Presented by Monique Rooney as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series

Juan Antonia Bayona’s The Impossible (2012) melodramatises the trauma and turmoil experienced by five survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: María Belón, her husband Enrique Álvarez and their three sons, Lucas, Simón and Tomás Álvarez. The film has been criticised for its ‘whitewashing’ of the devastating and ongoing effects of the tsunamidisaster on non‐white victims, particularly Thais and other South‐East Asians, through its depiction of tourist‐ rather than native‐victim/survivors and, particularly, through its recasting of the real‐life Spanish family as ethnically non‐specific characters for a ‘universal’ story in which ‘nationality didn’t matter’ (Bayona 2012). Reinforcing such a reading is the way the film concludes with ‘white’ mother, father and children being whisked away in an ambulance‐airplane that, arranged and paid for by their insurance company, is bound for Singapore, where Maria’s potentially life‐threatening injury will receive proper medical treatment. This paper counteracts the film’s foregrounding of biopolitically‐networked lives by attending to the performance of cosmopolitan actor Naomi Watts (her affiliations are British, Australian and American) as the film’s Maria Bennet (name changed from Belón). While evincing the power of a globally‐networked film industry, Watts’s role offsets the film’s planetary‐disaster narrative with an aquatic melodrama that explores the relation between ‘natural’ and technologized—bare and qualified—lives. Following my work on Rousseauvian melodrama (Living Screens, 2015), this paper looks at how the film represents post‐disaster re‐emergence of techne (digital and other networked communication) alongside a melodrama that insists on the primacy of racially‐diverse human interactivity involving sight, sound and touch.

Monique Rooney teaches literature and film in the English Program at the Australian National University. Her book, Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television, is due out in 2015.