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⡘ 277 The City That Déjà Vu Forgot Memory, Mapping, and the Americanization of New Orleans Briallen Hopper In the first Hollywood movie made and set in post-Katrina New Orleans , the Jerry Bruckheimer–Tony Scott action thriller Déjà Vu (2006), a spectacular disaster hits the Crescent City. Hundreds of men, women, and children die horribly in the water; corpses float to the surface; and body bags line the streets. Doug Carlin, a New Orleanian federal agent played by Denzel Washington, is angered by the devastation and haunted by the needless death. He risks his life to go back in time and prevent an American tragedy. Viewers may have the feeling that they’ve been here before. But the tragedy in Déjà Vu isn’t a flood. It’s a bomb. Déjà Vu can’t help but dredge up memories of Katrina, but from the beginning, the film works hard to displace Katrina with terrorism—and specifically to displace it with 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the War on Terror. In the opening scene, a ferryboat full of navy sailors and their families explodes in the Mississippi, thus moving the violent deaths of military personnel from Baghdad to New Orleans. In slow-motion shots echoing the iconic photographs of 9/11, men jump from the upper deck against a backdrop of fire and smoke. Images of the Navy families’ blonde children, also killed in the blast, recall the young victims in Oklahoma City, and this allusion is reinforced later when we learn that the explosion’s investigators are veterans of the Oklahoma City investigation. The scene’s overwriting of Katrina with terrorism is made explicit as a banner on the boat declaring “Katrina Only Made Us Stronger” goes up in flames: the past and present devastation of the flood is first denied with words and then completely consumed by the overwhelming present catastrophe of terrorist violence. As a film about terrorism and time travel that concludes with a dedication to “the strength and enduring spirit of the people of New Orleans ,” Déjà Vu causes us to consider again the vexed relations between 278 Briallen Hopper national and international memory and geography in the wake of Katrina . What are we to make of Déjà Vu’s replacement of Katrina with terrorism? What are the politics of layering Oklahoma City and Baghdad on New Orleans, of superimposing 2001 and 1995 on 2005 and 2006? Most reviewers of the film answered these questions by saying that there are no answers. They characterize Déjà Vu’s attempted engagement with Katrina and terrorism as incoherent and gratuitous: “senseless exploitation,” according to David Denby in the New Yorker; “grandiloquent pornography,” writes Desson Thompson in the Washington Post; “a cheap exploitation of current fears,” from Pam Grady on Reel .com; “a silly, shallow project garbed in pretensions of importance,” proclaims Peter Suderman in the National Review.1 The consensus, articulated most scathingly by Nathan Lee in the Village Voice, is that the political content of Déjà Vu is both superficial and simplistic: “[Director Tony] Scott wouldn’t know subtext if it rose out of the bayou and ripped off his arm, but that doesn’t stop him from sprinkling on references to Katrina . . . domestic terrorism, and Iraq.”2 Though most reviewers are troubled by Déjà Vu’s political allusions, Manohla Dargis claims the film reaches such an extreme of gratuitous exploitation that it becomes harmless and inoffensive. As she writes in the New York Times: “‘Déjà Vu’ is more removed from reality than most of [Bruckheimer and Scott’s] collaborations, which makes their exploitation of Sept. 11, Katrina , and Oklahoma City . . . less offensive than it might in a film that bore some relation to the real world. . . . ‘Déjà Vu’ is so wildly divorced from the here and the now of contemporary politics, policy and people that it’s impossible to get worked up by its invocation of these three calamities .”3 Echoing Dargis, Kenneth Turan observes in the Los Angeles Times, “What is interesting is not how little sense Déjà Vu makes, but how little that matters”; it’s a film “that nobody should be thinking about too hard.”4 The critics are partly right. Déjà Vu is a problematic movie that attempts (sometimes unsuccessfully) to invest its enormous explosions with equally immense emotional and political meaning. But unlike Dargis, I believe that Déjà Vu’s politics bear a striking...

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