Special Day

Yesterday was indeed a very busy and special day for our family. It has been a family tradition to celebrate Mother’s day with the entire family and with each one of us excitedly prepared with a gift and a letter for our Mum. Dad led the different activities lined up for the day. Everyone actively participated and contributed, which made the celebration truly meaningful and memorable. We made sure we have shown our love, appreciation and gratefulness to the one woman who painstakingly brought us in this world and nurtured us with unconditional love, guidance, and undying support.

Mum was still asleep when we scattered our gifts and letters cut out in different colours, shapes, and sizes by her bedside early in the morning. We then prepared breakfast consisted of steamed rice, fried eggs and sauteed tuna and bread. We squeezed fresh oranges to give her the freshest and healthiest breakfast just the way she does every day for all of us. We capped her breakfast delight with beautifully assembled fresh strawberry with classic yoghurt, her favourite dessert. When Mum woke up, she was greeted with a kiss from Dad and a happy mother’s day hug. Mom read the letters and opened the presents.

There was a big grin on her face when she opened my little brother’s gifts which are chocolate balls from the baptism party we went the night before. Same with my little sister who gifted Mum with the baby in a cradle also from the baptism party but both gifts were artistically wrapped in their personally cut out big hearts giving it their personal touch. My sister and I bought Mum a heart pendant. Dad treated Mum to a lunch at the Adelaide Casino after watching Pacquiao and Mosley fight there, while we children stayed at Urbanest, a cool students’ accommodation place across Adelaide Casino and baked macaroons there.

We had early dinner with my Dad’s fellow Filipino scholars. After having dinner, we then went to church and headed home after. Mum thanked us with kisses for the wonderful break from her daily routine of unselfishly attending to all our needs first over hers. I reflected on the day’s event and truly believed it was proper to pay tribute to all the mothers around the world for everything that we are, it was especially so because of our Mums.

There are many parents who are looking for someone who takes care of their children while they are away. Their option will be a day care center or nanny. If you are one of those parents, I want to persuade you not to choose quickly because they are not the same. They provide your child with different environment, you should select after understanding their similarities and differences. The first similarity between a day care center and nanny is that they take care of your child for specific period. Some parents can’t have jobs or study and pursue careers.

It is because they have to take most of their time off for taking care of their children and don’t have time to do it. The job of day care provider and nanny is to help those parents by taking care of their children. The second similarity is that a staff in day care center and nanny are trained people. They are educated in early child development or a related field. It means that they can assist your child in developing his academic skills. They can help children with preparation for kindergarten and children who are in school with homework.

Also, because they studied early child development or related field, they know children’s emotional needs and how to discipline properly. The third similarity is that they have issues with illness. Day care center can’t let you leave your child with them when he is sick. It is because, in the day care center, children are in close contact with other children ant it will let germs spread easily. On the other hand, it is needless to say, but a nanny can’t take care of your child when she is sick either. The first difference is the number of children they take care of.

Day care provider can’t take care of multiple children because there are many children in day care center. It means that they will not give one-on-one attention to your child. However, your child’s being among many children will good to your child. Your child will learn how to socialize because he will interact with other children. On the other hand, nanny is responsible for only your child, so your child will be able to open his heart to her quickly. The second difference is the location where they look after your children.

Needless to say, if you choose day care center, your child will be taken care of in the day care center. Your child may feel uncomfortable because he can’t move freely in the day care center like he does in his house. On the other hand, nanny comes to your home to take care of your child. Your child may feel comfortable to be in his house, but he will not be able to make friends like he can in a day care center. The third difference is the cost. You will have to pay for day care center between 62 dollars to 320 dollars a week. On the other hand, the cost of nanny is from 350 dollars to 700 dollars a week.

The cost of day care center is much cheaper than the cost of nanny, so to put your child into a day care center will help you a lot with money. However, a nanny does things worth the cost. For example, if your child is allergic to a certain food, she will not cook meal that contains that food if you ask her. This will not be done in day care center. As you know now, a day care center and nanny are similar, but not the same. They provide different environment for your child and affect you differently. Because of it, you have to consider carefully with whom you should leave your child while you are away.

Climate change, like many other environmental problems, is slow to develop, not amenable to simple or fast solutions, and caused by factors that are both invisible and complex (Adam 17).

Making a narrative film about climate change therefore does not fit easily into the commercial formulae of mainstream Hollywood, which favour human-interest stories in which individual protagonists undergo a moral transformation before they resolve their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can such classical narratives mediate an issue as complex as climate change without being not only inadequate, but even dangerous, lulling their audience into a false sense of security about our ability to deal with such problems?

Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British journalist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its emphasis on ‘a successful outcome and a narrative closure’. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the ‘real, material ecological crisis’ is ‘also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation’ (Kerridge 4).

Yet, as Jim Collins argues, ‘mass-mediated cultures’, including those of popular Hollywood cinema, are characterised by ‘semiotic complexities of meaning production’, which leave even popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretations (Collins 17). Film theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood movie as a ‘polysemous, multivalent set of images, characters, and narrative situations’, which therefore constitute what he calls an ‘ideological agglomeration’, rather than a single, coherent ideological position (Prince 40).

This polysemy may arise from the Hollywood industry’s commercial intention to maximize profits by appealing to as wide and diverse an audience as possible by making movies which, ideologically speaking, seek to have it all ways at once. One consequence is that, when we theorize about the effects popular movies may or may not have on public awareness of environmental issues, those effects are more complex, and less deterministic, than is often assumed is some academic film theories.

This essay will explore the range of meanings generated by The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which frames the issue of anthropogenic climate change within the familiar genres of the disaster and science fiction movie. Ideological analysis of the film, combined with a study of its audience reception, suggests that even a classical Hollywood narrative can generate a degree of ideological ambiguity which makes it open to various interpretations, both liberal and conservative. The ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow derives in part from the way its narrative mixes the modes of realism, fantasy and melodrama.

A realist film will attempt to correspond to what we understand as reality, mainly through the optical realism of its mise-en-scene and the sense of psychological plausibility produced by both its script and the performance of its actors. Melodrama, on the other hand, will simplify character and heighten action and emotion beyond the everyday. Hollywood movies tend to work by moving between these two modes of representation. Some genres, such as science fiction and horror, also move between realism and fantasy, a mode which exceeds realist plausibility by creating a totally fictive and impossible diegetic world.

As a science fiction movie, then, The Day After Tomorrow deliberately blurs the distinction between realism and fantasy. The narrative begins from a scientifically plausible premise: the melting of the Artic ice-cap, caused by anthropogenic global warming, cools the North Atlantic Current, colloquially known as the ‘Gulf Stream’, and thereby affects the weather in the Northern hemisphere. The movie then extrapolates from this premise beyond even the worst-case scenarios proposed by climate scientists.

The switching off of the thermohaline current generates a global superstorm, as a result of which an ice sheet covers Scotland and a tsunami floods Manhattan. The movie’s literary source, it is worth noting, was The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), by Art Bell and Whitely Streiber, whose television talk show on the paranormal suggests an interest in the ‘parascientific’; that is, in speculation beyond what is provable or falsifiable by scientific method. When interpreted literally, that is, as realism, The Day After Tomorrow clearly violates notions of scientific plausibility.

The basic climatology in the movie is inaccurate: hurricanes can only form over large bodies of warm water, not the cold seas found in high latitudes, where polar lows are the main storm systems. The movie also distorts the science of climate change, mainly by accelerating the time frame within which its effects take place, and by making them much worse than predicted. Any slowdown in the thermohaline current would take a period of years, at least, and probably centuries, rather than the days featured in the film.

Moreover, even if the North Atlantic Current did switch off, average temperatures would still be likely to rise, rather than fall, because of the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere (Henson 112-5). The film’s central narrative, in which government paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) walks in sub-zero temperatures all the way from north of Philadelphia to the New York Public Library, to rescue his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhall) who is sheltering there, is thus impossible: neither would survive such low temperatures.

For helicopters to freeze in mid-air, temperatures would not only be too cold for snow, but also too cold for human survival. Burning books in a library would be insufficient to keep people alive. Such implausibilities are worth pointing out, not because cinema audiences necessarily take what they see as scientific truth, but because science fiction often provides an opportunity to learn some real science. Indeed, as we will see later in this essay, environmental groups used the release of the movie as a ‘teachable moment’ on the science of climate change (Leiserowitz 6).

The two-disc DVD edition of the movie includes a documentary on the science of climate change; screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff commented on its release that, although ‘our primary concern’ in making the film ‘was entertainment rather than education. On the DVD, there’s room for both’. Acknowledging that the time frame he created for the movie was accelerated for fictional purposes, and that the ‘superfreeze’ was ‘purely a cinematic device’, he added that ‘the political, agricultural and societal consequences of a sudden change in the ocean currents would still be catastrophic’ (Nachmanoff 1).

To dismiss The Day After Tomorrow purely for its scientific inaccuracies, then, clearly misses the point of the movie, which is to use realist elements of climate science as a starting point for melodrama and fantasy, so that it can dwell on the spectacle of extreme weather, appropriate for a blockbuster disaster movie, and also invite the audience’s emotional engagement with the human-interest story that becomes the main focus of narrative. It is to these elements in the film that we will now turn.

As a ‘natural disaster’ melodrama, the film works on an opposition between nature and civilization, and invites an ambiguous identification on the part of the viewer: in Hollywood terms, we are invited to ‘root for’ both nature and civilization at various points in the narrative, although the values of civilization eventually become the dominant ones. Before that happens, however, the scenes of extreme weather make the experience of environmental apocalypse strangely attractive. As Maurice Yacowar observes, the natural disaster movie ‘dramatizes people’s helplessness against the forces of nature’ (Yacowar 218).

The set pieces of extreme weather in The Day After Tomorrow reveal the sublime power of wild nature: violent, chaotic, powerful beyond human control, and therefore exciting and seductive. Environmentalist Paul Hawken writes that the concept of doomsday ‘has always 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 disaster movies regularly feature television news 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 After Tomorrow follows this pattern. The audience’s complicity in seeking cinematic thrills in the scenarios of mass death and destruction caused by the weather is encouraged, rather than questioned, by the movie itself. Indeed, such thrills are the raison d’etre of its genre. Yet the aesthetics of the sublime have always been based 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 disaster 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 nature’s destructiveness in The Day After Tomorrow is the city. Hollywood disaster movies, writes Geoff King, share with millennial groups ‘a certain delirious investment in the destruction of the metropolis’ (King 158). When a series of tornadoes attack Los Angeles, the mise-en-scene focuses on familiar landmarks: the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, and a billboard advertising the model Angelyne.

Screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff observes on the DVD commentary that preview audiences greeted the moment where the Angelyne sign flattens the television reporter with cheers and applause (Emmerich). The sense of retribution is difficult to avoid: perhaps there is poetic justice in the media figure, parasitical on other people’s suffering, finding his nemesis in Angelyne, the model and aspiring actress who paid to advertise herself on her own billboards, and thus became for some emblematic of the meretricious values of the city.

As Mike Davis observes, Los Angeles is often given special treatment in apocalyptic narratives. ‘No other city,’ he writes, ‘seems to excite such dark rapture’. Unlike other cities, the destruction of Los Angeles ‘is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization’ (Davis 277). Geoff King draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ to account for such moments of ‘licensed 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 outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings’ (Sontag 215). Freud’s notion of the ‘death wish’ thus better captures the dark side of such fantasies. For Freud, such aggressions were natural drives that need to be controlled; art provides catharsis for such anti-social instincts. Patricia Mellencamp draws on Freud to argue that American television is both ‘shock and therapy; it both produces and discharges anxiety’ (Mellencamp 246).

The disaster movie works in a similar way, mobilising and exploiting our negative drives and emotions. But are there unconscious 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 back for its mistreatment at the hands of human beings. Psychoanalyst Karl Figlio draws on the theories of Melanie Klein to argue that scientific thinking itself is an act of repressive violence towards Nature. ‘Nature killed,’ he writes, ‘is nature in a vengeful mood, a primitive retaliatory phantasy that fuels apocalyptic forebodings.

The more scientific the culture, the more it is at the mercy of irrational fears, and the more it is dependent on scientific protection from them’ (Figlio 72). He cites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an ‘extreme example of scientific mapping that calls forth revenge from nature’ (75). According to this reading, then, when we watch nature getting its revenge, we as viewers are able to purge our guilt about its degradation. However, as Yacowar notes, the moral attitude of the typical disaster movie is ambiguous. Poetic justice in disaster films,’ he writes, ‘derives from the assumption that there is some relationship between a person’s due and his or her doom’. However, this notion breaks down when the ‘good die with the evil’ (Yacowar 232). The Day After Tomorrow works 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 bribe 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 draft 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 ethical critique in these scenes fits into the ideological agenda of many disaster films. As King writes, such films ‘include an element of criticism of capitalism, but this is a gesture that for the most part leaves its core values largely 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 mostly 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 Jack’s 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 trying 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 state clearly where the British royal family stand in this hierarchy of innocence and guilt: 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 key to survival. The rescue of the innocent, French-speaking African family is thus crucial in einforcing the movie’s ethical hierarchy based on racial, national and gender differences: they are saved by the white American woman (Laura), who in turn is saved by the white American male (Sam), thereby enacting in miniature two important themes in the movie. The most important of these is the narrative of male heroism and redemption. Melodrama, writes Linda Williams, is about a ‘retrieval and staging of innocence’ (Williams 7). In this film, the melodramatic plot of father rescuing son makes the moral point that hard-working fathers need to take a more active role in bringing up their sons.

The movie implies that, although millions of people may be dead, if one American family can be saved, then at least some good has come out of the eco-apocalypse. This message is more liberal, or at least not as unambiguously patriarchal, as in earlier disaster movies. In keeping with Stephen Prince’s notion of ideological agglomeration, mentioned earlier, although Jack’s wife is a doctor, she ends up playing the role of surrogate mother to a seven-year old 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 second important theme in the movie is the United States’ self-appointed role as global protector-policeman. The rescue narrative trumpets the frontier values of male physical heroism, strong 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, America’s role in world politics is also questioned by a more liberal discourse in the movie, when American refugees are forced to flee illegally into Mexico, in an ironic reversal of the real politics on the national border. This ironic reversal is itself made ambiguous, though, when later the United States government writes off all Third World debt, but in return, wins the right for its citizens to live as ‘guests’ in those countries. It should be noted that not all Hollywood movies with environmental themes are as individualistic 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 Away 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. Indeed, civilization, rather than wild nature, becomes the real object of audience identification by the end.

The choice of the New 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 Western civilization is finished’, he adds, ‘I’m going to save at least one little piece of it’. Ultimately, then, the movie celebrates reason and science as the values most 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 never able to control the forces loose against them’. The genre thus serves ‘the mystery that dwarfs science’ (Yacowar 228). This is also true of The Day After Tomorrow, in that the 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 advanced 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 didn’t 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 necessary for survival.

Moreover, advanced technology is ultimately a force for good. Jack is able to locate his son in the Public Library under the frozen wastes of Manhattan because of his friend’s portable satellite navigation system (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 complex as climate change (Mayer 117).

The values of civilization finally triumph over the destructive forces of wild nature when the pack of wolves, which escaped from Central Park Zoo earlier in the movie, return to attack Sam and his friends when they are searching for medicine 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 imaginative power of Computer Generated Imaging.

In Eco Media (2005), Sean Cubitt argues that The Lord of 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 ‘increasing belief’, he suggests, ‘that through the development of highly 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 identified by Geoff King, in which ‘the possibility of apocalyptic destruction is confronted and depicted with a potentially horrifying special effects/spectacular ‘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 moment. The superstorm passes, thereby confirming Jack’s earlier opinion that the storms will last ‘until the imbalance that created them is corrected’ by ‘a global realignment’.

Gazing at a beautiful, calm Earth, an astronaut in the International Space Station comments that he has ‘never seen the air so clear’. In Winston Wheeler Dixon’s 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 intractable problem explored in the rest of the movie. To return to the question posed at the start of this essay, does such an ending merely encourage evasion, denial and complacency in regard 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-saturated 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 process of interpretation is more open and varied 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 don’t need to worry. This message resembles the right-wing appropriation of the Gaia hypothesis; that is, the idea, proposed by the British chemist James Lovelock, that the Earth as a whole is a self-regulating system in a natural state of homeostatic balance.

In his 1999 book Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, Peter Huber used the concept of Gaia to justify a conservative manifesto that called for the dismantling of existing environmental regulations. The ‘most efficient way to control’ pollutants such as greenhouses gases, he argued, ‘is not to worry about them at all. Let them be. Leave them to Gaia’ (Huber 128). The notion of Gaia, we should note, is not the sole property of New 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 argument 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 analogy 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 Indemnity (1946), ‘it is not their inevitable demise we remember 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 reform in the election year of 2004. Early 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 warming, arguing that to take action would harm the American economy. In another reference to George W. Bush’s presidency, we are told that the administration in the movie has also refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction 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 planet’s natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong’. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the whole movie, the President’s public apology confirms the words of the African-American homeless man earlier in the film, who refers to people with their ‘cars and their exhausts, and they’re just polluting the atmosphere’.

The disaster has been a wake-up call for America, and the new start will allow for the changes in lifestyle 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 environmental 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 Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as a powerful exemplar (Opie and Elliott 35).

The Day After Tomorrow also uses both pathos and rational argument to convince its audience of the need to take steps to avoid environmental catastrophe. Critical speculation on the effectiveness or otherwise of making a disaster movie about global warming can draw on the conclusions of an empirical study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact 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 agreed with the statement, ‘There’s nothing we can do anyway’, whereas 82% preferred, ‘We have to stop climate change’. Reusswig). Indeed, the Potsdam study makes hopeful reading for environmentalists. It found that the publicity surrounding the film triggered a new interest in climate change, and raised 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 estimate various impacts on the United States as more likely, and to shift their conceptual understanding 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 ‘momentary 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 taken for in film theory. According to some versions of psychoanalytic ‘subject positioning’ theory, Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow tend to render spectators passive.

Under the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s theories of narrative, film academics such Colin McCabe and Steven Heath argued that only modernist or avant-garde narrative techniques can produce a more active (even revolutionary) film spectator. As the 1992 textbook New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics puts it, psychoanalytic film theory ‘sees the viewer not as a person, a flesh-and-blood individual, but as an artificial construct, produced and activated by the cinematic apparatus’ (Stam 147). In his book The Crisis of Political Modernism (1999), D.

N. Rodowick exposes the flaws in such thinking. The politics of political modernism, he writes, assume ‘an intrinsic and intractable relation between texts and their spectators, regardless of the historical or social context of that relation’ (Rodowick 34). But film viewers are flesh-and-blood individuals, and when they are treated 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 same 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 look 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 selective readings in order to further their own agendas. Patrick Michaels, one of the minority of scientists who stills rejects the idea of human-created climate change, pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie, and damned Hollywood for irresponsibly playing into the hands of liberal environmentalists by exaggerating the threat of global warming (Michaels 1).

Liberal-left environmental campaigners also understood that the movie’s foundation in science was flawed. However, they found its scientific exaggerations and inaccuracies less important than what they saw as its realistic portrayal of the American government’s denial of the scientific evidence for global warming. As former Vice-President Al Gore put it, ‘there are two sets of fiction to deal with. One is the movie, the other is the Bush administration’s presentation of global warming’ (Mooney 1). Gore joined with the liberal Internet advocacy organization MoveOn. rg, which used the movie’s release as an opportunity to organize a national advocacy campaign on climate change. Senators McCain and Lieberman also used the movie to promote the reintroduction of their Climate Stewardship Act in Congress (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: ‘Fear 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 people’s 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 informed 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 classical, 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. Classical narrative forms and genre movies such as The Day After Tomorrow can focus thought and provide an imaginative and provocative response to environmental crisis.

WORKS CITED

1. Adam, Barbara (1998), Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Routledge, London and New York.
2. Bell, Art and Streiber, Whitely (1999), The Coming Global Superstorm, Pocket Star Books, New York. Collins, Jim (1989), Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism, Routledge, New York and London. Cubitt, Sean (2005), Eco Media, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York. Davis, Mike (1998), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Henry Holt and Co. , New York. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2003), Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema, Wallflower Press, London and New York.
3. Emmerich, Roland, director (2004), The Day After Tomorrow, 20th Century Fox, Two-disc DVD. Figlio, Karl (1996). ‘Knowing, loving and hating nature: a psychoanalytic view’ in George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (eds), FutureNatural: Nature, science, culture, Routledge, London and New York. Greenpeace International (2004). ‘Big screen vs big oil’. http://www. greenpeace. org/international/news/the-day-after-tomorrow, 1-4. Hawken, Paul (1993), The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, HarperCollins, New York.
4. Henson, Robert (2006), The Rough Guide to Climate Change, Rough Guides, London. Huber, Peter (1999), Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto, Basic Books, New York. Keane, Stephen (2001), Disaster Movies, Wallflower Press, London. Kerridge, Richard (1998), ‘Introduction’, in Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels (eds), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Zed Books, London and New York. King, Geoff (2000), Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster, London and New York, I. B. Tauris.
5. Lieserowitz, Anthony A (2004), ‘Before and After The Day After Tomorrow: A U. S. study of climate change risk perception. ‘ Environment. 46 (9), 22-37. www. findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_m1076/is_9_46/ai_n856541/print, 1-12. Mayer, Sylvia (2006), ‘Teaching Hollywood Environmentalist Movies: The Example of The Day After Tomorrow’, in Sylvia Mayer and Graham Wilson (eds), Ecodidactic Perspectives on English Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Trier, WVT. Mellencamp, Patricia (1990), ‘TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television’, in Logics of Television, ed.
6. Patricia Mellencamp, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Michaels, Patrick J. (2004), ‘Apocalypse Soon? No, but This Movie (And Democrats) Hope You’ll Think So. ‘ The Washington Post, May 16th 2004, B01. www. washingtonpost. com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28338-2004May14? language=printer Mooney, Chris (2004), ‘Learning From Nonsense? ‘, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, http://www. csicop. org/doubtandabout/global-warming Nachmanoff, Jeffrey (2004), ‘Jeffrey Nachmanoff on The Day After Tomorrow’. http:// www. amazon. co. uk/gp/feature. html.
7. Nisbet, Matthew (2004), ‘Evaluating the Impact of The Day After Tomorrow: Can a Blockbuster Film Shape the Public’s Understanding of a Science Controversy? ‘, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, http://www. csicop. org/ Opie, John and Elliott, Norbert (1996), ‘Tracking the Elusive Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Character of American Environmental Discourse’, in James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (eds), The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington. Place, Janey (1978), ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed), Women in Film Noir.
8. BFI, London. Prince, Stephen (1992), Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film. Praeger, New York. Reusswig, Fritz, Scwarzkopf, Julia and Pohlenz, Philipp (2004), ‘Double Impact: The Climate Blockbuster ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and its impact on the German Cinema Public. ‘ PIK Report 92, Potsdam, 1-61. http://www. pik-potsdam. de/research/publications/pikereports/summary-report-n-92 Rodowick, D. N. (1999), The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.
9. Sontag, Susan (2001), Against Interpretation, Vintage, London. Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1992), New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond, Routledge, London and New York. Williams, Linda (1998), ‘Melodrama Revisited’, in Nick Browne (ed), Refiguring American Film Genres, University of California Press, London. Yacowar, Maurice (1986), ‘The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed), Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Nine percent of Utah’s population is Latino or Hipic.  And, at least thirty percent of the households of Utah have a Latino or Hipic individual present, regardless of whether the immigrant is living as a relative or working as a maid in the household (Overview, 2004).  Indeed, the Latinos are very hard working people.

They are studying with other racial groups in schools and colleges, and although many of them feel that they are discriminated against, they have already proved themselves to be “a growing and developing economic power base” (Warner, 2004).  This means that the Latinos are rather important to the economy of Utah today.

They are especially represented in the service industry.  Hotels, restaurants, the agricultural industry, construction and reconstruction – a variety of businesses are using the help of Latinos.  What is more, Latinos are paid less than the other workers are on average.  For every 72 cents given to a Latino for his or her work, a person from another racial group gets a dollar (Media).

Now if all Latinos were to leave Utah for a day, the economy would most definitely slow down and experience loss.  There would be countless absentees in the workplace, school attendance would fall, and those that discriminate against the Latinos would breathe a sigh of relief.  Still, the economy would bear the brunt of the departure of the Latinos.

In order to produce the goods and provide the services that the Latinos were previously helping businesses to produce and to provide, businesses would have to hire for a day workers that would charge more than the Latinos do.  Budgets would have to be changed, as businesses face a rise in their expenditures.

Moreover, businesses might decide to cut the supply of their products because of the increase in expenditures.  It may also be that businesses would not find replacements for the Latinos through the day.  Hence, businesses would have to slow down if not close down for the day.  In the long run, the economy of Utah would be seen to have been affected by the departure of the Latinos for a day.

     Utah, like all other states of America, thrives on diversity.  As a matter of fact, there is no state in America where diversity does not hold a very special place in the societal structure.

People who are living with the Latinos, and those that study with young Latinos in schools and colleges would testify that Latinos do add value to their particular groups.

When Latino maids in the home have to leave for a day, the mothers of the children for whom they had hired Latino maids, would also have to leave their workplaces in order to care for their children without maids.  This, too, would have an affect on the economy.  What is more, the value that Latinos add as family members is known only to the members of the households that Latinos occupy.

A Latino wife or husband leaving home for a day might turn out to be a problem for the spouse.  And, when the effects of the losses are accumulated taking into consideration the entire society, it may become obvious that Latinos are indeed an interwoven part of the societal fabric that cannot be torn apart without negative consequences.

Those that discriminate against the Latinos of Utah might breathe a sigh of relief in the absence of the Latinos.  Still, when the effects on the economy are brought into full view, the people that discriminated against the Latinos would also be seen to have been affected by the loss.

Latinos are today akin to an engine in a factory that cannot be done away with although there are many other engines in the same factory performing the same kinds of tasks in a different way.  Seeing that the first engine is present is evidence enough that the engine is important to the factory.  Similarly, Utah cannot imagine itself without Latinos at present.

This racial group has become an indispensable part of the lives of people who occupy Utah, in addition to their livelihood.  Gladys Gonzales, the editor and publisher of Mundo Hipo, explains this indispensability thus: “We are bringing synergy to this state… We are hard workers with an entrepreneurial spirit.  We want to contribute positively to this state and this country” (Warner).

It is this positive attitude that has allowed the Latinos to be fairly successful in Utah, despite the problems that they might face in their personal or public lives.  Furthermore, the Latinos are expected to continue adding value to the society and the economy of the state.  Indeed, if the Latinos were to leave Utah for a day, they will be missed by their friends, employers, and customers in Utah.

Even those that were displeased with the presence of the Latinos in Utah would face a loss as their favorite restaurants are closed down, and their businesses face an increase in expenditures.  Perhaps for such people, a day without Latinos would serve as a wake up call.  The Latinos would be anxiously awaited back in Utah.

References

Media Contacts. “U of U Researcher Reports Latino Immigrants’ Experience in Utah to be Mixed.” University of Utah. Retrieved from http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/05/jun/immigrants.html. (4 April 2007).

Overview of Utah’s Hipic/Latino Demographics. (2004). State Office of Ethnic Affairs. Retrieved from http://ethnicoffice.utah.gov/public_policy_and_research/documents/oea.his.lat.0505.pdf. (4 April 2007).

Warner, Laura. (2004, March 27). “Bias exists, but Utah Latinos optimistic.” Deseret Morning News. Retrieved from http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595052024,00.html. (4 April 2007).

The pressing question in this case is can automated external defibrillators save lives.  The answer is yes.  The secondary question is how many.  With no other considerations the addition of defibrillators to a gym’s first aid protocols will help save additional lives.

But in order to adequately determine how many more lives defibrillators can save, one must examine factors such as the overall health condition of the recipient, personnel knowledge, and response time.

Based on the details of this case, an on-sight defibrillators at Silver’s Gym may save the majority of those expected 100 incidents.  Of the 30 that would die before paramedics arrive, 24 will live with the use of the defibrillator.  Of the remaining 70 that would otherwise live, improper use of the defibrillator may cause 2.1 deaths, saving 67.9 lives.  The total expected number of lives saved with the on-sight defibrillator  is 91.9.

The estimates cannot be accurate, however, when considering the health issues that are evident in this case.  Beginning with Tommy, high cholesterol and high blood pressure changes the probability that a defibrillator would be effective.  Also, as people exercise in the gym their heart rates and blood pressures increases making them prone to a sudden cardiac arrest.

If the increased rates from exercise are compounded by poor health conditions, like Tommy’s that changes the estimates to a much lower figure as well.  The use of CPS and EMT response time also change those figures.   Finally, the actual condition that makes the person need medical assistance – heart attack, sudden cardiac arrest, or other condition – changes the figures.

Untrained personnel cannot properly assess  what aid to administer.  Obviously CPR is appropriate in some cases, the AED in others, and in some cases both CPR and use of the AED will be indicated.  Untrained personnel may not know how to check for devices such as a pacemaker which affects the use of the defibrillator.

Pacemakers could compound the improper use factor.  There is a chance of improper use on a person who has no pacemaker.  There may be a higher chance of improper use when a pacemaker is present.

In Tommy’s case, since he was not breathing, CPR was a proper response to help restore his breathing.  Without proper oxygen to the brain and heart the defibrillator may not have worked.  Silver’s Gym was not negligent in Tommy’s death.  Gym personnel administered CPR upon finding that he was not breathing.

A proper and expected response.  Had there been no personnel with CPR training, that would be a case for negligence.  Without knowing how quickly the call was made, a 12 minute response from EMTs was reasonable, so there was no negligence on the part of gym personnel calling, nor on the part of EMTs for poor response time.  Also, it appears that the gym personnel immediately responded to Tommy’s situation.  Had there been no one in the lobby where Tommy was sitting, or had they not responded in a timely manner, there would be a case for negligence.

The case states that “CPR alone is not effective in treating SCA.”  From that statement it is safe to assume that CPR is effective in treating SCA if accompanied by the correct use of a defibrillator.  However, in this case CPR and AED combined may not have been effective in countering the effects of high blood pressure and high cholesterol in a person who is overweight and does not exercise.

CPR and AED treat symptoms, not underlying causes.  Tommy had too many health risk factors – age, weight, sedentary lifestyle, and two severe health conditions – to justify a case of negligence against Silver’s Gym.

Defibrillators can and do help save lives.  When gyms and sports facilities have defibrillator equipment on-sight, proper use of the equipment can prevent some unexpected deaths.  It is important that there be trained personnel on sight who know how to administer first aid and life saving procedures such as CPR.

It is also important that they be trained in proper defibrillator use.   Individuals also have a contributing factor in how well life saving procedures work for them.  When people take more responsibility and become more active in ensuring their personal health, they increase the likelihood that CPR, defibrillators, and EMT protocols will save their lives in extreme emergencies.

Negligence occurs when gyms and athletic facilities do not have personnel properly trainedCPR and first aid.  Or when there are not enough personnel on hand to monitor and respond to medical emergencies in those facilities.  However, one cannot expect anyone, even well trained and highly skilled doctors to prevent death when several risk factors exist in one person.

Why would you choose any beach other than Galveston? The Galveston Island beach is peaceful and serene. The list of natural luxuries this haven provides is endless; and as I sit here relaxed, I soak them all in. In peace at the edge of the water, the myriad cares of the world behind me, the warming rays of the sun bathe me in their wonder and glory.

The world around me drowns out by the sounds of the wind whispering its song along the coast, and the distant thunder of the surf rolling forward in its never ending struggle to reach the shore.

I lose myself in the mist of these beautiful surroundings, and when I close my eyes I am hesitant to open them for fear I might find myself awoke from the most amazing dream. When I do open my eyes, and cast their gaze outward upon the beautiful blue expanse before me, I contemplate the contrasts of the world in which I am submerged.

The warm touch of sun upon my face and shoulders, the cooling sensations of the water washing over my feet with each surge in the tide, and the sounds of amiable laughter from the seagulls that dance endlessly into the breeze mixed with the surf roaring in its own baritone voice.

Both wishing their voice to be heard over the other and yet, in the end, combining into an opera of nature, singing me further into reverie in my chair at the edge of the water.

Even the sound of Galveston Island Beach patrollers driving along on their ATVs was just faint enough to blend in with the background sound of the surroundings and still manage to make feel safe and secure. I watch as the surf crashes on the rocks near the shore and the seagulls fly in swirling poetic patterns.

This is paradise in its barest form. Who could ask for more? “The Beach Blues” Could I have chosen a worst vacation spot?

Surrounding me in, what to the casual observer can only be described as, a competition for the right to be heard by all are the sounds of the tourists with their stereos blasting a nuance of different styles of music, there incessant questioning of their spouses or friends as to the hue of their skin, and their children screeching incessantly about ownership of some insignificant trinket.

The beach is smothered with cigarette butts and empty cans in the sand, deserted remnants of plastic toys, probably left behind long enough for the children who broke them to grow to adulthood and bring children of their own to cut their little feet on the same jagged fragments that dig in my heels. The neglected and unforgiving terrain of the beach is at least bearable and it pales in comparison to devastating scents emitting from its tenants.

I realize cutting off my nose might be a good idea when down the coast emerges a breeze that, while eagerly anticipated as a source of relief and refreshment from the glaring sun of the day, is now reviled for the scent of what can only be described as rotting seaweed being carried along in its embrace. The smell is so retched, I can taste it.

The sand baked by the sun, and battered by the multitudes of sun worshippers and their children, has become as hot ash from a fire scattered about waiting to greet the soles of the feet of the next brave soul willing to try and reach the edge of the water.

If the heat from the sand’s surface were not enough, the rays from the sun presses against my skin like an endless supply of needles prickling at my flesh, and I dare not close my eyes for fear the lids might burn clear off; dually, I’m blinded by this ball of hellfire in the sky. Kill me now.

This article is based on students who participated in Seneca College Orientation. It was a big success because everyone learned so much about their courses and everyone had fun. This orientation was for new students attending Seneca College, there are different departments of studies that were introduced. First, the president of Seneca College, David Jones welcomed students by his speech then after that, the president had every student in every department come up on the stage so that he could personally welcome everyone and give the students a pin.

Along with some of the board members, everyone shook hands and personally greeted each other a welcome aboard greeting. Everyone was amazed by the start of this formal ceremony. After the welcome greeting, the president introduced Ms. Erin Grant, Alumni and also the Valedictorian of her school year. She was thrilled to be called on to greet the new students. She shared some quotes to encourage the new students and told them not to worry about negative things because hard work is the key to success. It created a nice atmosphere among the students, because it took some pressure off their shoulders.

After she delivered her lovely speech, the president and the board members left the gymnasium while the students remained in their seats waiting for their department of study to be called down so that they can meet with the faculty members so that they can discuss further details about the courses with their future students. The faculty discussed what the courses were about and what the expectations on each of them were. They gave out a lot of informations to help the students know what they are entering into. The discussion ended and everyone enjoyed a delicious lunch on Seneca grounds. It was an unforgettable Orientation day at Seneca.