My first weather-porn experience occurred, fittingly enough, in bed. It was 4.30am on Martin Luther King Day, 1994, in Los Angeles, when I was woken from a shallow slumber by the sound of thundering paws. Household pets really do sense earthquakes several seconds before they happen. My cats skittered across the hardwood floor and hurled themselves under the bed. I knew exactly what was about to happen.
Seconds later it hit. The bed – the whole house – began lurching like a mechanical bull in a country-and-western saloon. A hairline crack in the plaster ran 2,5m up the wall in a trice, as if drawn by an invisible pencil. Objects hopped towards the edges of shelves as pictures unhooked themselves from the wall and crashed to the floor, and all the while an anguished feline keening issued from underneath the bed.
And I was instantly possessed by uncontrollable laughter. Like someone suddenly finding the right place in a huge wave, I surrendered to forces entirely beyond my control – and I lay back to enjoy myself. The quake felt as if it lasted a minute or more, but time in these circumstances is notoriously elastic. It lasted 13 seconds.
That apparently irrational laughter, which outlasted the catastrophe by a good 10 seconds, seems by any standard of reckoning a bizarre response to a potentially life-threatening calamity. On the other hand, so is screaming, and that’s no fun at all.
It’s all adrenaline. You can see the same sort of demented surrender in The Perfect Storm, as George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg scourge their tiny swordfish boat through what was later dubbed “the storm of the century” – a malevolent confluence of three weather systems that gives the movie its title – hoping to land their huge catch before it rots.
They ride over and through terrifying mountains of water that dwarf their vessel, the pair of them screaming with maniacal glee as another gigantic wave crashes down on their decks. Who on earth would want to put themselves through this?
Moviegoers have been doing exactly that with The Perfect Storm, though, and in their millions. During the movie’s gradual build-up one senses the audience’s impatience. The mood in the cinema says: “Bring it on. Throw everything you’ve got at me.” When they get it full in the face, they’re ecstatic.
There’s something about Mother Nature in a foul mood that awes us, particularly the notion that a wave, a wind, or even the ground beneath our feet, is capable of destroying us and everything around us. When the Big One kicks in, be it a hurricane, a tidal wave, an earthquake or even a comet, some part of us wishes to understand what it feels like to be in the epicentre of the awfulness. This can be risky at best. Therefore we seem to have invented a vicarious alternative: weather porn.
How else to explain the popularity of movies like The Perfect Storm, or books like Storm of the Century, Isaac’s Storm, When The Wind Blows and Nature on the Rampage? The last offers “hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, tornados, floods, heat waves, blizzards, volcanos, earthquakes and comets”. We’ve had Savage Skies and Savage Earth and Raging Planet. America’s Weather Channel offers round-the-clock weather reports and educates viewers in the workings of the Richter and Seffir-Simpson scales, but livens up its schedules with sections like Our Violent Planet, which showcases hot whirlwind and earthquake footage.
And if that doesn’t float your boat, or at least reduce it to matchwood, then head for the video store and rent Twister or Deep Impact or Hard Rain or Volcano or even Earthquake or The Wizard of Oz. And that’s just the nonsense out of Hollywood. Most of those don’t feature any heavy weather not cooked up on a digital effects workstation or in a studio tank.
The real thing is so much more impressive. I don’t mean real “megastorms” or eight-point tremblers, but video footage of them taken by camera-persons who are either stupid, suicidal or certifiable. Once upon a time you could only find this stuff on an occasional nature documentary. Now you can get hold of entire compilations of Mother Nature’s hissy fits from concerns as large as the Weather Channel or from small magazines like Stormtrack and collectors like Tornado Project.
The latter is headed by climatologist Tom Grazulis and offers over 500 hours of tornado footage. Grazulis’s two-hour tapes let you know the date, location, damage-assessment and even the death toll of every whirlwind it fetishises. One of his video boxes promises “spectacular tree-snapping, roof-flying footage … A man is hit by lightning while filming a tornado but doesn’t stop until hit by debris from his own house!”
“Here’s this thing that’s a mile high,” says Grazulis, explaining a tornado’s appeal, “and it’s roaming around with the energy of a nuclear power plant. This thing is out of control. It’s sneaky, it doesn’t belong on the planet. It’s prowling, and it comes and goes at will. It’s too big, it’s too devious and this damn thing ought to be whipped into shape!”
Fat chance. If anything the stormchasing maniacs who run into such situations are the things that’ll be whipped into shape, or smashed into atoms. But what their cameras and those of other weather-freaks capture is footage of astounding power: mile-long suspension bridges rolling like sheets of wet lasagne, hurricanes tearing roofs off some buildings and flattening others, earthquakes destroying whole streets and hurling cameramen to the ground. Since a lot of what’s collected is in home-movie form, the soundtracks often feature real people screaming “Holy Jesus”, or “Get your ass in the fucking basement!”
From the safety of the couch the similarities between stuff like this and hardcore porn are self-evident. Nothing matters but the bump’n’grind of weather systems destroying man’s hard work. Forget the dialogue; gimme the close-up, gimme the money shot. And you can fast-forward through the dull parts, and replay the really naughty stuff over and over. Oh, and the people making the movie might actually die right on screen, which is something of an entertainment bonus.
It’s been a long strange trip from a Sensurround Charlton Heston in Earthquake to this kind of material. Studios spend fortunes trying to recreate rotten weather, and mad amateurs spend nothing capturing the real thing. Either way, in print, on TV and at the movies, we lap it up. “Blow wind!” we cry. “Crack your cheeks! And while you’re at, it would you mind reducing those 30m pylons to kebab skewers?”
Brutish weather has always exerted a macabre fascination. Voltaire was obsessed with the Lisbon earthquake of 1775, which flattened the city and claimed more than 20Â 000 lives. Daniel Defoe wrote a book about the great storm that tormented southern England and killed 8Â 000 people in 1703.
But the weather has been particularly on our minds in the past decade or so. We’ve learned about global warming and read about El Niño. We’ve seen volcanoes at Montserrat and Mount St Helen, earthquakes in Armenia, Mexico City, Japan and California, to name just a few. We’ve learned that we may sometimes tame the land but we’ll never harness the wind and the water. We know more about inclement weather than we ever have, but that knowledge has no power in the face of our stupidity.
Innovations in home-video technology also mean that many more people can now capture such disasters for posterity and for our delectation. This is the sort of material that turns up in TV specials with names like When Mother Nature Attacks! or Real Life Natural Disasters! And now that we’re all visually accustomed to the wobbly cameras and grainy photography of The World’s Wildest Police Chases and similar shows, we are primed to accept this footage of natural mayhem without complaint.
There’s something millennarian about our love for weather porn. It appeals to our sense of vulnerability, and possibly even to a fear of our creator. As ever, the God Squad has its explanations. Religious bigot and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson has claimed that the reason Orlando, Florida, has experienced so many storms is because God is angry that Disneyland welcomes gay people.
The Reverend Pat should consider the experience of one of his fellow televangelists. The entire Oral Roberts University campus and TV facility in Oklahoma City was flattened by a tornado in 1974. Nothing outside the campus was touched, an example of how really bad weather can sometimes do really big favours for mankind.