The more I read and reflected upon Mick Broderick and Robert Jacobs’s Nuke York, New York, the more I realized just how much New York gets obliterated in movies. Broderick and Jacobs list a great many examples of films in which the city is destroyed via a nuclear attack or some other means that serve as an allegory for a nuclear strike, but if one were to widen the parameters to films that show New York being destroyed through non-nuclear means, the list would become incredibly large. From alien invasions in the vein of Independence Day, to natural disaster films like Knowing and The Day After Tomorrow, it just seems as though New York can’t catch a break.

Perhaps I’m thinking too practically, but I think a lot of it has to do with economical storytelling. Broderick and Jacobs mention that “New York City has long been emblematic of American progress, prestige and profit and regarded as a national and international site for both awe and envy”. So, knowing that, if a director or screenwriter wanted to get the point across to their viewers that the destructive event upon which their story is based is truly cataclysmic, what better way to do it than to show Manhattan’s skyscrapers crumbling? New York’s destruction–in this sense–is merely cinematic shorthand, conveying the idea that things are going really badly really quickly in the that particular film’s universe.