Has an explosion ever reverberated around the world quite as fast as the ill-fated Antares on Tuesday evening?
The privately owned, un- manned rocket, which was due to make a cargo delivery to the International Space Station, experienced a “catastrophic failure” seconds after lift-off from Nasa’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, resulting in a dramatic fireball captured by the official launch footage and crowds of onlookers.
Within minutes of the explosion, that footage was all over Twitter and Facebook – my timelines seemed like they had been taken over by pyromaniacs (as well as by people with an indepth knowledge of rocket science).
There’s no doubting the clips were spectacular - my personal favourite was filmed from a light aircraft a few miles away, and the big bang lit up the entire frame, a dazzling, awesome fireball, the aftershock causing the aircraft to wobble in the sky.
After watching a few of these clips, I noticed a repeated theme: all the tweets and status updates eagerly assured us that “this was an unmanned rocket”. It was important and natural to let everybody know there were no casualties.
Soon, however, I realised there was a thinly veiled subtext to all these assurances, as if “unmanned rocket” had instantly become code for “it’s okay to enjoy this massive explosion as nobody died”.
And enjoy it we did, over and over. But that enjoyment made me curious. Why are we so fascinated by big bangs? What part of our brain lights up, so to speak, at the sight of a huge explosion?
It’s a particularly timely day to ponder the question, as many of us will have just endured a sleepless night as Halloween fireworks lit up the sky and rattled our windows.
There can be no greater illustration of the human fascination with big, dangerous explosions than the fireworks industry. It’s telling that pyrotechnics really are the most ostentatious form of celebration. A big part of the appeal of a professional fireworks display is the way it’s a communal experience. We get to share our awe with the crowds around us, gasping in unison at the colours and sounds blossoming violently across the night sky.
While fireworks remain a special form of entertainment due to their relative rarity, Hollywood has become the most relentless purveyor of explosions, packing them in to the big summer blockbusters like popcorn in a tub.
Now cinephiles might sneer, but the explosion is an underappreciated aspect of the modern movie vernacular, the purest distillation of cinema spectacle.
Many of the most seminal cinema explosions were the work of Joe "Boom Boom" Viskocil, a pyrotechnics wizard who blew up the Death Star in the original Star Wars and perfected his technique by obliterating the White House in Independence Day. As film critic Tom Shone put it: "Viskocil had spent the best part of two decades pondering the fine art of mass destruction." (He died last August at the age of 61).
Nowadays, director Michael Bay, he of the distended Transformers movies, is undoubtedly the king of the big screen explosion, pioneering an excessively kinetic form of film-making known as Bayhem. If you can get past the incoherence and offensiveness of his films and focus on the way he blows things up, he's really quite an artist.
It might be hard to remember it now, but back in the era of Viskocil, big movie explosions were reserved for the thrilling finale or at least for major moments in the story. With the dawn of Bayhem, however, explosions have become the punctuation instead of the punchline.
Our fascination with huge explosions has not been tempered by the horror they generally produce. Two of the most iconic images of modernity involve massive explosions: the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima and the attacks of 9/11. Reconciling the savagery of the action with the stark aesthetic of the explosion is what renders those images so powerful.
Even at this remove, it seems deeply transgressive to admit to feeling awe at the sight of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and yet a pure, horrified awe was the most visceral reaction we experienced. When people said it was like something out of a Hollywood movie, they meant it was like something out of the really exciting climax of such a movie. It looked like entertainment, yet instilled fear, not pleasure.
Our fascination with big bangs, then, appears to be deeply ingrained and universal. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, in case you hadn’t guessed, but this runs rather counter to our intuitive reaction to explosions, which would be to run rather than stand there in admiration. Is our fascination really just the logical extension of the way our attention is drawn to bright lights and loud sounds, a malfunctioning warning system against danger?
Perhaps, our fascination with explosions, from failed rocket launches to volcanos, from Hollywood action movies to “Shock and Awe” military bombardments, is the Prometheus myth writ large, an exciting, adrenaline-inducing metaphor for our struggle to master nature. Shane Hegarty is away
