Fiction and Film in the Hothouse
Thoughts on climate change imagination and solutions, inspired by the Beaubien exhibit at George Mason University
The purpose of the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club is to explore new conversations across higher education through reading climate themed fiction and short stories. Dr. Michael Svoboda, a member of the book club, teaches writing and sustainability at George Washington university. Michael shares my obsession with climate fiction, but in a different medium — film. He’s written extensively on climate films for Yale Climate Connections and The Washington Post.
This fall, George Mason (another university in the Washington D.C. area) is hosting an exhibit by artist Aimée Beaubien. It’s called Into the Hothouse. After an introduction by book club alum Ben Auger, the exhibit curator, Jeffrey Kenney (Mason Exhibitions) and programs manager, Yassmin Salem, invited Michael and I into a conversation about art, fiction, film, and how we imagine climate change. The exhibit is described as “…a category-defying constellation of dozens of gathered, printed, and hand-made works that model, depict, or present botanical and environmental subject matter including intricately manipulated photographic materials and objects representing leaves, and flowers, vine and web-like textile configurations, and bio-plastic encased dried botanical specimens.”
While I haven’t physically explored the 2,000 square foot space, it seems to me like a stunning material chaos — like an artistic Walmart where you might actually perceive the incomprehensible idea that every item in any Walmart actually comes from the natural world, even plastic (which now permeates the natural world) is an extraction from the earth. Every. Single. Nonrenewable. Thing.
“Beaubien’s work cultivates both the pleasure of exploring an enchanted garden while its artificiality gestures toward the tension and confusion at the center of our distorted relationship with the ecological world.”
Michael and I were invited to share some recommendations for viewers of the exhibit to continue down the rabbit hole into which the Wonderland-like Beaubien exhibit beckons. We shared some recommendations of climate fiction and film, (which were added to a slideshow running outside the exhibit) and then we recorded a Zoom conversation where we talked about the different experience of the viewer/reader of novels and films, and brainstormed ways, as teachers and writers, to create depictions of positive climate change solutions in action.
We talked about different efforts to envision a climate changed future that isn’t an apocalypse. We each got interested in these depictions around 2014. For me, it was teaching Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwoord, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. For Michael the entry point was Snowpiercer, a film that was originally published as a graphic novel.
A while back I had interviewed a sequential art major at Savannah College of Art and Design, Skip Skilling, in a post about the graphic novel at the heart of Station 11, by Emily St. John Mandel, which was a 2021 selection of the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club (you can read that post, here). In the interview, Skip said “I think of comics as being between books and movies. With a book it’s all in your head, it’s in your brain, you have your own image in your head. The reader really has to participate, while with a movie everything is given to you — actors, pacing, delivery — you are very passive.”
That’s basically the point where Michael and I began our conversation about novels and film — the topic of agency.
KH: In novels, the author inhabits their own interior vision and controls the depiction of that vision. And I think the reader also has agency, filling in imagination and interpretation — each reader imagines the scene slightly differently. It’s like a psychic 1–1 conversation between the author and the reader. But films are more of a group effort — director, screenwriter, actors all influence the interpretation.
MS: It’s true, the viewer has much less autonomy in film. You are being invited to identify with the protagonist, and dangerous experiences are more visceral and enhanced to convey shocks and sudden changes. You are hearing music and seeing emotions being expressed. The kind of story that is going to be depicted in a movie is almost always compressed in terms of time frame and that leads it to choose certain kinds of events over others. Because It has to complete an entire cycle in 90 minutes— that requires events of a certain character. That has meant a lot of disaster movies and apocalypses that happen in a short time, or dystopian landscapes in which another kind of story arc completes itself.
KH: For me, when I read a scene like the opening chapter of Ministry for the Future, which is a detailed sensory account of devastating wet bulb event in India where hundreds of thousands of people die, I am captivated by a gamut of emotions — fear, empathy, horror, and just a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. When I read this scene I feel like I can touch some of the emotions that are otherwise overwhelming. I can really feel it. And then later when when KSR writes about solutions and ideas, I can imagine those in my own mind, too. Like, I can really think them. So, what are your thoughts about how we experience these scenes through film?
MS: Well, all of our stories are about different types of conflicts and problems. So the question is, can you adapt those frameworks to deal with this new problem? I think novelists are more sincere in doing that than filmmakers. Film makers have to justify a budget — a production budget, a promotional budget, they have to earn that back, so they are much more reluctant to leave established forms of storytelling. They use climate change as a pretext to tell the kind of stories they already know how to tell: nuclear war, terrorist attack. There are lots of ways to envision the end of the world, and that’s a big seller in movies. Climate change has become one of the new ways of retooling the story of the end of the world. It’s just apocalypse and dystopia.
The term “genre” implies a pre-existing story framework that you adopt. Part of the problem with climate change is that it is an uprecedented experience in human civilization.
KH: Yes, and that locks in our thinking into this “fight against climate change” when really climate change something we need to live with and work with and even maintain a philosophy of radical optimism or hopepunk. Being hopeful about the future is the new punk rock, how crazy is that? I’m really trying to love solarpunk novels, and I wonder, Is there such a thing as solarpunk films and if there were what would that look like?
MS: I’m in the same place with solarpunk, looking to love it, find something literary and teachable, something that helps me imagine a future where we have a thriveable life mitigating and adapting to climate change. But I’ve never really found one. There are many more movies about attempts to solve climate change going wrong than there are films that show a successful effort to address climate change. Snowpiercer would be in that camp — it’s about geoengineering gone wrong, and there’s a couple dozen films in which the premise is that, okay we made some movies about disasters that climate change might promulgate, now we need to tweak the theme a bit, so instead we’ll talk about about problems created by our attempts. But we’ve skipped over the creation of a story about a successful story of doing something about climate change.
KH: So what’s the missing piece to change the way we imagine climate change in film?
MS: Well we both viewed the panels at the Good Energy Project Hollywood writer’s climate summit, and I was impressed by the earnestness of the writers, at least, in how to incorporate climate change into television and movie production. And all of them were of the view that the first step is to acknowledge climate change in programs that are not totally devoted to it.
For example, I heard about a show runner for Grey’s Anatomy, the medical show. There’s a heatwave in Seattle and the power goes out, the plot is about how to deal with lethal heat and essential operations while the heatwave has increased energy needs creating a blackout. Something like that has to come from the writer, or a series creator, but then everyone has to be brought on board, that means changing a lot of minds before even attempting to create a vision.
KH: So if we could really change the way imagine the future, that kind of shift in a writer’s mind would lead to a new way of telling stories that maybe doesn’t lock us into disaster and fear and one heroic protagonist.
I’m thinking about the Lahaina fire on Maui. The important stories coming out of the disaster are not the conspiracy theories about space lasers. The stories that help the situation are the real community stories. So it’s about retraining our imaginations to tell these stories differently.
MS: I agree, and this summer’s events including the fires on Maui have really started that process. Here in the Northeastern U.S., wildfire smoke made climate disruption real, and dangerous. I’m not aware of a depiction of lethal heat in cli-fi movies. Instead, films keep replicating The Day After Tomorrow, which is a low probability event that has been cemented in the public imagination, and it’s probably not as productive for finding a realistic solution to climate change.
KH: I’m thinking about a video my friend put on Facebook a couple years ago when there was all the smoke in the San Francisco Bay Area. They were in their normal car, like a Honda Accord, all wearing respirators and the sky is orange. Everybody used the word, apocalyptic. I think you’ve identified something important, that we need to see, like, almost a cameo appearance of climate risk, and also of solution ideas as a small descriptive point in a script, not the main disaster plotline.
I mean, there is no magical solution! That was the problem I had with Extrapolations — we get to the end of the series and all along Elon Musk [a similar billionaire character] had the solution and was just holding it back for more money. And that is just not the case. There really is no evil billionaire to blame. There is no silver bullet solution. That’s just a lie, and I was really upset about that.
MS: I see what you are saying, totally, but on the other hand, something like that is baked in to the IPCC reports. There’s an assumption that we will achieve negative emotions, that’s baked into the models at some capacity. And in a way that we don’t know yet. But I agree that the villain in Extrapolations was kind of cartoonish.
KH: Technology is a program that’s being laid down for us to believe in, but that’s not what I want to believe in. I want to bet on humans being able to change: not just our behavior, but our relationship to the Earth and each other. That’s not a techno-fix. That’s an imagination fix. That’s a reboot. So this exploration of stories and storytelling, art, films, the Boubien exhibit that brought us together, and film…it’s not a small thing. It’s the thing! Imagination sets the path for learning, collaboration, and experimentation and the only way we can share those imaginations is through story and film. That’s a big deal!
MS: There’s a 1993 made-for-TV movie called The Fire Next Time. They go through a whole series of climate risks, mitigations and adaptation that might be done. The main character owns a fishing operation that’s experiencing difficulties due to warming in the Gulf, and disappearance of the shrimping grounds. His house is wiped out by a Category 5 hurricane that hits Louisiana ….this was made in the 90s, but it’s set in 2017.
In the film, the character winds up with a model of Amish simplicity where you can reduce your engagement with technology without losing it entirely, and the emphasis is on family connections. It’s a surprisingly rich early engagement with climate change, much more varied and tied to reality than what would follow. This was due to consultation with Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist who passed away in 2010. He actually appears in the film as himself. He gave them realistic advice on what climate change would look like in 25 years. And here we are.
KH: As you were talking I was wondering, what if we could have a series that was just normalizing: people living simple lives, not necessarily Amish, but in the future, just doing everyday normal things like making meals. Like HGTV, but with stories of adaptation and restoration and resilience. Could that be a thing? People have such high anxiety, and some of these films and stories are fueling it. We need to see some calm human competence.
It reminds me of an art exhibit I saw in Barcelona, After the End of the World. It had videos by Timothy Morton and this living room that was in a KSR future — Kim Stanley Robinson actually designed it, which was so cool. There was a little kitchen with hydroponic tanks where the family grew greens, newspapers that had future events, but dialing it back to ordinariness. Maybe dialing it back to ordinariness is part of what is needed in film and stories, to be able to see ourselves living in a new way.
MS: I’m thinking of 2040, that was a surprisingly upbeat documentary. It’s all conversations with people creating local grids based on solar power in Africa, people engaged in regenerative agriculture, kelp farming. The point of the series is that we actually have the technologies we need to solve this by 2040. I’d like to see the director, Damon Gameau, do a whole movie. I think that’s a possibility.
KH: Well, that gets me back to the book club and what I love about reading. I think it’s important to be able to just sit still and read a book, and then be able to talk about it with someone you care about. This is resilience. Reading is good for our mental health. Reading is magic! It’s how we cast ourselves into the future, and its how we stay connected to the past.
MS: I hear what you’re saying. I agree that we need communal experiences that show know how and agency. An analogue perhaps would be, instead of watching movies at home alone on a screen, going to the theatre was at least a step toward a communal experience.
Thanks Michael, for an interesting and collegial conversation about cli fi fiction and film, and thanks to Yassmin, Ben, and Mason Exhibitions at George Mason University for prompting this inquiry. If you’re in the Washington, DC area, the Beaubien exhibition is up at George Mason through November 10.
Read more of Michael Svoboda’s writing on climate themed films:
Yale Climate Connections Review of the Documentary 2040
Five Part Series on Cli-Fi film covering Snowpiercer, Into the Storm, The Day After Tomorrow and Interstellar
Cli-Fi Movies: A Guide for Socially-Distanced Viewers
Washington Post Article on Cli-Fi.
Read and follow Krista Hiser’s posts on climate themed literature and reading at the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club on Medium.com. Have a recommendation? Join our conversation in the comments.
