in the blackout. I tried to check the news on my phone, but it had died while I was stoned on CNN’s rolling coverage of the end of the world. I slid the windowpane up and stuck my head out above Fifth Avenue, into the throttled calm of what I took to be Sandy’s lopsided eye as it squatted overhead. A blast of salty, cold air shot through the apartment. Candles, flashlights, and whatever else was available to whomever was awake, lit the windows of nearby apartment buildings. Far below, NYU students emerged from a dormitory across the street to play in the drizzle. They ran about, enthralled with the novelty of this dent in the city’s armor, rapt with dumb joy as a chilly mist spritzed the turbulent October air, ignorant of whatever it was that was happening at the frayed edges of Queens and Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, until the hurricane wind gained strength again and the students returned to their rooms for the last act, whatever that would look like. Wrinkled sheets of rain darted across the city like huge flocks of birds, threaded between buildings and down the avenue. Far downtown, the Goldman Sachs building, a Tower of Gold buried in the velvety black of the storm, glowed obscenely amid its shadowed neighbors, powered apparently by its own generators. We, though apparently not they, were in for it.
With the power out, the wi-fi down, and my phone dead, I spent the next day in the apartment as the little dry food I had (varieties of crackers, mostly) ran out, wondering what had happened and who was injured and if anyone I knew had been killed. I paced the small guest room, moved back and forth between the window and the double bed while, outside, a few neighbors stood dizzied in the wreck of tree branches and stray garbage that had been flung down the avenue by the storm, seemingly dazed in the first gray light of this new world, which was probably the same world. Below, Fifth Avenue was like a scene from a film I hadn’t wanted to see let alone appear in: its plant life ripped apart, with branches scattered across the asphalt. Overhead the sky had resolved into the color of wet concrete. I kept to the bed for the rest of the day, trying to read a bad novel, until I couldn’t take the isolation of somebody else’s apartment with somebody else’s things anymore, and so I left and found a taxi.
We flew through the manic, cop-directed traffic of Manhattan without its streetlights, past the fallen trees and piles of trash and the dispersed and ugly detritus of buildings and vehicles, chunks of plastic and overturned garbage cans, until we crossed the empty Williamsburg Bridge and headed toward South Williamsburg, where I arrived home almost in tears, though I couldn’t explain to my roommate at the time why I felt so terrible since I was OK, “we,” everyone I knew, were OK. My distress was ridiculous, even to me, and felt all the more so whenever I tried to explain the feeling to him—or to anyone, for that matter (outside of New York, it seemed that the storm had had no effect on the rest of the world). In the disaster the city had become me, or I had become the city—a one-act drama that had attracted little sympathy from its would-be friendly audience. Things proceeded, online and elsewhere, per usual. My parents said it was fine. A one-night fling shrugged his shoulders. I couldn’t quite place this feeling in my catalog of previous melodramas, only that a city-me had been dealt some awful blow and I was struggling, on this makeshift stage of poorly defined grief, to get back up to monologue nobly about my or anyone’s resilience. I allowed the luxury of my passing victimhood to take its indefinite, blob-like shape in me. I would suffer, and make of my suffering a performance that somehow managed to ignore both the fact that I was unharmed and that the consequences of this new world with its shifting climate extended far more dangerously beyond the city.
“It’s fine,” my roommate said.
“I know it’s fine.”
Had I been in danger? Never once. And yet the storm’s vengeful spirit continued to haunt the edge of my reality. What would the city become now, and who would we become with it?
In the following week, my grandparents sent me a chain email with images from movies that were being passed off on the internet as photographs from the real hurricane (almost all of them were from disaster films), including the one from The Day After Tomorrow that Biesenbach would post some years later to his Instagram. Composite images of tornadoes over Manhattan, a supercell storm system from the Midwest or some other flat, skyscraper-less place Photoshopped over Midtown, sharks cruising the flooded Financial District. My paternal grandparents, cozy in their far-from-the-sea suburb in Nebraska, were happy to hear that I wasn’t hurt, but they wanted to know if the Statue had survived the storm. Subject: “FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD: You won’t BELIEVE what Sandy did to NYC!!”
Ed Halter, writing for Artforum online about disaster films of the 2010s, notes that these films propose a day after tomorrow in which we no longer overcome or survive disaster but rather enter an age of its permanent management:
These are cynical films at heart, allowing us to fantasize about negotiating survival within a failing system rather than letting us hope to replace it with something better. Their anxieties mirror the just-in-time logic of networked economies, in which a typical day of work consists of the management of multiple crises, thrown onto the laps of multitaskers thanks to the unfettered spread of instant connectivity.
Halter concludes his essay by quoting Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” her prophetic 1965 essay on atomic-era films where she writes that these works “are only a sampling, stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people’s response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness.”
In recent disaster films, the crisis frequently results from the strain on—or collapse of—those networked economies as their multi-taskers go offline once the power is cut off, the city has flooded, and the fires have spread across the bleak urban and suburban landscape. Scientists, realizing all too late that the seismograph has recorded the first tremors of an earthquake of an unprecedented magnitude, or that a global superstorm is booming in the Atlantic and headed toward the northeastern megalopolis, fail to alert or convince the sluggish authorities of the coming disaster that unfolds faster than the under-funded, under-staffed response system can react, leaving ordinary people, played by extraordinary actors, to their own means of escape into this new world.
“I picked the picture because pictures from movies often seem more ‘real’ …”
The Day After Tomorrow ends with a frosty New York lost forever to the tundra of a New Siberia, an icebox in the Acela corridor, its streets buried in untouched snow. Exiled to Mexico, the United States government sends a helicopter rescue mission to scoop up the remaining survivors in the Northeast, knowing that few—if any—have survived the weather no one believed would come. The future is here, the grave, sullen president acknowledges. Finally, really, here. After all these years of saying it wouldn’t happen, it has, a cinematic comeuppance in a world unwilling to face a changing climate. That is, ours. With much of the United States uninhabitable, permanently unseated from its metropolitan kingdom, the film ends in an absurd prophecy of crisis management that concurs with the doomsy mood of the eco-disaster films of the past few years.
“What did you do?”
Susan Sontag concludes:
There is a sense in which all these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent. They neutralize it, as I have said. It is no more, perhaps, than the way all art draws its audience into a circle of complicity with the thing represented … The films perpetuate clichés about identity, volition, power, knowledge, happiness, social consensus, guilt, responsibility, which are, to say the least, not serviceable in our present extremity.
A protracted exhaustion came over me once the power returned a week or so after the storm, mostly indefinable except in sleeplessness or, when I did fall asleep, in long-winded, talky nightmares in which neighbors discussed other storms, or storms loomed up over ominous dream-horizons deckled with the shards of broken cities, torched palm trees, erased beaches. Sensing, in my clipped, typo-ridden emails, that I was out of sorts in this disheveled New York, Chris wrote, “Why don’t you take a vacation.” He had already decided to spend all of November in Greenwich, wary
