Where Hollywood — and the Oscars — still miss the mark on climate representation – Grist todayheadline

The vision

“I need help making meaning of all this. And stories have always been how humans make sense of our world.”

— Anna Jane Joyner, founder and CEO of Good Energy

The spotlight

If you watched the Oscars this weekend, you might have been paying attention to the dazzling red carpet looks (so much silver!), or maybe host Conan O’Brien’s best jokes (poking fun at the nominees, himself, and of course Jeff Bezos), or that Wicked medley (chills). But did you clock how many of the nominated movies featured climate change?

Anna Jane Joyner did. Her nonprofit story consultancy, Good Energy, is dedicated to bringing more climate themes and plotlines into mainstream movies and TV. When she and her team analyzed this year’s Oscar nominees, they were hoping to see them pass a specific test: If the movie takes place on Earth, in the present day or relatively close, does climate change exist in that movie? And does at least one character know about it?

The results were a tad disappointing. One only Oscar-nominated film passed this “Climate Reality Check”: The Wild Robot, an animated movie about a helper robot that learns how to communicate with animals after getting marooned on a remote island in the not-too-distant future (though distant enough that the Golden Gate Bridge is mostly underwater, as we see in one subtle but striking scene). Last year, three movies made the cut: Barbie, Nyad, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.

Watch a trailer for The Wild Robot. Universal Pictures / YouTube

But in many ways, this year has been a breakout one for climate cinema, both in and outside of the Academy Awards. Sci-fi blockbusters Dune: Part Two (which was nominated for best picture, and won for sound and visual effects) and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which was also nominated for best visual effects) both took on climate themes in more metaphorical ways. And a variety of uniquely creative indie films tackled climate themes this year as well, like Flow, a dialogue-less fantasy movie from Latvia in which a cat and other animals must survive a biblical flood, which took home the award for best animated feature.

Although it didn’t garner any Oscar nominations, the highly popular Twisters played with both science fiction and real science in its depiction of climate change and extreme weather. And the icy, apocalyptic musical The End provided another example of creative approaches to tackling both the future of climate change and its root causes.

Any climate story is progress, says Joyner. But there’s a reason she puts extra focus on films that tackle our current realities: Keeping climate relegated to sci-fi and fantasy misses something important about what the movies can and should do when it comes to reflecting and helping us make sense of the human experience in the era of climate change.

“We’re all living in the climate crisis. Everyone on Earth is affected by it in some way at this point,” said Ali Weinstein, a TV writer, consultant, and activist, and one of the co-founders of the annual Hollywood Climate Summit. “That’s what we’re living — and our storytelling is supposed to reflect how we’re existing in the world.”

That’s part of the ethos behind Good Energy’s reality-check test, and the work of consultants like Weinstein who strive to bring climate awareness into more writers’ rooms. That work involves educating writers and creatives about the climate crisis and its many intersections with other facets of our lived experiences, Weinstein said, so that they have more opportunities to organically incorporate it into characters’ experiences — not only exploring it in allegories.

“It often is easier to address any social justice issue, not just climate, when you make it more abstract,” she said. That may be one reason why climate has more commonly been handled metaphorically, in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy.

“That was historically where it showed up the most,” Joyner said. Themes of ecological collapse and the perils of overextraction have been explored in many sci-fi and fantasy stories, often containing morals about how we must learn to live more sustainably, lest our future be barren and desolate. Think of The Lorax, for example — but also classics like the 1973 thriller Soylent Green, which contends with the future of food on an overpopulated planet, or the childhood favorite FernGully: The Last Rainforest, about a fairy-filled forest threatened by a logging company and a pollution demon. Joyner also pointed to some more recent high-profile examples that have been discussed as climate parables, like Avatar, which is premised on the attempted colonization and mining of the planet Pandora, and Game of Thrones, where society is threatened by the coming of a magically destructive winter.

Watch a trailer for Flow. Rotten Tomatoes Indie / YouTube

“We just felt it was really, really important that it not only showed up in fantasy, as a kind of metaphor that a lot of people didn’t actually understand or see … but it also showed up in stories about our real lives,” she said. People might find meaning and inspiration in fantasy, sci-fi, or historical stories, and these genres have often been seen as a more palatable, or even approachable, way to deal with tough or controversial themes — a way to sneak them in without the baggage of their current-day context. But representations in realism are needed to tell the full story. And, increasingly, stories that take place in the real world and don’t recognize climate change are creating something of a fantasy.

Relating to the characters we see in media can help us process our own experiences, decrease feelings of isolation, and increase agency. “It is a climate solution to see yourself on screen in a way that makes you feel seen and validated,” Joyner said.

The Climate Reality Check took inspiration from a similar thought experiment, called the Bechdel Test. Devised in the ’80s as a way to measure (and call attention to a lack of) female representation in film, the test asks simply: Are there at least two women in this movie? And do they, at some point, have a conversation about something other than a man?

Often critiqued as a comically low bar, the Bechdel Test in fact started as a joke in a comic strip by cartoonist Alison Bechdel. It made a punchline out of the fact that so many popular movies failed to represent the lives of women and treat them as complete characters. As Joyner and Weinstein noted, the same can be said of movies’ failure to reflect a phenomenon that is increasingly part of everyday life. The Climate Reality Check is a simple way for viewers to track that in what they’re watching.

But the test is also intended to be generative, Joyner said — it’s an invitation to writers, showrunners, and other creatives to think about bringing climate realities into their stories, in the interest of being relatable to viewers.

Of course, the stories we see on screen also help us relate to others — and boosting the presence of climate change in popular media is a part of raising awareness and motivating more people to take action. Research has actually shown that watching movies can increase empathy, something long believed but only recently tested. And representation in popular media has helped bring greater visibility to marginalized communities and issues in the past — many credit film and TV portrayals of queer characters with the real-world growth in acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, and subsequent policy changes like the legalization of same-sex marriage.

People do tend to create stories that stem from their own lived experiences — one reason why many advocates believe that true, authentic representation starts with more diversity among storytellers. And when it comes to direct experiences with the climate crisis, all of Hollywood just experienced a major wake-up call in the form of the devastating L.A. wildfires.

“The profile of a Hollywood television writer is not someone who is on the front lines of the climate crisis, traditionally,” said Allison Begalman, another co-founder of the Hollywood Climate Summit, and also of YEA! Impact, a social impact marketing consultancy. “I think, now that a lot of people in Los Angeles have experienced this wildfire, they’re seeing things a bit differently, and I believe that it will lead to an opening of understanding for a lot of people.”

Weinstein predicts, for instance, that we might see an influx of escape thrillers centering around catastrophic fires. “But I would really encourage people to look past the disaster narrative,” she said. Dwelling too much on the disaster itself, and the apocalypse of it all, can create a sense of apathy. “If we feel like the world has already ended, why would we fight for it?”

What she hopes to see instead are stories about what can grow from the ashes of a tragedy like the L.A. fires — communities banding together to help one another.

While the team is still in the early stages of setting the programming lineup for this year’s Hollywood Climate Summit, planned for early June, the impact of the fires will certainly play a role in shaping the agenda. Begalman said one thing they will likely emphasize is community preparedness and resilience, both within storytelling and for attendees themselves.

Joyner also echoed the need to highlight stories of contending with the impacts of climate change. She splits her time between Los Angeles and a family home on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, two places facing different forms of climate extremes. But she grew up in western North Carolina, which was thought to be something of a climate haven — before it was hit by Hurricane Helene, one of the worst disasters in recent history.

“I never expected that to happen in Asheville,” Joyner said. In the aftermath of the storm, she wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times about what it felt like trying to process the tragedy:

I have no emotional framework for this, no story to help me. Right now, what I desperately need are authentic stories that help us figure out how to be human in this changing world, to face this overwhelming crisis with bravery. Stories that help us navigate our very understandable fear, anxiety, grief, despair, uncertainty, and anger in a way that allows us to feel seen. Stories that make us laugh — not in ignoring our reality, but in the midst of it — and stories that remind us there’s still so much beauty here to fight for. That capture how, in the living nightmare of climate disasters, people demonstrate extraordinary kindness and creativity, as they’re doing in Asheville and Black Mountain at this very moment.

The only silver lining of tragedies like Helene and the L.A. fires, she said, was watching how communities came together to help each other. And that’s something that people were also able to watch in some of this year’s Oscar nominees — those that passed the reality-check test, and those that didn’t. In both Flow and the film it edged out for best animated feature, The Wild Robot, groups navigate the arrival of disasters by learning to cooperate and unite as a community. “It was all about people coming together — or in this case, animals and robots coming together, overcoming their differences, overcoming their fears, working in community to build resilience, to help each other,” Joyner said. A powerful message for climate movies, and children’s movies at that.

“I’m really glad that those stories are becoming more prevalent, because I think we really, really need them as impacts get worse,” Joyner said. “We have to learn how to work together and find courage.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

A parting shot

A life-size replica of Roz (aka Rozzum 7134), the titular character in The Wild Robot, at a headline gala at the BFI London Film Festival in October. Although an animated movie starring a humanoid robot isn’t exactly realism, it passed Good Energy’s reality check because it is clearly set on Earth, in a somewhat near future where climate change is evident. As the report notes: “Climate impacts and situations — from sea level rise to hints that humans have isolated themselves in climate-safe, domed cities — are subtly woven into the fabric of the storyworld.”

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Mia Torres / Grist

Spotlight: Universal Pictures / YouTube; Rotten Tomatoes Indie / YouTube

Parting shot: Shane Anthony Sinclair / Getty Images for BFI