Cold Earth / Семена Мёртвых

No spare fuel for cremation.

No spare fuel for bulldozers.

Wasteful of manpower to dig pits by hand.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, Emanuel Leutze

It is a decade since The Day After Tomorrow was released. Not the exact date (May 28th), since I've remastered the art of missing deadlines and got beaten to the subject. It's not a seminal film, nor ground-breaking in narrative or special effects; it is, however, the last Roland Emmerich film I enjoyed. Emmerich is something of a fetishist for destruction having made many many films about disasters - most famously and well-received Independence Day, and most infamously and less well-received Godzilla. Then there was 2012 for which I presented many criticisms a year and a half ago, primarily that is was built on a non-premise and the idea that it was somehow sci-fi. Emmerich was originally going to step away from the disaster genre but unfortunately went back on his word because he believed it was too good a concept to pass-up. See my criticisms for why I honestly have no idea how those words could reflect what sets '2012' in motion. However, let's get back to discussing The Day After Tomorrow (herein TDAT).

I'm normally not attracted to a film based on casting choices, per the way the movie industry operated in the 50s; yet Jake Gyllenhall was recently off the back of Donnie Darko breaking through on DVD the previous year. I don't think I've worn out my keyboard enough pointing out on this blog how I was ahead of the curve, but by the end of 2003 the rest of the country caught up and took a song from the soundtrack straight to number one at Christmas. At the time I wouldn't have been aware of who directed it, and don't recall being all that interested in seeing it except for the presence of Gyllenhall so kudos to him. If anything, I'm writing about the film now out of nostalgia - at the same time it was released I was in between my final exams at school.

Even in terms of Emmerich's oeuvre, TDAT doesn't innovate much. As I explained in my previous essay; Stargate (non-disaster), Independence Day, Godzilla, TDAT all follow the same formula in which the main character is drawn into the plot and privy to a nice top-down view of events which handily allows them to deliver exposition. If you discount alien invasion and nuclear-mutated giant iguanas running amok in a major metropolitan area as natural disasters, then TDAT is the first of his films to depict a global natural disaster. Films in which nature plays the villain are usually locally-restricted. Dante's Peak and Volcano (another of those non-coincidental subject pairings) arrived in 1997 and depicted, respectively, a volcano threatening a small town and a dribble of lava ambling through Los Angeles. A really bad winter doesn't seem like a very interesting blockbuster unless it has an unusual or interesting genesis - most obviously the notion of nuclear winter. TDAT has this, and although it was made a decade ago it's still relevant whereas the impetus of '2012' came and went like any sane person knew it would. Largely based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm, it manages to dramatise the predicted effects of, what used to be called, global warming.

Subtly referencing Planet of the Apes

Naturally plenty of laymen jumped onto the idea of cooling being caused by warming as preposterous. Even South Park had it come from a redneck speaking very much as author-surrogate. Let me just say it is relatively easy to understand the climate like a ripple pool - a shock to the water results in a wave that bounces back and forth until the energy from the disturbance dissipates entirely. In fairness, though, the film very much dramatises the premise, especially the speed at which such an event would unfold. When it was released there was a lot of talk about the boost it would provide to Green parties (in the vain of the supposed boost the SNP got from Braveheart in 1995) and public perception of the threat from climate change. Because of American exceptionalism, what would normally be dismissed as a popcorn romp that should be immune from scientific criticism became interpreted as dangerous liberal propaganda. I'm pretty sure if the bible is supposed to be read as a collection of allegories then an exception could be made for a film about devastating climatic shifts. Reality, of course, has a well known liberal bias. Ask the Marshall Islands. It's of course not helpful when lies or untruths or whatever you want to call them are used to influence people's opinion on an issue.

Emmerich's justification for the unseen global death-toll and extensive property damage (which is depicted) in this addition to the disaster genre is that he is raising awareness of climate change (which he admits is grossly sped-up in TDAT) and also the absence of government preparation for such a catastrophic event. While it is true that little in the way of serious planning has been undertaken in the US or other Northern hemisphere industrial states, it's a little hard for their fictional counterparts to do so in the face of temporal implausibility. Much in the way the start of '2012' is beyond stupid, you can easily and legitimately criticise the scene in which the climatology computers crunch the numbers and come back with the answer 'eight'. Not decades, not years, not months. Days. Days for the climate to fundamentally change. Still, asking 'what if the North Atlantic current shut down because of decreasing oceanic salinity caused by rapidly melting Greenland ice sheets?' is a hell of a lot more believable that 'what if unspecified subatomic particles one morning had a change of heart?'. Anyone who has read about timeframes for climate shift has surely encountered the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. In fact, I illustrated this post with Washington Crosses the Delaware specifically because it is believed to depict the freezing of the Delaware River in the midst of the little ice age. Furthermore, years ago I saw some Sci-Fi channel sub-par ripoff of TDAT and in one scene I spotted that painting in the background. I was the only one that understood the implication of the very deliberate placement of that artwork.

It may look like I'm nitpicking a film I've stated I like. If I wanted to do that I could point out the 'Cancer Kid' (not related to Cancer Man) is wholly superfluous to the plot as he only exists to keep the main character's mother busy. I have my own personal edit of the film which I invoke with the fast-forward key. What I'm actually doing here is thinking about the implications of the story. What struck me several months back which first made me plan this essay was randomly wondering what life would be like at the end of the film. Cinema is often more interested in depicting spectacle, than exploring a world - consider World War Z, based on a story in which a past apocalypse is revealed through assorted documentation. The film, on the other hand, was firmly an 'adaptation' in the sense that it dispensed with all that and just made it a conventional zombie movie. It, like TDAT, was a depiction of the spectacle of disaster; which is a slightly unsettling realisation which crops up whenever anyone tries to set their disaster in New York City as was practically de jure pre-9/11. There are massive implications for the events that unfold in The Day After Tomorrow. The title itself hints that things will be very different in forty-eight hours. We get a little taste of the changing world when American refugees from the storm are prevented from entering Mexico along the Rio Grande. Now that was perfect irony that I hoped got through to some audience members in the US. The news announces that the government has managed to negotiate an open border in return for forgiving all Latin American debt.

Clearly the Southern US states are coming under tremendous pressure from the surviving population of the Northern states fleeing the giant ice storm that is dominating the continent. Canada and the UK seem to be lost completely since the superstorms appear to touch down exclusively above the 49th parallel. It isn't a coincidence that the habitable climate hovers around the Mexican border since that is the same latitude as North Africa. The film is really about the developed world reaping what it sows. The moral of the story is lost if you punish the Third World for 'our' crimes, though it does undermine the idea that we have to save the planet if two thirds of it seems quite fine. Those Pacific islands under very real threat of rising sea levels actually have nothing to worry about in TDAT. The final shot of the Earth is incorrect regarding coastlines as the new ice age will have locked up a lot of water in on-land glaciers. That's why Antarctic melting is serious - because it rests on a landmass which is a high-altitude plateau like Tibet. Thus, the Marshall Islands, as mentioned above, will probably be able to engage in land-reclamation made easy.

With the northern economies in ruins and under ice, there will likely be a global economic shock. Asia, Africa, and Latin America would then stand to benefit being untouched by the storms (as the Southern hemisphere is predominantly ocean). Sociologically, there will be a massive cultural upheaval due to the influx of refugees being assimilated in due course. I would also think Saharan Africa could be turned green from new weather patterns, and a prosperous South would surely at some point lead to recolonisation of the lost North. In my mind a great follow-up could be set in this alternative future as we follow a latter day Columbus when the glaciers start to recede. Imagine archaeologists uncovering lost cities like New York. I recently saw a film that gave a glimpse of the world after a different kind of disaster.

¶ Spoilers for Threads

Last week I got round to watching Threads after buying the DVD nearly three years ago. At some distant time when Google Video was still a thing I had seen some clips that piqued my interest. Don't hate me for being late. Given that the 1983 BBC television movie is about depicting the consequences that nuclear war would have on ordinary people in the UK, it is of course inevitable that things go wrong at some point. Even though I knew it was coming, I was still tense before that white flash. Unlike super-fast super-storms, there was a plan for nuclear war. The film draws heavily on the Transition To War doctrine in depicting the emergency planning that was in place as of the early 80s. Emmerich can talk about the lack of emergency plans, well Threads essentially makes a mockery of these particular plans. Halfway between a drama and a documentary, it follows an ordinary couple in their late teens caught in an unplanned pregnancy as in the background an East-West diplomatic crisis occurs over a coup in Iran. Tensions continue to increase all the way to a tactical nuclear exchange between US and Soviet forces. After a lull, a nuclear weapon air-bursts over the North Atlantic disrupting NATO communications. This implies a Soviet first strike is underway.

I'm not old enough to remember the existential threat of the Cold War and I've never heard an air raid siren outside of fiction. When the warning system stopped transmitting the stand-by signal and announced 'Attack Warning Red' I think I turned white. Well, even more paler. When the people in the town centre hear the sirens and realise what's happening, I was terrified. When the attack is over, that's when I was horrified. The quotation at the top of the page is from on-screen text discussing the millions of corpses after 210 megatons hits the UK. To say that everything goes to shit is an understatement. Every time you think it couldn't get worse it presents you with some new horror. You thought nuclear winter was bad? Here's nuclear summer. In the latter quarter the film jumps ahead by a few years at a time ending up thirteen years after the attack - 1996. It is not the 1996 I would liked to have seen. The final scene shows you just how deep the bag of horrors goes.

Akin to a nightmare, we see the world the unplanned pregnancy grows up and lives in. Mad Max: The Road Warrior is a great film, now imagine it as something you'd need antidepressants to cope with. Societal collapse is an understatement. I was particularly fascinated, in a morbid way really, at the social changes. The children in this world speak almost incomprehensibly, raised as they were by a parental generation struck dumb by mass post-traumatic stress disorder. There is cultural collapse too. In the mediaeval period the peasantry spent all their time on subsistence farming and literacy was rare. The survivors of the attack are going to inherit the Earth, but what morsels they'll manage to grow in the irradiated soil remains to be seen. It took centuries to build Western life up to the level we enjoy and it's a bit like Jenga. The hierarchy of needs is a pyramid structure in psychology of requirements that must be met in order to permit more abstract needs. At its most basic, the theory is that a person must satisfy their need for food and water before they even consider writing a book or becoming an artist. Education in Threads consists of a single old radiation-damaged VHS tape playing on an old television hooked up to a generator running on vary scarce fuel.

I dare say in terms of pushing an agenda (which I do not mean in a partisan sense), Threads is far more effective in raising awareness of the futility of nuclear war than The Day After Tomorrow is in scaring American into signing the Kyoto Protocol. If I had seen this in the 80s as a child, like many of the commenters on IMDB, I would have had nightmares. After I watched it I expected to - and I'm 27½. After a week I still have scenes pop into my mind. On the up-side, I've gained a new appreciation for Boards of Canada's Tomorrow's Harvest. I can understand now what kind of film they had in mind when they described it as a soundtrack.

I'll have some more to say on the Cold War soon.

[2429/3.25]