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I have to say, I'm excited to see The Day After Tomorrow if for no other reason than the fact that The National Review is already freaking out about the filmmakers' propenisty to destroy New York City and, after seizuring about anti-American France, lashes out at the German director (Old Europe is Old Europe, natch), asking us all to ponder whether "the filmmakers [could] be motivated to destroy New York City with such regularity for the same reason that radical Islamists have launched their attacks there? Is it because they can't stand the fact that New York lives, eats, and breathes Western-style capitalism? Machiavelli once said that to win a war you should destroy the icons of your enemy's people."
My reasons for wanting to see this probable crapola are two-fold.
1. My masochistic eschatological streak. I am compelled by morbid curiosity to watch/read anything end-of-the-world related (although not too heavy on the Apocalyptic tip, since Hardcore Fundamentalist Apocalypse is kind of a retarded framework for putting fear into the hearts of mankind, since either you believe in it, literally, in which case you are most likely a Fundie, and you just know you aren't going to be Left Behind when the time of Isaiah 11:16 or NYC 9/11 comes, so for you the Apocalypse is twinned with the Rapture in a bible-thumping variation on the Eros/Thanatos liebestod, or there is a slight chance you work for the opposite camp, in which case you will be busy with the logistics of installing the headquarters of the Antichrist in the United Nations. Either way, literal belief in the Apocalypse = interpellation in the cosmology that produces the Apocalypse = Apocalypse as a homeopathic, rather than allopathic condition = precludes a Great Fear of the Other which is essential to all ELE* scenarios commodified in popular culture, like ALIENS destroy mankind (like, can you get any more "other" than aliens?) or ASTEROIDS destroy mankind, or NATURE destroys mankind (albeit with some help from the irresponsible mankind), or MUTATED VIRUS destroys mankind. That last one, to be fair, plays on the fear of the "other" within ourselves, externalizing that cultural heart of darkness and turning it against us, but ontogenesis notwithstanding, the potential threat must be exported onto the other side of the binary before it can fuck shit up. This is why we have never seen a big blockbuster about nuclear devastation following the same formula as all the other disaster movies. Nuclear disaster movies fall into the categories of a) satire, like Dr. Strangelove, which is a whole other cup of tea, b) existential and/or cautionary films like On the Beach, Testament or Miracle Mile, which offer up character-driven narratives against the backdrop of pointless, or even accidental nuclear annihilation or c) where there is limited nuclear damage perpetrated by terrorists, who, after are defeated at the end, like The Sum of All Fears. Nuclear weapons are our greatest anxiety, and they can hardly be "otherized" because humans made them and humans wield them. The only example of a Hollywood Disaster movie where wide-scale nuclear damage is done is Terminator 2 where rogue robots that qualify as "others" nuke mankind. (If you think about it, really, the first eschatological narrative was of God destroying the world and totally straightforwardly, too. And some twisted fundamentalist masochistic pleasure stems from that ur-narrative, but obviously God can't be Other, or at least not that kind of Other, so the Apocalypse has to be brought to you by Aliens, or at least terrorists. Any which way, it comes from above, and the skyes they do open).
2. My belief that this film will create a very confused, but possibly productive public discourse. The movie itself sounds pretty retarded as movies like this tend to be; apparently, there is a scene where Jake Gylenhaal explains the relationship between the Gulf Stream and the global climate to a roomful of meteorologists, and I think maybe there are wolves (!) in the New York Public Library? But the point is, this movie is much more likely to get people to start thinking about the environemnt than all the reports of the hand-wringing environmentalists that have been flying under the radar of the press for the last few years. The Administration, in an unusual moment of a correct assessment, predicted that people will be leaving the theater asking "could this really happen?" and promptly put a gag order on NASA, forbidding them to give interviews on the subject of "science fiction vs. science." Al Gore has already made a statement equating the fictional exaggerations of the film with the equally fictional denials of BushCo on the subject of climate change. And all in all, I think this movie can be like a Trojan Horse, terrifying Americans, who are ready and primed to be terrified by mass media, as demonstrated by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, doing so in a populist format that appeals to a broad demographic, unlike Michael Moore's upcoming Farenheit 9/11, and for once it can terrify them about something other than the Russians, or the Soviets, or the Ah-rabs, or the Aliens, who are really like the Russians or the Ah-rabs, because a crucial part of American narratives is depicting the enemy as mindlessly collectivist and locust-like. Furthermore, since, as evidenced by the National Review article angrily speculating about anti-capitalistic schadenfreude underlying Emmerich's penchant for destroying New York in his movies, any harm befalling New York on-screen these days is a political choice, and we all know how susceptible the American public is to visual metonymy (Saddam = 9/11, anyone?), so hopefully the message the audience will take with them will be that Bush wants to destroy New York. And, you know, no matter how unlogically one arrives at that conclusion, the conclusion itself is still accurate.
* ELE: a technical term, meaning Extinction Level Event that has become a pop-culture favorite. I first heard it used in Deep Impact, a fine selection from the Summer Disaster Flick ouvre, where the plot is kicked into gear by a "could happen to anyone" miscommunication, where a reported thinks a senator is cheating on his wife with a woman named Ellie (phonetically identical to ELE), but then it turns out all the secret communications he is engaged in really have to do with a mass extinction that's gonna be a-happenin' as soon as that asteroid hits the Earth. Also see Busta Rhymes album.
My reasons for wanting to see this probable crapola are two-fold.
1. My masochistic eschatological streak. I am compelled by morbid curiosity to watch/read anything end-of-the-world related (although not too heavy on the Apocalyptic tip, since Hardcore Fundamentalist Apocalypse is kind of a retarded framework for putting fear into the hearts of mankind, since either you believe in it, literally, in which case you are most likely a Fundie, and you just know you aren't going to be Left Behind when the time of Isaiah 11:16 or NYC 9/11 comes, so for you the Apocalypse is twinned with the Rapture in a bible-thumping variation on the Eros/Thanatos liebestod, or there is a slight chance you work for the opposite camp, in which case you will be busy with the logistics of installing the headquarters of the Antichrist in the United Nations. Either way, literal belief in the Apocalypse = interpellation in the cosmology that produces the Apocalypse = Apocalypse as a homeopathic, rather than allopathic condition = precludes a Great Fear of the Other which is essential to all ELE* scenarios commodified in popular culture, like ALIENS destroy mankind (like, can you get any more "other" than aliens?) or ASTEROIDS destroy mankind, or NATURE destroys mankind (albeit with some help from the irresponsible mankind), or MUTATED VIRUS destroys mankind. That last one, to be fair, plays on the fear of the "other" within ourselves, externalizing that cultural heart of darkness and turning it against us, but ontogenesis notwithstanding, the potential threat must be exported onto the other side of the binary before it can fuck shit up. This is why we have never seen a big blockbuster about nuclear devastation following the same formula as all the other disaster movies. Nuclear disaster movies fall into the categories of a) satire, like Dr. Strangelove, which is a whole other cup of tea, b) existential and/or cautionary films like On the Beach, Testament or Miracle Mile, which offer up character-driven narratives against the backdrop of pointless, or even accidental nuclear annihilation or c) where there is limited nuclear damage perpetrated by terrorists, who, after are defeated at the end, like The Sum of All Fears. Nuclear weapons are our greatest anxiety, and they can hardly be "otherized" because humans made them and humans wield them. The only example of a Hollywood Disaster movie where wide-scale nuclear damage is done is Terminator 2 where rogue robots that qualify as "others" nuke mankind. (If you think about it, really, the first eschatological narrative was of God destroying the world and totally straightforwardly, too. And some twisted fundamentalist masochistic pleasure stems from that ur-narrative, but obviously God can't be Other, or at least not that kind of Other, so the Apocalypse has to be brought to you by Aliens, or at least terrorists. Any which way, it comes from above, and the skyes they do open).
2. My belief that this film will create a very confused, but possibly productive public discourse. The movie itself sounds pretty retarded as movies like this tend to be; apparently, there is a scene where Jake Gylenhaal explains the relationship between the Gulf Stream and the global climate to a roomful of meteorologists, and I think maybe there are wolves (!) in the New York Public Library? But the point is, this movie is much more likely to get people to start thinking about the environemnt than all the reports of the hand-wringing environmentalists that have been flying under the radar of the press for the last few years. The Administration, in an unusual moment of a correct assessment, predicted that people will be leaving the theater asking "could this really happen?" and promptly put a gag order on NASA, forbidding them to give interviews on the subject of "science fiction vs. science." Al Gore has already made a statement equating the fictional exaggerations of the film with the equally fictional denials of BushCo on the subject of climate change. And all in all, I think this movie can be like a Trojan Horse, terrifying Americans, who are ready and primed to be terrified by mass media, as demonstrated by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, doing so in a populist format that appeals to a broad demographic, unlike Michael Moore's upcoming Farenheit 9/11, and for once it can terrify them about something other than the Russians, or the Soviets, or the Ah-rabs, or the Aliens, who are really like the Russians or the Ah-rabs, because a crucial part of American narratives is depicting the enemy as mindlessly collectivist and locust-like. Furthermore, since, as evidenced by the National Review article angrily speculating about anti-capitalistic schadenfreude underlying Emmerich's penchant for destroying New York in his movies, any harm befalling New York on-screen these days is a political choice, and we all know how susceptible the American public is to visual metonymy (Saddam = 9/11, anyone?), so hopefully the message the audience will take with them will be that Bush wants to destroy New York. And, you know, no matter how unlogically one arrives at that conclusion, the conclusion itself is still accurate.
* ELE: a technical term, meaning Extinction Level Event that has become a pop-culture favorite. I first heard it used in Deep Impact, a fine selection from the Summer Disaster Flick ouvre, where the plot is kicked into gear by a "could happen to anyone" miscommunication, where a reported thinks a senator is cheating on his wife with a woman named Ellie (phonetically identical to ELE), but then it turns out all the secret communications he is engaged in really have to do with a mass extinction that's gonna be a-happenin' as soon as that asteroid hits the Earth. Also see Busta Rhymes album.
