What is Cli-Fi, and Why Should We Care? Part I

Critiques of The Day After Tomorrow point to its exaggerated claims regarding global warming not as a way to highlight the film’s environmental ideologies but to highlight one of its biggest weaknesses. The environmental message seems lost because it rests on such a poor interpretation of climatology. Instead, critics valorize the film’s spectacular effects and faithful execution of the eco-disaster formula. A surface reading of the environmental politics on display in the film, then, deconstructs the film’s environmental leanings. 

But director Roland Emmerich’s assertion that the film’s climate-change exaggerations were intended as a way to add to its dramatic appeal points to another consequence of the “sublimely ridiculous” ecological disasters: large box office sales. All of the 258 reviews on the Internet Movie Database admit that the environmental catastrophes on display in the film are spectacularly powerful, drawing audiences who crave the entertainment value that a highly special effects-driven disaster movie provides. The special effects paid off: The Day After Tomorrow grossed $528 million worldwide and earned a stunning $85.8 million during its opening weekend.

For us, more appealing are ecological themes beyond the surface meaning, themes that help us answer questions like, how is this cli-fi-disaster? How is this cli-fi-disaster film different from those that have come before it? And (as Dan Bloom suggests) can cli-fi movies serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse? Our readings of early and contemporary cli-fi films suggest they can, at least potentially, reveal the eco-horror behind the spectacle on display.

For us, cli-fi films continue some of the same trends we note occurring in monstrous nature cinema, including drawing on anthropomorphism to both humanize and vilify nonhuman nature. Dan Bloom asserts, “In order to be a cli-fi short story or novel, the book will have a climate theme, of course. It can be set in the past, the present or the future, and it can be dystopian or utopian.” The same definition applies to filmic cli-fi, which, like short stories and novels, explores climate change and global warming explicitly. Bloom also differentiates cli-fi from environmental literature and film, declaring, “But if the book is just about the environment, such as protecting rivers or stopping air pollution, then it wouldn’t really be a cli-fi novel [or film]. There are other categories such as eco-fiction or calling a book an eco-thriller if it is about the environment.” Earlier cli-fi films that anthropomorphize monstrous nature explicitly fit Bloom’s criteria, a point we’ll consider in next week’s blog.