The On-Screen Onslaught of New York City

I decided to give some serious thought to how many times New York City has been destroyed or under attack in movies. NYC really seems to bare the brunt of on screen city destruction, be it by aliens, tidal waves, the next Ice Age, giant lizards, giant gorillas, giant roaches, epic battles, vampire diseases, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man; the list goes on and on. 

Below I’ve compiled a short list of films where some variety of New York City based damage has occurred:

  • Godzilla
  • Ghost Busters
  • End of Days
  • Deep Impact
  • Spiderman
  • Batman (Yes, Batman…‘Gotham is known to be architecturally modeled after New York City, but with exaggerated elements of the styles of the city; before Detective Comics #48, Batman’s adventures were said to happen in New York City. Gotham City derives its name from a sobriquet for New York City, which was first popularized by the author Washington Irving in his satirical work Salmagundi (1807). Irving adopted the name from the story of the Wise Men of Gotham, in which the inhabitants of the town of Gotham (in Nottinghamshire, England) behave like madmen’ - Wikipedia.)
  • Superman (the Metropolis? ‘Metropolis is depicted as a major US city on the country’s East Coast. The city is known for being one of the largest and wealthiest cities on earth.’ Okay, putting ‘Superman’ into my argument may weaken my point a bit as the co-creator and original artist of Superman, Joe Shuster, originally modelled the Metropolis skyline after Toronto, where he was born and lived until he was ten. However, ‘since then, Metropolis has become a city inspired by New York City.’ - Wikipedia.)
  • Independence Day
  • I Am Legend
  • War of the Worlds
  • The Day After Tomorrow
  • King Kong
  • Highlander
  • Gremlins 2
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Mimic
  • Armageddon
  • X-Men
  • DareDevil
  • Hellboy
  • Fantastic Four
  • Cloverfield

Breaking the mould, disaster movies Twelve Monkeys and Outbreak (telling the tale of a spreading deadly virus) are set in Philadelphia and various other locations in the United States, but not New York City. This is unusual for disaster films, for it seems that if you’re going to be serious about making some kind of film based on a catastrophe, you really need to set it in NYC.

From 1996 to 2008, 14 films have depicted New York City being destroyed. That’s an average of about one film a year. This is compared to 1 in the 1930s, 3 in the 1950s, 2 in the 1960s, 2 in the 1970s and 1 in the 1980s.

Below is a full list of films that feature New York City being completely obliterated, or shown as a post-apocalyptic Hell-hole:

  • Deluge (1933)
  • When Worlds Collide (1951)
  • Invasion USA (1952)
  • The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)
  • Planet of the Apes (1968)
  • Destroy All Monsters (1968)
  • Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
  • Meteor  (1979)
  • Escape from New York (1981)
  • Independence Day (1996)
  • Godzilla (1998)
  • Armageddon (1998)
  • Deep Impact (1998)
  • Aftershock: Earthquake in New York (1999)
  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
  • The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
  • Godzilla Final Wars (2004)
  • King Kong (2005)
  • War of the Worlds (2005)
  • Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York (2006)
  • Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)
  • I Am Legend (2007)
  • Cloverfield (2008)

What is this preoccupation that filmmakers seem to have with destroying New York City? In 2001 it even became a reality when the two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, but even that didn’t seem to stop New York getting continually destroyed on film. There was a lull for a few years after this, but then filmmakers returned to their old habits and decided to ruin New York again twice in 2004, with lots of ice and snow and bad weather and wolves and things (The Day After Tomorrow), and with a giant lizard (Godzilla Final Wars) on the rampage… again, and twice in 2005 when another giant animal, this time a gorilla (King Kong), also did a similar thing and went on the war path around the city and aliens (most probably illegal ones) came down and started trying to enslave the human race (War of the Worlds).

There also appears to be a trend where superheroes seem to converge in NYC in large numbers:

  • Superman (see above point about The Metropolis)
  • Batman (see above point about Gotham City)
  • Spiderman
  • DareDevil
  • Hellboy
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • X-Men
  • The Fantastic Four (all four of them)
  • And a rich plethora of villains to add to the mix.

Even The Incredibles, although they live in the fictional city of Metroville, has a distinct New York City type vibe to it.

I guess NYC is a city that especially needs saving above the other cities in the States or indeed anywhere else in the world. Why else would all the superheroes live there? Well I guess it’s true. It does seem to need saving when you think of all that’s happened to it on film. It’s a comforting thought to think of a superhero hovering above the city on rooftops watching out for trouble and helping all the citizens.

So why does this near obsession of showing NYC being damaged, destroyed or obliterated in film, exist? New York is one of the most famous cities in the world. It is the financial centre of the world as it is the financial seat of the most powerful nation in the world. With nearly 44 million people visiting the city in 2006 it is one of the most visited cities in the world. It is still seen by many people in the way it was seen during the 19th century when the city was transformed by immigration, with people from countries around the world come to pursue ‘The American Dream’. The fact that these films show shocking scenes of the devastation of so great a city is quite deliberate and is set there to enhance feelings of fear and anxiety. How can the USA’s greatest and most powerful city be so easily damaged and destroyed? What about the American Dream? How can that dream be so easily obliterated? It unnerves people, perhaps on an unconscious level.

We are also used to seeing NYC. We see it on sitcoms, on numerous TV shows, and in numerous movies (and not just ones starring superheroes or disaster movies). As such it has become almost familiar to us, even if we have never been there ourselves. It is unnerving to see something familiar reduced to scenes of rubble and suddenly we don’t recognise it the way we knew it.

But why has there been an increase in films depicting the devastation of NYC? Why not during the Cold War, for example?

During the mid-1990s Bill Clinton became President (1993 – 2001), and in 1993 terrorists detonated a car bomb in the car park below the World Trade Centre in NYC. They were said to be working under the direction of Osama Bin Laden. Weeks after this, the CIA (supposedly) uncovered a plot to assassinate President GW Bush whilst he was in presidency. Clinton responded with cruise missile strikes on Iraq.

In 1995 Clinton proposed ‘comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combating terrorists, whether they strike at home or abroad.’ He also issued Presidential Decision Directive 39 stating ‘[we] should deter, defeat and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens’. It called terrorism ‘a matter of national security’. He increased funds to the FBI, the CIA and local police. The threat of further terrorism was being taken very seriously.

In 1996 the CIA established the ‘Bin Ladin unit’. Bin Ladin was now acknowledged to be more than just a terrorist financier, but a leader of a global network.

In 1998 the Counter-terrorism Security Group (CSG) was set up to ‘detect, deter and defend against terrorist attacks’. In the same year, US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed.

In 1999 the Clinton administration and the Jordanian government apparently thwarted a terrorist attack to detonate bombs at various New Year millennium celebrations around the world.

The threat of terrorism seemed to be everywhere. This time it was not a war like others we’d known, for how can you target terrorist cells? They are elusive. It’s not like declaring war on a state as it is a completely different entity. Terrorists don’t act like states: their behaviour is more erratic and less predictable. Terrorism is something far less familiar to us than the wars of the past, and it is this threat of terrorism that we have been constantly reminded of ever since.

It’s also important to note how much the doomed message of global warming and climate change is rammed down our throats on a daily basis.

Terrorism from the left, climate change and natural catastrophes from the right, it does seem like we are all but doomed as a society. So perhaps people are able to relate more to these films at the moment. Maybe these films wouldn’t have been so popular at another time.

Films always tell us a message of our times. As fictional as they might be, they always convey some message of the political or social climate of the times of the country in which they were made. The films I’ve mentioned in this rambling article build a picture of the reality of the times in the United States. It is a time of anxiety, a time when people are well aware of their fragile place in the world, and how easily it could crumble down around their heads.