Operations of destruction in media and culture echo the fantasies and fears of the audiences that consume them. In the chapter that follows, I discuss representative examples of world destruction, and the desire audiences have for these images, which, in turn, echo the appetite for disaster in contemporary news cycles. The repetition of endless iterations of world destruction in recent film history suggests an attracted paranoia for the end of a world that provides comfort and cushioning from the apocalyptic desperation that audiences imagine would follow it. The reason for this paranoia is because, as Claire Colebrook has observed, ‘these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality’. In Part 1, the aesthetic and symbolic effects of disaster films are discussed in relation to the mediation, and mediatization of disaster events after September 11, 2001. I take the position that aesthetic representations of disaster incorporate both restricted and general economies of expenditure in the destruction of spatial relations (architectural structures) that societies rely upon in order to function.