The destruction of New York City: A recurrent nightmare of American Cold War cinema

Abstract

This article examines the repeated appearance of scenes showing the partial or complete destruction of New York City in American cinema of the Cold War. While this theme goes across genres, it has been especially prevalent in science fiction films which are the focus of this study. It begins by showing the particular reasons for this morbid fascination and the history of such imagery in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature and cinema. The paper then analyses the changing presentations of destruction from the 1950s to the 1980s and relates them to the dominant fears and anxieties of each period. It concludes by taking a brief look at the continuation of the theme in the post-Cold War period.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Arnaud Regnauld and Henri Zuber for their help and advice.

Notes

Lori Maguire has the Chair in British and American Studies at the University of Paris VIII. She received her doctorate in Modern History at St Antony's College, Oxford, and she holds a higher doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She has recently published The Foreign Policy Discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States in the ‘New World Order’ (Cambridge Scholars, 2009).

 [1] Numerous studies of science fiction cinema exist. To name but a few: Kuhn, Alien Zone; Kuhn, Alien Zone II; Sobchak, The Limits of Infinity; Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War and Brosnan, Future Tense; Bartholomew, ‘Science Fiction Films’; Peary, Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies. There are many others that there is not the space to list here.

 [2] A number of films outside the science fiction genre also played with this theme, such as Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964). Others showed New York as a crime-ridden wreck, like Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979). 1981's Fort Apache, the Bronx (Daniel Petrie, 1981) showed a corrupt and racist police force battling even worse criminals and Nighthawks (Bruce Malmuth, 1981) concerned the arrival of Europe's most famous terrorist in the city.

 [3] New York, of course, was also faulted for its seediness: bars, prostitution, etc. For histories of New York, see Lankevich, American Metropolis?; Moorhouse, Imperial City; Kaspi, New York, 1940–1945; Muhlstein, Manhattan, to name but a few.

 [4] Such a fire did, in fact, occur in 1835. Fraser, Wall Street, 43.

 [5] Cooper, Home As Found, 108–9.

 [6] The title means ‘things of the future’ in Greek which already links it to science fiction.

 [7] Poe, ‘Mellonta Tauta’, 381.

 [8] James, The American Scene, 74.

 [9] Ibid., 83.

[10] Ibid., 75.

[11] Ibid., 84.

[12] Dos Passos, The Best Times, 86. See also O'Connell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York, 135.

[13] White, Here is New York, 24–5.

[14] Mulvey and Simmons in New York: City as Text, 1 make the point that since New York is, in a sense, between Europe and America, facing towards both, it ‘can represent both a spiritual antithesis to the middle America that would repudiate it and an American epitome to the rest of the world that would embrace or repudiate it’. Ric Burns wrote in the companion volume to the PBS history of New York: ‘To many foreigners it represents America; to many Americans, it represents all that is foreign’. Burns and Sandars, New York, xiii.

[15] As far as I can tell, the first film to destroy New York was The Battle Cry of Peace (Wilfrid North, 1915), now lost. It details the city's invasion by an unidentified enemy that looks German. It was generally seen as Allied propaganda. See The New York Times' review, 7 August 1915. New York was attacked again in a forgotten pacifist film of 1933, Men Must Fight (Edgar Selwyn).

[16] Wollen, ‘Delirious Projections’, 25 sees some parallels between the skyscraper, and film, which developed at the same time.

[17] Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, 213. See also Murphy, ‘Monster Movies’.

[18] Quoted in Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 77. Barry Keith Grant wrote: ‘We eagerly await the climactic tidal wave that will sweep over New York and its landmarks of western civilisation’. ‘“Sensuous Elaboration”’, 22.

[19] For more on this see Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds, 75 and Michaels, The American Movies Reference Book.

[20] Although Barclay, in his study of Viewing Tastes of Adolescents in Cinema and Television, 18, found that the genre was not particularly appreciated by British adolescent boys with 39 per cent listing science fiction as their least favourite type of film.

[21] For more on this, see Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds. Also Perrine, Film and the Nuclear Age and Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light.

[22] See, for example, Weart, Nuclear Fear, 194

[23] As Sandars observes in Celluloid Skyline, 387–8: ‘How better to convey the end of the world than to show the destruction of its best-known place … In the nuclear era, the greatest symbol of civil society was inevitably the greatest possible target, whose annihilation would provide the most wrenching symbol of atomic nightmare’.

[24] For more information on the film and examples of publicity shots and posters see http://www.conelrad.com/features/invasionusa/index.html. Accessed 15 January 2003.

[25] The trailer can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = cNZaMm5q_BA. Accessed 20 February 2009.

[26] See Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 152.

[27] Ibid.

[28] And even some that belong to the domain of fantasy like the television series I Dream of Jeannie.

[29] See Dean, ‘Between 2001 and Star Wars’. Fried's The Russians Are Coming! shows the decline of patriotic displays at the end of the 1950s. The following decade saw increasing cynicism about American institutions and values caused by the revelation of racial inequality through the civil rights movement and disillusionment with the Vietnam War. Watergate, of course, further increased cynicism in the 1970s.

[30] The inscription on the Statue, by Emma Lazarus, reads: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’

[31] The script is available online at http://pota.goatley.com/scripts/pota_finalshoot2.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2009. Interestingly enough, only the first words ‘My God!’ can be found in the shooting script. The rest seems to have been added during filming.

[32] For more on this see Greene, Planet of the Apes.

[33] The script can be found at http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Escape-From-New-York.html Accessed 25 February 2009.

[34] See, for example, Biskind, Seeing is Believing or Sayre, Running Time.

[35] Stephen Keane comments in Disaster Cinema, 101, that ‘in 1998 watching New York getting destroyed became standard fare’.