Hollywood and Climate Change
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Ecocinema-00-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:00 Page iii ECOCINEMA THEORY AND PRACTICE EDITED BY STEPHEN RUST, SALMA MONANI, AND SEAN CUBITT Ecocinema-00-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:00 Page iv First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ecocinema theory and practice / edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. p. cm. — (AFI film readers) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Environmental protection and motion pictures. 2. Environmentalism in motion pictures. 3. Ecology in motion pictures. 4. Documentary films—History and criticism. 5. Motion pictures—United States. 6. Ecocriticism. I. Rust, Stephen. II. Monani, Salma. III. Cubitt, Sean, 1953- PN1995.9.E78E26 2012 791.43′6553—dc23 2012007629 ISBN: 978–0–415–89942–0 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–89943–7 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–10605–1 (ebk) Typeset in Spectrum by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton Ecocinema-01-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:03 Page 191 hollywood and climate change nine stephen rust Tipped off by a phonecall to the office, a National Weather Service employee turns on the Weather Channel and sees that an unprecedented storm front has suddenly descended upon Los Angeles. He immediately calls his supervisor for authorization to issue a severe weather alert. Cut to the supervisor who answers the call, turns on his television, and walks to his bedroom window to witness a funnel cloud form on a nearby hillside. Cut to paleo-climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his team of researchers as they walk into the White House situation room, which is filled with televisions tuned to Fox News coverage of a tornado destroying the Hollywood sign. Cut back to the supervisor as he drives into downtown LA, steps out of his car, and watches several more funnels destroying the city’s skyscrapers. Cut to the employee watching television who suddenly sees his boss standing directly in the storm’s path. Cut to the boss who answers a phone call from the employee and gets in his car to flee. Cut to the employee who watches as a funnel picks up a city bus and drops it directly on the supervisor’s car. Cut to a Fox News reporter who has been tracking the storm. “It-it-it looks like some sort of huge, horrific, terrifying nightmare, Ecocinema-01-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:03 Page 192 only this is the real thing!” he shouts into the camera just before being smashed by the wall of a building, flung by a global warming super-tornado in this sequence from Hollywood blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow. Released in 2004, The Day After Tomorrow earned more than $500 million at the global box office and is often mentioned alongside former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as a touchstone moment in the history of environmental cinema.1 The timely release of these films occurred during the same period that a significant majority of Americans came to recognize climate change as a phenomenon that will impact not only the planetary atmosphere but every aspect of social life.2 Responding to what Yale public opinion researchers have described as a “sea change” in American public stephen rust attitudes toward global warming between 2004 and 2007, this chapter provides a brief historical survey of climate change cinema and analyzes how The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth uniquely demonstrate that cinematic texts can and do reflect hegemonic environmental perceptions as well as the ways in which those prevailing hegemonies have shifted over time. That is, they offer a window into what I term the “cultural logic of ecology,” and epitomize the pronounced shift in American popular dis- course about the relationship between human beings and the Earth that is taking shape in the early twenty-first century. Climate change is not the only global environmental risk exploited by Hollywood in recent years: consider nuclear war (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991), deforestation (Fern Gully, 1992), bioterrorism (28 Days Later, 2002), species extinction (Earth, 2009), and population growth (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008), for example.3 Yet, climate change films also deserve sustained ecocritical analysis because over the coming decades the phenomenon is expected to exacerbate existing environmental problems and to present new challenges. By 2050, based on mid-range scenarios, climate change alone is expected to globally displace up to 200 million people and to ensure that between 15 and 37 percent of the world’s terrestrial fauna are “committed to extinc- tion.”4 Already strained by the forces of globalization, developing nations can expect to endure the most immediate and severe impacts.5 At the most recentround of UN climate talks, held in Durban, South Africa in late 2011, more than 180 nations signaled their continued willingness to take action on climate change by voting to extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol through 2015.6 Meanwhile, the United States—the world’s top per capita energy 192 consumer and greenhouse gas emitter—continues to sit on the sidelines, hampered by deep-seated political and ideological divisions.7 Nevertheless, this chapter demonstrates that between 2004 and 2008 The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth played a crucial role in American culture by drawing sustained media attention to the issue, raising awareness among viewers, and signaling a popular shift in the cultural logic of ecology. Ecocinema-01-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:03 Page 193 a brief history of climate change cinema In a sense, all cinema is a form of climate cinema because anthropogenic warming of the climate was already underway by the time Edison and the Lumière Brothers made their first films. For thousands of years prior to 1750, carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere averaged around 280 parts per million (ppm) by volume.8 Yet by 1957, when Charles Keeling began measur- ing carbon dioxide concentrations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric h Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, levels had risen to 310 ollywood an ppm.9 In 2010 the total volume of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere surpassed 393 ppm, an increase of 40 percent over the preindustrial era.10 Increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere amplify “the greenhouse effect,” a natural process that traps dc limate c the sun’s heat at the earth’s surface. The increased carbon released through the burning of fossil fuels is acting “like a thermal blanket to keep the earth warmer than it would otherwise be.”11 As James Hansen, director of NASA’s hange Goddard Institute, explained to Congress in 2008: “Warming so far, about 2°F over land areas, seems almost innocuous, being less than day-to-day weather fluctuations. But more warming is already ‘in-the-pipeline’, delayed only by the great inertia of the world ocean.”12 Although it is impossible to accurately predict the effects of sea level rise and shifting weather patterns, it is clear that these issues demand serious and immediate attention.13 Interestingly, 1896 was a touchstone year in the intertwined histories of cinema andclimate change. That year, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause average global temperatures to rise between 5 and 6°C (9 to 11°F), a result “remarkably similar to current projections.”14 Expecting population and energy consumption to remain relatively con- sistent, however, Arrhenius estimated that it would take nearly 3,000 years for the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to reach 500 ppm, a level we may potentially reach by 2050.15 Also in 1896, Lumière cinematographers began traveling the globe and filming events for local audiences.16 Among the first cinematographers was Kamill Serf, who traveled to the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan, and shot a 30-second film of burning oil wells.17 In the film, flames billow from two tall derricks andaplume of smoke covers the sky at the top of the frame. The scale of the spectacle is emphasized by a small human figure walking away from the center derrick and out of the 193 frame, as if this is all just business as usual. Intended primarily to astound rather than persuade audiences, Serf’s actuality film falls under film historian Tom Gunning’s description of the early “cinema of attractions.”18 When considered from a modern ecocritical perspective, however, as Murray and Heumann suggest, the film’s meaning shifts from spectacle to catastrophe, especially when considered alongside later films which juxtapose the aesthetic pleasures of burning oil with its Ecocinema-01-c.qxd 23/7/12 12:03 Page 194 material consequences, such as Lessons of Darkness (1992) and There Will Be Blood (2007).19 These changing meanings of spectacle and catastrophe are also present in films that feature automobiles.