Cli-Fi Defined: The Case of Frogs (1972)

In a May 2014 interview, deep-green activist Dan Bloom—arguably the first to use the term cli-fi for climate fiction and film—asserts, “I believe that cli fi novels and movies can serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it” (Vemuri).  Bloom’s claims echo those of Rahman Badalov, who in 1997 declared “Blazing oil gushers make marvelous cinematographic material…. Only cinema can capture the thick oil bursting forth like a fiery monster.” But Badalov not only views these oil gushers as monstrous nature. He also notes the dual message of monstrous nature cinema: to both condemn environmental degradation and entertain with spectacle. According to Badalov, cinema does not only highlight the fiery monster of the gusher. For him, “Only cinema can [also] display such an awesome inferno in its terrifying beauty and majesty.” Bloom’s admission that “the impact of cli fi novels and films has been minor, very minor” may point to the same dual role of cli-fi and other monstrous cinema. For Badalov and Bloom, cinema has the potential to bring environmental issues such as climate change to the forefront. But the cinematic mechanism also has the potential to obscure that message with spectacular beauty.

Such is the conundrum we face when writing about monstrous nature film, a puzzle amplified in recent spectacular cli-fi films from The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to Elysium (2013), The Colony (2013), Snowpiercer (2013) Noah (2014), and Into the Storm (2014). Monstrous cinema and its cli-fi offshoots may present important environmental messages, but they also must entertain viewers with spectacular effects to attract the audiences needed for big profits. And these awesome cinematic presentations may actually obscure the ecological points on display. Yet, they all include elements associated with the cli-fi genre.

According to Dan Bloom, “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. [i]

Considered one of the earliest eco-horror films, Frogs (1972) confronts environmental destruction with a vengeful bevvy of psychic frogs. During an annual Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) birthday celebration on the fourth of July, these frogs telepathically communicate with other animal species, enticing them to attack Crockett’s family and guests one by one. The film highlights how almost every family member despises nature so much they spread harmful chemicals to eradicate all nonhuman animal life. The film suggests the frogs recognize the source of these animal deaths—humans, especially the spoiled rich Crockett patriarch and his family. On the night of Jason Crockett’s birthday, frogs, snakes, alligators, lizards, birds, and spiders begin to pay Crockett back, and in Frogs nature wins. Like humans, frogs and other animals in the Florida swamp surrounding Crocket’s mansion sense the source of their oppression and fight back.

Despite the deaths of family and houseguests, millionaire Crockett still maintains his superiority to nonhuman nature, exclaiming, “I still believe man is master of the world.” Nature photographer and environmentalist Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) offers an alternative view, asking, “Does that mean he can't live in harmony with the rest of it?” Like humans, frogs and other animals in the Florida swamp surrounding Crocket’s mansion sense the source of their oppression and fight back. In Frogs, anthropomorphizing these swamp creatures provides an environmental message, but it also humanizes nature and provides a means to punish the real monster—Jason Crocket and the human oppressors he represents. Frogs highlights how nature might fight back when humans attack their climate.

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[i] Bernice Murphy offers an overview of these 1970s animal attack movies in her The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture chapter “Why Wouldn’t the Wilderness Fight Us?: American Eco-Horror and the Apocalypse.”

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.

Film Ecology 2: Hooper and Human Costs

As with the burning of Atlanta scene in Gone with the Wind, construction and destruction also highlights how Hollywood represents stunt artists and ecology as expendable, an attitude most evident in films like Hooper (1978). In Hooper, the impact of stunts on the stunt artists who perform them is both made transparent and critiqued. The film also shows us the environmental impact of the special effects that accompany each of those stunts, occasionally commenting on their negative effects on ecology. Hooper interrogates the consequences of attitudes that construct human life and the environment as expendable, even as it climaxes with a spectacular and awe-inspiring scene meant to capture audiences: a representation of the destruction of Los Angeles that is parallel to the Atlanta fire scene and residents’ reactions to it in the production of Gone With the Wind. With this special effects-driven scene and others, Hooper shows us how complicated critiques of film production practices become in an industry where entertainment is the goal. Yet, in spite of this conflict between spectacle and critique, Hooper stands out as a film that exposes how dangerous film productions can be to both stunt artists and the environment.

Hooper highlights the impact stunt work has on the stunt men’s bodies while foregrounding the insensitivity of directors willing to sacrifice human lives for spectacular effects in most of the “gags” on display in the film. But the last “gag” in Hooper (and “The Spy Who Laughed at Danger”) most powerfully illustrates how both human lives and ecology are seen as expendable in this filmic world, as long as movies make enough money. Ski’s ideas have inspired the director, according to the film’s producer, Max Burns (John Marley), so he rewrites the script’s ending and adds lots of stunts culminating in the destruction of L.A. on screen. The stunts Roger constructs to end the film seem outlandishly impossible in a 1978 film without access to computer-generated graphics. When Roger explains the new ending to Hooper and Ski, it sounds like a nightmare on screen. According to Roger, Hooper and Ski will drive through “the biggest earthquake ever,” but a bridge will blow up, so Hooper and Ski will need to rappel down the mountain to escape—and Roger will capture this stunt in one shot. The ending stunt sounds spectacular enough, but Ski, the young “immortal,” wants more and suggests, “Why not jump a car across the gorge.” After speculating about the distance a rocket car might jump, even Max thinks this stunt is too risky. But Hooper sees the stunt as a way out of the stunt business: They can do this last stunt for $50,000 each, and then quit.

The big stunt goes as planned: Roger watches from a helicopter and yells, “Action.” Then we hear and see an explosion, and a building collapses. Crashing cars are everywhere. Hooper and Ski keep driving past exploding gas stations and a series of explosions on the road. Cars overturn and collide with one another. Then another series of explosions pours out spectacular fumes of fire and smoke. A tanker goes through a building and another set of explosions cracks open the other side of the road. Hooper and Ski continue driving their rocket car, now racing through a line of collapsing smokestacks that nearly hit their car. They’re almost to the bridge and watch as a truck full of explosives blows it “to shit.” The pressure in their nitrous-powered rocket car seems too low for the jump, but Hooper demands they continue, and they fly across the ravine, landing safely on the other side. This spectacular filmic event destroys the set and looks like it destroys the city of Los Angeles. It nearly kills two stunt men, who barely make it across a ravine in a car built to fly half the distance across. Max fires Tony, the assistant. And Ski and Hooper look at the fallen bridge at the bottom of the ravine in awe. Yet Roger, the director, merely exclaims, “Spectacular, wonderful. I knew you could do it!” As Roger sees it, they have captured a “tiny piece of time” on film, so the stunt, no matter how dangerous or destructive, was worth that strip of film.

Hooper at least marginally critiques the exploitation of human flesh for effect, since it shows us the injuries and chronic physical damage Hooper and Jocko endure after performing risky stunt work. The film’s narrative sets up Roger as a villain willing to sacrifice stunt men for a good show and the film industry as an economy where greed runs rampant. The film gives a nod to both nonhuman nature (a dog with a Humane Society advocate is saved by Hooper) and to the environment (Tony mentions pollution and smog in L.A. as a reason to quickly extinguish a fire). But ultimately, the stunts themselves capture our attention, just as Roger suggests when ruminating on the power of film as a medium that can capture time. In the context of the film, the last, most dangerous, and (consequently) most spectacular stunt also “saves” Hooper, since it provides him with the funds he needs to buy his ranch. The effects in Hooper are not only critiqued in the film’s construction of “The Spy Who Laughed at Danger” but also valorized in their own right. Hooper was nominated for an Academy Award in the sound category. Walter Frith calls the movie “action on laughing gas.” In “Excessive Disclosure in Burt Reynolds’ Star Image,” Jacob Smith sees drunk scenes as “prolonged excuse[s]” for laughter (29). Smith highlights the promotional image for Hooper, an “iconic cowboy with mustache, squinting eyes, and cowboy hat, but with mouth obscured by a pink balloon of bubble gum,” (30) to support his claims about Reynolds’ image as an actor seeking fun, not work, in both film and life.

But the image also showcases the stunt man’s roots in Western lore—cowboys willing to take risks and live isolated lives on the range just like stunt artists sacrificing themselves for spectacular effects on the screen. The film seems to validate that individualist image rather than a communal one connecting humans and nature. Smith asserts that Hooper “ridicules environmental activist and humane society representatives,” those advocates working for nonhuman nature. The film praises the work of individual stunt men willing to take risks, overcome obstacles, and provide awe-inspiring spectacle on the screen. Hooper critiques “the conceited dramatic actor and pretentious director,” according to Smith. It does not seem to critique the work of stunt men. Instead, it valorizes the spectacular results of their stunts. Still Hooper examines the filmmaking process in a unique way, since it highlights stunt men and their work, showing us a behind-the-scenes view of the effects these stunts have on both the stunt artists and the environment. By making the consequences of stunt “gags” transparent, Hooper provides a critical reading of the filmmaking process and its negative effects on its stunt men and the environment their stunts destroy. Even though the critique is couched in the film’s own rhetoric about the entertainment value of spectacle, it provides a space in which we can begin to discuss the impact of filmmaking on both human and nonhuman nature.