by Bruce McConachie

I’ve been teaching and writing about the intersections of popular culture and social-political norms for most of my professional life. Although my publications on rituals, plays, and films have sparked some progressive insights and actions, I now believe that a blog can be immediately useful in our current struggle to create a more egalitarian and resilient life for our grandchildren. I addition, I recognize that my boomer generation has done more than any other to foster American myths that have trashed the biosphere for all of us. So, I believe I owe it to future Earthlings to use my training and knowledge “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to [Mother] Nature” to show her ongoing ruin and our emerging tragedy.    

The climate chaos we’ve let loose is already causing substantial economic, psychological, and social damage and threatens widespread homelessness, starvation, and anarchy unless it is checked and ultimately reversed. Those committed to Deep Adaptation believe that we must adapt to the quickening pace of climate disasters, relinquish social and economic habits that are dooming the cultures and nations we have built, restore right relationships with the Earth where we can, and craft an egalitarian and democratic future to sustain ecological and political justice for all. So I’ll be connecting some dots linking film and TV stories to the historical structures and attitudes such fictions support. 

Although few popular dramas deal directly with our climate difficulties, many take for granted a status quo that is moving us inexorably toward disaster. Others acknowledge our climate-related problems but accept them as an uncomfortable necessity. In her recent op ed piece for the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg damns Hollywood script writers for refusing to give ordinary viewers something positive to do that will help us to transform our future. She singles out Hugh Jackman’s Reminiscence, in which rising oceans have submerged much of southern Florida, reducing Miami residents to addictive nostalgia. Rosenberg concludes that the film is “about escape – not adaptation. As such, Reminiscence is a great illustration of how strangely passive and defeatist an industry full of Prius early adapters has been about the biggest challenge of our time” (Post, 8/26/21). She contrasts such pessimism to the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose New York 2140 “envisions how cooperative apartment buildings might respond to New York’s submergence.” In Rosenberg’s telling, “climate change will upend our lives, but we all have something to contribute to the response to this radical reordering.”  

Evolutionary climatologist George Marshall would agree with Rosenberg but also sympathize with Hollywood’s difficulties. In Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014), Marshall details several reasons why Hollywood scriptwriters, directors, and actors – along with the rest of us – have problems telling climate-related stories. First, unless it has a happy ending, most people feel threatened and isolated by stories about life-threatening disasters caused by situations over which they have little control.  Climate change, says Marshall, is also maddingly complex; it is “unfamiliar, slow moving, invisible, and intergenerational” (226), all attributes that play poorly to our long-evolved tendencies to avoid difficulties that appear to have little to do with our immediate safety and comfort. These characteristics also blur the focus on interesting characters with particular problems and/or compelling quests, the primary ingredients of a good film. 

Nonetheless, it’s clear from Marshall’s final chapter, subtitled “Some Personal and Highly Biased Ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole,” that there are lots of possible stories Hollywood writers could be telling to shape our preparations for the future. Back when his book was published in 2014, Marshall was thinking more about novels than television and movie scripts, but his general ideas about narrative apply to stories in all media. Here’s what I take to be his main point: “We need a NARRATIVE OF POSITIVE CHANGE [caps in original], in which “our adaptation to climate change does not just protect what is already here but also creates a more just and equitable world” (233). Marshall follows this generalization with specific advice, such as BUILD A NARRATIVE OF COOPERATION that does not insist on unity, ACTIVATE COOPERATIVE VALUES RATHER THAN COMPETITIVE VALUES by emphasizing what we have in common, and CREATE COMMUNITIES OF SHARED CONVICTION in which people can reveal their doubts and fears as well as proclaim their commitment to common goals (234-35). In social evolutionary terms, this kind of narrative depends upon mobilizing a cooperative “we” to quiet the fears of “me” so that we can work together for a more adaptable and equitable “us.”             

But can this ethic help to generate a good script for a popular Hollywood movie or TV series? Sure. Here’s a possible scenario I have composed for a sci-fi film titled Down on the Farm:

Somewhere on a planet called Imperium in another galaxy in the Earth year 1965, the apparently wise interracial and interspecies elders of the planet are listening to a presentation by a committee they appointed on whether to colonize the Earth for agricultural production as a part of their intergalactic empire. With pictures of our lovely blue planet in space and a few statistics about US agricultural production in the 1960s, the committee wins permission to visit the “third rock from the sun” for a closer look.  Using rapid educational and surgical techniques to transform committee members into simulated Earthlings, Imperium prepares them for their near speed-of-light voyage to Earth. Included in the group are the married, middle-aged Zotars and their teenage son named Three. Soon after the Zotars are put into hybernation in their space transport, they awaken in 2022, Earth time, on the outskirts of Spring Valley, an agricultural town in southeastern Minnesota where our planet’s receding glaciers deposited some of the richest soil in the world. 

            Settling into small town life, papa Zotar accepts a job in a seed and fertilizer store, mama Z. joins the local Methodist church and agrees to teach Sunday school, and Three enrolls in Spring Valley High, joins the 4-H Club, and gets himself on the basketball team. After several comic false starts and misadventures, the Zotars begin to uncover some grim realities about how agriculture in Minnesota has changed since the 1960s: Most of the family farms in the area are going broke because Wall Street financiers bought out the local bank and it can no longer loan farmers money on the basis of expected profits; Monsanto monopolizes the sale of all seeds and fertilizer in the area, requiring local farmers to pay outrageous prices for their products; and the price of farm equipment for seeding and harvesting continues to sky rocket. On top of these difficulties, flooding has washed away several years of crops from many local fields, a problem repeated two months after the Zotars move in. The more Three learns about recent changes in agriculture and the difficult lives of the local farmers, the more he respects their struggle and questions his parent’s motivation to reduce them to slaves of Imperium.  

         High school basketball in Spring Valley is flourishing, however, primarily because Three, nicknamed Three-Pointer for his uncanny ability to score from anywhere on the court – a result of his interstellar powers – has led his team, The Astroids, to the state championship. Three has also fallen in love with Becky, a cheerleader for The Astroids, and she takes him home to the family farm expecting that her parents will accept him, despite his quirks, as a future son-in-law. Becky’s overly protective father, though, is suspicious of Three and begins discovering anomalies in the Zotars’ past that cannot be explained. He confronts Three, who runs from the accusations back to his parents. But after they remind him of the family mission and tell him to reject Becky, Three flees from them as well and hides out in a local barn.

With the championship game coming up, Three knows his team needs his extraordinary talent to win. Becky finally discovers his hiding place and confronts him to find out what’s going on. Three explains his true identity as an Imperium native and the reason he and his parents were sent to Earth. Next, he condemns Imperium’s plans for the Earth and its people and tells her that he wants to become a Homo sapiens, despite their obvious flaws, so that he can marry her. She is frightened and amazed. “You mean you still want to become a human being even after you see how badly we’ve fucked up the Earth?” she asks in exasperation. “Yes,” he says, and as for the Big Game, Three tells her that he will put aside his special powers and play like a regular Earthling. He does so and the team loses the championship. Whether he and Becky live “happily ever after” is a jump ball at the end.  

In the epilogue, the two Zotars return to Imperium and tell the elders about their rebellious son and what they have learned about agricultural production on Earth. The elders dismiss Three as a fool and tell the Zotars that the Earth’s climate crisis is so advanced that they doubt human life on the planet can survive for another ten years.

This scenario follows the cooperation-for-positive-change pattern outlined by George Marshall. The general motives of the main character – the teen who rebels against his elders because he can foresee a better world for himself and those he loves – are standard Hollywood fare. My plot for Down on the Farm, in fact, borrows from Superman, Avatar, Pinocchio, and numerous high school basketball films. Its familiar characters and plot twists repeat a formula that would probably make for reliable popularity and profits.

But if this scenario is typical, why haven’t the movie moguls already made dozens of such films? Actually, Hollywood was making hundreds of these cooperate-to-change-the-world movies from the mid-1930s through the late 1940s. Among the best of them, all featuring variations on Marshall’s plots and ethics, are Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). There were also the many WW II movies that emphasized shared convictions, cooperative values, sacrifice for the nation, and fighting for the possibility of a better tomorrow. 

These films had nothing to do with climate change, of course. They were motivated instead by the larger cultural shift that began initially with the success of the New Deal, surged after Pearl Harbor, and crested with the victories of 1945.  It is sometimes said that the best way for the US to deal with the enormity of the climate crisis would be to put the nation on a war footing to fight it. That could only recur, though, if our popular media also refought America’s “Good War.” Apart from the racism, sexism, and classism that plagued the nation during those years, there is little likelihood this midcentury era of national unity and resolve will return. For evidence, we have only to contrast the present paranoia and anger over vaccines and masks today with the relief and joy that greeted the smooth roll-out of the Salk vaccine against polio in the early 1950s. Besides, the world at war is hardly a suitable metaphor for Deep Adaptation’s commitment to loving transformation.

Nonetheless, it’s good to know in our crazed and cynical times that many Americans really believed, despite our many differences, that it was possible for the nation to cooperate for the common good and a future based in equality and a sense of humor. But it will take more than another Frank Capra to demonstrate that at the movies today. 

I welcome your comments.  Please send them to bamcco@pitt.edu.  copyright 2021

Bruce McConachie is a retired professor of popular dramatic entertainment. His latest book, Drama, Politics and Evolution (2021), examines the interplay of popular films and politics as a part of the gradual disintegration of social cohesion in the US since 1965.