Enraptured by nature’s fury in The Day After Tomorrow: Deleuze’s movement-image and the George W. Bush era of global warming denial

Abstract

As global warming was questioned and de-prioritized during the George W. Bush presidency, the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow functioned as a reactionary and visceral cinematic discourse, enlivening environmental efforts to address humanity’s influence on global warming. Demonstrated through analysis using Gilles Deleuze’s three-part movement-images as an analytic approach, the film uses familiar settings such as Los Angeles and New York City as perception-images. The action-image demonstrations of nature’s wrath and violence in those settings are accompanied with scientists being pardoned by nature and as they are able to walk unscathed into and through natural disasters. Finally, the affection-images display humanity’s terrifyingly enraptured facial expressions when confronting global warming-caused natural disasters. As the film leaves a bleak outcome for humanity under the context of global warming denial, it simultaneously employs an ecotheological discourse in the early twenty-first century to empower global warming prediction, demonstrative of the growth of the theological shift in visual display of global warming rhetoric.