I did a post not too long ago along similar lines about the specific destruction of the Statue of Liberty, which I think ties into this.
http://gerrycanavan.blogspot.com...nd-
despair.html
It's been viewed by like 40,000 people so far, probably the most amount of people who will ever look at anything I produce.
What's interesting to think about here is why no other cities have been able to edge their way into this particular apocalyptic fantasy. Why not Detroit, for instance, given both its high prominence as the foundry of 20th century capitalism and the racial anxiety that drives the imagination of this day? Why so much less Los Angeles or Washington D.C., both of which can lay strong(er?) claim to the beating heart of the American way of life? I wonder how much of it has to do with Ellis Island and ethnic, rather than racial animus—back to the Statue of Liberty again, it might be that the vestigial understanding of NYC as the place where people and things enter the country necessarily corresponds to the place where danger enters the country. (The commonplace figuration of the immigrant as a biological contagion might be very relevant here.)
And of course size is a factor too—as America's greatest and biggest city, often seen as the highpoint of its cultural achievement even while (or perhaps it is the reason why) people in the hinterlands view it as a dangerous and decadent cesspool, it is only natural that our imagination turns to it when we require an orgiastic spectacle of destruction.
Finally, just to preempt Vu on the production end, it's clear that the endless destruction of New York, with Los Angeles taking second-place, in popular media has a lot to do with the fact that the movers and shakers and writers and directors of the culture indrustry are headquartered in those two cities.
Another important missing film from your list: War of the Worlds (2005), which reappropriates the imagery of 9/11 in specific and arguably offensive ways. If it'd been directed by anyone but Spielberg, the attacks on Cloverfield would have happened three years earlier.
"NYC stayed alive despite the fracture; capital continued to flow into the environment, in a continual resuscitation of those masses of “dead” human labor, thanks, in part, to the great symbolic weight it carries in the cultural imaginary."
even through de-industrialization, white flight, etc. it was and still is the financial capital of the world, with the dollar the international reserve currency since the end of WWII; the U.S. went off the gold standard right about when NYC was peaking as an urban hell-hole. 'globalization is full of contradictions.'
Nice analysis, but there were at least two other films that broke the tacit agreement not to destroy NYC after '01.
"Spider-Man 2" did an amazing amount of damage to several NYC spots, so while not destroying the city it certainly rampaged there a good bit. SM #3 did not really destroy much, even having the big ending battle in a nameless construction site, so I wouldn't count that.
And "I am Legend" had the most thoroughly well-destroyed NYC I've ever seen. The destruction was mainly off-camera, but the aftermath was so excellently detailed as to be completely believable.
Since "Batman Begins" has Gotham as an analogy to NYC, and destroys it fairly well, this could even count as another breaking of the agreement. There are probably still others I've missed, like that dragon war one.
Also overall I would think that NYC gets destroyed because it makes more of an impact to destroy greatness. When a small town gets destroyed, like the one in "Tremors" out in New Mexico or something, it lacks oomph.
And fear not, films will continue to hit NYC first and foremost with monsters and such, until such time as NYC actually gets destroyed, after which there will just be a few kitchy nostalgia destruction movies made occasionally.
thanks, dan, these are good (though i believe batman begins was both imagined and shot in chicago). 'i am legend' especially i think would be interesting to think about in this context.
also let's not forget the king kong remake.
i'd like to know how many new york destruction movies include prominent shots of the american flag.
there's a crude psychoanalytic argument waiting to be made that the city (symbolized by the statue) is misogynist america's cosmopolitan girlfriend -- all love and vengeance when someone actually beats her, but we're not considered mentally healthy unless we're imagining it constantly.
especially if we're from L.A.
"in a kind of Dorian Gray twist, the end of NYC’s destruction on film heralds the end of its potency/prowess in “reality.”"
in regards to this point i wonder if it would make sense to consider 9/11 itself in the same genre as its filmic competitors. wasn't the effect of the attacks a hot patriotism injection followed by a reckless (and occasionally profitable) military campaign?
maybe they just had to wait for 9/11's televisual oversaturation to wear off, for different images of new york's destruction to regain their power to shock and awe.
...and validate.
I'm a bit short for time, but this goes right along with a Baudrillard-summary piece I was reading at the moment.
"Previously, Baudrillard had claimed in “The spirit of terrorism” that much of the world was complicit with the event of 9/11 in dreaming that the superpower be put in its place and that urban and technological hypermodernity be punished for its arrogant colonization of everyday life, a fantasy regularly acted out in disaster films."
I've got a few comments to make on that later. Great site, btw.
I read Baudrillard's claim as actually more radical than that: he seems to be claiming in "The Spirit of Terrorism" that the terrorists (and possibly the East/Global South itself) was acting as the agent of the West's own death-drive and fantasy of its destruction.
I have a blog post or two in my about this, but in the meantime here's an excerpt from a paper I wrote trying to tease this idea out in more detail, starting from the standpoint of Guy Debord's spectacle:
...Here Retort is right that Debord’s notion of the spectacle is more useful in understanding September 11 than Baudrillard’s concept of the symbolic—though the reasons why may not be initially clear. Debord defines the spectacle as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” which is “the very heart of society’s real unreality”:
"In all its specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing mode of a social life. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself."
To say that September 11 occurred as spectacle is simply to recognize not only the central importance of the television newscast in both the experience and the memory of the event but also the communal nature of this viewing, the way in which society (especially American society) suddenly and immediately ground to an unprecedented, days-long halt so that everyone could watch the same images at the same time, over and over again. In this way we must correct Stockhausen slightly: September 11 is not the greatest work of art there has ever been, but rather the greatest spectacle. No other event so has thoroughly dominated social relations; for no other stretch of time do so many people share, in quite the same way, exactly the same memories.
In spectacle, too, we find the motive for Baudrillard’s strange insistence on the willful suicide of the towers and the displacement of agency from the terrorists back onto the West. Baudrillard writes that the West’s fantasies of its own destruction were made concrete on September 11, that “they did it, but we wished for it.” He even makes the startling claim, repeated throughout The Spirit of Terrorism, that the Towers committed suicide, that “you had the impression that that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicide” and that “the West, in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy) has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.” Žižek, too, is drawn to the psychoanalytic possibilities of the “disaster movie” made concrete: “…the impossible which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.”
This critical impulse is, perhaps, nothing so much as the high theoretical equivalent of the 9/11 Truth Movement, a grassroots movement which seeks to expose the explosive “truth” of the terror attacks as an “inside job” through a variety of advertising techniques, most especially viral Internet video. In both cases the idea that the West suffer a grievous blow at the hands of the Global South, at the hands of its “outside,” cannot be countenanced, and must be replaced with a reconceptualization of the event that somehow returns agency to the West itself.
What are we to make of this desire to see Al Qaeda as somehow functioning as the concrete manifestation of the West’s own death drive, to locate September 11 within the symbolic order as a type of product of the West itself? I find the answer in Debord’s enunciation of the spectacle’s “enormous posititivity”:
"The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.” The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances."
The collapse of the World Trade Center is an unimaginable horror, and yet it presents itself to us precisely as an historical inevitability, as a necessity rather than as a contingency. It presents itself, as it does to Baudrillard, as the culmination of a historical trajectory begun in 1973 with the first construction of the Towers, almost as if (as he suggests) it had always been the very telos of the Twin Towers to someday fall, as if Independence Day and a thousand imagined apocalyptic disasters had always been prophetic prefigurations of the event that must someday follow. (Art Spiegelman goes even further than this in his graphic memoir of September 11, In the Shadow of No Towers, finding bizarre prefigurations of the terror attacks in turn-of-the-century newspaper cartoons, which may have once had innocent readings but which now seem entirely sinister.) Žižek, for his part, characterizes September 11 not as the reemergence of the Real but says instead that on that day our “image entered and shattered our reality.”
What the Debordian reading of September 11 highlights is that this “image” is no less a spectacle than the “reality” it shatters. What September 11 shatters is precisely the system’s monopolization—not of violence, as Retort would have it—but rather of the realm of appearances itself. The collapse of the towers is horrible precisely because it is radical contingency caught on film, because the powers-that-be did not cause it, could not prevent it, and cannot undo it. The collapse of the towers is “out of reach and beyond dispute,” not as the enormous positivity of a system that produces value in the form of spectacle but as the terrible (but equally enormous) negativity of that system’s annihilation, a very different sort of return of the repressed than the one Žižek describes. One local, often overlooked effect of the collapse of the Towers may now seem to take on transcendent metaphorical importance: the sudden cessation of some broadcast television signals in the New York Metropolitan Area concurrent with the collapse, due to the loss of the transmitting antenna housed at the tower’s top.
In this way September 11 is the spectacle’s rebirth as anti-spectacle. What September 11 tells is this: “Everything that appears is bad; whatever is bad will appear.”
In all fairness, the piece was an attempt at debunking Baudrillard's anti-globalization shtick. You're reading - the death drive of the West - is essentially guaranteed by Baudrillard's own controversy with his remarks in Parisian newspapers; he claimed he wasn't justifying the acts of terrorists, simply asserting, basically, "don't confuse the messenger with his message."
I couldn't really excerpt the rest of the paper, but it's basically built around an argument that the subsequent replaying of the event and its reenactment in various forms of media spectacle have been devoted to reestablishing the spectacle society's sense of total control over the realm of appearance in the face of 9/11's radical contingency, more or less through the manipulation of memory.
btw, the paper of record has officially taken note:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.co...rs-of-brooklyn/
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