NYC`s fictional demise explored in book

New York, Dec 13: On the morning of Sept 11, 2001, University of Massachusetts professor Max Page was proofreading a proposal for an exhibit at a New York museum about a subject he knew well — the destruction of New York City. Page, who teaches architecture and history at the university`s Amherst campus, had recently published a scholarly work on slum clearance and city planning in Manhattan from 1900 to 1940 — what he calls the "regular destruction of a capitalist city." During his research, he discovered a parallel universe of fictional representations of the city`s demise, a seemingly bottomless trove of novels, paintings, movies, comics and video games inventing new ways to decimate America`s largest city. As might be expected, the exhibit Page was planning the morning of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center never happened. For at least a short while, New York`s real-life catastrophe effectively silenced any discussion of the city`s fictional Armageddon. Now the proposal on which he was working has become a book. "The City`s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York`s Destruction" explores the imaginative and often profitable (think Superman, Godzilla, Spider-Man) ways that filmmakers, writers and artists have blown up, incinerated, drowned or depopulated New York City. Page is a lucid writer whose thesis is supported with reams of research. The book is worth getting for the illustrations alone — 161 black-and-white and color images of the city aflame, under water, overgrown with weeds or about to be invaded by space aliens or monsters. Without getting bogged down in arcane, academic lingo, Page thoughtfully analyzes why the city`s ruination has been such an enduringly popular theme. In some narratives he cites, New York is portrayed as a hellish cesspool of greed and inequality, epitomizing the worst of human nature, which must be destroyed for mankind to be redeemed. In others, the city is seen as simply the best and most exciting place on Earth, the epicenter of wealth, power, achievement, glamour. And for that reason, it becomes an irresistible target for evil geniuses like Superman`s nemesis Lex Luthor and others of his ilk. Page also notes an important aesthetic consideration: No other US city comes even close to looking as spectacular as New York does when its monumental skyline is crumbling and Miss Liberty has toppled to the ground. For a time after 9/11, some believed Americans, and especially New Yorkers, would never again be able to indulge their taste for so-called disaster porn. Of course, they were wrong. In the last chapter of the book, about destruction fantasies post-9/11, Page assures us that it`s perfectly OK — even healthy — to gobble up these cataclysmic scenarios for the vicarious thrill: "New York has been destroyed for so long that it is somehow reassuring to see the tradition continue. ... What we crave from these tense Hollywood films of menace and devastation is, in fact, reassurance that the city has survived." Bureau Report