书城外语英语PARTY——时尚之国·美国
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第23章 人文景观Human Landscapes(3)

The height from ground to the tip of the torch is 305 feet (93 meters); this includes the foundation and the pedestalpedestal n.基架, 底座, 基础 vt.加座, 搁在台上, 支持. The height of the statue itself, from the top of the base to the torch, is 151 feet (46 meters).

The statue was built from thin copper plates hammered into wooden forms. The formed plates were then mounted onto a steel skeletonskeleton n.(动物之)骨架, 骨骼, 基干, 纲要, 万能钥匙.

The statue is normally open to visitors, who arrive by ferry and can climb up into her crown, which provides a broad view of New York Harbor. A museum in the pedestalaccessible by elevatorpresents the history of the statue. At one time, the ladder in the right arm was also open to the public, but it has for many years been restricted to staff use, for maintaining the lighting equipment in the torch.

The statue and island were closed from September 11, 2001 to August 3, 2004 in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. During this period, only the grounds of Liberty Island were open again for visitation; the Monument, museum, crown, and all outdoor observation decks were closed.

The Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus” was written for the statue, and engraved on a bronze plaque in 1903, 20 years after it was written. The plaque is located on a wall of the museum, which is in the base of the Statue. (It has never been engraved on the monument itself). In its famous culminatingculminating adj.到绝顶的, 终极的, 最后的 lines, Liberty says,

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest - tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Although Liberty Island is closer to New Jersey than to New York, it has been part of New York since the issuance in 1664 of the colonial charter that created New Jersey (see charter text). Portions of nearby Ellis Island that were formed by subsequent landfilling are, under a Supreme Court decision, part of New Jersey, but that decision had no effect on Liberty Island. The island is owned by the federal government and is administered by the National Park Service.

The Statue of Liberty in Popular Culture

During the 1940s and 1950s, the iconographyiconography n.肖像学, 肖像画法 of science fiction in the United States was filled with images of ancient, decayed Statues of Liberty, set in the distant future. The covers of famous pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction all featured Lady Liberty at one time, surrounded by ruins or by the sediments of the ages, as curious aliens or representatives of advanced or degenerate humans of the future gazed upon her remains.

Perhaps the most famous appearance of the statue in cinema was in the ending of the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, where the statue appears decayed and halfburied in sand, serving as painful, undeniable proof to the film,s protagonistprotagonist n.(戏剧, 故事, 小说中的)主角, 领导者, 积极参加者, Taylor, that he has been on Earth the whole time. It also appears in the beginning of its first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and against a dark nighttimenighttime n.夜间 backdrop of a futuristic, desolatedesolate adj.荒凉的, 无人烟的 Manhattan in Escape From New York.

In 1978, at University of WisconsinMadison, Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian of the “Pail and Shovel Party” won election by promising to give campus issues “the seriousness they deserve.” In 1979 (and again in 1980), they created their own version of the Planet of the Apes scene by erecting replicas of the torch and the top of the head on the frozen surface of Lake Mendota, creating a fancifulfanciful adj.爱空想的, 奇怪的, 稀奇的, 想像的 suggestion that the entire statue was standing on the bottom of the lake.

In 1986 the statue was featured on the New York State license plate which were on the road until withdrawn in 2003.

The Statue of Liberty was animatedanimated adj.活生生的, 活泼的, 动的, 愉快的and walked through New York City in the film Ghostbusters II (1989). In the film Independence Day (1996) it was destroyed. This statue is also the stage for the climax in the films Saboteur (1942) and XMen (2000). Much of the advertising for the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) used an image of the Statue of Liberty nearly buried in snow and ice, after a gigantic tidal wave and catastrophiccatastrophic adj.悲惨的, 灾难的 climate change. She and her renovation scaffolding were also featured in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) as the setting for a fight scene.

The first level of the video game Deus Ex takes place on Liberty Island and inside the statue; in the game,s backstory, the statue,s head has been destroyed by terrorists. In the sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War, the last level is again at the statue, which has been reerected as a light sculpture.

In the computer game Red Alert 2, the destruction of the Statue of Liberty is seen twice, once during the first allied mission and once during the introduction, though both scenes depict the same event from different perspectives.

On April 8, 1983, CBS broadcast a program, the fifth of a series featuring illusionist David Copperfield, in which he made the statue apparently vanish. The effect took place at night. The program showed the statue from the point of view of an audience seated on a groundlevel platform, viewing the statue through a proscenium arch. According to William Poundstone, the illusion involved closing curtains fitted in the arch; turning off the statue,s floodlightsfloodlight n.泛光照明, 强力照明, 泛光灯, 照明灯, 泛光 vt.用泛光灯照亮; and slowly rotating the platform on which the audience was sitting. In a literal example of misdirection, the now dim, but not quite invisible, statue was no longer aligned with the arch. Thus, when the curtains were opened, the arch now framed darkness. Televised views from a helicopter showing the statue,s “disappearance” were, according to Poundstone, views of a duplicate ring of lights, surrounding empty ground, that had been installed on Liberty Island for the illusion.

The Japanese animation series Read or Die featured an actionpacked air chase scene culminating in a showdown at the Statue of Liberty. The sequence included a character plummeting down the interior of the hollow statue.