Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?

 

Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?

 

 

 

According to New York Times culture reporter Cara Buckley, Hollywood is hopping on the cli-fi bandwagon and as evidence she cites the latest Avengers and Godzilla movies  as well as “Aquaman,” “Snowpiercer,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “Interstellar” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” — as having invoked the climate crisis.

 

Her article was headlined ''Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?''

 

Her answer was that actually Hollywood is not so scared of climate-themed movies nowadays and more are on the way, thanks to audience demand and a good flow of money by activist investors.

 

As the 2020s approach, we can expect more and more Hollywood studios to greenlight hot topic cli-fi movies with A-list actors and top producers and directors, among them activist producers such as Marshall Herskovitz, Sonny Fox and Norman Lear, the Times believes.

 

One of the producers in Hollywood that Buckley interviewed (and typical of the lazy reporting by Times climate reporters, she didn't bother to contact The Cli-Fi Report for a quote or two) told me after the article appeared in print: "I mentioned the cli-fi term to Cara several times during our discussions and I was surprised by how much of our conversation made it into the piece, although my main point got a little muddied by the way she framed it."

 

Buckley put things this way: In “Avengers: Infinity War,” the archnemesis, Thanos, opts to head off environmental collapse by reducing humanity — along with all living beings — by half. In “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” eco-terrorists unleash predatory beasts to forestall mass extinction and keep the human population in check.

 

In “Aquaman,” King Orm, the leader of an undersea kingdom, concludes that the only way to prevent earthly destruction is to wage war on humans.

David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, one of the writers of “Aquaman,” said using pollution as a motivator made Orm more relatable and less “mustache-twirly,” and added, “It gave him some nuance.”

 

More sober takes on the subject, at least on the silver screen, Buckley wrote, have largely been confined to documentaries, such as the 2006 Al Gore hit, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

 

One big studio feature that tackled climate change, “The Day After Tomorrow,” in which subzero superstorms envelop half the globe, was released 15 years ago and while it got the science complertely wrong -- global cooling, a new Ice Age? -- that movie prooved to be a global hit and woke up audiences worldwide to the theme of climate change. In that sense, the movie was a real step forward.

 

The actor and director Fisher Stevens, who has made several documentaries about environmental issues, including two with Leonardo DiCaprio, said he found it deeply frustrating that Hollywood had not taken Big Oil to task onscreen in a significant way.

 

“We need a pop culture ‘Forrest Gump’ movie like the one Hollywood legend and Tufts alum Steve Tisch produced to wake people up,” Stevens told the Times, “because the fossil fuel industry is doing everything to stop us in America from believing that fossil fuels are causing climate change.”

 

While several un-named movie directors told the Times it is hard to find financing for cli-fi movies that challenge audiences to change their ways, things are changing now in Hollywood.

 

Roland Emmerich, the writer and director of “The Day After Tomorrow,” said that while it is still not so easy to find a story that franchise-addicted film studios will release, there's an enromou sea change in Los Angeles now.

 

Adam McKay, whose film “Vice” about former Vice President Dick Cheney included references to the Republican Party’s minimization of climate change, said that he was working on a new cli-fi movie addressing the issue, and that his production company was developing a scripted series looking at the effect of radial warming on human civilization.

 

So yes, cli-fi is in the air in Hollywood and the 2020s and 2030s will be pivotal, according to the Times.

 

“Is any of this enough? No way,” McKay wrote to the Times in an email. “It seems like there’s no such things as ‘enough’ with global warming.”

 

In addition, TV dominates the culture at large now and plays a vital role when portraying our warming planet, according to the Times.

This is the entertainment era of cli-fi and sci-fi where the climate crisis takes a central role.

Item: A June 2019 episode of ''Big Little Lies'' dove into the subject in an unexpected way when the young daughter of the main character has an anxiety attack about the future of the planet. The storyline constituted just a single subplot, but it spawned a minor eruption of hot takes, analysis pieces and recaps.

Grist magazine discussed the question of how to talk to children about climate change. 

Esquire magazine deemed the second grader's panic-stricken retreat into a closet as a metaphor for living in 2019.

The Vulture website called up a child psychologist to get her point of view.

Climate-change anxiety is now a part of growing up, opined  the Washington Post.

Pop culture has caught on to the cli-fi predicament we are in now.

The 2020s will be an important decade in the entertainment industry, as producers and directors get the Greta Thunberg message.

Item: When an editor and writer with set out to find major cli-fi TV shows addressing the damage that humans are inflicting on our atmosphere he said he found three good ones:  ''Game of Thrones,'' a National Geographic docu-series called  ''Life Below Zero'' and the Norwegian cli-fi thriller  ''Occupied."

More are on the way, according to industry sources. Hollywood is waking up.

The climate crisis that's reshaping every aspect of human experience is being mirrored now on TV and in Hollywood.

Advocates think that this shows the chances for real, aggressive action on climate. A writer and producer for a climate-themed web series  told a reporter earlier this summer that if we want to change the politics in this country, we have to change the stories that are being told around [climate change] issues. We need something [like cli-fi] that can contain the whole range of people's lived and real experiences.

The deep level of emotional engagement that comes from a dramatic storyline can influence people's real-world behavior, according to an American literary journalist who has been studying the issue for years and founded The Cli-Fi Report online.

Hollywood gatekeepers are no longer standing in the way of great climate television shows. Science Fictional and cli-fi shows and series are beginning now to agressively tackle climate change. The jig is up.

Although ecological catastrophe is often seen as supremely difficult to dramatize, more screenwriters, producers and directors are beginning to say "Lights! Camera! Action!''

Disasters linked to climate change are now more in the headlines than ever before and people are feeling the consequences much more acutely. The science has also become more terrifying.

An American blogger says we have 30 more generations, 500 years, to create novels, movies and TV shows about global warming and try to stop it before it becomes ''unstoppable.'

While telling a direct story about climate change is hard because there aren't instantly identifiable heroes and villains, according to industry sources, help -- and hope -- is on the way.

Hollywood will never be the same and neither will social media conversations after major new cli-fi TV series and movies reach the masses worldwide.

The invention of “cli-fi” as a narrative category can be credited to Dan Bloom

Irish Journalist Stephen Phelan on "The Rise of Cli-Fi in a Global Context"

(c) COPYRIGHT 2019 / Stephen Phelan
===========================

 

More than a decade ago, in the year of Hurricane Katrina, climate change had not yet flooded into fiction. Scientists were wondering if and when the worlds of art and literature would ever collide with the overheating planet that they saw in their projections. “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” asked the leading US environmentalist Bill McKibben in an article of 2005. His theory was: we still weren’t quite scared enough.

The problem was too big, too diffuse, too complex to provoke a visceral response. “It hasn’t registered in our gut,” he wrote. “It isn’t part of our culture.” In the years since, the weather has worsened and the culture has shifted. The US alone has seen its eastern seaboard half-submerged by Hurricane Sandy and half-buried under arctic snowstorms, while the west coast suffers chronic drought and near-constant bushfires.

As this article is being written, the monsoons are again inundating the streets and buildings of Mumbai, and the heat index in Marshahr just popped the top off the thermometer at a fantastical 165 degrees F.

 

Rising temperatures, sea levels and rain gauges seem to have finally released what McKibben calls “a torrent of art” around global warming.

Poems like Ruth Padel’s Slices of Toast. Plays like Richard Bean’s The Heretic. Movies like Snowpiercer and Interstellar. This past May, we even got the climate change opera that McKibben called for, when CO₂ – directed by Giorgio Battistelli and inspired by Al Gore’s landmark eco-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth – made its debut at La Scala in Milan.

We have also seen the flourishing of literature on the subject. Relatively recent non-fiction titles like Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From A Catastrophe draw on McKibben’s own work by way of precedent. His pioneering 1989 treatise The End Of Nature is now read as something of a classic, having raised the alarm with an early, mournful note of eulogy. “I love winter best now,” he wrote way back then, “but I try not to love it too much, for fear of the January perhaps not so distant when the snow will fall as warm rain.”

McKibben says he’s too busy organising to get much writing done. He’s an instrumental figure in the 350.org campaign, which takes its name from the maximum number in parts per million CO₂ at which the Earth’s atmosphere can sustain our current civilisation. Artists are a vital part of the project, he says, “the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream”. He cites the time-lapse photography of James Balog, which shows city-sized regions of ice collapsing into the ocean, and the aerial tableaux of John Quigley, who arranges crowds into formation against dramatic natural backdrops to militate for urgent action. But writers make images in their own way.

“They help people picture meaning in their minds,” says McKibben. “Nuclear explosions were relatively easy to imagine, because we always had the mushroom cloud. But here we have the explosions of a billion pistons in a billion cylinders every second.” He doesn’t think another treatise from himself or some like-minded polemicist would “move the needle all that much”. “That said, a really good metaphor is probably as useful in the fight as a new kind of car engine.”

And this is where the novelists come in. When Cormac McCarthy published ''The Road'' in 2007, a  lyrical parable of human endurance set in a near-future of dead trees and starving survivors, the activist George Monbiot called it “the most important environmental book ever written”. Marcel Theroux’s ''Far North,'' which traced the grim adventures of US refugees across post-eco-apocalyptic Siberia, was heralded two years later by the Washington Post as “the first great cautionary fable of climate change”. Other acclaimed authors like Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver have conducted their own extensive research on glacier retreat, fresh water depletion, and species extinction to produce novels as diverse as Solar, The Year Of The Flood, and Flight Behavior, all best-sellers that were peer-reviewed by scientists as well as the usual literary critics. In terms of style, tone, or approach, these books have almost nothing in common.

Though heavily based on his disheartening artist’s expedition to Arctic Norway with the Cape Farewell project, McEwan’s Solar, for example, took the form of absurd and bitter comedy. But if visions of a weather-beaten future have been the stuff of pulp and science fiction for at least a century, we have lately reached the point where they are taken much more seriously. And there is now enough climate change fiction on the shelves for “cli-fi” to become a growing genre unto itself.

The invention of “cli-fi” as a narrative category should be credited to Dan Bloom, an American freelance journalist based in Taiwan, circa 2008. Today he says he came up with it “on the spur of the moment”, while trying to sell a script he’d written for a movie titled Polar City Red, to be set in a dystopian Alaska. His pitch was inspired, in a roundabout way, by renowned environmentalist James Lovelock, who has long since decided that it’s too late to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and that we are effectively “doomed doomed doomed”, as Bloom puts it. Lovelock is his hero, but he doesn’t share that view.

“I’m an optimist,” says Bloom. “I’m not coming from a dark place, I’m working from a reservoir of compassion for the next 30 generations.” He was also thinking of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On The Beach, a work of popular fiction that probably awakened more people to the threat of nuclear war and the horror that would follow than any contemporary scientist or campaigner had managed. It was later made into a hit movie with Gregory Peck that buried even deeper into the public consciousness. Bloom’s own film has not been produced as yet, but he has parlayed his coinage of that resounding new term into an ongoing project called The Cli-Fi Report, a web-based archive and research tool.

He keeps particular track of the literature now making its way into school curricula and college reading lists – “cli-fi” is being rapidly adopted as a subject of academic study, giving rise to new university courses in Cambridge, Norway, India. More important, says Bloom, is the way that subject seems to be engaging and inspiring young readers.

“My hope is that one of those readers might become the next Nevil Shute and write the On The Beach of climate novels. Personally, I’m not so worried about the next 10 or 20 years. No apocalypse will come that soon. But we need to start preparing now, mentally, emotionally, and I think art can help. Visionary storytelling that sounds the alarm.”

As Bloom well knows though, no true storyteller wants to be a preacher, and no serious artist would consent to serve as a mouthpiece for scientists and policymakers. The politics of climate change put art at risk of being read as propaganda, and the whole concept of “fiction” becomes pretty slippery when both sides of the debate use that word to dismiss each other’s “facts”. To sceptics, man-made global warming is a myth. To those convinced of its reality, denial is a kind of counter-myth.

It might be worth noting that certain core arguments about the power of humanity over nature, and vice versa, can be traced back to one of the oldest stories in existence. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some time around 2100 BCE, begins with the destruction of forests to make way for mighty cities, and builds toward an account of a deluge that drowns the world. That ancient Sumerian poem survives at least in part as the original flood myth, and we tend to resurrect such myths when circumstance demands – witness last year’s odd but timely Hollywood blockbuster Noah, which cast Russell Crowe as the eponymous ark-builder, and recast a biblical apocalypse in a ecological light.

British nature writer Robert Macfarlane has noted that the Norse legends of Ragnarok and Balder became popular again in Victorian England, when eminent scientists like Lord Kelvin were predicting a new age of global cooling, as a prelude to the so-called “heat death” of the universe. The Earth would turn too cold to live, the sun would freeze into a ball of black ice and fall out of the sky, just as the Vikings had foretold. Except, of course, it didn’t happen.

Which is to say that we’ve been burned before. If we need a fitting flood myth for the Anthropocene epoch – what some environmentalists are calling our current geological period of prevailing human impact and influence – then we also need it to ring absolutely true. To be most useful to us, Macfarlane has suggested, the ideal literary response to climate change “would need to be measured and prudent, and would need to find ways of imagining which remained honest to the scientific evidence”. And to that end, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow might be the very model of a cli-fi novel: the story of a New York risk analyst who is fully exposed to one of his own worst-case scenarios when a superstorm devastates Manhattan.

Drawing on the author’s years of research and reporting on the subject, it was written just before Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2011, and released only after the offices of his publishing house had been cleared of broken glass and floodwater. Sandy created “complications”, as Rich puts it today. He had set his novel in the near-future, then the present came crashing in. For the sake of maximum veracity, he made a few last-minute adjustments to the manuscript, adding in little details to reflect what had actually happened. His fictional Hurricane Tammy was still a worse event by one or two orders of magnitude, but beyond that, he says, “all the scientific facts are accurate”. “It’s scarier that way, and more honest too.”

Rich did not intend Odds Against Tomorrow to be read as prophesy, or prescription. He wasn’t trying to convince climate change sceptics or play to the worst fears of those already persuaded. “I had no axe to grind,” he says. His protagonist, Mitchell Zukor, obsesses over imminent disaster, while other characters face it down or look away, adopting attitudes that range from nihilism to pragmatism to panic. Rich says he doesn’t feel that any one of these positions is more valid than another, but he does think they raise questions “that all of us must resolve for ourselves”.

“When it comes to environmental issues, should we all quit our jobs and become activists? Or recycle and turn the lights off at night and feel bad all the time? Or should we just do whatever it takes to support our families?” The overriding question is an existential one, and Rich believes that novelists are no less qualified to ask it than scientists or politicians – how are we to live like this? “It’s not just the fear of environmental collapse, but pandemics, terrorism, financial ruin, natural disaster, you name it. What’s it doing to us, this constant sense of threat, the inundation of bad news? And what are we supposed to do about it?” Writing cli-fi might be one answer, and reading it might be one way to prepare.

“Imagination can ready the mind for eventualities that might once have seemed far-fetched,” says Rich. “It can also be a form of inoculation. I don’t think anyone who watches Independence Day is necessarily going to be more afraid of an alien invasion. They’re more likely to be less afraid.”

By 2030, he reckons, every university in the world will be teaching courses in environmental fiction. “But younger novelists will be producing the work. We’re the ones with most at stake. We’re the ones who have to live through this mess.”

Cli-Fi genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some feature films --- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change. LISTEN TO RADIO PODCAST HERE:

 

Cli-Fi genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some feature films --- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change. LISTEN TO PODCAST HERE:

Photo credit: Universal

Bruce Dern starred as an astronaut in charge of preserving Earth's last forests on a spaceship in "Silent Running"

 

2 San Diego Film Critics Pick 6 of Their Favorite Cli-Fi Feature Movies

That's right: Cli-fi movies are in the game now too, and it’s not just documentaries that tackle issues of climate change

 

Webposted on Wednesday, July 3, 2019

 

Climate change movies

Beth Accomando's top picks
"Silent Running" (1972)
"Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2012)
"Snowpiercer" (2013)

Yazdi Pithavala's top picks
"Melancholia" (2011)
"Take Shelter" (2011)
"Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015)

Genre filmmaking can tackle serious issues in unexpected ways. Here are some cli-fi feature films -- outside of documentaries -- that explore climate change issues with storytelling

There are plenty of documentaries about climate change — "An Inconvenient Truth," "Before the Flood," "11th Hour," "Chasing Ice" — and all these try to build a case to convince people that climate change is real and requires attention. But documentaries often are seen as having distinct points of view that can limit their audience and end up just preaching to the converted.

That's where genre cli-fi films may have an advantage in reaching a larger audience with a message. A film like "The Day After Tomorrow" may just be a ridiculous disaster film without much science to it yet the impressive images of a new ice age can stir the imaginations of people to contemplate what if. It's that power of a narrative film with its engaging characters and cinematic magic that can pull an audience in and sometimes get them to think about serious ideas while they are being entertained.

Moviewallas' film critic Yazdi Pithalvala joined KPBS radio arts and culture report Beth  Accomando to talk about climate change movies.

TRANSCRIPT:



Speaker 2: 00:32 Well, best start off. What do you think a cli-fi genre films and narrative films can do differently from documentaries and tackling these issues?

Well, I think when people go to documentary, sometimes if the documentaries have a point of view, people put up their guard a little bit and they tend to preach to the converted more. But with a narrative film you're using usually personal stories and something that really engages the audience, I think it really hooks them and brings them into a story so that they're more open to ideas. Right.

And Yaz do talk about that engagement a little bit. I mean, people may not really realizing they're getting a climate change message when they're watching a feature film.


Speaker 3: 01:06 Yeah. I think it's like, you know, a good, a good dose of medicine when, when it's wrapped properly, when it's weakened enough that it goes down. You spoonful of sugar. Yeah. Spoonful of sugar goes down. Well and, and you know, not, not to make it sound terrible, but I think there's the history of science fiction has been the history of climate change in a way.

Speaker 2: 01:24 And uh, well let's get onto the role of science fiction. How has it played in the role of the world of real science, science fiction?

Speaker 3: 01:31 I mean, being a scientist myself, I mean I think I see a lot of parallels. A, I think certainly a lot of the early star Trek, you know, they've borrowed heavily from science, so I think they've kind of helped each other out.


Speaker 2: 01:41 And uh, Beth, how can pop culture work to influence public opinion or help focus attention on certain issues? Well, pop culture, like as you said, it goes down easy. So people go to get entertainment and a lot of times filmmakers will hide messages underneath or just make them a little more digestible. So I think people are more game to go to a film that looks appealing or that's an art house film and possibly get a message they weren't anticipating getting. But these climate fiction films, is the real purpose behind a lot of them climate change in this message or is that incidental? Well, I think a lot of films and a lot of filmmakers have something to say and they choose to say it in a particular manner because narrative fiction or science fiction appeals to them. Because you know, with science fiction there's so much about it that is engaging from a filmmaking point of view that a filmmaker is very attempted to work within that genre.


Speaker 3: 02:37 Josie, yeah, I mean it takes regular situations and makes them extreme. So I think from a, from a plot and script writing perspective, it's fabulous because you know, you can, you can put characters to very extreme situations and watch what happens.


Speaker 2: 02:51 All right, well let's get onto your top climate fiction film picks. And Beth, your top pick. It's being screened Monday at digital. Jim Cinema. Tell us about silent running white's your topic. Sure. This film was made in 1972 but it really feels like a holdover from the 1960s Joan Baez does a song at the end of the movie. Bruce dern plays kind of the environmental astronaut because this is set in a future where earth can no longer grow any plants. The plants are all on a spaceship that's floating around waiting to find out what the decision of the lawmakers are. So in this scene, Bruce dern tries to explain to the other astronauts why it's important to keep these forests alive


Speaker 4: 03:31 and that it calls back a time when there were flowers all over the earth and there were valleys and there were planes of tall green grass that you could lie down in that you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies and that was fresh air. And there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed and closures blasted some millions of miles out into space.

Speaker 3: 03:51 Your top pick Yazdi my topic is, uh, the Mad Max movies and they've all been set in a very dystopian future where all of arts resources of La have run out. But I think more so the very last one, uh, Mad Max fury road, uh, really brings to point, you know, this, this, this future world where the most precious commodity is water because there's so little of it now I've Seen Mad Max fury road didn't occur to me that was a climate change film. Can you kind of explain the context? So that's precisely the point of we were talking about earlier is that when it's packaged as entertainment, I still think mad max fury road is the epitome of action. And within the context of that action movie, this whole point about water being a very precious resource, resources being seemed in and you don't even realize that, you know, that's the message that we could very easily get to a point there. Uh, while you're having fun and watching things blow up.

Speaker 5: 04:46 [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] its absence

Speaker 2: 05:08 thirsty. Just listening to that though. You're number two pick. This is a beautiful film called beast of the southern wild and it's about a by you community called the bathtub where a storm is threatening to flooded out and completely destroy it. And it's very kind of sad and melancholy and in the sense that it's not just climate change, but it's the loss of a whole culture. And there's a little girl at the center of it and she talks a little bit about what they're expecting in the by you


Speaker 6: 05:38 one day till the storm the ground's gonna see and the water's gonna rise up so high ain't going to be no bathtub, just a whole bunch of water.

Speaker 3: 05:50 Al Gore couldn't have said it better himself and a Jasta, you're a number two pick. My number two pick is a movie called Melancholia came out in 2011 and it's about two sisters and they're frayed relationship, but it's set in the context of a looming disaster in that a, this, this, this giant planet is going to collide into planet earth. And it's about how do you live your life knowing that this is happening. And it's kind of curious because the main character played by Christian Dunn suffers from acute depression. And for her, the end of the world is a daily occurrence. So she's the only one who is well adjusted in a way.

Speaker 2: 06:26 All right. And quickly, I want to get to each of the films that came in last and your top three Beth. Sure. Snowpiercer reminds me a little bit of Mad Max in that it's set in a dystopian future. And the thing about both of those films is they show that if there's climate change and if something like water or something else becomes a valuable commodity than it shifts the whole power structure too. And that's one of the dangers. Alright, in a Jasta you're third

Speaker 3: 06:49 before I go to my third. I have extreme love for Snowpiercer as well. If you haven't seen it, you need to, my topic is take shelter and this is a movie about a man who has visions that something bad is going to happen and that a storm is going to come and it's going to engulf everyone. And in a way becomes an allegory about those people who believe in climate change versus those who are deniers. And where do you put your faith? Who Do you believe? And it's a, it's a pretty good film.

Speaker 7: 07:16 You gotta go crazy. Is that what he told her? Well listen up [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] you [inaudible]

Speaker 2: 07:37 and I remember when George h w Bush called the Al Gore ozone man. And that was kind of friend, son from that glip right there. Well A, it's, it sounds like a, a lot of thing to, to think about and plenty of things that you want for moviegoers, especially if they're passionate about climate change or what to do about it. And even if they're not.

Thanks very much Beth and Yazdi. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And they were speaking to KPBS's Mark Sauer

 For more coverage from the KPBS climate change desk: Go to kpbs.org/climate change