What’s your favorite New York City-centric Sandy meme: the Fallen Tree, the Flooded Platform, or the Dangling Crane? (I’m going with the Dangling Crane.) I rode through the storm unscathed, without even losing power, and watched it unfold on television and online. In general, still images of the storm are more powerful and communicative than video footage, maybe because the gravity of the situation isn’t undermined by the self-serving narration and heroics of local newscasters. The damage in coastal Queens and New Jersey is devastating, and images of ruined homes there remind me of press photos coming out of war-torn regions in Libya. There’s incredible violence in them. But this is nature perpetuating the violence, and we can probably expect more, and more frequent, anomalous “weather events” like this. As I heard one caller on a local radio show last week plead, we can’t continue to occupy “land that nature wants back.”
The storm brought back scenes from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I saw several months ago, on a gentle summer afternoon. I liked the way the movie used light and sound to shape a particular physical world (damp, overstuffed, aphasic) in a way that regular movies don’t. And I liked the way the movie examined the unadorned, expressive faces of its actors, many of them black, which regular movies don’t. Beasts takes us to the Bathtub in New Orleans, a low-lying land that became an island after Hurricane Katrina. As another major storm approaches, a band of Bathtub residents defy a forced evacuation and return to their homes. It’s a highly romantic position and, as narrated by Hushpuppie, the gritty five-year-old at the center of the story, understandable. What this movie shows clearly, and the Sandy media coverage does not, is that nature has the awesome power to rewrite geography and obliterate culture. Maybe it’s something we can’t think straight about right now, as we aid the displaced and evaluate the damage. It’s much simpler to think about the Dangling Crane.