Emmerich vs NYC.

Randy Kennedy and Dale Peck seem to have either caught two different movies or two very different sets of New Yorkers watching Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow. Or more probably, the two writers simply have very different dispositions. Kennedy was at the American Museum of Natural History on Monday night for the New York Times: "When the waters finally leveled off, there was silence, and then a huge round of applause. 'Wow,' one man said, clapping like a basketball fan after a half-court shot. 'Wow.'"

Peck, the novelist famous for his Hatchet Jobs, as he calls his own collection of essays, claims in the New York Observer that the same Manhattan-engulfing tidal wave "elicit[ed] little more than slightly embarrassed titters" from the audience at the Ziegfeld Theater.

Doesn't matter. Peck's piece is the more interesting of the two because he takes those titters as a starting point from which to riff on the mood in the city: "The point is not that New Yorkers are living in fear, but that we're not." From there, he explores a mindset fully aware that some sort of attack is inevitable "sooner or later, be it another bomb, or radioactive device, or chemical or biological agent," but just as convinced that whatever happens, it'll happen with the sort of objective, birds-eye scope of Emmerich's narrative - that is, masses will die, but no individuals.

Posted by dwhudson at May 26, 2004 9:16 AM