Tuesday, April 23, 2024

April 23, 2024: Climate Culture: The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On the necessity but limitations of disaster movies, and an important variation.

It makes perfect sense that the first climate change film would have been a disaster movie. By far the most consistent type of disaster on which that longstanding genre focuses (although not the only one of course, and thank goodness or there’d be no Airplane!) is the natural disaster: whether relatively everyday ones like fires and floods, more extreme ones like mega-earthquakes and –tsunamis, or thoroughly extreme ones like volcanoes and asteroids, it’s very often nature that is creating the catastrophic conditions which jumpstart these movies. Which makes The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a film in which rapidly worsening climate change causes a huge number and variety of natural disasters (including pretty much all of those referenced above, among others) to strike Earth all at once, just about the most iconic disaster film of all time. In 2004 that premise seemed like dystopian science fiction; twenty years later, it hits a whole lot closer to home. But either way, I don’t know that there could be climate change cinema without the genre of the disaster film.

But here’s the thing about disaster films: they have to find their way to some sort of a happy ending. Of course there’s been plenty of destruction and death along the way, so things won’t simply return to the way they were; but for at least some of our characters, usually the protagonists natch, there’s got to be a sense at the film’s conclusion that they will be okay moving forward. (There are of course, as with every rule, exceptions.) The Day After Tomorrow certainly doesn’t try to pretend that the world hasn’t changed—indeed, one of its final moments involves astronauts on the International Space Station looking down upon a profoundly changed planet—but nonetheless, much of the film’s conclusion focuses on our main characters, who have survived the catastrophic events and are reunited with loved ones to uplifting notes on the musical score and so on. As realistic as disaster movies can (at least at times) be, that is, there’s still a layer of melodramatic storytelling that makes the genre somewhat less well-equipped to really confront the worst possibilities of the climate crisis.

And then there’s Don’t Look Up (2021). In many ways Don’t Look Up seems to be another classic disaster film, with the impending disaster this time a comet with the potential to destroy all life on Earth, the usual scientist characters who figure out the disaster before everyone else, and so on. But Don’t Look Up turns out to be a satire instead, and so all the folks in that “everyone else” don’t pay any attention to the scientists and the disaster continues unabated—right up to (SPOILERS) an ending in which apparently no one, not our protagonists or anyone else, escapes the disaster with their lives. That might seem pretty bleak, and in some ways it certainly is—but as you can see from that hyperlinked clip, there’s also a remarkable degree of tenderness and shared humanity in that ending, and I find those emotions more realistic and moving than a more typical happy ending could possibly be. As a subgenre, the climate disaster movie might just have to evolve from the familiar tropes, and if so Don’t Look Up offers at least one model for how to do so.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?

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