top level. So I want to know, John, you've looked at these disaster movies, you broke them down, and then you looked at them according to disaster myths. How well did they do accurately capturing a real disaster environment? So what did you find?

when you looked at

John Carr (: 30:51

So we saw a couple different things. So one is on the reality end of things, there's a lot of the stuff that we would expect in a real disaster that's accurately reflected. So the idea that we have pro -social behavior, people helping one another, you have individuals that are not waiting on assistance. They're doing the best things that they can. They're making choices based on the information that they have as opposed to, you know, kind of sitting in the fetal position, just waiting till somebody comes and helps them.

those types of pro -social behaviors, we see those exhibited in almost every movie with the exception of ones that kind of err on the side of like a horror movie, that the whole vibe of them is to give you a very different experience than kind of an action adventure. However, on the myth side of things, we do see quite a bit of the idea of a, what Dr. Montano and I call like a gun grab moment.

This is something that is unique to disaster films and specifically American disaster films. If you look at international ones, there's some really good movies out of Norway, some good ones out of South Korea, some other ones in different places, and that moment doesn't happen in most of those other places. And even in American disaster movies, many of those moments don't lead to

a further reference of those guns later in the film. It's just something where the main characters, that's just what you do. Stuff's hitting the fan. I better grab my gun. And, you know, going back to the idea of genre and the relationship with the society that's watching that movie, that's something that is important to recognize. And with genre, it's one of those things where it's a relationship between the filmmaker, the people that are viewing it.

and the film itself, where is it because the filmmaker's wanting you to see something? Is it because the viewer is expecting that? And so the filmmaker puts that in. It's very, very tough to say, but what we can say is that that is in there as a consistent trope within these movies. And that's at the same time as the pro -social behavior. So a good example is in San Andreas.

Overall, in the movie San Andreas, you see very little antisocial behavior, very little violence, very little aggression. But whenever the rock, you know, crashes into the strip mall area and he decides he needs to get some equipment, there's a moment where he's got a gun in his face and there's this altercation and that brief moment happens. But then still, you know, looking at the, you know, thousand foot level, that still happened in that movie, even though the rest of that is is, you know, pro social.

Same thing with a movie like Greenland. Overall, people are very helpful in that movie, but you still have, you know, Gerard Butler getting attacked in the back of a truck. You still have kids getting kidnapped out of the back of another SUV because they have those. So we see those types of things there. We see the antisocial behavior, those things we call the disaster myths. The research has noted the presence of these disaster myths in disaster movies.

all the way back to the 70s to the towering inferno, the earthquake, those types of older movies. And they are present. They are less prevalent in current disaster movies than in the previous generation and frankly, less prevalent than we would have expected up until we went through. But it's something that the older researchers claimed that that is the reason why we have a perception that these myths happen in disasters.

And for me, going through the research for my dissertation, my takeaway is I think it's probably more likely that people have, going back to the idea of that disaster imaginary, they're wrapping up a lot of other elements of pop culture into their own perception. And the disaster movies have a very, very small part of that.

Mitch Stripling (: 34:56

So let's do a quick rundown then. So what are the other pop culture elements that we're talking about? So Jordan, you mentioned video games. Give us a quick, what's a quick video game example.

Jordan Pascoe (: 35:08

Well, one of the things that we looked at was the rise of first person shooter games in the years after 9 -11, which I think are really, you know, like we talk about sort of Black Hawk down and behind enemy lines as having been these sort of critical cultural tools for kind of gathering support for American military incursion in Iraq. But I think that there was also in one of the things I think a lot about is that in between 9 -11 and Katrina,

those were the core years in which the rise of those first person shooter games happened. Many of them took the form of anti -terrorist games or science fiction variations on that. And so they allow for an even more actively participatory version of some of these imaginaries. And it's striking, you know, I mean, there was a lot of that go get your gun moment in Katrina.

And obviously there's a long history of that. Like I'm not saying it's just video games, but for all the debate that we have over whether or not video games cause violence, multiple studies have shown that video games do make people more likely to interpret others as likely to be violent towards them. And that seems like a really, really important part of constructing.

these kinds of imaginaries, even if the video game is not necessarily disaster oriented, the fact that one of the pervasive features of the first decade of the 20th century is that is the huge rise in popularity of these games. So people are actively engaged in this kind of world of threat, right? A violence that teaches one to interpret any kind of threat as something that's going to require a violent.

interaction.

Mitch Stripling (: 36:57

So I want to ask Lindsay to take us deeper in a second into this, kind of what the world we're creating there, but I want to see if we're missing anything. So we've talked about trainings, exercises, plans, movies, video games, all of these kind of cultural artifacts that are forming our disaster imaginaries. Is there anything I'm missing from that list?

Lindsay Thomas (: 37:18

I mean, I think, I do think literature has a role in this. It's historically certainly has had a huge role. Science fiction as a genre that has had a huge role, I think, in formulating in the 20th century, at least, the kind of older disaster imaginary. I think the status of literature today is interesting and, you know, it doesn't have the same reach and cache as the more what are now more mass media forms like films or video games.

And so I think literature today tends to be thought of and discussed less as a form of mass media or a form of media in which a lot of people are engaging and so therefore could arguably form something like a disaster imaginary and something that's more niche and therefore tends to be like more critical or more interested in sort of reformulating what are perceived as mass culture ideas. But I certainly think in the 20th century,

literature, particularly the genres of science fiction, had a large role to play in constructing a disaster imaginary that probably still we are feeling the legacies of today.

Mitch Stripling (: 38:24

I just want to personally validate this with my own Katrina story. I remember being prepped in Florida to go into Mississippi to work on Katrina and my team leader, and I'm not joking, Lindsay, you're going to think I'm joking, who was reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. He was giving our briefing meeting, like, everybody get ready, do you have supplies? And then at the end of the briefing, he was like, and I hope you're all packing.

because where we're going, you're going to need it. And this was a public health medical assessment team. Do you know what I mean? Three weeks afterwards. And so I do think there's this way that we're creating this world that is maybe not the world we need to be in, right? The disaster movies, they're doing a pretty good job, but there are these glaring areas and they're kind of around violence a little bit, it seems like. So maybe, you know, Lindsay, you've written eloquently about the permanent catastrophe and sort of what that's doing to our... So take us through what you think is...

is happening.

Lindsay Thomas (: 39:24

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the arguments I make in the book is that preparedness training exercises are good at some things. One of the things that they're good at is training particular kinds of people. And I think a lot of this is implicit and or unconscious in a lot of the exercises themselves and or the way in which they're received. But I think what they're very good at is training particular, targeting particular kinds of people to think about disasters in particular kinds of ways, right?

to think about disasters as one -off events, as terrible crisis moments, right, as spectacular type of events like we might see in a movie, right? What I think or what I argue in the book is that a lot of these exercises or preparedness as a paradigm really more than anything are not so good at is...

lected national security from: 2001

A lot of that was again about training people to regard some kinds of events as disasters and to ignore other things that are actually disasters like white supremacy, climate change, to name just two of the big ones that I talk about in the book.

Mitch Stripling (: 41:01

So this is the thing that struck me, just getting into this question, working emergency after emergency and looking at this stuff and going through a lot of preparedness training that never struck me as particularly accurate, right? That was not as good as maybe the Sigma science fiction standards. It's like, is the question of why? And this I think is the most important question for us. And so Jordan, I'm shooting this one squarely at you, right? You know, it seems like a super terrible idea.

for a society to teach disasters in a way that is not accurate because it could lead to more people getting killed, right? I mean, my public health assessment team feeling that they were going into a violent situation is not helpful to the world, right? Knowing that people, thinking that people are threats when they're more than likely not gonna be threats is not great. It doesn't seem like it's gonna have good disaster outcomes. So why?

Why would a society do that? What is our society trying to do with this disaster imaginary?

Jordan Pascoe (: 42:05

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think, you know, you asked the question earlier, what are we missing in the construction of the disaster imaginary? And the two things that I would add onto the table, I think, are two of the oldest threads in the construction of this imaginary, one of which is religion, right? It's the sort of apocalyptic imagination that comes with in certain kinds of religious discourses and narratives. And the other one is our political imaginary. And so we we write about this in the book using

state of nature theorists to think about this, right? We're sort of building here on Naomi Zach's work, who's argued that one way of thinking about what a disaster is, or the way that we imagine what a disaster is, is we think of it as like a rupture or a suspension of our social contract that sends us all back into a state of nature. And, you know, as the philosopher Charles Mills has famously argued, that story of the state of nature is a profoundly

racialized story, right? It is from the very beginning, a profoundly racialized story, which is invented in order effectively to give Europeans a justification for coming over and colonizing and settling the new world, right? It is a construction of the new world, as new, as empty, right? As a state of nature just waiting to be civilized.

And historically, that's precisely the moment where those narratives emerge. And historically, that's precisely the work that they do. And so if we think of it in those terms, we can think of our disaster imaginary as offering us opportunities to recharge that narrative, right? Just sort of recharge racialized and colonial narratives. And in particular, in moments where the actual experience of disaster

might lead to new kinds of coalitions. It might lead to new kinds of communities that would undermine existing kinds of hierarchies. And so one thing our disaster imaginaries do is that they offer people a collective shared way of interpreting what's happening that's actually kind of like recharging and reinvigorating, you know,

And again, those stories from Katrina are a really good example of this, right? The fact that the stories of violence in the Superdome seemed believable, right? It's not just sort of like a misinformation story. It's that people were willing, like that seemed true to so many people. And what that did is it recharged a certain kind of deeply American racial imaginary that

that organized the disaster and its response in particular kinds of ways. And I was thinking about this earlier actually with John, when you were talking about the sort of get your gun moment in these movies and often in movies that are otherwise pro -social all the way through, one of the ways that we think about that is that this state of nature narrative is multi -dimensional. There are multiple states of nature, right? There's the sort of Hobbesian state of nature, which is the go get your gun state of nature. But then there's the Lockean, hey, let me help my neighbors.

state of nature, except my neighbors aren't everyone, right? And those are sort of coexisting and one disaster experience can slide from one to the other. And one response can be organized to be doing both kinds, to be operating in both kinds of sorts of imagined states of nature. So I think it gives us a set of tools for thinking about the complexity of this, that it's not just one narrative, it's these kind of multiple frames that

Lindsay Thomas (: 45:40

Mm -hmm.

Jordan Pascoe (: 45:50

fit neatly like a little puzzle box together that these sort of nest together and then crack open so that they're ready. And part of it is they're ready made and they're familiar. And that familiarity, the fact that so many of us are deeply familiar with these ideas and stories, whether or not we realize they are, that's part of their power.

Lindsay Thomas (: 46:10

that the expectation is part of the power, right? That you expect certain things to happen. I also want to say, Jordan, just jumping back to the Katrina narratives and sort of false narratives and misinformation, not only did it circulate in the media as true, but also then would wind up a couple of years later in the congressional hearings and then the reports produced as documents as fact by the federal government investigating why the response to Katrina didn't go as planned and was so.

bad, right? Is that those stories ended up in that report as evidence of people not listening to the government's instructions, right? And so those false reports end up being documented and reported as fact later on.

Mitch Stripling (: 46:51

And you kind of build on that argument, Lindsay, that sort of fiction is fact argument. What do you think that does to the sort of preparedness enterprise? Do you know where do you think that's led us?

Lindsay Thomas (: 47:04

Yeah, interesting. And I think it's, you know, it's not the same as, but it's of a piece with the really prevalent concern and worries today about misinformation and disinformation, right? It is not the same thing, right? But I say it's related because it, in my view, can lead toward a kind of not only confusion between fiction and reality,

or a greater sort of confusion in the sense of like one isn't sure what actually did happen. Not only that, but also a sort of greater acceptance of explicitly fictional things as having a kind of reality of their own as being sort of, in other words, as disregarding the line between fact and fiction. And as using fictions as evidence of

real world phenomena, that's sort of where I see it tip, it can tip more into the misinformation and disinformation realm and sphere, a sort of general laxity about the distinctions between what is real and what is real, what is real in our world, and what is real in fictional narratives, and how those are two different things.

Jordan Pascoe (: 48:26

And it's worth noting to that, right? It's worth noting how old that pattern is, right? Like I was talking about sort of this invention of the state of nature right around the time, right? Hobbes is writing right around the time that England is beginning to send colonists over. That whole story is an example of what Lindsay just described, right? You've got to get Europeans who are willing to come over and brave the wilderness. How do you do that? By selling them a fiction, by selling them a fictional story of where they're going and what's going to be available to them.

there and that becomes a foundational American story. And so that's part of why I think this story in particular is so deeply rooted and therefore so powerful in these kinds of moments.

Lindsay Thomas (: 49:07

Also just say sorry one more thing is that I think one of the things that it does is it because of the impetus in training exercises because there are lots of Forces at play that aren't they don't have to do with the narratives themselves Really the scenario sometimes can just be sort of more incidental to what the goals of the exercise actually are because that because of that fact I think what what these exercises if you're just looking at the exercises themselves as texts what they can communicate sometimes

Mitch Stripling (: 49:09

Yeah.

Lindsay Thomas (: 49:36

is two pat solutions, right? That, if we just do X, Y, Z, we will solve the problem of this emergency. Everyone will know what to do. Everyone will have their place, and it will be over. We will have solved active shooters. And really, solving active shooters depends on things that are totally outside of the exercise itself, if we want to actually talk about actually solving situations like that.

Mitch Stripling (: 50:02

You know, that's, you know, Lee Clark's Plans as Fantasy Documents is one of my favorite books for that reason. And it talks about how when you write an emergency plan, you're often writing it to just soothe your bosses rather than actually solve a real world problem. And that was, it's not great for the exercise design teams of the world, but you're often designing an exercise that executives will be okay with, which I guess lessens your incentive to make sure your fiction corresponds with the world. I guess my question is, and John, I'm going to put it to you over the 20 years of

Lindsay Thomas (: 50:06

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 50:31

disaster movies is, do you think we are getting better? Maybe movies can answer this, but in emergency management, we think, well, we did the post -Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act and so on and so forth, and we did Papa and Papaya and all these other things in the public health world. Are we getting better at imagining these disasters? Have movies gotten better anyway? Do you know that one?

John Carr (: 50:55

I'd say no. I mean, the challenge that we have is, you know, the hazards that they're actually showing are, you know, in many cases, the ones that are creating the least amount, if we want to put a dollar amount on it, they're creating the least amount of damage each year. So just looking at, you know, for Dr. Montano and I's study, we looked at 20 years worth of disaster movies, 2000 to 2020. The most common ones that we saw were

tornadoes, earthquakes, planetary or astronomical. So things comets, asteroids, those types of things. But if we look at something like hurricanes, there were very, very few of those. There were one wildfire movie. I'm just looking through my list right now. One wildfire movie, one tsunami, one electrical storm.

I think there were three hurricane movies or there were nine hurricane movies. So there were more than that. But still, you know, for something like wildfire, one wildfire movie over a 20 year period, as opposed to the current reality that we're living in, that does not seem proportional to, you know, the, for us, we look at the opportunity of communicating exactly what you're talking about, Mitch, where developing this perception in the public eye.

Developing the understanding of what's going on, looking at from an operational standpoint. Here's what a wildfire event looks like. Here's who's active in a wildfire event. Here's what it would look like to experience this as a family. There's really only one wildfire movie and that's only the brave. And that's from the perspective of a wildland firefighter, a very different experience than if you were to flip and look at, you know, San Andreas, where you show, you know, the rock has his character and he's a rescuer.

But everybody else, they're civilians, they're experiencing the disaster and it's showing different perspectives of that. And that's one thing for Dr. Montano and I that we're pushing for is to show some of those realities that there's lots of very interesting events that are out there and we're not showing the things that we are standing in the face of right now, the things that are going to happen in the next 10, 15 years. Because if we can change that,

disaster imaginary for this group, then that's going to affect how people are voting, how people are supporting the work of FEMA. You know, right now, a big challenge we're facing is the lack of capacity and emergency management at a local state federal level. You know, FEMA right now is drastically understaffed. And it's one of these where if the public had a greater, you know, risk perception of what was happening, maybe some of that would change.

Mitch Stripling (: 53:22

Yeah.

John Carr (: 53:36

And so the fact that we have one wildfire movie over 20 years, that to me signals that we could be doing something differently. And of course, that's not what filmmakers priorities are, but that's something that we're advocating for to say, you can help us and you can make a really cool Michael Bay level movie. That's also going to make you money and do the things that you want as well. You can make your 2012, you can make your day after tomorrow, and it can be about a wildfire movie and everybody can be satisfied.

Mitch Stripling (: 54:04

But, but...

John Carr (: 54:04

Right, that's what I'm looking at. So yes, we're not showing the hazards that we are at greatest risk for and it's affecting us.

Lindsay Thomas (: 54:07

Thanks for watching.

Mitch Stripling (: 54:15

Maybe we can aim higher than Michael Bay. Maybe we can aim for a Jordan Peele level movie. And you know, it really struck me when you were talking, you know, I read the Ministry for the Future recently, which is a great book about imagining future catastrophes, and it opens with an extreme heat incident. And it was one of the few times that I had experienced extreme heat in any kind of format. And in a literary format, it works really well. And I guess, Lindsay, I'm going to use that to segue to you first.

I just want to be clear, I know that you haven't said your favorite preparedness artifact yet, okay? So I'm still coming for you. But also, what do you think we could do to improve the way that we imagine these disasters? Are there other ways that you can imagine them that you've thought about?

Jordan Pascoe (: 54:50

Hahaha

Lindsay Thomas (: 55:04

Yeah, this is a very tough question, you know? And I think one answer is within the realm of what emergency management, as I understand it, can do and does do very well, right? Often, which is, you know, think in really detailed terms about how to allocate resources and sort of logistics, right? And so I think thinking through

on the ground in terms of on the ground reality about allocating resources not according to pre -existing paradigms that exist for good reason sometimes but that often fall short of actually capturing reality right but sort of walking through developing more I guess on the ground knowledge with people in the community right and that's a really hard a really hard thing I know right because every community is different disasters are going to affect different communities of people differently.

So that's one general answer. Another answer is maybe even harder, which is like the answer is not within the realm of emergency preparedness always. The answer is actually outside of emergency preparedness. Once we get to the crisis, for a lot of things, I'm not trying to say emergency preparedness isn't important, but it's too late. What we need is to build up social welfare systems that will help people.

to not be on the precipice. And so when a disaster happens, they actually aren't thrown over that precipice, right? Or they have systems and support, social systems and support to rely on in the event of disaster. And I think that is something that's missing when we're just only thinking about preparedness, right? When preparedness is posed as the only answer.

to catastrophes and to disasters, right? It's one way of dealing with things that happen, but it can't be the only way.

Mitch Stripling (: 57:03

So Jordan, what do you think building on that? I mean, if preparedness isn't the only way or preparedness is infected with these sort of state of nature disaster, well first, is it like Attorneys General? Would it be states of nature or state of natures? Maybe you can clarify that for us. What do you think?

Jordan Pascoe (: 57:21

And we go with states of nature, I think. Yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 57:23

Okay, good. Thanks for the definition. And then how do you think we can break out of it or can we? Is it embedded so deep that any attempt at preparedness is going to be stuck within that imaginary?

Jordan Pascoe (: 57:38

Well, one framework that we found really useful when we were thinking through this is the epistemologist Lorraine Code draws on Cornelius Castoriadis' distinction between what she calls instituted imaginaries and instituting imaginaries. And I wish they had better names because that doesn't sound that different. But, yeah, petition for a better name for this distinction.

Mitch Stripling (: 57:56

It's not a Michael Bay movie, you know, we can agree on that.

Jordan Pascoe (: 58:04

But I think, you know, I do think that part of it is the work of seeding new kinds of imaginaries, is, you know, it's building a different kind of repertoire of stories. So like, John, I think this question of like, could we be making different kinds of disaster movies is a really powerful one. You know, like we didn't get to talk about my favorite preparedness artifact, one of which I have to say is just Mitch's story of how

he got into disasters from being a theater kid and so staging preparedness exercises too. Like I think that's like an amazing story. Anyway, sorry, sorry.

Mitch Stripling (: 58:39

that story. That's an embarrassing story for me. geez.

Lindsay Thomas (: 58:43

Mitch, you have to read Tracy Davis's book. Have you read Tracy Davis's book? It's all about theater and Cold War civil defense. It's really good. Yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 58:46

No, no.

okay, okay. Love it.

Jordan Pascoe (: 58:51

I'm afraid if you're LA. But the other one, and we'll talk more about this in the next episode, were the CDC's pandemic preparedness plans that they wrote after SARS in 2008. Because those plans, right, which laid out sort of what lockdowns would look like and what impact this would have on individual liberty and so on and so forth, made absolutely no mention.

of the fact that shutting schools would lead to a crisis of care. It was nowhere in the documents. They just absolutely missed it. And when the pandemic happened, it took about, I don't know, negative eight minutes before all of us were like, well, fuck, what are we gonna do with the kids, right? And that became one of the defining features of that experience of lockdown.

and the preparedness documents completely missed it, which is to say that in some sense, like this to me is a really interesting example of this kind of problem of fiction, we radically misunderstood through the entire process of preparedness, what kind of social and economic disaster a pandemic was gonna be, right? And part of the reason I think we missed that was because, you know, we've talked a little bit here about...

the kind of racialization of these imaginaries, but there's also a very strongly gendered dimension to this, right? Like we've touched a little bit on the kind of the heroism of disaster movies, for example, right? But that celebrates and emphasizes a very kind of like exceptional masculine form of disaster labor.

And it de -emphasizes the ways in which disasters also surge all kinds of caregiving labor, right? The critical role of caregiving, reproductive and relational labor in disasters. And so to me, those pandemic preparedness documents just remain just utterly like mind boggling.

that so many, like the list of authors for those is so long, none of them were like, I don't know, what are the kids doing here? Like, who's taking care? No one thought it, right? And so to me, this is part of the question of like, well, how do we imagine differently? We might need different people in the room when we imagine. We might need different perspectives to bring to the table, to think about what is a pandemic? What is it? What kind of social, political, economic,

rselves where we did in early: 2020

Mitch Stripling (: 1:01:33

We were in some ways poor novelists, right? These kind of ticks that you're talking about, these sort of underlying racial imaginaries and the sort of the biases that we're carrying are in some ways making us poor imaginers, right? It's making our imaginations worse and not up to the job that they need to be up to for these crises.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:01:36

you

If you're in the John Updike novelization of a pandemic, right? Like you're gonna miss some stuff.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:01:56

I mean, I

Mitch Stripling (: 1:02:03

a little John Updike shade happening.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:02:03

Yeah, just shade for John Updike. But yes, just to jump on that quickly, completely agree, Jordan. Also, I think your comment, Mitch, about we're poor novelists. This is my literary scholar side coming out now. A novel, one would want to argue within literary studies, is a different thing than just a narrative, right? What novels are good at because they are long.

because they take a long time to read and you have to invest a lot of time in them, is these minute, really textured details and contextual information, right, that is hard to generalize, but highly specific, right? And so when the impetus of something like a preparedness exercise is to standardize and to generalize, to make it applicable across different contexts, to spread out capabilities across different contexts for good reasons, but when that's the impetus, you are not getting the kind of good

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:02:36

I'm going to go to bed.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:02:59

imagining that something like a novel can give you, that something like a long -form fiction can give you, which is this minute, hard to generalize, contextual, specific information that is incredibly detailed, but really important.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:03:15

That was a beautiful answer. And also, Lindsay, it's getting awkward that you haven't shared your favorite preparedness artifact yet. So I just, I need you to give me something before we move to closing statements. So what is resonated with you through all the work you've done on this?

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:03:21

Hahaha!

you

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:03:27

Sure.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:03:27

you

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:03:32

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Con Plan 8888, which was put out by

Joint and Combined Warfighting School,

a pedagogical tool to teach students how to create disaster scenarios. It's about a counter -zombie scenario, so what to do.

It's imagining what to do when zombies take over the earth. So I would be remiss for not mentioning that one. But I think it's a pedagogical tool. It's not a real one. I think my favorite real one would be FEMA's table top exercise called the Whole Community Planning for the Unthinkable, which was a part of their Whole Community series focused specifically around unprecedented catastrophic events. This one is a category five hurricane hits the US Eastern seaboard.

a 7 .8 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico, which then triggers a 10 to 8 to 10 foot tsunami that rips through the Caribbean. So all these things are happening at once. I love that one because it's completely over the top. It's completely, dare I say, hokey. But also when you read through the script and you read through the and you watch the videos, which were available online.

Again and again and again, the actors who are doing that script emphasize that this is real. This is our reality. This is really happening, everybody. Everybody has to believe this is really happening. So there's such an emphasis on the reality of this insane event in which a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tsunami have happened all at once in the same geographic area. I love that one, yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:05:12

That's definitely a Michael Bay movie. I think he's probably optioned that already. I want to just take a second and let's just do, if each of you can just think of a closing statement, you know, going through this conversation, if there's something you wanted to say but you didn't, that you want to get out there, I want to get it there. And I'm just going to say, you know, that scenario, that exercise is one of my favorites too. And that's a, it's a Craig Fugate special who was running FEMA at that time.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:05:14

Yes.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:05:40

And Craig, who I worked under when he was at Florida, always believed that in exercises you needed to surprise people and you needed to push people. There was none of this like make it a safe space for everyone. He was like, break the system. The only reason to do an exercise is to break the system. And I've always loved that. And I learned something new about Craig Fugate just a couple of weeks ago because when...

the solar flares were happening and people were talking about the space force and our new ability to look at solar radiation. He was the only FEMA leader who had already, first day on the job, contacted NASA because he knew about the dangers of solar radiation and he added that to their exercise designs. So somewhere, Lindsay, there is an exercise scenario from FEMA where you had a hurricane and a tsunami and a pandemic as well as massive solar radiation hitting the earth all at the same time, courtesy of Craig Fugate.

It's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. So let's go through and let's just say who wants to put on the table what they didn't get to say, but boy, they wish they did now that we're closing out. Leave it all in the field. That's what I say.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:06:36

Amazing, yeah.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:06:55

It's okay. I can edit the awkward silence out also

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:06:59

Good. Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think something that I will say, we've been talking a lot about how disaster scenarios and training exercises accord or don't accord with reality, right? And I think one of the things that I try to think through in the book is what it means for something like a training exercise that is about a hurricane, a tsunami.

John Carr (: 1:06:59

.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:07:21

an earthquake, solar flares, what have you all happening at once to claim that it is realistic, right? And so you've given me one answer, Mitch, that it's about stretching the capabilities of the system and trying to break it, right? Another answer from the sort of perspective of a literary scholar who's interested in longer, the longer history of realism as an aesthetic, right, is that this is actually a different kind of realism that we're operating with and we're thinking about something like a training exercise than if we're thinking about something like a 19th century.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:07:26

Hahahaha

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:07:51

novel, right, which arguably invented novelistic realism. And the reason that I argue that it's different is because the realism that is involved in something like a training exercise is about inviting participants into an already preformed reality that is the disaster, right? And so it doesn't matter in that context if the disaster accords with reality or how well or how poorly it does, right? Instead, you ask participants to accept

the exercise to accept the disaster as is, to suspend questions about probability and likelihood and reality, and instead to engage with the world of the exercise. That's a type of realism that science fiction as a genre has long perfected, has long asked its readers to participate in. And I see a lot of commonalities between that understanding of realism as an aesthetic and the type of realism.

that training exercises which are purportedly impossible even, you know, in the case of a zombie one that they traffic in. Yeah, so I would say that's a more academic point about a different understanding or type of realism, a different understanding or even definition of the word reality that happens in training exercises.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:09:08

Love it.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:09:10

say actually that I had a slightly different reaction to the sort of unthinkable preparedness exercise, which is that I was a little bit like, yeah, that just sounds like, I don't know, May of 2020. Like, you know, like we have now lived through these periods in which like five major disasters are happening simultaneously. And

One of the things that disaster imaginaries do, we started this conversations that are talking about the exceptionalism, but part of that exceptionalism is this idea that there's only ever like one disaster happening at a time. And I think that we are increasingly living in a world in which that is just not true. We now have, you know, things that are operating the level of catastrophes that can't stay in the news for more than a 24 hour cycle. And so, you know, I think that

And so, you know, like, Lindsay, your description of the actors all being like, this is real, it's really happening, right? To some degree, that is how we all are in a disaster, right? I think about the ways in which many people had a hard time perceiving 9 -11 as real, even as they were watching it right in front of their faces. It seemed cinematic. And so there was this way in which the cinematic image of the towers falling was still speaking.

over the actual thing that was happening right in front of what was happening. And so there's a very interesting set of cognitive and epistemic questions about what happens when the imagined fiction is so powerful that it is in fact...

you know, I'm using the speaking over, right? One is experiencing in some sense the fiction in order to access the reality. So that there's a sense in which one is sort of like this is really happening. You have to remind yourself it's the pinch me feeling, right? And so I'm thinking about the ways in which...

You know, we've now all lived through a period in which there were simultaneously a global pandemic, hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires, right, on top of earthquakes all happening in the same month. And so I think it's worth remembering that this idea that disasters are singular and exceptional is an understanding of disasters that emerges from a highly privileged standpoint, right, for many, many, many people.

in the world, life is a series of disasters that are consistently compounding and layering on top of one another. And so I think that this question of like, what are the perspectives from which we are understanding, defining and conceptualizing disaster? And what are the perspectives that are being shut out of that process? And I mentioned this a little bit when we talked about the pandemic planning document, right? Whose perspective is...

are we thinking from, right? But I think even this question of like, what is unthinkable? That is often a question that we're asking from a relatively privileged perspective that may make us blind to the ways in which disasters are often multiple, right? They are often as Yara Marboni has put it, like a swarm, right?

Mitch Stripling (: 1:12:25

Well, that's a depressing place to end, you know. So, John, come on, John. Give me something. Give me a little hope or optimism at the end of it.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:12:26

Try those. Yeah.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:12:30

haha

John Carr (: 1:12:36

So I'll bring it back to the disaster preparedness piece. I think that's one that reading through Mitch and Jordan, your work, Lindsay reading through your work, I really enjoy seeing different perspectives of that and being able to think differently about something that for me, my career started with working in the scouts, working with CERT teams and disaster preparedness being the core of that and not really questioning as a teenager.

why we're doing what we're doing, what we're doing, you know, and going through, and then you go through and through my master's, through my doctorate, starting to look at some of the root issues that Lindsay, you were talking about, where, you know, we're identifying that there's a big difference between what you can do with preparedness and what you can do with, you know, some of the longer term piece of identifying, you know, what are the systemic pieces that we really need to address.

And right now the big challenge that a lot of us are talking about in emergency management is the limited capacity that emergency management has. That capacity is about all you can do with a one person shop. You know, here in, in my home state of Missouri, we've got the Casey Metro area that, you know, it's probably, I think, you know, what is it? I think 200 ,000 people and they've got a six person staff for the entire city.

not including how many people come and commute during the day. So the, you know, 2 million person Metro area as a collective, they may have, you know, 15, 20 people overall in that huge space. That's drastically understaffed, especially whenever you've got all the different events that could possibly occur there. and so the reality that many of these emergency managers are dealing with is if I have a one person shop or in Kansas city, a six person shop,

there's not a lot I can do to address systemic issues. The best that I can do is coordinate, communicate, and do that disaster preparedness piece. And so that's the reality that a lot of them are dealing with. And I think, you know, right now there's research being done by FEMA on kind of doing a census of how many people are in these individual agencies, what's their staffing capacity, what's their budget, what are their resources.

And the hope is to kind of move the needle on that and to improve things. But I also think, you know, the storytelling piece, the narrative piece of what we're talking about is very important as we look at how to reframe what we're talking about, because there is this idea of, you know, one we talk about a lot is the idea of a natural disaster and that, you know, this is something that happens versus something that this is a disaster that is a culmination between nature and society.

and reframing that, reframing the way that we understand things and reframing how society is engaging in these pieces can hopefully start helping people understand what emergency management is. And then that get backs the systemic piece. But of course, that's a really, really big challenge to take on. And that's why these movies and these different pieces of storytelling are so important because these are the things that people actually go to organically.

they go to the theater and they go and find these things. They're probably not going to find the research that I'm putting in these journals. They're probably not going to find a lot of the op -eds that, you know, my colleagues are putting in the New York times and other places. They just don't do that, but they are going to watch San Andreas and they are going to ask me if it's realistic, what the rock does. And so maybe by changing some of those pieces and by changing literature and by changing some of those other areas, you can start nicking away at some of those and maybe.

maybe start changing that imaginary as we've discussed.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:16:18

All right, well, thanks so much for that. And thanks, John. Thanks, Lindsay, so much for being on. This has been a great conversation. And we hope to have you back again to go even deeper into the disturbing imaginary of disasters that we share. So thanks so much.

Lindsay Thomas (: 1:16:33

Thank you. Thanks very much.

John Carr (: 1:16:33

Awesome, thank you.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:17:04

My one regret there is that we had to record that before Twisters came out. I know. And so our thoughts on Twisters will never be integrated into that. That's a real tragedy, I think. It's true, because I'm sure we will have many, many thoughts on Twisters. And all of that was really about how we imagine disasters, this kind of sort of nostalgic, Western -flavored Bruce Willis way of thinking about that. I prefer Tom Cruise in certain lights.

Has Tom Cruise done any disaster movies? Well, I consider really, is that a serious question? I mean, listen, I consider War of the Worlds, I think is a disaster movie that Cruise and Spielberg did together. I think that counts. I don't know if it shows up in IMDb. I don't know if it's in John's papers or not. So we'll have to do a follow -up on that. You know, the thing about all that is it leads to the question of why? Why?

are our imaginaries so tuned to think of disasters in this shoot them up kind of a way. Mitch, do we get to talk about philosophy now? I know. We're going to go so deep. We're going to go so deep into what it is that creates our disaster imaginary and what purpose that imaginary serves. Because, spoiler alert, it is serving a purpose to our entire society and to its resilience in making us imagine disasters in this

to talk about this in the next episode, we're going to have to say epistemological a lot. And you know what that means? we're going to have to bring back the drinking game. Yeah, it's going to be pretty heavy drinking. We might have to go to either non -alcoholic beer or else high -proof whiskey, one of those two options. We'll see which one feels better. See you next time on Tough Shift.