Cities, Zombies, Earth spinning towards Sun, yadda yadda yadda

Just seen '28 days later'. Not bad for a brit-flick. Shot in doubleplus-grainy DV by Danny Boyle, it's a pretty exciting horror-thriller (ok, yes it does suffer from a few classic brit-flick problems i.e. lack of visual ambition, fuzzy-minded intellectual framework (despite being written by Alex Garland), dodgy dialogue, and often terrible acting, particularly from kids who aspire only to the lofty standards set by the Children's Film Foundation in the '70s). However, the film opens with a captivating sequence (set to magisterial shoegazer-schlock-rock by godspeed you black emporer!) in which our hero awakes in a post-apocalyptic deserted London, staggering around the City and Oxford Street, after a beautiful Waterloo sunrise.

I always find these scenes compelling ... one of the few good things about 'Vanilla Sky' was seeing tough heterosexual Tom Cruise find himself alone in an empty Times Square (Radiohead deemed the appropriate shoegazers there ...). Or the recent, and absolutely appalling, 'Reign Of Fire', featuring a ravaged London (scorched but still standing). Recall also earlier films ... Romero's classic zombie flicks, with abandoned factories, gas stations and shopping malls ... and 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire', with Edward Judd wandering through a post-war London about to burn, as the planet spins towards the sun. Love that film. Can anyone think of other great 'deserted cities' movies?

For bonus points, compare and contrast with the Japanese moviemaker's desire to see the city destroyed. Generalising massively of course (particularly as Hollywood now seems to be a city-destroyer too), but is there a meaningful cultural difference here? Between the Eastern approach (witness almost any anime), which popular theory has linked to the imminent reality of earthquake/tidal wave, or memory of Hiroshima/firebombing? And a Western approach, in which the city remains standing, but we are removed from it?

Probably something to do with estate agents.

Apropos of zombie flicks (as '28 days later' is), Marina Warner writes an interesting piece in The Guardian on the genesis of the zombie idea, linking Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the modern industrial city.

"But the movie that sealed the appropriation of the zombie for white consciousness was - is - The Night of the Living Dead, made in 1968 in Pittsburgh, once the great steel capital of America. By then, the mills were closing and Pittsburgh was facing decline; the team of George Romero and John Russo recast the Caribbean living dead as a ravening, restless, superannuated white proletariat rising up, under the effect of a radiation leak, to contaminate all with their condition."

Comments

[matt]

great deserted PLANET + CITY scene: The Martian Chronicles

great deserted spaceship scene: the very end of 'Silent Running'... >sob<

[dan]

Remembered another one ... Escape from New York! OK, not quite totally deserted, but they only come out at night ...

[Dan]

The start of Twelve Monkeys features a snowy, deserted post-viral Philadelphia, which has bears and lions running around in it etc. Bruce Willis is dumped in it ...

[Michael Honey]

I posted recently along tangentially similar lines: the key movie for me would be the low-budget NZ film The Quiet Earth.

[Dan]

Article in The Observer today (16 May 2004):

"To found a city is to establish a civilisation. When a city falls, civilisation ends. These are our most ancient stories, perpetually retold by tragedy and epic. Aeneas escapes from ruined Troy and in compensation builds a new city in Rome; as the cycle repeats itself, Rome is vengefully besieged by Hannibal. Contemporary history brings the cycle up to date. The Greeks burned what Marlowe called the 'topless towers' of Troy, just as al-Qaeda targeted the haughty mercantile skyscrapers of Manhattan. This week Brad Pitt renews the assault in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy , and later in the month New York will be destroyed once more in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow."

The Observer: Necropolis Now

Mentions a couple of films that would be worth checking out in this vein, specifically of deserted Manhattans: 1959's On The Beach and that same year's The World, the Flesh and the Devil.

[Dan]

The 1962 version of Day of the Triffids has a brief 'deserted London' moment ...

[Dan]

Oh, and the Charlton Heston-meets-zombies (spot the difference) not-terribly-good SF flick The Omega Man is set in a deserted Los Angeles, which I duly noted watching Los Angeles Plays Itself recently.

[Colin]

Hello Dan, your post on Warriors and gaming led me to the one I'm responding to now. Forgive me for wandering from films to television series to other media. Two films missed above: the classic post-apocalypse film absolutely riven with images of the emptied city of Sheffield Threads, the weaker, but still striking American version The Day After. Onto tv: the BBC television series Survivors literally haunted my childhood dreams (why did my parents let me watch it??), late Sunday afternoons thrilled to the BBC's Day of the Triffids and some years before there was the social breakdown of children's (hunh?) series The Changes, not to mention the final Quatermass film and Space 1999's moon spinning through space jettisoned from its orbit by a catastrophe that destroyed the Earth (it's a bit of a digression from your theme, but the series were absolutely soaked in the feeling of isolation, strangeness and loss that pervades the preceding examples). In terms of fiction, Samuel R. Delaney's stone classic Dahlgren inhabits a nearly abandoned city after an unspecified apocalypse and there's the narratives of Jeff Noon's Vurt, Pollen and most recently Falling Out Of Cars are set in similar spaces. Seemingly most of J.G. Ballard's fictions of course. John Foxx (Underpass, etc) and Gary Numan (Down In The Park), Aaron Copland's Quiet City (though it acts more as a prelude to awakening so shouldn't really count). And the web's awash with sites detailing derelict spaces e.g. this one and this one. All fear and fascination for what the world might be like after we're gone I guess. A good project for a coffee table book or fan website... Cheers, Colin.

[Dan Hill]

Via Rodcorp, Where London Stood, this excellent resource on variously deserted or destroyed cities.

[Dan Hill]

Some years later, Digital Urban blog links to the aforementioned sequence from '28 Days Later'.