Movies Fumble for Ways to Convey Climate Message
How do you tell a story about the destruction of the world?
Movie- and TV- makers know how to do it with aliens, of course, or suggest it with invented political intrigue and rogue leaders. But capturing the real global threat of climate change is far harder than filming any spaceship landing. Just ask Darren Aronofsky, whose recent thriller, “Mother!,” buried his climate- change message in allegory.
“It’s really tough,” said Fisher Stevens, the filmmaker and actor. “It’s not a very sexy subject, and people just don’t want to deal with it.”
Mr. Stevens, who won an Oscar in 2010 as a producer of “The Cove,” a documentary about dolphin- hunting, used the star power of Leonardo DiCaprio for his latest environmental film, “Before the Flood,” which examined global warming in a way Mr. Stevens hoped would inspire viewers to change their habits. A 2016 National Geographic documentary, it found a sizable streaming and digital audience.
But getting Hollywood movies about climate change made is not easy. And when they do refer to it — as did the Roland Emmerich 2004 disaster flick “The Day After Tomorrow” — they rarely do much to galvanize the public to action. Even well-intentioned filmmakers with carefully drafted cautionary tales often miss the mark, climate scientists say.
Part of the problem is simply plot, said Per Espen Stoknes, the author of “What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.” “As opposed to terrorism or drugs, there is no clear enemy with climate change,” he said.
And when climate change is depicted on screen, it’s often in an on- slaught of fire and brimstone, an apocalyptic vision that hardly leaves room for a hopeful human response. That, climate researchers and social scientists say, is exactly the wrong message to give.
“Typically, if you really want to mobilize people to act, you don’t scare the hell out of them and convince them that the situation is hopeless,” said Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the University of Michigan.
But that is just the kind of highstakes film Hollywood loves to produce — like “The Day After Tomorrow,” which depicted New York City as a frozen dystopian landscape. Or “Geostorm,” in worldwide release this month, in which the climate goes apocalyptically haywire, thanks to satellites that malfunction.
Research shows this kind of dystopian framing backfires, driving people further into helplessness.
“You have to frame these things so people feel like they have an entry point,” said Max Boykoff, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
The question becomes how best to motivate people. “It’s a difficult balance,” Mr. Hoffman said. “You have to communicate the sense of urgency, otherwise you won’t have a sense of commitment.”
Some high-profile examples, like the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” may go too far. “The movie was 100 percent about fear,” said Ed Maibach, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia. “And during the credits, literally the credits, they made some recommendations about what we could do. That should’ve been a prominent part of the narrative, in telling people the highest value actions they could take.”
More recent documentaries and programs like “Years of Living Dangerously,” a National Geographic series in which different celebrity hosts investigate environmental issues around the world, hope to find the sweet spot between jolting audiences and inspiring them.
But as the well-reviewed and little-seen “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” demonstrates, the right messaging doesn’t help if nobody catches it. “The term ‘climate change’ isn’t as sexy and ‘script friendly’ as most plotlines,” said Debbie Levin of the Environmental Media Association. The solution, some said, was to employ a bit of misdirection. “Agriculture, water issues, environmental justice,” Ms. Levin said. “Those all are big issues that work really well dramatically without saying the words ‘climate change.’ ”
Mr. Maibach said the greatest problem is that people are not talking about climate change enough. “We call it the climate silence,” he said, “and it’s pretty profound.”
So, Mr. Hoffman said, we need “more movies, more TV, more music. We have to touch people’s hearts on this. It’s critical.”