Lumen Winter 2023 - Flipbook - Page 35
(1973)? This post-apocalyptic sciencefiction film is set in New York in 2022, at a
time when 40 million people are enduring
a permanent heat wave and a single
corporation controls half of the world’s food
supply. Soylent Green was released back
in the early 1970s, when Greenpeace and
the Gaia hypothesis were first entering the
mainstream. Five decades later, it remains
staggeringly prescient in its depiction of
overpopulation and societal collapse. And,
in light of recent estimates that as many
as 50 million climate refugees may need
to find new places to live by 2025, Soylent
Green’s depiction of food shortages and riots
have become increasingly relevant from an
environmental justice perspective.
“Climate change has
come to rival the dangers
of nuclear war, alien
invasion and terrorism
in our collective cultural
imagination.”
Sometimes, cli-fi films start out as
something else entirely. The plot of Don’t
Look Up (2021) revolves around two
low-level astronomers who discover that a
massive comet is set to collide with Earth
but are met only with scepticism, denial and
wilful ignorance. In fact, Don’t Look Up is
not really about a comet at all. It’s about
climate change. And as a film historian, I
find this sustained turn towards climate
anxiety in popular cinema fascinating.
Perhaps those TV series about nuclear
disasters (Chernobyl) or zombie outbreaks
(The Walking Dead) or global pandemics
(The Last of Us) aren’t really about what
they seem to be. As Mark Bould’s wonderful
book The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021)
reminds us, what if all the stories we tell
today are actually about climate change?
Documentaries have also thrived. The
Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth
(2008), featuring former US Vice President
Al Gore, presents the science behind
global warming and the environmental and
political impacts it is having on the world.
It played a crucial role in American culture
by drawing sustained media attention to
the issue of climate change and heralding a
cultural shift in the way ecological concerns
could be discussed. Ever since, there has
been a steady flow of climate-focused
documentaries - Chasing Ice (2012), which
follows National Geographic photographer
James Balog as he captures images of
melting glaciers in the Arctic, 2040 (2019),
by Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau,
which explores the ways in which existing
technology may allow us to transition to a
more sustainable environmental future, and
Thank You for the Rain (2017), which follows
a Kenyan farmer who films the damages
wrought by climate change to his village.
It is clear then that at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, climate change
has come to rival the dangers of nuclear
war, alien invasion and terrorism in our
collective cultural imagination. Films
about those topics are still enormously
popular with audiences around the world,
but contemporary cinema is increasingly
concerned with climate anxiety and cli-fi
preoccupations.
As I write this, James Cameron’s Avatar:
The Way of Water (2022) has just become
the third-most watched film of all time
at the global box office: that’s a film as
much to do with biosphere harmony and
ecosystem respect as it is with terrorism and
interplanetary pillage. What these recent clifi films – both fact and fiction – remind us
is that the “imagination of disaster” remains
a thrilling, often perversely enjoyable
experience, but it is becoming progressively
more complicated.
In the darkened cinema, we may once have
vicariously taken pleasure in seeing planets
destroyed or tsunamis hitting the shore.
But now, post-Katrina, post-Black Summer,
post-Solomon Islands, visions of climate
disaster are no longer confined to visual
effects companies and laptop simulations.
Today’s future-based stories have shifted
focus from imaginary technologies or
faraway planets. Instead, the pivotal
themes are at home: the backdrop is Earth,
the villain is the climate, and its weapon a
never-ending surge of natural disaster.
Dr Ben McCann SFHEA is Associate Professor
of French Studies – and an avid film scholar
and writer.
LUMEN – WINTER 2023 35
