I haven’t seen it. Don’t know if I will. But Rich’s posts reminded me of this email I got the other day:
[I saw Day After Tomorrow] last night, and I wonder if you’ve had any other readers who’ve experienced the same thing I did, in terms of a bizarre audience reaction to certain scenes. At least, the audience reaction seemed bizarre to me, but maybe I’m the odd man out, here in San Francisco.
Here’s the thing: At one point, the movie’s TV newscasters are showing footage of how Mexico has shut the border to Americans, and there are scenes of desperate American refugees wading across the Rio Grande to enter Mexico illegally. Later on, the newscaster says that Mexico has allowed the U.S. to set up refugee camps in return for forgiveness of Mexico’s foreign debt, and still later a chastened, wised-up Vice President grovelingly thanks Mexico and all the other nations of “what we used to call the Third World” for generously accepting American refugees. All this stuff, especially the illegals-wading-across-the-Rio-Grande footage … Well, when this movies comes out in Mexico City theaters, as I’m sure it will, I’m sure these scenes will provoke a lot of joyous hooting and howling and pumping of fists in the air, and all that’s perfectly understandable — in Mexico. But let me tell you, it’s weird and kind of disturbing to sit in an American theater, surrounded by an American audience, and to hear these scenes greeted with clapping and cheering and screams of delight. I hasten to add that I looked around before and after the movie, and I’m not an ethnologist, but it didn’t look like there was a particularly large percentage of Latinos in the audience, even by San Francisco standards. Most of the audience seemed pretty white-bread by my guesstimate. My reluctant, creeped-out conclusion is that there are just an awful lot of San Franciscans who look at these scenes of desperate American refugees fleeing to Mexico and think: Yeah! Yeah! At last the Americans get what’s coming to ‘em! That’ll teach ‘em! That’ll show the bastards!
I don’t know what country my fellow San Franciscans think they’re citizens of, but emotionally at least, it’s apparently not the U.S.
Bob Pryor (Feel free to use my name. And if the position of “your movie guy” is vacant, consider this a job app. [When IS Lowry giving you that raise?])