Disaster revisited in `The Day After Tomorrow'

To found a city is to establish a civilization. When a city falls, civilization ends. These are our most ancient stories, perpetually retold by tragedy and epic. Aeneas escapes from ruined Troy and in compensation builds a new city in Rome; as the cycle repeats itself, Rome is vengefully besieged by Hannibal. Contemporary history brings the cycle up to date. The Greeks burned what Marlowe called the "topless towers" of Troy, just as al-Qaeda targeted the haughty mercantile skyscrapers of Manhattan. This week New York will be destroyed once more in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow.

This time the avenging armies have been replaced by nature's fury. As the polar ice melts, an omnivorous ocean rolls in to swamp the city, and a frigid storm kills 7 million people. It is all due to happen, as the film's title predicts, at any moment. Suddenly the future has caught up with us: we are staring at the end of time. No terrorists are necessary since Emmerich's digital wizardry capsizes the world's cities for our delectation. A hailstorm of cold, jagged meteorites batters Tokyo, tornadoes playfully tear Los Angeles apart, and then that hungry wave engulfs Manhattan. The enemy in this case is our imaginations, avid for the spectacle of catastrophe.

Ever since New York became a global capital we have been dreaming up disasters with which to assail it. Oswald Spengler, the historical prophet consulted by the Nazis, concluded that "the rise of New York" was "the most pregnant event of the 19th century," the 20th century, therefore, laid plans for the city's fall. Spengler envisaged Manhattan as "the stone colossus that stands at the end of the life-course of every great culture," an image of spirit materialized in concrete and steel. The arrogant colossus begs to be knocked off its pedestal. Hence, in New York's imaginary necrology, the upsets suffered by the Statue of Liberty. In Planet of the Apes the allegorical matron lies humbled in a sand dune, and in The Day After Tomorrow she raises an ineffectual arm above the snow drifts, still gripping a torch that has been quenched by ice.

Sometimes the apocalypse arrives in the form of a dismissive breeze that blows away the monuments to our presumption. Bertolt Brecht in a poem written during the 1920s surveyed the "tall boxes on the island of Manhattan" and predicted that "of such cities will remain what passes through them, the wind!"

Wells recognized the inevitability of what he so far-seeingly imagined: New York had to be wrecked, "because she was too strong to be occupied, and too proud to surrender." By 1908, when he wrote this, such previews of apocalypse were already commonplace, and it was the Americans, not their enemies, who self-destructively dreamed them up. In 1889, J.A. Mitchell's novel The Last American warned about "the sudden rise and swift extinction of a foolish people." Explorers in the year 2951 pick their way through the remnants of a civilization they call Mehrikan, which was laid low after a massacre of Protestants in 1927 incited decades of religious warfare.

It gradually becomes clear that the necropolis is New York, though a jungle has pushed its way through the pavements of Fifth Avenue and only the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge protrudes uselessly from the river. One remaining savage crawls from the undergrowth and is killed beneath "a large sitting image of George-wash-yn-tun," the defunct god of these exterminated people. The archeological narrator, who has traveled here to collect souvenirs, turns out to be Persian.