Day After Tomorrow

FTER Hollywood photograph theatre and modality alternate The mean solar day after(prenominal) tomorrow. Ingram, David. In haggle on Water Literary and ethnical Representations, Devine, Maureen and Christa Grewe-Volpp (eds. ) (Trier Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008). Climate reas sign of the zodiacalize, uniform many gradeer(a) environmental problems, is slow to develop, non tame to simple or fast solutions, and cause by f doers that argon both invisible and intricate (Adam 17).Making a yarn delineation approximately humour potpourri thence does non fit easily into the commercial formulae of primary(prenominal)stream Hollywood, which choose human- hobby stories in which individual protagonists undergo a honourable transformation before they solution their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) innocent narrations mediate an issue as hard as temper alternate with appear world non except inadequate, nal behaviorstheless tear d confess dangerous, lulling their reference into a false virtuoso of security about our ability to enshroud with such problems?Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British diarist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the long-familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its tension on a successful issue and a narrative clo indisputable. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an everyw here(predicate)ly assure mood of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the satisfyingistic, material ecological crisis is as well a ethnical crisis, a crisis of representation (Kerridge 4).Yet, as Jim collins get bys, mass-mediated rageures, including those of common Hollywood cinema, argon constituentised by semiotic entangledities of meaning production, which tolerate scour popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretati ons (Collins 17). bourgeon theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood word-painting as a polysemous, multivalent fit(p) of images, characters, and narrative situations, which therefore constitute what he c resolelys an ideologic agglomeration, instead than a single, transp bent ideological position (Prince 40).This polysemy may arise from the Hollywood industrys commercial intent to maximize profits by sympathetic to as wide and diverse an au worknce as possible by reservation photos which, ideologic tout ensembley speaking, seek to check it every(prenominal) ways at once. One organization issue is that, when we theorize about the effect popular motion pictures may or may not have on creation k nowingness of environmental issues, those effects are much entangled, and less deterministic, than is frequently assumed is slightly(a) academic claim theories.This essay countenance explore the range of meanings dumb engraftd by The day conviction by and by tomo rrow (2004), which frames the issue of anthropogenic modality flip-flop within the familiar writing styles of the hazard and science manufacturing moving picture. ideological analysis of the hold, combined with a knowledge of its minding response, suggests that stock- quieten a unequivocal Hollywood narrative tolerate generate a degree of ideological am capaciousuity which catchs it open to various interpretations, both devoid and conservative. The ideological ambiguity of The mean solar day by and by tomorrow derives in p c oestrus from the way its narrative mixes the flairs of factuality, magic trick and melodrama.A realist pic leave attempt to correspond to what we under ache as reality, in general through the optical world of its mise-en-scene and the disposition of psychological plausibility produced by both its script and the performance of its actors. Melodrama, on the former(a) hand, leave simplify character and heighten action and emotion beyon d the everyday. Hollywood ikons take to the woods to work by moving amid these twain modes of representation. round genres, such as science fiction and horror, alike move between realism and thaumaturgy, a mode which exceeds realist plausibility by creating a totally fictive and unrealizable diegetic world.As a science fiction moving picture, then, The twenty-four hour period after tomorrow deliberately blurs the promissory note between realism and fantasy. The narrative begins from a scientifically plausible forego the melt d stimulate of the Artic ice-cap, caused by anthropogenic spherical melting, cools the congluti state Atlantic Current, colloquially known as the Gulf Stream, and thereby affects the digest in the Northern hemisphere. The word picture then extrapolates from this premise beyond even the worst-case scenarios proposed by temper scientists.The worsting off of the thermohaline current generates a planetary superstorm, as a egress of which an ic e sheet covers Scotland and a tsunami floods Manhattan. The images literary rise, it is worthy noting, was The Coming planetary Superstorm (1999), by Art Bell and Whitely Streiber, whose television blabber show on the paranormal suggests an fire in the parascientific that is, in speculation beyond what is provable or falsifiable by scientific method. When understand literally, that is, as realism, The twenty-four hours after(prenominal) Tomorrow clearly violates notions of scientific plausibility.The basic climatology in the ikon is outside hurri postes back tooth only form over large bodies of warm water, not the unwarmed seas found in high latitudes, where frigid lows are the main storm clays. The pictorial matter besides distorts the science of temper miscellanea, mainly by accelerating the time frame within which its effects ware side, and by fashioning them much worse than predicted. Any slowing in the thermohaline current would abridge a period of years , at least(prenominal), and probably centuries, quite a than the days featured in the scoot.Moreover, even if the North Atlantic Current did switch off, average temperatures would still be presumable to rise, rather than fall, because of the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere (Henson 112-5). The fools central narrative, in which government paleoclimatologist scallywag Hall (Dennis Quaid) walks in sub-zero temperatures all the way from north of Philadelphia to the sassy York human race program library, to deport his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhall) who is sheltering there, is olibanum impossible neither would survive such low temperatures.For helicopters to stop in mid-air, temperatures would not only be too glacial for snow, exactly also too refrigerated for human survival. Burning books in a library would be insufficient to respect the great unwashed alive. Such implausibilities are worth pointing out, not because cinema auditory senses necessarily take what they see as scientific truth, tho because science fiction often provides an prospect to learn both(prenominal) real science. Indeed, as we will see later in this essay, environmental groups used the release of the depiction as a teachable blink of an eye on the science of temper change (Leiserowitz 6).The two-disc videodisk edition of the photograph includes a documentary film on the science of climate change screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff commented on its release that, although our direct revive in making the film was fun rather than education. On the videodisc, theres room for both. Acknowledging that the time frame he created for the movie was intensify for fictional purposes, and that the superfreeze was purely a cinematic device, he added that the political, agri hysteriaural and societal consequences of a sudden change in the maritime currents would still be catastrophic (Nachmanoff 1).To dismiss The sidereal day later Tomorrow purely for its scientific inaccuraci es, then, clearly misses the point of the movie, which is to use realist elements of climate science as a featureting time point for melodrama and fantasy, so that it can sulk on the spectacle of ingrained weather, appropriate for a blockbuster happening movie, and also realise the sense of hearings emotional engagement with the human-interest story that conveys the main focus of narrative. It is to these elements in the film that we will now go game.As a natural hap melodrama, the film deeds on an opposition between spirit and nuance, and invites an ambiguous identification on the contri barelyion of the viewer in Hollywood terms, we are invited to root for both nature and civilization at various points in the narrative, although the determine of civilization eventually become the dominant unrivaleds. Before that happens, however, the scenes of thoroughgoing weather commit the experience of environmental manifestation strangely attr agile. As Maurice Yacowar obse rves, the natural hazard movie dramatizes peoples helplessness against the forces of nature (Yacowar 218).The set magic spells of extreme weather in The Day after(prenominal) Tomorrow reveal the sublime authorityfulness of wild nature violent, chaotic, puissant beyond human control, and therefore evoke and seductive. environmentalist Paul Hawken writes that the concept of doomsday has eer had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama (Hawken 204). As Stephen Keane points out, although hazard movies regularly feature television reinvigorateds show reports commenting on the events that are taking place, they do not go on to make the critical point that we are all electronic voyeurs (Keane 84).The Day subsequently Tomorrow follows this pattern. The audiences complicity in seeking cinematic thrills in the scenarios of mass death and destruction caused by the weather is supercharged, rather than questioned, by the movie itself. Indeed, such thrills are the raison detre of its genre. Yet the aesthetics of the sublime have always been ground on vicariousness if we take pleasure in the destructive forces of nature, it is from the safe distance of our movie seats, where we are in the position of voyeurs, rather than of victims.This construction of victimhood in the adventure movie depends on narrative alignment when people die, we do not dwell on them, nor on the bereaved people they leave behind. Typical of the disaster genre, the focus of natures destructiveness in The Day After Tomorrow is the city. Hollywood disaster movies, writes Geoff business leader, share with millennial groups a certain delirious investment in the destruction of the metropolis ( top executive 158). When a series of tornadoes ravish Los Angeles, the mise-en-scene focuses on familiar landmarks the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, and a billboard advertising the modelling Angelyne.Screenwriter Jeffrey Nachman off observes on the DVD commentary that preview audiences greeted the moment where the Angelyne sign flattens the television reporter with cheers and praise (Emmerich). The nose out of retribution is difficult to ward off perhaps there is poetic evaluator in the media figure, parasitical on other peoples suffering, finding his nemesis in Angelyne, the model and aspiring actress who paid to advertise herself on her own billboards, and hence became for some typic of the meretricious value of the city.As Mike Davis observes, Los Angeles is often given special treatment in revelatory narratives. No other city, he writes, seems to excite such dark rapture. opposed other cities, the destruction of Los Angeles is often envisioned as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization (Davis 277). Geoff King draws upon Mikhail Bakhtins notion of the carnivalesque to account for such moments of license enjoyment of destruction, based on an overturning of cultural norms (King 162). But the destruction is too cruel, as well as unfocussed and generalised, to be simply an anti-authoritarian gesture.As Susan Sontag noted, science fiction films provide a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give topic to cruel or at least amoral feelings (Sontag 215). Freuds notion of the death wish indeed slide down captures the dark side of such fantasies. For Freud, such aggressions were natural drives that indispensableness to be controlled art provides catharsis for such anti-social instincts. Patricia Mellencamp draws on Freud to reason out that American television is both blow and therapy it both produces and discharges anxiety (Mellencamp 246).The disaster movie whole shebang in a similar way, mobilising and exploiting our blackball drives and emotions. But are there unconscious(p) meanings specific to the natural disaster movie? One reading of such movies is as revenge of nature narratives, which enact a fantasy of nature getting its own pole for its mistreatment at the pass of human beings. psychoanalyst Karl Figlio draws on the theories of Melanie Klein to argue that scientific intellection itself is an act of repressive violence towards spirit. reputation killed, he writes, is nature in a vengeful mood, a primitive retaliatory phantasy that fuels apocalyptic forebodings.The to a greater extent(prenominal) scientific the culture, the more it is at the mercy of unreasonable fears, and the more it is dependent on scientific protection from them (Figlio 72). He cites Mary Shelleys pawlenstein as an extreme example of scientific purpose that calls forth revenge from nature (75). According to this reading, then, when we capture nature getting its revenge, we as viewing audience are able to purge our delinquency about its degradation. However, as Yacowar notes, the moral carriage of the typical disaster movie is ambiguous. poetical justice in disaster films, he writes, derives from the assumption that there is s ome birth between a persons due and his or her doom. However, this notion breaks down when the good die with the evil (Yacowar 232). The Day After Tomorrow full treatment according to these generic expectations, with Nature at times appearing amoral in its destructiveness, and at other times, a force of moral retribution and punishment. The arrogant businessmen who bequest the bus driver, and the corruptible bus driver himself, get their comeuppance when they drown in the tidal wave that engulfs Manhattan.Jeffrey Nachmanoff reveals in the DVD commentary that, in an early design of the script, the businessman had been negotiating an insider deal with the Japanese businessman killed by the hailstorm in Tokyo (Emmerich). In the final version, the latter lies to his wife on his cell phone moments before his death. The respectable critique in these scenes fits into the ideological order of business of many disaster films. As King writes, such films include an element of rebuke of capitalism, but this is a gesture that for the nearly part leaves its core values by and large intact.A few excesses are singled out, such as the greedy cost-cutting that undermines the integrity of the eponymous star of The Towering Inferno, leaving the remainder broadly speaking untouched (King 153). In The Day After Tomorrow, then, greedy, self-interested individuals are punished. Yet innocent people also die in the movie, including the climate scientists who freeze to death in Scotland, led by the avuncular Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), and Jacks friend Frank (Jay O. Sanders), who falls to his death through the roof of a building, after cutting his own rope to prevent his friends from endangering their lives in laborious to rescue him.These are figures of heroic sacrifice, also central to the disaster genre, because they bring out the redemptive aspects of the apocalypse. The film does not land clearly where the British royal family stand in this power structure of innocence and immorality what is clear, is that death by climate change is no respecter of class privilege and wealth. The disaster movie, then, is about which values are the reveal to survival. The rescue of the innocent, French-speaking African family is thus crucial in einforcing the movies ethical hierarchy based on racial, bailiwick and grammatical gender differences they are saved by the white-hot American woman (Laura), who in turn is saved by the white American male (Sam), thereby enacting in illuminance two important themes in the movie. The close important of these is the narrative of male gallantry and redemption. Melodrama, writes Linda Williams, is about a retrieval and theatrical production of innocence (Williams 7). In this film, the melodramatic plot of mystify rescuing son makes the moral point that hard-working fathers fill to take a more active employment in bringing up their sons.The movie implies that, although millions of people may be dead, if one American fa mily can be saved, then at least some good has come out of the eco-apocalypse. This pass on is more liberal, or at least not as clearly patriarchal, as in to begin with disaster movies. In keeping with Stephen Princes notion of ideological agglomeration, mentioned former, although Jacks wife is a doctor, she ends up playing the role of surrogate mother to a seven-year sure-enough(a) boy with cancer, separated from his parents by the storm.The movie can thus be interpreted as either liberal (she is a doctor) or conservative (she is placed in the stereotypical female role of nurturer). The secant important theme in the movie is the join States self-appointed role as spheric protector-policeman. The rescue narrative huntsmans horn the frontier values of male personal heroism, crocked leadership and individualism, encapsulated by the iconic image of the torch of the Statue of Liberty emerging from the waves of the tsunami that engulfs Manhattan.However, Americas role in worl d regime is also questioned by a more liberal discourse in the movie, when American refugees are forced to flee lawlessly into Mexico, in an dry reversal of the real politics on the national border. This ironic reversal is itself make ambiguous, though, when later the United States government writes off all trio World debt, but in impart, wins the rightly for its citizens to live as guests in those countries. It should be noted that not all Hollywood movies with environmental themes are as individualist in their proposed solutions as The Day After Tomorrow.Some have endorsed more collective forms of action, even in narratives led by strong individuals an image of placard-waving protestors recurs in Free Willy 2 The Adventure Home (1995) and Fly outside Home (1996) as a sign of collective resistance. Ultimately, The Day After Tomorrow prefers American notions of liberal individualism, which it turns into universal values by identifying them with human civilization as a whole. In deed, civilization, rather than wild nature, becomes the real object of audience identification by the end.The choice of the raw York Public Library as the place of sanctuary and rescue is significant in this respect. One of the survivors makes sure he preserves the Gutenberg Bible from burning, not because he believes in God, he says, but because, as the first book ever printed, it represents the dawn of the age of reason. If horse opera civilization is finished, he adds, Im going to save at least one little piece of it. Ultimately, then, the movie celebrates reason and science as the values more or less central to Western civilization. Unusually for a Hollywood disaster movie, scientists are neither evil nor incompetent.As Yacowar notes, specialists in disaster movies, including scientists, are almost neer able to control the forces loose against them. The genre thus serves the mystery that dwarfs science (Yacowar 228). This is also honest of The Day After Tomorrow, in that t he scientists are unable to contain the devastating effects of climate change once they have begun. Ultimately, writes ecocritic Sylvia Mayer, the movie makes the point that the most advance(a) and dedicated scientific work is still powerless against the forces of nature once they are unleashed (Mayer 111).Nevertheless, the scientists are the heroes of the movie. Their advice on the risks of climate change was ignored by the politicians until it was too late. As the director of the National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration angrily tells the Vice-President You didnt want to heat about the science when it would have made a difference. The scientists computer models prove correct in the movie, unlike in real life, climate science provides the clear, certain and unambiguous knowledge obligatory for survival.Moreover, advanced engine room is ultimately a force for good. Jack is able to locate his son in the Public Library under the set wastes of Manhattan because of his friend s portable satellite navigation remains (which, of course, would not work in such a massive storm). He is also seen driving a hybrid Toyota Prius earlier in the film. Reason, science and technology thus win the day. However, as Sylvia Mayer also notes, the movie stops short of simplistically advocating a technological fix for environmental problems as complicated as climate change (Mayer 117).The values of civilization finally be on cloud nine over the destructive forces of wild nature when the relative majority of wolves, which escaped from Central Park menagerie earlier in the movie, return to onset Sam and his friends when they are searching for medicament and food. That the wolves are computer-generated special effects only adds an extra layer of irony to the triumph of civilization and benign technology in the movie. Indeed, the movie itself can be seen as a paean to the inventive power of Computer Generated Imaging.In Eco Media (2005), Sean Cubitt argues that The Lord o f the Rings trilogy (2002-3) can be read as a celebration of the computer technologies from which it was made, which are an artisanal mode of production that demonstrates a creative place for technology within green thinking. There is an increase belief, he suggests, that through the development of exceedingly technologised creative industries, it is possible to devise a mode of economic development that does not compromise the land (Cubitt 10). The thematic resolution of The Day After Tomorrow is ambiguous, however.The ending of the movie follows the recurrent pattern of the genre identify by Geoff King, in which the possibility of apocalyptic destruction is confronted and depicted with a authorizationly horrifying special effects/ outstanding reality, only to be withdrawn or limited in its extent (King 145). Typically, then, destruction is extensive, but total apocalypse is prevented at the last-place moment. The superstorm passes, thereby confirming Jacks earlier tactile sen sation that the storms will last until the imbalance that created them is corrected by a global realignment.Gazing at a beautiful, calm public, an astronaut in the foreign Space Station comments that he has never seen the air so clear. In Winston wheeler Dixons phrase, this could be the exit point for the viewer that disaster movies invariably provide (Dixon 133) the moment where the audience is let off the hook with a simplistic, evasive solution to the seemingly balky problem explored in the rest of the movie. To return to the question posed at the lead of this essay, does such an ending merely enfearlessness evasion, denial and complacency in turn over to issues such as anthropogenic climate change?Dixon argues that contemporary American cinema serves those who wish to toy with the themes of destruction, from movies about atomic apocalypse to those that flirt with Nazism. This cinematic cult of death, he concludes, is the ultimate recreation for an exhausted, media-saturat ed culture, a cult which remains remote, carefully contained within a box of homicidal and genocidal dreams (Dixon 139). But the ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow, as well as its audience reception, suggests that the plow of interpretation is more open and vary than this.From an environmentalist perspective, the melodramatic ending of the film is ambiguous. No matter what human beings do, it appears, the Earth will heal itself. According to this reading, the message of the movie is that, because the storm eventually passes, we dont gather up to worry. This message resembles the right-wing appropriation of the atomic number 32 hypothesis that is, the mind, proposed by the British chemist James Lovelock, that the Earth as a whole is a self-regulating system in a natural present of homeostatic balance.In his 1999 book Hard common land bringing the Environment from the Environmentalists, Peter Huber used the concept of Gaia to unfreeze a conservative manifesto t hat called for the dismantling of alive environmental regulations. The most efficient way to control pollutants such as greenhouses gases, he argued, is not to worry about them at all. permit them be. Leave them to Gaia (Huber 128). The notion of Gaia, we should note, is not the sole property of bare-assed Age environmentalists or deep ecologists.According to this interpretation, the movie appears to endorse the idea that humanity, through a combination of ingenuity, courage and chance, can survive whatever Nature may throw at us, an occupation used by conservatives like Huber to justify a non-interventionist approach to environmental issues. It is a mistake, however, to assume that the final moments of a movie, when narrative closure is achieved, dictate its overall meaning. An proportion may be drawn here with the critical analysis of the role of women in film noir.As Janey Place argues of the female characters in films such as Double bonus (1946), it is not their inevitable demise we mobilise but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all, exciting sexuality (Place 48). In a similar way, the most memorable images in The Day After Tomorrow are probably the scenes of extreme weather. The main advertising image for the movie showed the shot of the hand of the Statue of Liberty held above the storm surge an image of survival which at least includes a sense of struggle, rather than the calm, reposeful Earth revealed at the close of the film.Indeed, the above interpretation of the film as conservative is contradicted by its more explicit message, which advocated liberal political elucidate in the election year of 2004. archeozoic in the film, Vice-President Becker, played by an actor who bears an obvious resemblance to Dick Cheney, refuses to listen to the advice of scientists on global heating, arguing that to take action would harm the American economy. In another reference to George W. Bushs presidency, we are told that the institution in the mo vie has also refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on the decrease of greenhouse gas emissions.At the end of the movie, Becker, now President, appears on television to apologise to the nation out of a newfound sense of humility For years we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planets natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the whole movie, the Presidents public apology confirms the lyric poem of the African-American homeless man earlier in the film, who refers to people with their cars and their exhausts, and theyre just polluting the atmosphere.The disaster has been a wake-up call for America, and the new acquire will allow for the changes in life-style necessary for a more sustainable future. The government will also change its attitude to the Third World from one of arrogance to gratitude. In these moments, the movie works as a secular form of jeremiad secular because the environmen tal catastrophe is not seen as punishment from God, but as human-created. Opie and Elliott argue that both implementational and evocative strategies are necessary in successful jeremiads, and cite Rachel Carsons obtuse Spring (1962) as a powerful exemplar (Opie and Elliott 35).The Day After Tomorrow also uses both pathos and sagacious argument to convince its audience of the need to take steps to avoid environmental catastrophe. Critical speculation on the potential or otherwise of making a disaster movie about global warming can draw on the conclusions of an existential engage by the Potsdam plant for Climate violation Research of the reception of the movie in Germany. This found that the movie did not appear to reinforce feelings of fatalism in its audience. Less than 10% of the sample agree with the statement, Theres nothing we can do anyway, whereas 82% preferred, We have to stop climate change. Reusswig). Indeed, the Potsdam study makes hopeful reading for environmentali sts. It found that the promotional material surrounding the film triggered a new interest in climate change, and increase some issues previously unfamiliar to audiences, such as the role of oceans in global warming. A similar study of reception in the United States concluded that the film led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming, to bode various impacts on the United States as more likely, and to shift their conceptual consciousness of the climate system toward a threshold model.Further, the movie encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority. However, whether such changes constituted merely a flying blip in public perceptions remained to be seen (Leiserowitz 7). These empirical studies are important because they show that audience reception is a more complex and variable process than it is sometimes interpreted for in film possible ac tion. According to some versions of psychoanalytic crush positioning theory, Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow tend to render spectators passive.Under the influence of Bertolt Brechts theories of narrative, film academics such Colin McCabe and Steven Heath argued that only modernist or original narrative techniques can produce a more active (even revolutionary) film spectator. As the 1992 textbook newfangled Vocabularies in exact Semiotics puts it, psychoanalytic film theory sees the viewer not as a person, a flesh-and-blood individual, but as an false construct, produced and activated by the cinematic apparatus (Stam 147). In his book The Crisis of Political contemporaneousness (1999), D.N. Rodowick exposes the flaws in such thinking. The politics of political modernism, he writes, assume an intrinsic and intractable recounting between texts and their spectators, regardless of the historical or social context of that relation (Rodowick 34). But film viewers are fle sh-and-blood individuals, and when they are treat as such by film theorists and researchers, the phenomenon of film reception becomes more complex and nuanced, and less deterministic and stereotyped, than that imagined by subject positioning theory.Empirical audience research shows that we do not all watch the like movie in the same way, and that audience responses are complexly determined by a long list of variables, such as nation, region, locality, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and, last but certainly not least, individual temperament. When we visit at the public reception of The Day After Tomorrow, then, it is clear that different interest groups appropriated the movie in different ways.Both sides of the public debate about climate change interpreted the movie within a realist framework, either positively or negatively, and produced discriminating readings in order to further their own agendas. Patrick Michaels, one of the minority of scientists who stills reject s the idea of human-created climate change, pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie, and doomed Hollywood for irresponsibly playing into the hands of liberal environmentalists by exaggerating the threat of global warming (Michaels 1).Liberal-left environmental campaigners also unsounded that the movies foundation in science was flawed. However, they found its scientific exaggerations and inaccuracies less important than what they power saw as its realistic portrayal of the American governments denial of the scientific evidence for global warming. As former Vice-President Al instrument panel put it, there are two sets of fiction to deal with. One is the movie, the other is the Bush administrations presentation of global warming (Mooney 1). bloodbath joined with the liberal Internet protagonism organization MoveOn. rg, which used the movies release as an opportunity to organize a national advocacy campaign on climate change. Senators McCain and Lieberman also used the movie to stir the reintroduction of their Climate Stewardship Act in sexual intercourse (Nisbet 1). Greenpeace endorsed the underlying premise of the film, that extreme weather events are already on the rise, and global warming can be expected to make them more frequent and more severe. It summed up its response to the movie with the line affright is justified (Greenpeace 1-2).The use of this movie to encourage environmental debate suggests that it is perhaps only if Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow are peoples sole, or even main, source of information on the environment that we should worry. As Sylvia Mayer argues, Hollywood environmentalist movies have the potential to contribute to the development of an environmentally sure sense of self that is characterised by an awareness of environmental threats, by the wish to gain more effective knowledge about them and by a disposition to participate actively in efforts to remedy the problem (Mayer 107).In this respect, a classi cal, Hollywood-style narrative does not necessarily inculcate or reinforce a feeling a complacency or denial it its audience. In any case, no narrative can be as complex as the reality to which it refers all art is a process of simplifying, selecting and giving shape to reality. authorised narrative forms and genre movies such as The Day After Tomorrow can focus thought and provide an imaginative and provocative response to environmental crisis. working CITED Adam, Barbara (1998), termscapes of Modernity The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Routledge, capital of the United Kingdom and New York.Bell, Art and Streiber, Whitely (1999), The Coming Global Superstorm, Pocket Star Books, New York. Collins, Jim (1989), red-carpet(prenominal) Cultures Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Routledge, New York and capital of the United Kingdom. Cubitt, Sean (2005), Eco Media, Rodopi, capital of The Netherlands and New York. Davis, Mike (1998), ecology of fright Los Angeles and the Imagin ation of Disaster, Henry Holt and Co. , New York. 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