Hidden Scars:Narratives Of Trauma In Disaster Films

At present,multi-level and multi-disciplinary disasters are breaking through the boundaries of time and space,posing a threat to human life and even survival.Against the backdrop of a risky society,cinema has become an important intermediary for people to record and reflect on disasters.In the process of watching disaster films created based on real events,audiences are also experiencing disaster events and retracing the history of disasters,which may produce stress reactions,depressive symptoms,and even precipitate into collective cultural trauma memories.In this paper,Douban.com was chosen as a sample bank to select 22 disaster films based on real events with a Douban rating of one point or more.On the basis of Alexonder Jeffrey’s cultural trauma theory and existing research on film trauma narratives,I obtained three types of images,namely,the sufferer,the resister and the survivor,by sorting out the main characters in the films,and based on this,I categorized the disaster films created by real events,and then inspected the trauma-bearing groups,trauma sources and trauma representations behind each type of films.Based on these three categories,we categorised the disaster films created from real events,and then looked into the trauma-bearing groups,trauma sources and trauma representations behind each type of film.The study found that in the life trauma narratives of disaster films based on real events,disasters caused by natural factors such as iceberg collisions and air crashes disintegrate the "Noah’s Ark" constructed by humans in an instant,posing a serious threat to the lives of the victims.In these disasters,the victims,as human beings,are insidiously divided into naked beings and immune groups,suffering from ideological shocks,broken families and even loss of life.In the heroic trauma narratives of disaster films based on real events,the resisters are crowned as a series of growth-oriented,tragic and redemptive heroes who,in the face of disasters such as animal totems,natural totems and even technological totems,accomplish the mission of saving the other and self-exaltation,weakening their own traumatic encounters,thereby conveying the values that man can win and that things are man-made.In the ghostly trauma narratives of disaster films based on real-life events,the survivors survive the disaster,but for reasons such as longing for friends and family and regret for the past,they live on with their walking bodies,scarred hearts and doomed families,reduced to a ghostly existence.The ensuing polyphonic catastrophe triggers a return to the shame of the undead and perpetuates a hidden intergenerational trauma in the form of death or rebirth.