For Spengler, New York was the loftiest creation of the over-stretched Western world; after its fall, the rise of an Eastern empire begins.
Roland Emmerich blew up the White House and made skyscrapers buckle like molten wax in Independence Day. He might have been expected to do more of the same in The Day After Tomorrow, but his new film is surprisingly sober. These days pyrotechnics are best left to al-Qaeda, whose hijackers on Sept. 11 wrote, directed and acted in their own disaster movie. Emmerich, placating the foe, makes penitent amends by disarming belligerent America: a new president apologizes for the country's gas-guzzling (which prompts the climatic upheaval) and humbly thanks "what we used to call the Third World" for offering a haven to the refugee population of the US. And as the film ends, helicopters rescue survivors who have escaped drowning by clambering up to the tops of skyscrapers: high-rises, you see, are life-savers after all!
When the purging water pours into New York, Emmerich ventures to undo the moral and psychological damage inflicted by Sept. 11. The World Trade Center collapsed because all that aviation fuel
ignited inside it.
The teenage protagonists of The Day After Tomorrow visit the Natural History Museum in New York and admire a Siberian mammoth, still intact with a gullet full of food after it was overtaken by the onset of the first Ice Age. Of course it's dead, but it has left a good-looking corpse: surely that must be some consolation.
During the storm, we watch as the Empire State Building turns into an icy stalagmite, glittering and tinkling as the cold courses down from its needling spire; Spengler's stone colossus is now a glacial ornament. This is Emmerich's grandest image, and it acknowledges that cities are immortal artworks, indifferent to their human inhabitants. Imagining these disasters, we wish ourselves out of the way -- though we hope that we might return as ghosts, to look at the beautiful world we created and then destroyed.
RSS