Hello! We’ve got another episode with a guest — this time with Dr. Michael Svoboda. He’s a professor of writing at George Washington University, and we discuss with him how the climate crisis is depicted in film and literature.
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We get into what kinds of themes are usually portrayed in climate fiction (or cli-fi) films and how all of that shapes our understanding of the climate crisis. For example, when you have movies such as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ that centers around an extreme weather event that takes place over the course of two hours, how does that impact how we think of climate change as a succession of disastrous events (ie. wildfires, floods, hurricanes, etc.) rather than the gradual, often invisible, process that it is? We tend to turn our attention to the climate crisis when we are bombarded with devastating news and horrid images, but we don’t think of the ways that climate change seeps into our everyday life and what is happening all around us, minute by minute, day by day.
We also examine how individualism has reshaped the types of stories that are being told, not only in cli-fi films, but also in the massively popular superhero movies. As Amitav Ghosh noted in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” During the time when the world was modernizing, there was a shift in literature, from an examination of our collective reality to an exploration of the individual psyche.
At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.
“Twentieth-century art, wrote Roger Shattuck in 1968, has tended to search itself rather than exterior reality for beauty of meaning or truth, a condition that entails a new relationship between the work of art, the world, the spectator, and the artist.” It was thus that human consciousness, agency, and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise.
How exactly has that shaped movies? Well, the prevailing message of the archetypal disaster or superhero film is one in which there is a ‘chosen individual’ tasked with responsibilities and powers that allow him to stand above the rest of society and fight off a villain, with the hope of returning to the status quo rather than paving the way for real change to occur.
We can also see how this translates into politics, and the way in which it has flattened into an expression of personal identity rather than a full and constant engagement on improving societal conditions.
It is rather a politics that is also increasingly conceived of as an “individual moral adventure” in the sense of being an interior journey guided by the conscience. Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.
The fact that laissez-faire ideas are still dominant within the Anglosphere is therefore itself central to the climate crisis. In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries.
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Dr. Svoboda regularly reviews most forms of climate related media, and he shares with us some of his favorite cli-fi films, so stay tuned until the very end!
Climate fiction & reimagining the future