Purportedly entertaining films that feature global warming and climate change can indeed affect public understanding. But films are often bound up in problematic and limiting identity politics, which commonly reiterate racial, gender and sexual stereotypes positioning as they do white men as being the decisionmakers and the voice of authority.
These are findings of Bridie McGreavy and Laura Lindenfeld of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine, who analysed three films that feature global warming prominently: The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (2008) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).
The Day After Tomorrow, a drama directed by Roland Emmerich and featuring as its lead, male character a paleoclimatologist who predicts that global warming might actually plunge the planet into a new Ice Age, is simply a search-and-rescue in which the lead character must make a daring trek across America to get to his son, trapped in the cross-hairs of the sudden global storm.
Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy directed by Randy Olson is supposedly a comedy, a mockumentary exploring the chaos surrounding global warming. It blends documentary and reality style in encounters with the silliness of environmental extremism and the seriousness of Hurricane Katrina. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, directed by Davis Guggenheim documents Al Gore’s campaign to get the issue of global warming recognised internationally.
All three films have had their share of critics. And all three have their factual errors and distortions. All three have their hidden agendas, the researchers content. None of the films is peer-reviewed. Nevertheless, such storytelling does have an impact on popular culture and public perception of a given issue. McGreavy and Lindenfeld suggest that dominant representations of race and gender in these films fail to align with the key sustainable development goals of equity, freedom and shared responsibility. Instead, their position as “entertainment” influences our sense of the world, guides our relationships and may well affect, in a detrimental manner, our collective abilities to create a sustainable future.”
McGreavy and Lindenfeld said in their study that was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Development, “Scientific consensus on climate change is clear. Attention to this issue in the mainstream media is likely to grow stronger as the reality of a changing climate comes home.”
The researchers identified three central implications for how representations help produce sustainable societies in which all members can engage. First, films help audiences construct meaning as expressed through measures like levels of concern about risks, perceived efficacy in the face of uncertainty, and active information seeking. Second, these constructions occur in complex systems of production and negotiation guided by broader interactions within a political economy. Third, representations create a discursive space in which audiences seek information, have concerns, and potentially act in ways that collectively result in sustainable development.
They add, “Ideological criticism of movie representations is important because it helps us discover how texts align with or differentiate themselves from dominant discourse.” They suggest that we need to engage critically with films to understand who is positioned as having the ability to act and how. “It is not just about rational, fact-based reasoning but about making and using films to challenge dominant stereotypes, change social institutions, and empower citizens more broadly,” McGreavy says.
