Kant’s sublime and the disaster film after 9/11

This chapter uses Immanuel Kant’s notion of the Sublime to trace formal developments in the disaster film post-9/11. It considers how several films from that generic group attempt to stimulate and shock audiences who witnessed the mediated events of the morning of 11 September 2001. Starting from the qualitative and quantitative magnitude of the collapsing towers (matched with Kant’s dynamical and mathematical Sublimes), it proposes a third category—the ubiquital—to frame the universal images of that disaster and then considers how the post-9/11 disaster film attempts to reproduce effects of that experience. It uses three films—The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009), andCloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—as case studies of broader tendencies in the genre, assessing their efforts to recreate the sensory assault of that historical morning.