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You can lead me to a disaster film but you can't make me shut up about it

Windows are a big deal in The Day After Tomorrow. A pane smeared with wolf's blood in an abandoned Russian freighter, a porthole in a satellite, a clouded hospital window in a power outage. A Cheneyesque politician peeks through blinds at what is supposed to be a sunlit exterior. A helicopter pilot opens a window and freezes to death in moments. Countless unfortunates stand around like yokels and stare through windows at onrushing death. People bang on windows, peer through them, smash them with axes, fall through them and run from millions of high-velocity glass shards. How do you know when really bad shit is happening, viz. the Earth is freezing like the tip of a kid's tongue on a tetherball pole (stupid kid)? All the windows on the Empire State building shatter. Roland Emmerich has done just about everything possible you can do with windows in a film that's not explicitly about the hazards of plate glass. Except maybe for having Dennis Quaid carve mystic runes on his flesh with a stray shard. Which would have made his role way more interesting.

Like zombies, who are afforded the privilege of being both alive and dead at the same time - and presumably the additional privilege of being able to kill the slow and the indecisive among us - windows get to have it both ways, being at once a protective barrier and a potentially deadly entrance point that comes complete with its own lacerating ammunition. You never know in a disaster movie whether the characters, who can't tear themselves away from the window as the monster/tornado/critically desalinized ocean is rushing towards them, are going to be a bunch of gawking chumps or a part of the small band of survivors - the elect few, the saved, who can stare into the face of death and not be annihilated. After a bit the movie starts to display high-tech versions of windows, substituting television screens and computer monitors when the low-tech and hopelessly narrow-band windows get covered in snow. The point is to allow the characters to be able to watch jaw-dropped as their deaths run at them and kick their slack faces through the goalposts of the hereafter.* Emmerich's favourite trick is to have some poor slob clear away snow or dirt or general schmutz from a window, only to be vouchsafed a view of the last thing they're ever going to see on this world. I think a third of the total running time is taken up with reaction shots.

Usually it's easy to pinpoint the survivors in a disaster or horror flick in the first thirty minutes. Actually, it's easier to figure out who's going to die and work back from there. Anyone who argues with the hero in the first act will be dead by the second. Anyone foolish enough to argue with the hero in the second act, after the original naysayers have all met gruesome deaths, will get to meet their own in the third act, usually by increasingly complex means, until a Rube Goldberg crescendo of dismemberment and suddenly opening pits and industrial misadventure has been reached, after which the survivors can relax, knowing instinctively that their skins are safe. The only character who gets to argue with the hero and live is the heroine, whose stubbornness will melt away at the last moment as she submits to the hero's will and plays a crucial role in saving the day. This argument and its sexually gratifying resolution make the inevitable credit-cueing kiss almost unnecessary. The real bending over happened at the film's climax. The usual pattern of these films pretty much enacts the ultimate alpha male wish fulfillment: all opposing males die and the desired female acquiesces utterly, takes it so completely that the whole freaking Earth is saved. The fantasy reaches its apotheosis in The Core: Rugged American Aaron Eckhart knows how to save the Earth. parade of foreign ponces and celebrity scientists with weaker chins than Eckhart venture different opinions and die horribly, but not before they admit to being in the wrong. Then they're burned, crushed, blown up or whatever. Plucky Hilary Swank has a few ideas of her own, gets with the program, survives under the benificence of Rugged Eckhart.

In The Day After Tomorrow, the scriptwriters have pulled the formula inside out like a stinky sock destined for the wash. The loyal, the prescient, and the submissive all end up dead, each with an expression on their face that says, "Well, I saw that coming". By and large, the ones who argue with the hero (Dennis Quaid) survive. The hero's friends, the guys who stick with them, the fellow Cassandras, all offer their deaths as proof of their predictive skills. "We're all going to die!" they scream, and promptly illustrate their thesis, QED. Never have movie scientists taken such pains to prove a point.** The real problem in this film is locating the contrary heroine. Dennis Quaid's character has a wife (who gets her own maudlin subplot in which she hangs around with a cancer-ridden kid named Peter who's always reading from a copy of Peter Pan, framed so that whenever the camera trains on him the top half of the book is in frame and you can see the word "Peter". It's like he's wearing a name tag.) The son gets a kiss from his brainiac crush, but that's really another subplot, time filler to allow New York to die a frozen window-shattering death. No, the feisty femme in The Day After Tomorrow is the Vice President, played by Kenneth Welsh doing a really creepy Dick Cheney impersonation. Throughout the first two thirds of the film he sneers at Quaid and his band of quirky science buddies, laughs at his outlandish and certainly never-before-aired "global warming will spawn an Ice Age" theory, then pooh-poohs his call for evacuation. By movie's end, though, after he has put on the flightsuit of presidency and reconfigured the United States in Mexico (which would make it The United States of The United States of America Mexico or something), he suddenly bends over and takes all of Dennis Quaid's warnings to heart. And how do you know he's had a change of heart, shed his reptilian skin and come out pink and wriggly? He suddenly starts peering through windows.

You don't get to see what the President of the United States of Everywhere is looking at.*** Judging from previous scenes, it's tense soldiers, dazed and frightened Americans, and a tent city that stretches to the horizon. What he's really looking at, of course, is The Future. Once all the windows stop playing death scenes, the utopia reel gets threaded in and the characters are witness to a cataclysmically changed but somehow hopeful world. Why this new world, with its frozen North and now helplessly overcrowded South, should be better in any way than its unfrozen predecessor, is not made clear, but the President's brand-new attitude indicates that all humanity has looked through that window. I'd be more tempted to view the future in terms of the tent city, an endless slum patrolled by soldiers and powered by an underground economy of barter and scrap. First to go, along with metal fixtures and pipes, will be panes of glass. Then our windows will lose their liminal status and just be holes in tarpaper.


*Death is a field goal kicker pumped on steroids and painkillers. I forgot to tell you earlier when the latest round draft choices were announced. It's the Hollywood Thanatics, the newest team in the league!

**The world needs more movie scientists. They're mavericks, men of action, quirky nerds, guinea pigs, occasional megalomaniacal monsters, and darn handsome. If they're WASPS.

***A bank of 1000 watt lights with a heavy orange gel over top, the better to simulate that daylight-infusing-individual-man-with-mandate-of-Heaven look.

Retracted on 2004-05-31::12:25 p.m.


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