(Photo: The Star Trek Cast. Paramount Pictures )
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Two documentaries, including one called Everything’s Cool , will deal with global warming this year. They join The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth as movies concerned with climate change. KPBS film critic Beth Accomando considers how popular entertainment affects us.
CLIP - Star Trek Theme: “...to boldly go where no man has gone before…”
The 1960s TV series Star Trek may not have dealt directly with global warming, but its sci-fi adventures tackled everything from the cold war, to racial diversity, to the environment. It also influenced the kids who watched it.
Lee : I’m embarrassed to say but a lot of things I hold very firmly in my personal beliefs came from that show.
Jim Lee is a comic book artist and publisher who grew up with the show.
Lee : If you look at fantasy movies and science fiction movies I think they stir up the imagination they stir the powers of creativity and entertainment makes it easy to sit through a lesson.
Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth tries to make a lecture on global warming easy to sit through.
CLIP - Al Gore : It heats up worldwide and that’s global warming, that’s the traditional explanation but here’s what I think is a better one…
Cartoon VO : Global warming or none like it hot…
CLIP - Manny : It’s all gonna flood. Come on we gotta warn them. Sid : Maybe we could rapidly evolve into water creatures.
But global warming themes aren’t limited to movies says Ramie Tateishi, who lectures at UCSD about science fiction.
Tateishi : I think you see it more and more. In the last series of Dr. Who, the British show, the season finale from 2006 had global warming as one of the issues.
CLIP - Dr. Who : Look at it a world of peace, they call this the golden age. But it’s a lie. Temperatures have risen by two degrees in the last 6 months, the ice caps are melting and they say all this is going to be flooded.
Tateishi says science fiction is particularly good at dealing with the interplay of technology and nature, and the uncertainty of the outcome.
Tateishi : A lot of the science fiction images are representations of those fears and anxieties.
But for comic book artist Jim Lee, whose primary concern is delivering action filled entertainment, global warming presents problematic story material.
Lee : To me, it’s so slow it’s not like we’re gonna wake up one day and it’s all over.
Nuclear annihilation or Armageddon from a meteor hitting earth definitely offer more dramatic potential on the big screen. That’s why the film The Day After Tomorrow sped up the process of global warming to make it more dramatic.
CLIP - Jack : This is very urgent sir, our climate is changing very violently and it’s going to happen over the next six to eight weeks.
Vice President : I thought you said this wouldn’t happen for another hundred years or so.
Jack : I was wrong.
CLIP - South Park : We finished running the tests. Global warming is going to strike two days before the day after tomorrow.
In very different ways, satires like South Park and films like The Day After Tomorrow have become part of the debate over global warming. The Day After Tomorrow may have been more fiction that fact but the news media brought in experts to debate its accuracy. That’s why science fiction can be an effective genre says Ramie Tateishi.
Tateishi : Science fiction is really a great way of taking any hypothetical situation and actually visualizing it in a way that you couldn’t do if you were constrained by rules of reality or physics or what have you.
That’s what The Day After Tomorrow did. It visualized what could happen in an extreme global warning scenario.
CLIP - News announcer : In Nova Scotia the seas rose by 25 feet in a matter of seconds…
Lee : On the one hand I think it sort of exploits our fears of these situations but on the other hand it does give a clear way of presenting the dangers of it.
Jim Lee says that in suggesting the worst that can happen, science fiction can deliver a very potent warning. It can also inspire people to come up with solutions. Which brings Lee back to Star Trek.
Lee : What I got out of science fiction and Star Trek is a tremendous amount of hope that if we just stay smart and we use common sense that we will continue and even with something like global warming our scientists will deal with it but we all have to play our part.
CLIP - Kirk : We’re a most promising species Mr. Spock, as predators go. Did you know that?
Mr. Spock : I’ve frequently had my doubts.
Kirk : I don’t, not any more, and maybe in a thousand years or so maybe we’ll be able to prove it.
MUSIC OUT: Star Trek end theme music.
