There's something about Roland Emmerich that touches a global nerve. Terrorists, for example, seem to have a thing for his movies. A few weeks ago, Variety reported that FBI investigators rushed out and grabbed themselves a copy of Godzilla when Abu Zubaydah, a suspected Al Qaeda lieutenant they've been holding and interrogating, kept bringing up "the bridge in that movie" and "the statue in the water." That's when the official warnings went out with particular attention paid to the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Could've happened that way. We have no idea, of course. But the ways Emmerich's movies have jibed with the post-9/11 world have been particularly disturbing because those movies wear the absurdity of their premises and spectacles on their sleeves. They swagger and shout: This is escapist entertainment at its best because its just too plain crazy to ever actually happen. And yet, as J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in December, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon emanated "the sense of a world directed by Roland Emmerich for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch."
In other words, who could watch major American landmarks being blown up and not think of the Twentieth Century Fox-produced Independence Day. And wouldn't you know, Emmerich and his writing and producing partner Dean Devlin noticed the connection as well. Wouldn't you be surprised if they weren't planning a sequel? Announcing the inevitable a few days ago, Devlin said, "I think there was something in the culture the first movie touched on that went beyond spaceships and buildings blowing up. And after September 11, there was something in the culture that reminded us of the message of the movie and how people came together."
The "message of the movie"? Give us a break, Devlin. If Independence Day was supposed to be about "how people came together," that message got shouted down by all the nationalist bravado, from the title to the let's-kick-some-ass speech delivered by the Jet Fighter Pilot in Chief. Frankly, the linkage between Independence Day and 9/11 gets pretty scary once you scratch the surface of the visual parallels. Just to pick up one of any number of issues, note how the rest of the world sits and waits for word from America on what to do. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, "every time another country needs to be represented in abbreviated form in Independence Day, a stereotypical image dating back to the fifties is reverted to." In 2002, however, the rest of the world is not quite so postcard quaint -- or obeisant.
But come on, some will be thinking. To take that comic book of a movie at face value is to almost willfully misread its intentions just for the sake of starting a non-argument. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Bill Pullman's smirking performance, Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch's clowning around and, especially as a Mac user, the sheer audacity of bringing down an obviously technologically superior civilization with a PowerBook. But if all the America First fervor (probably all the more fervent for America being the German immigrant director's adopted country) can also be dismissed as tongue-in-cheek, what subversive intentions are laid bare?
If you find any, let me know. In the meantime, I would bet that most audiences left the theaters back then thinking less about irony than about how really cool it is that, whatever happens, America will beat the shit out of it. What Armond White recently wrote in the New York Press about Josie and the Pussycats, that "the layers of self-parody and actual venality are hard to discern," applies here as well.
So imagine the cognitive dissonance with which anyone seriously concerned about global warming is going to greet news that Emmerich and Murdoch are teaming up again to get The Day After Tomorrow in theaters by the summer of 2003. The team is promising hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and the onset of the next Ice Age. As Bart Simpson would say, Coooool.
It's impossible, of course, to know what the movie's bottom line is going to be, but it sure doesn't hurt to hazard a guess. Let's see, how about: Global warming is bad. It causes hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and could very well hail the onset of the next Ice Age. Is this going to be a movie you want on your side? That question's harder to answer.
Let's say the movie's not a self-parody. Or, let's say it is, but as with ID4, most people don't receive it as such. And a genuine worry about rising thermometers spreads throughout the land. Despite the Bush administration's recent release of an Environmental Protection Agency report finally admitting that, with our oil refineries, power plants and automobile emissions, humans are feeding greenhouse gases like... well, like there was no tomorrow, and precisely because the same Bush administration has decided to do exactly zilch about it, one can easily enough picture Republican Congresspeople and oil lobbyists scoffing at a public brouhaha aroused by a silly Hollywood movie.
But at the same time, the global warming issue is rather unique in that there is probably not going to be a single, 9/11-like event that heralds a new era and a new way of thinking. A Hollywood blockbuster may be the best shot this accumulative effect has got at getting any attention at all.
Ok, then. We'll take it.
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