Exurban Living
Exurban Living
The lifestyle companion to www.urbansurvival.com and www.peoplenomics.com
House of Cards? A review of The Trigger Effect (1996)
by Greg Schaller
This month, our Independence Journal features a series of articles on “What if … (you had no electricity). These articles reminded me of a 1996 movie I recently viewed, called The Trigger Effect. What follows is a brief review of that movie, with a goal of encouraging some thought about the potential effects of a “power failure” on our collective psycho-emotional states.
What would happen if “the power went out,” and it didn’t come back on right away, and no one came to rescue us? That is the subject matter of an “old,” but still salient movie, called The Trigger Effect. Written and directed by David Koepp (co-writer of the block-buster Jurassic Park), Trigger Effect is the story of suburbanite couple Matt (Kyle MacLachlan) and Annie (Elisabeth Shue), and their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney), who very rapidly find themselves “without power,” and all that means.
The movie begins, aptly enough, in a movie theatre, show-casing the rudeness that increasingly represents the way we interact with each other, even with “power.” Soon, the lights of the city wink off, and we see one plausible version of what we look like without our power, without our “life support,” without our house of cards scaffolding. There’s a brief scene, even prior to the movie theatre scene, of marginalized coyotes fighting amongst themselves for some limited good; that’s our sans power future, according to The Trigger Effect.
The movie is short --- 93 minutes, but it does a good job of exploring the multiple dimensions of the breakdown of our power-supported society-of-cards, including broken romantic relations (masculinity-femininity), broken race relations, and broken socio-economic relations. In the movie, the power ultimately comes back “on,” but one is left with the disturbing feeling of exactly how close to the edge we really are. This movie shows precisely the costs of our power addiction/dependency --- our total lack of the ability to have healthy, nurturing, genuinely supportive relationships … what will we do when the power goes out?
Writer: imaginaction@sbcglobal.net
Publisher: george@ure.net
Editor: elaine@ure.net
All contents © 2005 George A. Ure