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

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

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

It makesperfect sense that the first climate change film would have been a disastermovie. By far the most consistent type of disaster on which that longstandinggenre focuses (although not the only one of course, and thank goodness or there’dbe no Airplane!)is the natural disaster: whether relatively everyday ones like fires and floods, more extreme oneslike mega-earthquakesand –tsunamis, orthoroughly extreme ones like volcanoes and asteroids, it’s veryoften nature that is creating the catastrophic conditions which jumpstart thesemovies. Which makes The Day After Tomorrow(2004), a film in which rapidly worsening climate change causes a huge numberand variety of naturaldisasters (including pretty much all of those referenced above, among others) to strikeEarth all at once, just about the most iconic disaster film of all time. In2004 that premise seemed like dystopian science fiction; twenty years later, ithits a whole lot closer to home. But either way, I don’t know that there could beclimate change cinema without the genre of the disaster film.

But here’s thething about disaster films: they have to find their way to some sort of a happyending. 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 ofour characters, usually the protagonists natch, there’s got to be a sense atthe film’s conclusion that they will be okay moving forward. (There are ofcourse, as with every rule, exceptions.) The Day After Tomorrow certainly doesn’ttry to pretend that the world hasn’t changed—indeed, one of its final momentsinvolves astronauts on the International Space Station looking down upon aprofoundly changed planet—but nonetheless, much of the film’s conclusionfocuses on our main characters, who have survived the catastrophic events andare 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’sstill a layer of melodramatic storytelling that makes the genre somewhat lesswell-equipped to really confront the worst possibilities of the climate crisis.

And then there’sDon’t Look Up(2021). In many ways Don’t Look Upseems to be another classic disaster film, with the impending disaster thistime a comet with the potential to destroy all life on Earth, the usualscientist characters who figure out the disaster before everyone else, and soon. But Don’t Look Up turnsout 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—rightup to (SPOILERS) anending in which apparently no one, not our protagonists or anyone else,escapes the disaster with their lives. That might seem pretty bleak, and insome ways it certainly is—but as you can see from that hyperlinked clip, there’salso a remarkable degree of tenderness and shared humanity in that ending, andI find those emotions more realistic and moving than a more typical happyending could possibly be. As a subgenre, the climate disaster movie might justhave to evolve from the familiar tropes, and if so Don’t Look Up offers at least one model for how to do so.

Nextclimate culture tomorrow,

Ben

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