Por TERRY CAESAR

Professor de literatura norte americana na Mukogawa Women’s University em Nishinomiya, Japão, e autor de vários livros, incluindo estudos críticos do sistema universitário nos Estados Unidos.

VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS:

"O dia depois de amanhã" em Curitiba

Tradução: Eva Paulino Bueno

“The Day After Tomorrow” in Curitiba

In a foreign country, you do things differently. One thing you do is see movies you would never see at home, wander into the theater at different times, and be delighted to pay cheaper prices. Therein lies a tale. But in my case it was finally about none of these things.

“The Day After Tomorrow” was playing everywhere in Brazil this past month. Before arriving, I had never heard of it. Was the film first-run also in the United States? (In fact, yes.) In any case, I wondered, why this film–presumably as American-centered, not to say, chauvinistic, as the director’s previous blockbuster hit, “Independence Day”--for Brazil?

Distribution rights (to which ordinary mortals are not privy) undoubtedly explain some of the reason; theaters get the films international agreements with studios and distributions companies allot to them. And of course audiences in most countries can easily be expected to like yet another extravaganza about global destruction, complete with innocent children, lone-scientist heroes, and plenty of special effects. 

So I mused, anyway, while standing in front of one theater’s poster for “The Day After Tomorrow,” early one Curitiba afternoon. It seemed to be a quintessential formula film. The sort of film where somebody is guaranteed to state: “This has never happened before.” (In fact, somebody does.) Ho, hum. Yet I had a both few hours to waste,  it was cold outside, and the movie only cost less than a dollar. At least, it seemed, I would get to see New York overcome by a tidal wave.

Could this, in turn, be one reason “The Day After Tomorrow” was playing all over Brazil? It is one thing for an American audience to enjoy the destruction of New York, famed for its arrogance, its violence. (New York is America’s Rio.) It is another thing, though, for a Brazilian audience to enjoy this destruction. Maybe I plunked down my two-and-a-half reis just to try to watch from a Brazilian perspective.

If so, there was a surprise in store for me right away. To a degree, the producers of “The Day After Tomorrow” have already incorporated into the script some imagination that is not exclusively American. When the apocalyptic horrors begin, the accumulation features snow in New Delhi and hailstones in Tokyo. Probably it would have been too much, however,  to hope  tornadoes along Ipanema. 

Even more surprising, when these horrors become literally frozen into the form of a new Ice Age for North America, the solution for the whole southern half of the continental United States is to flee south across the Mexican border! From an American perspective, this is a witty development. The issue of illegal Mexican immigration across the same border is an enduring political one.

Alas, though, the movie exhibits little interest in the irony and no interest in exploring its politics. Americans simply flee, Mexicans are initially resistant though quickly mollified when their debt is forgiven, and there is only the vaguest mention of countries “farther south.” So we’re no closer to Sao Paulo, say, than we were before the movie began. Curitiba remains inconceivable.

Worse, the narrative of “The Day After Tomorrow” soon returns to the U.S., where the scientist-hero successfully rescues his son from the New York Public Library. (All Americans across the border celebrate this development, as well as news of survivors elsewhere in the frozen north.) An amazing moment is completely lost to American popular entertainment: the prospect of South America saving the United States!

It is as if the script has pondered this possibility just long enough to dismiss it. Could there have been other, more undreamed-of, possibilities? The whole of Texas resettled in the Amazon? All the African-Americans of Atlanta suddenly confronting the Afro-Brazilians of Salvador? We will never know. In a sense, “Brazil” can be imagined anyway as a--if not the-- name of such undreamed-of developments.

Easier of course to dream them in Curitiba than Chicago. Furthermore, easier perhaps in Curitiba to see that some specific location of Brazil might have begun to expose the whole plot of “The Day After Tomorrow”–even as far south as it goes–as suspiciously akin to the imperialism that the whole apocalyptic idea has been designed to conceal. Presumably it makes a difference that Americans look south because a new Ice Age rather than Communism is headed their way.

But does it make the same difference to a Brazilian as to an American audience? Hard to say. No matter how utterly American in focus and even in theme, blockbuster films such as “The Day After Tomorrow” are increasingly constructed for a global audience. Its dilemmas are given as “universal,” its sensations are built in as irresistible. Who among us cannot “identify” with a father in search of his son?

Nevertheless, in another sense, “Brazil” can be understood as one name for the national limit of such constructions. To everybody on earth, the prospect of Americans streaming into one’s country in order to avoid freezing to death is not a happy one. To some, it is not even a forgivable one–no matter if the entire globe is in some way threatened. Let Brazilians represent all these people.

Indeed, let them represent more authoritatively a geographically immediate and appropriate (given the movie’s script) resistance to the machinations of the United States, nowhere more devious than through its popular entertainment. “The Day After Tomorrow” is an excellent example, because it concedes that nations to the south of the United States exist. Yet still, only vaguely, after Mexico. And enduringly, once more, only insofar as they contribute in some manner to America’s destiny.

That any of these countries could change this destiny, or otherwise redefine it, is simply not taken into account, any more than Brazil itself is taken into account, either as one country among the nations of South America or as one possessing its own distinctive identity among these nations. Let “Brazil,” therefore, be the name of a final thing: all that must remain unspecific about a movie such as “The Day After Tomorrow.” In order for its peculiar apocalyptic fears to be unleashed or for its curious narrative turns to take place sympathetically, the film must contain a world without Brazil and without any mention of Brazil.

Of course, to me, this chill Curitiba afternoon, there was an additional, if personal, reason to keep thinking of Brazil: it was cold in the theater. There was no heat. My jacket was too thin. Did somebody say, Ice Age? Ironically, though, I was watching a movie in which the temperature of where I was watching was narrated as just the opposite. How could anybody–much less an American--be so cold in Brazil, of all places?

Of course in actual terms the answer is simple: like anywhere else, Brazil is cold during the winter, especially in the south (and perhaps most notoriously in Curitiba). Moreover, Brazil is no more uniformly or unproblematically hot than the United States is uniformly or unproblematically cold. Yet it is in the interests of each nation to see the other in these fixed, stable ways, at least through their respective imaginative constructions.

Trouble is, what of life apart from these constructions? Well, sometimes it makes no sense. Not only was I freezing in a place where–in the film-- I was supposed to be saved from freezing. I was also an American trying to imagine myself as Brazilian. In this last, I failed, of course. A “Brazilian” perspective on “The Day After Tomorrow” is undoubtedly more elusive.

But at least the effort to locate such a perspective kept me warm. Life is location, after all–specific circumstances, exact temperatures, and all the rest. You do not have to see movies in order to realize this, although some of them--let all be aptly represented by “The Day After Tomorrow--can be so dumb that just striving justly to locate yourself in relation to them seems as necessary (at least on certain days) as keeping your scarf tight around your neck.