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.