The Climate Crisis Is Also a Crisis of Culture

NAB

Netflix comedy drama Don’t Look Up has got people talking but not about the thing the filmmakers intended – climate change - but about whether it was any good.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/the-climate-crisis-is-also-a-crisis-of-culture/

With headlines filled for a few days last November with heads of state meeting to dither, delay and deny environmental catasrophe at COP26, the response from the art world has been either to over exaggerate to the point of silliness (think Deepwater Horizon or Greenland starring Gerald Butler) or, more alarmingly, just meh.

Most critics agree that Don’t Look Up lands between those camps.

The movie, which is both an allegory (it’s not climate change, it’s an asteroid!) and a political satire drawn directly from the headlines, has been widely criticized for its “wake-up-sheeple howl,” in the words of Rolling Stone’s David Fear.

In her essay on the topic at New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/164926/dont-look-up-movie-good-climate-cinema Eleanor Cummins quotes climate futurist Alex Steffen saying that we now live in a world that is “trans-apocalyptic” adding that our lives are increasingly defined by constant engagement with ecological realities like floods and fires.

“The more TV shows, books, and movies depicting climate change—and the more variety of climate consequences depicted—the better,” Cummins argues.

Yet as novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote in The Great Derangement in 2016 “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and thus of the imagination.”

Cummins charts cinema’s recent response. 1980s cinema was largely free of depictions of environmental crisis, “and when global warming returned with a vengeance in 1995’s Waterworld, its critique of the oil industry barely registered.”

A decade later, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) begins at a United Nations–style climate summit, where paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) warns world leaders that global warming will paradoxically trigger another Ice Age.

Despite criticisms of its heavy-handed script and dubious ‘science’ The Day After Tomorrow was a commercial success, while “presenting global warming in a laughably unrealistic way,” wrote one critic.

“The film itself doesn’t seem to have dramatically altered individual viewers’ attitudes on climate change,” says Cummins, which was presumably writer director Adam McKay’s intention with Don’t Look Up.

McKay himself says he was inspired by the 2019 book by David Wallace-Wells called The Uninhabitable Earth that depicts the ways which will wreak havoc on the planet if nothing is done to combat the climate crisis.

Explains McKay in the film’s production notes: “It all boiled down to this idea I just couldn’t shake: We all know how to react when there is a killer with an axe, or when your house is on fire, but what [he] was writing about was a million times worse. How do we get people to realize this is a clear and present danger? How close does that danger have to be for us to have the proper response? I felt like I needed to write this script.”

Yet he chose a comedy as the vehicle to get this message across, referring to sitcoms like Office Space and Idiocracy and movies Dr. Strangelove, Network, and Wag the Dog.

“I played with the idea at first of making a straightforward drama or a small, intimate character study, but at a certain point I knew I needed to make a comedy, because I felt like after these last few years, we really, really needed to laugh.”

Perhaps that choice in itself is a response to the sombre tone of other recent ‘cli-fi’ movies. Cummins picks out Downsizing (2015), Mother! (2017), First Reformed (2017) and Woman at War (2018) as all showing characters living in our dying world of the present or near future not some 50 or 500 years hence.

To which I’d add George Clooney’s slow but impactful (and ultimately hopeful) The Midnight Sky.

“Characters and audiences are alternately despairing, angry, and hopeful about our future,” says Cummins. “Perhaps that’s why many of the climate change movies of our time have forgone the action and adventure of postapocalyptic worlds and refocused on the psychological and spiritual experience of impending doom.”

The duality of McKay’s intent to convey realism whilst giving it all a star-studded disaster movie sheen is evident in comments from his key crew.

Hank Corwin, the editor of Don’t Look Up, does say that working on the film “was much more of a spiritual approach”. He spent months “looking at everything from eagles to hippopotami” and drew on music and artwork, most notably from pointillism and surrealism to punctuate the film with a variety of stock images, freeze frame shots, and mixed visual media.

“What I found was by putting in little moments of nature, you were able to have moments that showed it’s not really humor so much as folly, which is well disguised as comedy. When you show birds flying, when you show an ocean, it grounds it into reality.”

Director of Photography Linus Sandgren referenced more straightforward thrillers and action-packed films including Armageddon and Independence Day in his approach. “From my point of view, it felt important to not emphasize the humor with the cinematography, but rather try to keep it serious and have the cinematography live in the thriller world as much as possible because the comedy sort of comes up naturally anyway.”

Dr. Amy Mainzer served as science advisor for the filmmakers and cast of Don’t Look Up. She said (in the production notes) that the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth are “incredibly unlikely”.

“It’s not something that you’ve got to go out and buy asteroid insurance like you would for a car! Now, when it comes to climate change, that’s something that is really, really, really likely to be happening. We have excellent evidence. And the consequences are really bad. So that means it’s an urgent, high risk thing and we really need to be putting everything we can into that problem.”

The art world is not about to get serious with climate change but Cummings seems to call for it to be embedded as a reality in every genre.

“Where is the marriage plot set in a carbon-regulating city that successfully retreated from the fire lines, or the gangster film about organized crime in renewable energy? The sitcom about a family whose full house is on stilts above the waterline, or the Wall Street movie about emissions pricing?”

Just round the corner, on Feb 04, lands Lionsgate’s cli-fi directed by Roland Emmerich – he of The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 – and starring Halle Berry.

Moonfall is about a hitherto unknown hole in the moon which hides something that triggers environmental armageddon on earth.