It’s getting tough to not think we are headed for apocalypse. With meaningful change on a global policy level seeming less and less likely as our political system continues to stall in arguments over whether climate change exists or not, society’s future is looking grim. In a rather pessimistic (but maybe a better term is realistic) for the New Yorker, writer Jonathan Franzen says that: “You have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it (Franzen, 2019). Now, Franzen is no scientist, but he seems to be capturing the narrative that our generation has been fed for years now: Unless we do something about it, everything will be wiped out by climate change.
This is sort of a brutal thing to deal with. In the past year alone, I’ve heard the term “climate anxiety” thrown around almost as much as the topic of climate change. Most of us are terrified of what is coming for us. This anxiety is not encouraged by the world momentarily crossing the critical threshold of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures while I was gathering information for this journal (Ray, 2023). We can’t even really grasp what truly is coming for us. In the absence of legislative change, we are sort of left hoping for a mysterious technological advancement that will save us all. What we are waiting for in the face of the potential apocalypse, is a “deus ex machina”, a literary term describing a plot device that swoops in at the end of the narrative and solves all problems (Methmann, 2012).
What will this look like? It is sort of impossible to imagine what this deus ex machina may look like. Certain movies have tried. Though they are not to be looked at as scientific models for what to do, seeing as they are fiction, there are three movies that come to mind that show technological “solutions” to the apocalypse we may soon face: WALL-E, Interstellar, and Snowpiercer.
First off, there is WALL-E. It is probably not a bas assumption to make that we’ve all seen this movie, as it was one of the defining movies of our collective childhoods. The climate disaster world WALL-E imagines is that of a world filled with uninhabitable amounts of pollution, with humans leaving Earth to board a spaceship in an attempt to leave for a while and come back when the Earth is more livable. Society has vastly changed while aboard the spaceship, with all people being immobile without the assistance of machines, all of them still consuming in large quantities, this time without any of the repercussions. In their place on Earth, a race of robots is left, with their task being to package and dispose of all the waste left behind. Centuries after the humans first left, WALL-E, the last of the earth-roaming robots, and EVE, a robot sent to evaluate life on Earth, to alert the humans aboard the spaceship of a plant that has grown on Earth’s surface, signaling that the planet can now sustain life again. The movie ends with the humans returning to Earth in hopes of re-starting civilization.
Next, we have Interstellar. This film centers on Cooper, a former pilot for NASA who is tasked with finding another inhabitable planet for humans after poor agricultural practices and lack of regard for the environment send humanity into a second, much larger Dust Bowl. The only crop that can be grown is corn, and even this will not last long. Cooper, along with three other astronauts, are forced to leave their lives and families behind in order to find a more suitable home, bringing a civilizations supply of human embryos with them. While Cooper does this, his daughter, Murph, works on a long-abandoned gravity formula that will allow the humans currently living on Earth to continue on the new planet. Due to a combination of love and black hole induced time dilation, the formula is solved, allowing for humanity to continue in tact.
Last on our climate movie watchlist is Snowpiercer. In this movie, in an attempt to combat global warming, world governments released CW-7, a cooling agent, into the air, causing the world to freeze over, killing almost everything. The only people left are those who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that is fully self-sustaining. The train has a strict caste system set in place in order to “maintain order”. The movie centers on Curtis Everett, a man from the back of the train trying to push his way to the front to establish equality. The movie ends with Curtis deliberately blowing up the train in order to stop the system of injustice. Two children survive, going outside to discover that temperatures are now survivable.
So what can we learn? Well, first off, we have to prevent the apocalypse before it happens, because the worlds of all of these films seem horrific, and should be avoided at all costs. Second, and more important to my point, it seems that the message of these movies is to sort of wait the crisis out, hoping that technological advancement will eventually save us. Whether it’s a shockingly adorable robot, a magic formula for gravity, or a train that lets us wait out the disaster, each of these films has some sort of technology that leads to the hopeful salvation of humanity. These movies however, are all science fiction, and ambitiously unrealistic ones at that. The “wait for technology to save us” approach will not work in real life. There’s no funny robot to get rid of our issues. There will be no convoluted formula about gravity. There won’t be a train that can sustain humanity. We’ve got to do something to stop the climate disaster before it happens. There’s no deus ex machina at the end for us. That only works in the movies.
Franzen, Jonathan. “What If We Stopped Pretending?” The New Yorker, 8 Sept. 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending.
Methmann, C., & Rothe, D. (2012). Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse
in global climate politics. Security Dialogue, 43(4), 323-344. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010612450746
Ray, Siladitya. “Global Temperatures Briefly Crossed Critical Threshold For The First Time Last Week.” Forbes, 20 Nov. 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/11/20/global-temperatures-briefly-crossed-critical-threshold-for-the-first-time-last-week/?sh=170fa629368e.