There’s always a moment of anticipation, of bristling, silent dread, in the great films about catastrophe. The bustle and noise of a film’s expository passages recede. Some of the house lights go out. A hush falls– and maybe even the crickets stop cricking. Don Delillo’s classic postmodern novel White Noise, far from a popcorn page-turner, nevertheless captured this sensation well: a prestigious college town menaced by a toxic cloud on its outskirts. We experience a grim awakening to distinctly modern terrors from the p-o-v of an insecure middle-aged professor and his over-educated, chatterbox family. Taunted by their equally motormouthed TV sets, this egghead clan reasons and dissembles its way around panic about as efficiently as a laborer shoring up a levee with paper towels.

Last week I witnessed a lot of folks reaching for the paper towels in New York City. At my day job, well-heeled co-workers and superiors fretted over their investments in the wake of a careening stock market but quickly cheered themselves up by noting that the financial panic was good for our company’s business (no, not pharmaceuticals or pawn brokerage). There was casual talk of pulling vast sums out of banks and stashing cash at home– then rumors about criminals, wise to this practice, going on burglary sprees in upscale neighborhoods. There was a lot of good humor, but it was definitely gallows humor.

On the subway after work one of those days, I found myself going for the paper towels. Heading uptown, the 5 train lurched and braked abruptly with a loud BANG. All of us standing in the packed car were thrown. Silence. Everybody woke up, shut up, waited. The train hissed in a slow, steady rhythm. “Not good, not good,” a man said. The train tried to go again, another BANG, another hard stop, as if it hit something. Silence. Again, the hissing. The section of train tunnel we were stopped at was so narrow, the sooty walls on either side seemed close enough to touch. And no announcement.

When a subway train stops because of traffic congestion, the conductor comes on the loudspeaker within seconds. But we all waited for several minutes, no announcement. Just that steady hiss. A little kid who had been crying since the first BANG started hyperventilating, nose and eyes the same red. His dad picked him up in his arms to calm him. A teenage girl sobbed into her boyfriend’s jacket. Others, like me, made happy small talk. “Just signal trouble,” I said to the 50-something woman next to me. “Been happening all week, said it in the paper.” I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it sounded good. She nodded but kept staring up at the ceiling loudspeaker, like, tell me something good, damn you.

About ten minutes later, the conductor thought to inform us that the train had gone into “emergency” and just needed “re-charging”– “We’ll be moving shortly, thank you for your patience.” So we weren’t dead.

“Maybe this really is the end of the empire,” my wealthy boss had said earlier that day, referring to the stock panic and the Lehman Brothers collapse. It sounded like a movie line, and I instantly wondered who among the contemporary film auteurs would do this era of cheerful panic justice? Michael Haneke has been taking stabs at it for the past decade. Time of the Wolf and Cache were wall-to-wall paper towels and leaky sandbags, by design. Stateside, Larry Fessenden has also been on the job with Wendigo and The Last Winter. And America’s busy-bee infotainer, Steven Spielberg, captured the sensation in the first act of his War of the Worlds redo: Tom Cruise moving numb and dazed about his own house, covered in the ashes of others. But most post-9/11, American disaster and horror flicks have been preoccupied with how our bodies would look on fire, drowned, smashed into atoms. They’re having fun.

Catharsis or denial? I remember the pop culture professor in White Noise, talking about his lectures on car crashes in American cinema:

I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.

This century, Ho’wood has traded in the cars for human flesh. Now we watch people crash, burn and fall apart like flimsy chassis, still trying to pull something exhilarating out of something we can’t fathom. The emphasis on “improve, prosper, perfect” is all that matters, Americans.