The Day After Tomorrow highlights a different way to envision evolutionary narratives and the heroes that drive them. In cli-fi films from the 1970s and eco-comic disaster films from the 1980s forward (such as Eight Legged Freaks [2002] and Warm Bodies[2013]), disaster plots are driven by two different kinds of heroes: tragic pioneers and comic community builders. The Day After Tomorrow,on the other hand, relies on a different kind of hero, one that arguably combines both tragic and comic characteristics. Our reading of The Day After Tomorrowattempts to make the idea of the new ecological (eco)-hero more transparent rather than rearticulating the obvious ecological messages on display in the film. In The Day After Tomorrow, heroic roles are filled not by tragic pioneers or even bumbling comic heroes, but by a father seeking to save his own child from an environment that humanity has made toxic in multiple ways. In The Day After Tomorroweco-hero and father Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) attempts not only to save the world from global warming but to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) from a flooded and frozen New York City.
This new breed of eco-hero fails to fit in categories of tragic or comic heroes as defined by either Aristotle or Joseph W. Meeker. Meeker expands Aristotle’s categories to include the natural world in his eco-critical approach to Classic literature. Meeker’s tragic heroes in the natural world are the ecological pioneers, “the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (“The Comic Mode” 161). His comic heroes build community. Meeker argues that once ecosystems mature, heroic solitary pioneers become not only unnecessary but also subordinate to the group. In a mature or climax ecosystem, “it is the community itself that really matters, and it is likely to be an extremely durable community so long as balance is maintained among its many elements” (Meeker “The Comic Mode” 163). Comic heroes emerge from these climax ecosystems.
Jack Hall serves the community while maintaining a solitary quest, however. This new eco-hero combines the best qualities of the tragic and comic heroes to build a better world community while also saving children who are closest to them. As an intellectually driven hero seeking to save the world from the consequences of climate change he endured at the North Pole, Jack looks like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth when he explains global warming to a world delegation but like Thorn when he saves himself from a glacial collapse. In spite of these two daring acts—one physical and the other intellectual—Jack’s many weaknesses are also on display in the film. When he returns from his latest Arctic trip, his house plants have nearly died, his son has failed calculus, and his ex-wife has lost faith in his ability even to pick up his son in time to get him to the airport for a scholastic bowl tournament.
These everyday events, however, are juxtaposed with images of worldwide eco-disaster. Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), an oceanographer, discusses the possibility of a new Ice Age, and reports of its oncoming effects soon come in from all over the world. Pieces of ice fall from the sky in Tokyo, destroying cars and killing any people they strike. Snowstorms drift into New Delhi. Storms hit Jack’s son Sam’s flight, on its way to New York. And when Sam and his friend Laura (Emmy Rossum) reach the city, they watch from their taxi as flocks of birds migrate away from the city, seemingly disturbed by climate change. When Jack enters Professor Rapson’s data into his climate model, the results are devastating. According to their conclusions, the Earth will be in a full-scale ice age in six to eight weeks.
More disastrous events point to this upcoming ice age: frozen helicopter pilots in Scotland, and massive flooding in New York City with tidal waves catapulting down its broad avenues. Sam and the rest of his scholastic bowl friends make their way into the New York Public Library, and the father/son narrative takes center stage. Sam finds a water-logged pay phone in the library, calls his father, and hears his father’s promise: “wait it out and burn what you can. I will come for you. I will come for you.” The rest of the film revolves around Jack’s quest to save his son, and his son’s and ex-wife’s evolution into new eco-heroes like Jack.
The family melodrama becomes the main focus until the film’s end, even though it is occasionally broken with more global concerns, like the death of the President and the fate of American refugees in Mexico. Jack’s ex-wife Lucy’s (Sela Ward) heroism is highlighted when an ambulance arrives to save her and a young patient, Peter, whom she has refused to leave alone. And when Sam gathers penicillin and food from an iced-in Russian ship, he too demonstrates his potential as an eco-hero. Jack serves as the most daring eco-hero, when he saves his son and the remaining New York survivors from the library. As Jack explains, “I made my son a promise. I’m going to keep it.”
This eco-drama ends with father and son reunited (and possibly husband and wife). The cli fi-disaster looks like most disaster films in every way other than the way the image of the hero is constructed. In The Day After Tomorrow, the hero is a true eco-hero, attempting to save the world from environmental disaster, but his most heroic act is localized and less than self-sacrificial. Jack makes his heroic journey not to save the world—as we might expect an eco-hero and a climatologist to do—but to save his son. And both Lucy and Sam act heroically for similar reasons—to save the individuals they love, not the world, the nation, or even the community.
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