Every so often, Hollywood accidentally doubles down on an idea so obviously that it becomes an industry joke: It's impossible, even now, to think about Red Planet without thinking of Mission to Mars, A Bug's Life without Antz, Deep Impact without Armageddon, Striptease without Showgirls. The phenomenon recurs once again this year, when Americans will be treated to two separate films about terrorists storming Washington: Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen, released to middling reception in March, and Roland Emmerich's inflated summer blockbuster White House Down, which opens this weekend. These films, though made on widely different budgets and, as critics have already observed, from widely different ideological perspectives, share one overarching quality: Both are obsessed with seeing the White House obliterated spectacularly.

Olympus Has Fallen stars an exaggeratedly grizzled Gerard Butler as former secret service operative Mike Banning, a highly trained bodyguard resigned to working an unglamorous desk job after failing to protect the president's wife. But when North Korean terrorists take over the White House and kidnap the president and his son, it's up to Banning, naturally, to swoop in, save the day, and redeem himself in the process. Olympus Has Fallen is, in some ways, a genre film par excellence, keeping the narrative lean and the action deliriously over-the-top, and if it seems informed by typical rah-rah nationalism, it at least treats its right-wing embellishments so lightly that it practically qualifies as camp.

White House Down takes the approach one step further. It plays every action-movie convention for comedy, relishing the contrivances of its by-the-numbers screenplay as if it were a Wayans family production. Its premise is actually more left-leaning than you might expect — the homegrown terrorists are red-state extremists funded by American arms manufacturers. But, by the time Jamie Foxx's wisecracking president throws on a pair of Jordans and rides around his front lawn with a rocket launcher, any claims the film might have to progressive politics are almost literally torpedoed. Intended or not, the film is a straight-up comedy.

Variations in sensibility aside, the destruction remains uniform in Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. In each case, the presidential quarters are torched, shot, and otherwise blasted to smithereens. Our nation's most prized real estate suffers not only the full wrath of the terrorists but, while on lockdown, the necessary efforts of the American military to break and rescue whatever hostages are lucky enough to survive. This obviously isn't the first time a major national landmark has been torn apart onscreen. In fact this isn't even the first time Emmerich himself has made an example of the White House. Independence Day's signature image, of an alien laser tearing through the building's crown, is an enduring testament to our fascination with seeing self-destruction vividly realized. (You can even get it in GIF form.) That image sticks because, as the terror of real life repeatedly proves, national monuments mean more to us than simple brick and mortar.

is that realistically destroying the White House is no longer an impressive technical feat. Asandscreenwriter Zack Stentz observed in a recent piece for the Hollywood Reporter , "In the modern landscape of CGI-driven event moviemaking, the possibilities for both creation and destruction have become almost limitless." And yet, instead of marshaling this technology toward the realization of incredible new worlds and visions of an unbridled imagination, "Hollywood seems only interested in taking the collected talents of screenwriters, directors, animators, and previsualization artists and using it to blow stuff up." And not just any stuff, either: Summer blockbusters have become increasingly intent on seeing our world as we know it meticulously rendered only so that it may be more believably torn down, as if the highest aspiration of the modern Hollywood blockbuster were to convince its audience that the world is ending before its eyes.

This degree of visualization requires, of course, a painstaking level of craft, but one gets a sense when watching, say, the widespread ruination of downtown San Francisco at the climax of Star Trek Into Darkness, or the toppling of buildings throughout New York in The Avengers, that the realism of what we're watching has become somehow too easy. And ease causes complacency. Though we might be impressed that the evisceration of an American city looks so detailed that it might pass as real, it's hard to imagine anybody legitimately awed by it anymore, at least in the sense that we were awed by the moving dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or the shark footage of Jaws. Nobody watches the White House being torn apart in White House Down and wonders how they did that. It's a pretty safe bet that the answer is "a computer." It's technical wizardry as second nature, and it's gotten boring.

I wonder if it isn't irresponsible, too. Given how fresh the trauma of real-world terrorism is in the minds of the American public, what purpose does seeing those events reimagined for the sake of summer spectacle really serve? Is the White House's destruction at the hands of invading terrorists really so far removed from the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the Pentagon, or any number of other national buildings whose importance is rooted in the heart of the country? Obviously we aren't offended — people flocked to Olympus Has Fallen and will likely flock en masse again to White House Down this weekend — but the degree to which our nation's graphic ravaging has been naturalized and made into light action-comedy is strange. Maybe it's a case of working through the issues the only way we can. By channeling real anxieties into the fluff of escapism, we're trying to convince ourselves that these threats aren't real. By seeing the president shoot a rocket launcher at terrorists, we're relegating terrorists to the realm of fantasy, the scenario playing out as such ludicrous fun that we can't imagine it being scary.

The cineplex has always been a kind of "safe space" within which we can act out fantasies, relieve tension, and hopefully feel some sense of catharsis. This can be a productive process, and in the wake of real trauma, it might mean more to Americans to see realistic threats mocked than to have them reimagined soberly — the idea of "tasteful" onscreen terrorism is no less problematic, if for different reasons. But isn't it disconcerting that, in late 2001, we can pull the release of a movie like Collateral Damage because its cavalier action hit too close to home, but only a decade later we're more comfortable than ever with flagrant homeland terror as entertainment? If there is an invisible line that blockbuster films cannot cross, where is it, and why does it seem to move so suddenly during times of crisis? There was a lot of talk after 9/11 about the way Hollywood action had inured us to images of catastrophic destruction — "it was just like a movie" — and there was a vague sense, maybe even a promise, that filmmakers would be more sensitive to the dulling effects of their spectacle. Clearly we're past that. But it raises a significant question: If an act of terrorism hit U.S. soil tomorrow, would we feel comfortable watching White House Down the next day? If the answer is no, we should think about why.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io