Cli‐fi on the screen(s): patterns in the representations of climate change in fictional films

Abstract

Fictional works about climate change, or cli‐fi, have been hailed as a new genre. As a complement to previous WIREs studies of novels and plays, this article focuses on cli‐fi films, providing an overview of some 60 films, including major theatrical releases, smaller festival films, and made‐for‐TV movies. Of the many possible impacts of climate change predicted by scientists, this study finds that filmmakers have focused on extreme weather events and the possibility of Earth slipping into a new ice age. These choices reflect filmmakers’ predispositions more than any scientific consensus and thus demonstrate the challenge that cli‐fi films pose to climate change communicators. Finally, noting the recent emergence of films that parody concerns about climate change or that depict attempts to mitigate its causes or ameliorate its effects as possibly more disastrous than climate change itself, this study recommends that researchers in the humanities and social sciences look beyond The Day After Tomorrow, which has received far more attention than any other film. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:43–64. doi: 10.1002/wcc.381 This article is categorized under: Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

Science stories as culture: experience, identity, narrative and emotion in public communication of science

“…Transportation can have powerful persuasive consequences because it promotes emotional engagement with the characters in ways that can never be accomplished with the mere presentation of facts. Fiction's ability to generate emotional engagement is a major reason for the development of the genre of 'cli-fi' (climate fiction) in literature, film, and theatre over last decade [Johns-Putra, 2016;Svoboda, 2016]. Cli-fi is an effective form of climate communication because it can "translat[e] graphs and scientific jargon into experience and emotion" [Tuhus-Dubrow, 2013].…”

Ecological Gentrification in Response to Apocalyptic Narratives of Climate Change: The Production of an Immuno‐political Fantasy

“…The representation by cinema of a future which is both terrifying and unavoidable—particularly true of climate fiction (cli‐fi) films, such as The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, ) and After Earth (Shyamalan, )—has a powerful effect on the audience's psyche, as they are simultaneously enrolled in the production of new desires and the living out of existing desires through a process of collective dreaming (Lebeau, ; Žižek, ). The issue, from a cursory analysis of 13 films viewed by me and a more comprehensive analysis of 61 cli‐fi films by Svoboda () is a tendency to articulate the resolution of the crisis around a ‘hero’ or a deus ex machina . Tuhus‐Dubrow () also points out that cli‐fi genre novels and films tend to portray a much more violent cataclysmic event than the slow and eventual reality of climate change, in part because a slow, incremental change in global average temperature is not particularly exciting when compared to, for example, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (Ferrante, ) in which the last family on Earth travel the planet and time in order to stop an outbreak of tornadoes (originally made more powerful and frequent by climate change) which contain not only sharks, but dimensional vortices.…”

Audience Reactions to Climate Change and Science in Disaster Cli-fi Films: A Qualitative Analysis

“…Climate change and other environmental problems are increasingly featured in fictional films (Murray & Heumann, 2009) such as the blockbusters The Day After Tomorrow (2006) and Snowpiercer (2013) and lower-budget productions such as Category 6 (2004). The cli-fi film genre is broad and contains films that touch on climate change only briefly (Svoboda, 2016).…”

“…Kaplan explores the broader genre and concludes cli-fi is evidence of environmental pretrauma, or anxiety about things that will happen in the future (2015). Svoboda examines the history of cli-fi films and begins the process of classifying these films by the type of disaster they feature (Svoboda, 2016).…”

“…Researchers have begun to address cli-fi's impact on public attitudes and beliefs about climate change (Leiserowitz, 2004;Lowe, Brown, Dessai, de Franca, Doria, Haynes, & Vincent, 2006;Svoboda, 2014Svoboda, , 2016. However, so far these approaches have mainly used quantitative measures to examine audience responses to cli-fi.…”