A few nights ago, I had the severe displeasure to watch Armageddon, a Jerry Bruckheimer film where the fate of the world is in the hands of a roughneck oil driller, Harry (played by Bruce Willis). He lives with his trusty (if eccentric) drilling crew, and extremely gorgeous daughter (Grace) on a drilling rig in the middle of the ocean. The overarching plot of the film sees Harry and his boys recruited to drill into, and plant bombs within some comets which threaten Earth with total destruction. However, most of the drama turns on Harry’s controlling relationship with Grace, and his attempts to prevent her sexual relationship with his “best driller”, AJ.
What ensues is a crude reinforcement of yankee class, gender, racial and ecological politics. Moreover, the film is rooted in its mission to portray all relationships as strictly hierarchical - there is always a winner and more importantly, always a loser in the fight for survival.
Harry and the drillers are one big family, with Harry as patriarch, AJ playing the gifted son who’ll take over the business, and Grace as Harry’s substitute wife and precious daughter. Harry sees himself as protecting Grace from “the world”, part of which is to protect her from sexual relationships with the “roughnecks” who work on oil rigs. These class-based politics are reinforced at every stage of the drama. There are working class “roughnecks” who, even though they earn enough to stay outside of the social norms, but are not worthy of a stable relationship with a woman. They only have one another - but not in a gay way. To prove this, the drillers engage in some very nasty exploitation of women (and of course some of those women are sex workers). Only Grace remains off limits to all except Harry (her father/boss) and AJ (who is also a deputy boss on the rig).
Armageddon is patriarchal in the extreme. Grace, although clearly an adult woman, is Harry’s virtual prisoner. As both his daughter, and his employee, she is subject to his will in the private an public spheres. Co-habiting on an oil rig means there is nowhere to hide from Harry’s jealous rages. He enforces his ownership over Grace’s sexuality by shooting her lover.
When Grace defies Harry, she does so by giving herself sexually to AJ. As a woman, she is presented as having two options in life - to be a daughter or to be a wife. We are treated to a visual depiction of her choice as Harry and AJ, each leading a drilling team to the comet, are simulatenously blasted into space in separate space shuttles. The image of two phalluses surging through the atmosphere is concentrated on for several minutes - a crude reminder that Grace, stuck on Earth, is dependant on these two men for not only her livlihood, but her survival. If they fail to destroy the comet, the world is doomed. If neither of them come back, she’s out of a job, a husband and a family.
Luckily for Grace, Harry sacrifices himself and the world is safe. This film is about generation, the patriarchal way. Harry ultimately retains control of Grace’s sexuality - by allowing himself to be killed, he hands her over to AJ. (Harry could have allowed AJ to make the sacrifice and returned to meddling in Grace’s life). This turn of events shows clearly that although Grace defied her father/husband that when her defiance was carried out within a patriarchal framework, it will all work out in the end. It also shows the Hollywood distaste for the non-traditional family. Grace and Harry’s adult relationship is more distasteful than Harry’s demise.
Racially, Armageddon unites black and white Americans to pick on their former war adversaries: the Japanese and the Russians. Is there something severely warped in the American psyche that makes it taunt its enemies, even when those enemies aren’t?
Some Japanese business people who tour Harry’s oil rig are patronised as Grace and Harry argue in English in front of them. The Japanese play dumb - of course if they don’t speak “engrish”, then they won’t be able to read intonation and body language to know they are witnessing a fight. Passively, they respond with a thumbs up “you the man, Harry, you the man”. Harry is a man’s man, and the envy of the weedy Japanese sarariman. The Japanese give Harry their money, the symbol of their potency, because Harry is more of a man - not because they are canny business people who expect a large return on their investment. Oh no, that would be ludicrous.
The Russians astronauts are incompetant and poorly equipped. Mir, the Russian space station, malfunctions in the most rudimentary (and deadly) way - a safety lever breaks off, and Mir explodes. The danger might’ve been avoided had the resident of Mir been watching the monitors instead of telling those culturally superior yankees about his Grandfather’s tractor. Those Russian commies never came close to emulating an American standard of life, not even in their space station, which the americans manage to destroy.
Not only is America the only nation to save the human race from the killer comets sent by mother nature to wreck havoc, but it is also the first to be affected by them. Those comets fall first in the centre of Manhattan! In the first scenes, we’re treated to interracial fisticuffs as a Hawaiian and a Negro argue on a street corner - too bad for the Hawaiian (of course he’s a big fat guy), because he’s smoked by a comet. Mother nature: 1, Hawaiin imigrants who hawk godzilla dolls on streetcorners: 0.
Here we witness a brilliant scene of devastation: the Twin Towers smoking, though still standing. This is supposed to tug on the american hearstrings to justify the by-any-means-necessary attitude of NASA and the military. Spend big dollars on secret and dubious military projects, pollute the atmosphere with rocket fuel, sell anything that stands still, enforce rigid hierarchy and discipline - OK, just save us from nature; tame the untamable; remove uncertainty from our dull lives. The only thing more frightening that a dull life is the fear that it could be taken away.
Nature a great antagonist in a total distaster film. As people, Russians have motives, can be (mis)understood, pitied, have human fallability and are all too like the rest of us. But nature - that frightening force that controls the rotation of the Earth, the waves, seismic activity - it might be understood, but it is far from being tamed. Ordinary lives (and life itself) is at stake, and the filmmakers need not explore the complex motivations of a human perpertrator when the dark forces of nature are available to take the rap. It simple - nature is either inert (and we don’t need to worry about it) or evil in which case men need to save us from it. At least no-one brough up the politics of loggin the Amazon, or selling denatured seed to farmers in india. Monsanto is safe for another day, thanks to this mindless pap about the evils of leaving nature to itself.
Armageddon should’ve been titled “When nature attacks - yankee dicks fight back”. Unfortunately, Hollywood proves once again that it is the unimaginative lackey of the status quo, catering to the lowest cultural value, fed by the safest return on the dollar, and the secret pimp of the big dicks hiding in Jerry Bruckheimer’s head.
Postscriptum
One of the writers of this tripe is Jonathan Hensleigh, who also wrote Die Hard 3. Die Hard is nicely appreciated here.
