Day After Tomorrow
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Hollywood cinema and climate change: The Day After Tomorrow.
Ingram, David. In Words on Water: Literary and Cultural Representations, Devine, Maureen and Christa Grewe-Volpp (eds.) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008).
Climate change, like many other environmental problems, is slow to develop, not amenable to simple or fast solutions, and caused by factors that are both invisible and complex (Adam 17). Making a narrative film about climate change therefore does not fit easily into the commercial formulae of mainstream Hollywood, which favour human-interest stories in which individual protagonists undergo a moral transformation before they resolve their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can such classical narratives mediate an issue as complex as climate change without being not only inadequate, but even dangerous, lulling their audience into a false sense of security about our ability to deal with such problems? Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British journalist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its emphasis on 'a successful outcome and a narrative closure '. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the 'real, material ecological crisis ' is 'also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation ' (Kerridge 4). Yet, as Jim Collins argues, 'mass-mediated cultures ', including those of popular Hollywood cinema, are characterised by 'semiotic complexities of meaning production ', which leave even popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretations (Collins 17). Film theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood movie as a 'polysemous, multivalent set of images, characters, and narrative situations ', which therefore constitute what he calls an 'ideological agglomeration ', rather than a single, coherent
Hollywood cinema and climate change: The Day After Tomorrow.
Ingram, David. In Words on Water: Literary and Cultural Representations, Devine, Maureen and Christa Grewe-Volpp (eds.) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008).
Climate change, like many other environmental problems, is slow to develop, not amenable to simple or fast solutions, and caused by factors that are both invisible and complex (Adam 17). Making a narrative film about climate change therefore does not fit easily into the commercial formulae of mainstream Hollywood, which favour human-interest stories in which individual protagonists undergo a moral transformation before they resolve their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can such classical narratives mediate an issue as complex as climate change without being not only inadequate, but even dangerous, lulling their audience into a false sense of security about our ability to deal with such problems? Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British journalist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its emphasis on 'a successful outcome and a narrative closure '. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the 'real, material ecological crisis ' is 'also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation ' (Kerridge 4). Yet, as Jim Collins argues, 'mass-mediated cultures ', including those of popular Hollywood cinema, are characterised by 'semiotic complexities of meaning production ', which leave even popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretations (Collins 17). Film theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood movie as a 'polysemous, multivalent set of images, characters, and narrative situations ', which therefore constitute what he calls an 'ideological agglomeration ', rather than a single, coherent
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