How Movies About the Climate Crisis Work to Make Us Forget About the Climate Crises

Abstract

One of the central problems in the current discussion about the climate crisis is the fact that we (in the broadest sense of the term) do not act according to the knowledge available. That is, the sciences are more or less unanimous in their claim that we need to change our ways of living drastically, and yet we do very little to change. Given that there’s no shortage of scientific evidence, the central issue is not necessarily knowledge, but how we relate to what we already know. But how do such changes in how we relate to what we know come about? How can a radical shift in our way of living come about? Facts don’t seem to do it. In light of this stand-still it is easy to resort to either anger or resignation. One suggestion is that arts, and movies in particular, may help us change our attitudes to what we know. In this article, I show how that what is required is not a mere change in attitude, but that we learn to reconfigure the concepts we live by, and that many films about the climate crisis often may conceal the climate crisis for us and prevent us from engaging imaginatively with the prospect of a radically changed way of living. Not all movies that are, in an objective sense “about” the climate crisis, allows for transformative experience where we learn to conceptualize our world differently.