Climate Fiction
‘Cli-fi’ is an abbreviation of ‘climate fiction’, which was
popularised in the last decade and refers to a category of genre or
literary fiction that takes global warming or climate change as its
subject. The prototype is probably Jules Verne’s Sans dessus
dessous (1889, translated as The Purchase of the North
Pole), an uncannily prescient novel involving a conspiracy to
change the Earth’s climate to make more fossil fuel available to a
corporation. Cli-fi includes novels, novellas and short stories
featuring natural as well as anthropogenic climate change and J.G.
Ballard’s early contribution, a quartet in which human civilisation was
destroyed by all four of the classic elements, deployed both causes:
The Wind from Nowhere (1961, air), The Drowned World
(1962, water), The Burning World (1964, fire, later published
as The Drought), and The Crystal World (1966, earth).
Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) is an early example of
cinematic cli-fi and although it was a commercial and critical failure
at the time of its release, it was regarded with greater respect in the
year in which it is set – 2022 – in consequence of its critique of the
capitalist mode of production. Ballard’s quartet provides a convenient
heuristic for selecting a characteristic sample of the cinematic genre
as it emerged at the end of the 20th century: Kevin Reynolds’
Waterworld (1995, water), Roland Emmerich’s The Day After
Tomorrow (2004, air), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road
(2015, fire), and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021, earth).
Climate change is anthropogenic in all four cases, although the cause is
implied in Waterworld and complicated in Don’t Look
Up.
Cinematic World-Ecologies
Sociologist Jason Moore opens his magnum opus, Capitalism in the
Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015), by
defining capitalism as a way of organising nature rather than
an economic or social system. He warns against the separation of
capitalism or modernity from nature or ecology because the two have been
inextricably linked in a relation of life-making since the long
sixteenth century. As such, Moore adopts a world-system approach he
refers to as capitalist world-ecology. Capitalist world-ecology is not
an interaction of world-economy and world-ecology: world-economies just
are world-ecologies. He regards human exceptionalism, the view
that human beings are independent of the spatiotemporal web of
interspecies dependencies, as deeply misguided because human agency has
always been a part of nature and his inquiry begins with the
co-production of human and nonhuman animal life and the environments
that maintain them. Capitalist world-ecology has been converting energy
into capital in increasingly innovative and expansive ways since the
coincidence of the Dutch agricultural revolution, Central European
mining revolution, and Madeiran sugar-slave nexus in 1450. This year
marks the beginning of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Age of Capital), in contrast
with and in opposition to the ‘Anthropocene’ (Age of Man). The
Anthropocene is used to describe the geological epoch during which
humanity has had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and
climate and is usually dated to either the Industrial Revolution
(1760-1840) or the First Agricultural Revolution (10000 BCE). In Moore’s
assessment, the current epoch is characterised by the impact of
capitalist civilisation, which was inaugurated between the two
revolutions, rather than by the impact of humanity as a species.
My elemental quartet of climate change cinema are the product of
either the Hollywood film industry or Netflix’s streaming service and,
as such, inextricably bound up with capitalist world-ecology, both
constituting and mediating a market reliant on cheap labour and free
nature to hundreds of millions of consumers across the globe. In each of
the films, the narrative moves from an unstable inaugural condition to a
retrospectively inevitable condition and the transition from inaugural
to closural order both represents and evaluates an imagined
world-ecology. The quartet and its genre can be subdivided on the basis
of whether climate catastrophe is part of the story’s setting
(Waterworld and Fury Road), exploring themes of
adaptation and recovery, or a diegetic event (The Day After
Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up), exploring themes of
anticipation and mitigation.
Narrating Climate Change
Both
Waterworld and
Fury Road establish their
respective postapocalyptic settings very quickly and very concisely, the
former as a world with nothing but water and the latter as a world where
everyday life has become a hunt for water. At exactly a minute into the
opening sequence of
Waterworld, the Universal Pictures logo
disappears and the camera moves to a position above the north pole of
the rotating Earth. As it zooms in, the ice cap melts, the sea levels
rise, and a brief voiceover explains what the audience is seeing. The
whole exposition takes less than forty seconds. The voiceover in
Fury Road begins at eighteen seconds into the opening sequence,
with Max (played by Tom Hardy) introducing himself and providing all the
audience need to know about his world as consisting entirely of ‘fire
and blood’. His voiceover, which is interrupted by the contributions of
anonymous others, continues for another forty seconds, during which a
great deal is explained quickly: the apocalypse was anthropic in cause,
the Earth can no longer sustain human life, and the global ecological
collapse is mirrored on the personal level by Max’s psychological
breakdown.
In contrast, The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look
Up open in a world that seems almost identical to our own. This
signals that the catastrophic event has not yet happened and that either
it or its threat will be one of the sequence of events that constitute
the plot of the narratives. Both films begin with scientific teams, one
on the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica and the other at an observatory
at Michigan State University. In The Day After Tomorrow, the
ice shelf cracks and breaks away, the significance of which is explained
in the following scene when protagonist Professor Jack Hall (played by
Dennis Quaid) tells the United Nations Conference on Global Warming in
New Delhi that another Ice Age may be imminent. In Don’t Look
Up, postgraduate student Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer
Lawrence) discovers a new comet and she and her supervisor, Professor
Randall Mindy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), determine that it will
strike the Earth in six months. This immediately sets the plot in motion
as the two scientists try to communicate their discovery to those in a
position to take action.
The plot of each of the four films moves through the unstable
inaugural condition to a closural order that is unforeseeable but
retrospectively inevitable. Each closural order represents a
world-ecology that is politically, morally and aesthetically ‘right’
because it is consequent on the responses of the protagonists,
antagonists and other characters to the inaugural condition.
Don’t
Look Up closes with the destruction of the Earth by the comet,
which is an inevitable consequence of the power elite’s decision to
abort a perfectly feasible plan to destroy the comet in favour of an
incredibly high-risk plan to exploit its mineral resources for profit.
Fury Road closes with the literal ascension of Imperator
Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron) to power, following the overthrow of
a male supremacist hierarchy by a revolution with a firm basis in
economics – the communal distribution of the Citadel’s currency, water.
The Day After Tomorrow closes with an inversion of power
relations that reverses the polarity between the Global North and Global
South, establishing a more just (but not obviously more sustainable)
world-ecology.
Waterworld closes with the Mariner (played by
Kevin Costner) delivering a small group of people to Dryland, a Garden
of Eden in which humanity can flourish and create a new
world-ecology.
The world-ecology represented in the closural order is either
represented as desirable (Waterworld, The Day After
Tomorrow, and Fury Road) or undesirable (Don’t Look
Up) and the audience’s desire is enlisted by a complex and manifold
combination of narrative form, cinematic style, and thematic content.
The desire that drives Waterworld is stimulated relatively late
in the narrative as it is only after Helen (played by Jeanne
Tripplehorn) makes a deal with the Mariner that the audience’s ambition
becomes focused on the three of them reaching Dryland. The quest for
Dryland is both reflected and complicated in Fury Road, where
it takes a circular shape. The audience’s desire is for Max to assist
Furiosa to achieve her goals, which change from taking the Five Wives to
the Green Place to turning the tables on their pursuers, attacking the
Citadel, and transforming its sexist and elitist political economy. The
desire that drives The Day After Tomorrow is also stimulated
relatively late, at the halfway point when Hall sets off to New York to
rescue his son from the climate catastrophe in progress. From the very
beginning of Don’t Look Up, the audience desire that the
imminent catastrophe Dibiasky and Mindy have discovered be averted,
which requires first that the scientists communicate their discovery to
the authorities, then that the authorities believe the prediction they
have made, and finally that the authorities take preventative
action.
Shaping Desire
As already mentioned, Hollywood and Netflix are part of capitalist
world-ecology, exploiting both labour and nature to make massive profits
with their films, in spite of paying grotesque salaries to selected
stars. All four of my quartet sustain this world-ecology by means of
their contribution to the global world-system and promote that global
world-system by providing audiences of millions of people with
distraction, diversion, and dissipation. What I mean is that time spent
watching the films is time spent not doing anything about climate
catastrophe and perhaps – given how enjoyable they are all – taking a
perverse pleasure in the greatest (more accurately, ultimate) mass harm
humanity has ever inflicted on itself. The quartet can, once again, be
subdivided, into those that are complicit in capitalist world-ecology
(Waterworld and The Day After Tomorrow) and those that
are both complicit in and resistant to capitalist world-ecology
(Fury Road and Don’t Look Up).
Waterworld’s driving desire is simply for the status quo,
finding that last remaining piece of Earth – Dryland – that has not yet
been exploited to ruin and can sustain what is left of humanity (before
we inevitably destroy it too).
The Day After Tomorrow subsumes
the desire for a world-ecology that is not devastated by climate
catastrophe into a personal quest – Hall’s rescue of his son (and his
son’s rescue of his love interest) – prioritising the individual and the
family above the collective and failing to integrate the private with
the public. The same two criticisms can be made of Ballard’s original
quartet, with
The Wind from Nowhere aspiring to the status quo
and
The Drowned World,
The Burning World, and
The
Crystal World subsuming the political under the psychological.
Fury Road is more successful, establishing a convincing link
between more equitable modes of production and more just social
structures and Max’s intervention succeeds where the Mariner’s fails –
in transforming the existing world-ecology into something better.
Don’t Look Up is even more successful, achieving its impact in
a different way, with a downbeat rather than uplifting ending. While the
Earth is destroyed, it is destroyed by human greed rather than the
deus ex machina of the comet.
Changing world-ecology requires a reconstruction of the global
economy and indeed Moore predicts that capitalist world-ecology is
reaching its own closural order, although he is not optimistic about
what the replacement will be. A reconstruction of the global economy
will not, however, be achieved by top-down measures alone – if it all.
One only needs to recall the very recent memory of resistance to
relatively minor impositions like social distancing, mask-wearing and
lockdowns to see how reluctant human beings are to give up any freedoms
whatsoever, even when there is overwhelming scientific evidence in its
favour. If world-ecology is to be changed completely, it must be from
the bottom-up, which will require a reconfiguration of human
consciousness to desire different things, such as sustainability over
consumption. Culture shapes desire and cinematic narratives are a
sizeable and significant part of our culture. Climate change cinema thus
has an important role to play and films like Don’t Look Up and
Fury Road have demonstrated the shape that role might take.—Rafe McGregor
Published online ahead of its appearance in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #75, due in June 2023.
