In a very weird way, The Day After Tomorrow was my favorite film growing up. I think I loved the survival of it and the drama of living out an apocalypse disaster. Watching the film was obviously terrifying, but the ice age forming spectacle that it was, developed the beginning of my love for winter.
To summarize the film a little, a group of students visiting New York City encounter a progression of extreme weather events, brought on by climate change. The weather eventually oscillates into a massive global winter storm, which forces the group to wait out an ice-age-esque apocalypse in the public library, until they can be rescued (arctic exploration style).
The film is clearly a hyperbole for our world on the brink of climate disaster, and rests on Hollywood's dramatization of extreme survival - something I will say I am continuously thrilled by in cinema. For all of the junk disaster flicks that get created (I still watch them by the way), truly this one holds up pretty well to the test of time.
What I find striking though is how much nostalgia for winter I feel when I watch this film. This is typically during a snowstorm - preferably a big one and typically once a year. The glow of the streetlights illuminate the static of the snow coming down. I tuck away a sense of dread thinking about the sidewalk that is going to need to be shoveled, and I sit warmly on my couch. Maybe the fire is roaring beneath the tv screen, and maybe I have a cup of something hot to sip on.
I have tried digging into the meaning behind this particular nostalgia many times. When winters lack a big snowstorm as I’ve described, watching this film ignites even more nostalgia. I live in the upper great lakes region of the United States, just below Lake Superior. During a quintessential winter, snow arrives as a white blanket beginning in early December, and remains uninterrupted until around March, sometimes even April.
Without sounding too melodramatic, when winter does not produce this semi-permanent white blanket, I feel uneasy, like something is wrong. The weather is cyclical, some winters are warmer and some winters bring more snow. Over my lifetime I’ve noticed the cycle fluctuate more and more. The meteorological record indicates this too. Winters are warming and the average length of winter has shortened by two whole weeks in the last few decades.
The Day After Tomorrow is a weird climate change film. Instead of a world warming to the brink of disaster, the disaster in this film ends up being the snowstorm that plunges the world back into an ice age. In a poetic way, this film is resetting the chapter of our current climate age. The world is warming so fast, what if it just reset?
We started our warming world after the last ice age when the northern ice sheets melted and gave way to agriculture and cities. The ice age is our modern birth. The story of our current environment begins here. But we’ve accelerated this warming trend now to a point where the effects can be felt in our own lifetimes. It’s not a major natural event or disaster that is collectively being experienced (though these obviously do happen throughout our earth). Instead, our warming environment is experienced through memory and observed change.
I am one who observes feelings. Climate and the environment in the places we live are rooted in an experience like a childhood home. They are precious and their impermanence makes for deep emotions and longing. Winter is that for me. Winter is nostalgia in this changing world. I would not dare to dream of a scenario in which the world plunges back into a sphere of ice, but I do dream of a season that isn’t ushered away in the future.
#WinterNostalgia #ClimateChange #CozyTraditions #WinterTraditions #PreservingWinter #RevivingNostalgia #Impermanence