|
After adjusting to the realization that this film was not going to convince me ahead of time to accept it’s vision of natural disaster, I was free to return to the spectacle at which it excels, loosen my focus on the literal, and let it attempt what (in my estimate) good films do best: weave a global emotional effect. There are a number of relational subplots that should interrelate but which prod me instead to write about them because I don’t quite see how they do. I am thinking of the world of fathers and sons that plays so prominently in this film. Dennis Quaid’s exhuberantly serious meteorologist character, Jack, plays the neglected son to a patronizingly critical Vice President, who has a penchant for letting others know how it feels to be second best, at best. As the bad father who is not quite in command, he reminds others that they are even less so. However, an equally compelling argument could be made for seeing him as a Cheney figure, who wields the greater power, Rasputin-like, from behind the scenes. In fact, the president, while ultimately heeding Jack’s warnings and accepting his recommendations over the objections of his VP, flees too late and perishes. The VP having once acceded to full power is able to acknowledge the error of his allegiance to the patriarchy of big business at the expense of mother nature. His new-found repentance provides Jack with an even greater moral victory as his priorities turn personal, in the determination to save his son. Is victory in the masculine arena of power over the very standards of domination necessary to justify turning to the needs of the son, or are these just two versions of the same shift in paternal sensibility? There is a family values motif in this movie which tugs at Jack to be a better father to his son Sam, but he cannot embark upon this mission until he succeeds in being the best possible ‘son’ himself. He has to establish his credentials as a larger-than-life public savior before he is allowed to dedicate himself with equal abandon to his son, and this dilemma captures something paradoxical about the role of fatherhood in contemporary American culture. Unless a man first proves himself socially, positive attention to his children risks being seen (and experienced even by him) as more maternal than paternal. But the masculine fight for social validation alienates him from the dependency and natural limitations that children most need help with. The mother in this film navigates this territory professionally, with instinctive success, in her self-sacrificing role as doctor to a terminally ill boy, while the father struggles even to register his parental mandate, before over-compensating with risk-taking behavior that would surely cost him his life in anything but the fantasy world of film. When Jack’s research into the Paleolithic past prevails over conservative, bureaucratic denial as the better model for coping with a suddenly disastrous future, and he is officially recognized as the man with the plan to save the undoomed half of the American nation through decisive flight, only then is he freed up to get on with rescuing his son from the paternal freeze that has been threatening to consume the boy for some time. In a diversionary attempt at casual conversation while they are waiting to freeze to death, Sam’s budding love interest asks what have been his favorite vacations. He only half jokes, “You mean besides this one?” and picks a 10 day period of isolation on an ice-bound ship, alone with his father. Sam’s girl-friend considers this boring, while Sam treasures it as an oasis of identification with a father still capable of caring about him from beneath his public persona and profession schedule. The freezing circumstances are reminiscent of the frame of the novel, Frankenstein, where we hear the god-like doctor’s story of obsession with the initially innocent and loving but ultimately murderous ‘son’ he creates unnaturally without a mother, then rejects. We hear his story from his deathbed aboard the ice-bound ship of the narrator who passes on his tale to us. In contrast to the mutual destruction of the doctor-father and monster-son, we know that the father in The Day After Tomorrow will rescue his son against all odds, and we know it because neither of them doubt it for a second, taking for granted an other-worldly certainly that rivals that of Speilberg’s robot-boy in AI, seeking his maternal Blue Fairy. I am usually a complete sucker for emotional father-son relationship scenes in movies, and worried whether I was going to lose it again while watching this one. So it surprised me when the culminating rescue scene touched me barely at all, as if I were registering what I usually feel mostly by its absence. I was left wondering what happened, or rather what failed to happen? Somehow the magical inevitability and ultimate manly aplomb of the father-son reunion managed to avoid the emotion of reunion, reneging on the shift in sensibility that the movie promises initially. When father and son hug, certain men in the audience grunted low-voiced acknowledgements of what this reunion failed to make believable. Or were they begrudgingly able to voice some of what they wanted to feel, but are reluctant to, and what the film’s reserve actually makes allowances for? On the surface, The Day After Tomorrow commendably reverses many of the male stereotypes typical of action films, validating remorse and responsibility for past blindness and insensitivity, over dogged and violent heroism. But a stereotype it still effectively reinforces is that men not only show their love for others --perhaps especially for their sons-- through sacrificial action, but that this action is an adequate substitute for emotional experience. Is this effect calibrated to what the filmmakers deem emotionally tolerable to the largely male teen audience of block-buster action films, or is it just culturally unconscious? Or does the father’s overblown action really signify for some an inexpressible depth of feeling? By way of contrast, I find myself thinking of the very different effect of a very different film I saw recently in which hateful exasperation manages to communicate a depth of love between two people, a level of feeling that would be fatal in The Day After Tomorrow. In this other film, Iris, about Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease after a brilliantly free-spirited and intellectual life, the strain that her degeneration places on the relationship with her husband, is expressible and survivable only because of their decades-long dedication to each other. Shortly before her removal to a nursing home and still living in the squalor that expresses their desperation, the husband, John, rails at Iris about how much he hates her now and doesn’t want to be with her. Often simply vacuous, she responds to this outburst with an affectionate, consoling hug, as if her husband had finally succeeded in joining her in the misery of her isolation. Comparing the two films is somewhat bizarre, but I do so to highlight certain conventions and underlying assumptions about what passes as love and intimacy in different film genres. While AI has a poignancy befitting the most basic level of attachment between mother and child, and Iris integrates intimacy with an honest hatred of losing life-long attachments, The Day After Tomorrow, professes family passions it has yet to discover. Its passions are fairly undeveloped artifacts of fantasy and idealization. I am reminded that we do not go to blockbusters for emotional insight, while nonetheless hoping that The Day After Tomorrow foreshadows a shift in the conventions of heroism.
|
|