Thursday, May 20, 2004
The Gospel of Tomorrow
Sandy Starr at Spiked has an excellent discussion of The Day After Tomorrow as Green propaganda. Entertainment or science? “The answer you get from the filmmakers depends on whether they stand to gain publicity from a scientific debate about the film (in which case, it’s serious), or whether you’re taking them to task over the film’s scientific accuracy (in which case, it’s just entertainment). You have to hand it to the marketing department—the blurring of fact and fiction is an ingenious promotional technique.” Heads you win, tails I lose. “What purpose can raising ‘awareness’ of an unlikely or impossible scenario possibly serve, other than encouraging people to be more afraid than is rational? And why would scientists, of all people, wish to encourage such irrationality?”
Well Sandy, since you ask, it occurs to me that this is a reminder that ]http://www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php] much of environmentalism is, as Michael Crichton has argued recently, more religion than science[/url]. This movie is thus more than mere propaganda (boring). It is proselytizing (even more boring, not to mention hypocritical given the Passion hysteria). I’m all in favor of religion in movies, but let’s at least be honest about it. Truth in advertising? In this case let’s try starting with truth in science.
Then again, maybe The Day After Tomorrow is an accelerated documentary about the city of Chicago, as this AP article implicitly suggests.