Children of Men (2006) and the New Eco-Hero

Both The Day After Tomorrow and Children of Men (2006) illustrate similar visions of the new eco-hero. In both films, heroic roles are filled not by tragic pioneers or even bumbling comic heroes, but by fathers seeking to save their own children or children they adopt as their own from an environment that humanity has made toxic in multiple ways. In The Day After Tomorrow Jack Hall attempts not only to save the world from global warming but to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) from a flooded and frozen New York City library. In Children of Men, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) agrees to help an activist group transport Kee (Claire-Hope Ashite) and her soon-to-be-born child to a group of benevolent scientists on the coast, saving the only surviving baby in a dying world. In fact, in the film’s opening, crowds of people mourn the loss of the youngest living person, a teenager murdered by a fan.

This new breed of eco-hero fails to fit in categories of tragic or comic heroes as defined by either Aristotle or Joseph W. Meeker. Meeker expands Aristotle’s categories to include the natural world in his eco-critical approach to Classic literature. Meeker’s tragic heroes in the natural world are the ecological pioneers, “the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (“The Comic Mode” 161). His comic heroes build community. Meeker argues that once ecosystems mature, heroic solitary pioneers become not only unnecessary but also subordinate to the group. In a mature or climax ecosystem, “it is the community itself that really matters, and it is likely to be an extremely durable community so long as balance is maintained among its many elements” (Meeker “The Comic Mode” 163). Comic heroes emerge from these climax ecosystems. 

Jack Hall and Theo Faron serve the community while maintaining solitary quests, however. In Children of Men, Theo transports Kee to a haven at sea to save her child and, ultimately, the world. But Theo chooses to act because his ex-wife, Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), reminds him of the loving family life they shared when his own son lived. In Children of Men, both mother (Julian) and father (Theo) die during the undertaking, but our last glimpse of life in the movie shows us Kee and her baby floating in a boat while a ship in the distance comes closer to save her. The focus is local rather than global in this well-shot film, with long takes emphasizing the individualized perspective of the hero and his acts. 

Yet neither of these heroes act like pioneers attempting to conquer an opponent, even if that opponent is the environment or an ecological disaster. They don’t fight against the disaster but against the forces that caused it. And they fight most intensely not for all those affected by the disaster—as do most eco-heroes—but only for sons, friends, and a helpless child. The new eco-hero is not a tragic pioneer, who sacrifices him or herself for a species. Nor is this hero a comic hero, who bumbles and succeeds only communally. This hero acts alone, but only at a local level, not seeking control of a landscape or species but seeking to save new and renewed relationships, just as Theo saves Kee. It is up to Kee to save the world.

The Day After Tomorrow and the New Eco-Hero

The Day After Tomorrow highlights a different way to envision evolutionary narratives and the heroes that drive them. In cli-fi films from the 1970s and eco-comic disaster films from the 1980s forward (such as Eight Legged Freaks [2002] and Warm Bodies[2013]), disaster plots are driven by two different kinds of heroes: tragic pioneers and comic community builders. The Day After Tomorrow,on the other hand, relies on a different kind of hero, one that arguably combines both tragic and comic characteristics. Our reading of The Day After Tomorrowattempts to make the idea of the new ecological (eco)-hero more transparent rather than rearticulating the obvious ecological messages on display in the film. In The Day After Tomorrow, heroic roles are filled not by tragic pioneers or even bumbling comic heroes, but by a father seeking to save his own child from an environment that humanity has made toxic in multiple ways. In The Day After Tomorroweco-hero and father Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) attempts not only to save the world from global warming but to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) from a flooded and frozen New York City. 

This new breed of eco-hero fails to fit in categories of tragic or comic heroes as defined by either Aristotle or Joseph W. Meeker. Meeker expands Aristotle’s categories to include the natural world in his eco-critical approach to Classic literature. Meeker’s tragic heroes in the natural world are the ecological pioneers, “the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (“The Comic Mode” 161). His comic heroes build community. Meeker argues that once ecosystems mature, heroic solitary pioneers become not only unnecessary but also subordinate to the group. In a mature or climax ecosystem, “it is the community itself that really matters, and it is likely to be an extremely durable community so long as balance is maintained among its many elements” (Meeker “The Comic Mode” 163). Comic heroes emerge from these climax ecosystems.  

Jack Hall serves the community while maintaining a solitary quest, however. This new eco-hero combines the best qualities of the tragic and comic heroes to build a better world community while also saving children who are closest to them. As an intellectually driven hero seeking to save the world from the consequences of climate change he endured at the North Pole, Jack looks like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth when he explains global warming to a world delegation but like Thorn when he saves himself from a glacial collapse. In spite of these two daring acts—one physical and the other intellectual—Jack’s many weaknesses are also on display in the film. When he returns from his latest Arctic trip, his house plants have nearly died, his son has failed calculus, and his ex-wife has lost faith in his ability even to pick up his son in time to get him to the airport for a scholastic bowl tournament.  

These everyday events, however, are juxtaposed with images of worldwide eco-disaster. Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), an oceanographer, discusses the possibility of a new Ice Age, and reports of its oncoming effects soon come in from all over the world. Pieces of ice fall from the sky in Tokyo, destroying cars and killing any people they strike. Snowstorms drift into New Delhi. Storms hit Jack’s son Sam’s flight, on its way to New York. And when Sam and his friend Laura (Emmy Rossum) reach the city, they watch from their taxi as flocks of birds migrate away from the city, seemingly disturbed by climate change. When Jack enters Professor Rapson’s data into his climate model, the results are devastating. According to their conclusions, the Earth will be in a full-scale ice age in six to eight weeks. 

More disastrous events point to this upcoming ice age: frozen helicopter pilots in Scotland, and massive flooding in New York City with tidal waves catapulting down its broad avenues. Sam and the rest of his scholastic bowl friends make their way into the New York Public Library, and the father/son narrative takes center stage. Sam finds a water-logged pay phone in the library, calls his father, and hears his father’s promise: “wait it out and burn what you can. I will come for you. I will come for you.” The rest of the film revolves around Jack’s quest to save his son, and his son’s and ex-wife’s evolution into new eco-heroes like Jack. 

The family melodrama becomes the main focus until the film’s end, even though it is occasionally broken with more global concerns, like the death of the President and the fate of American refugees in Mexico. Jack’s ex-wife Lucy’s (Sela Ward) heroism is highlighted when an ambulance arrives to save her and a young patient, Peter, whom she has refused to leave alone. And when Sam gathers penicillin and food from an iced-in Russian ship, he too demonstrates his potential as an eco-hero. Jack serves as the most daring eco-hero, when he saves his son and the remaining New York survivors from the library. As Jack explains, “I made my son a promise. I’m going to keep it.”

This eco-drama ends with father and son reunited (and possibly husband and wife). The cli fi-disaster looks like most disaster films in every way other than the way the image of the hero is constructed. In The Day After Tomorrow, the hero is a true eco-hero, attempting to save the world from environmental disaster, but his most heroic act is localized and less than self-sacrificial. Jack makes his heroic journey not to save the world—as we might expect an eco-hero and a climatologist to do—but to save his son. And both Lucy and Sam act heroically for similar reasons—to save the individuals they love, not the world, the nation, or even the community.

Early Cli-Fi: The Day of the Animals and the Greenhouse Effect

The Day of the Animals (1977) addresses the Greenhouse Effect more blatantly than films from the era like Frogs, while also anthropomorphizing the animals that seek vengeance against humanity for its mistreatment of nature. The film’s opening title cards explicitly states it’s focus on humanity’s contribution to Earth’s damaged ozone layer and suggests that The Day of the Animals serves as a warning regarding the possible negative consequences of our environmental exploitation:

"In June 1974, Drs. F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California startled the scientific world with their finding that fluorocarbon gases used in aerosol spray cans are seriously damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Thus, potentially dangerous amounts of ultra-violet rays are reaching the surface of our planet, adversely affecting all living things. This motion picture dramatizes what could happen in the near future if we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet."

In The Day of the Animals, humans are constructed as villains when dropped off for a hike in the mountains. In response to a chemical imbalance caused by the depletion of the ozone layer, animals from condors and vultures to bears, mountain lions and wolves attack the hikers as their known enemies. In The Day of the Animals, then, animals have become more like humans, able to determine the cause for their possible demise—a human-caused hole in the ozone layer.

The film illustrates humanity’s culpability by constructing at least some of the hikers as monstrous. Advertising executive Paul Jenson (Leslie Nielson) embodies all the negative qualities that have led to the animal attacks. In one scene, he even exclaims, “If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jackass out of me for years. Neville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!”

Uncredited hiker Sam (Walt Gorney), on the other hand, explains why nature is assaulting them when he declares, “God sent a plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no good fellers.” Ultimately the only defense against these animal executioners is military intervention, but the film makes a case for changing our destructive behaviors to preserve nature and ourselves. The "cheese" may cause more laughter than thrills, but the message of The Day of the Animals is clear: climate change may have dire consequences, so we better clean up our act before the animals fight back.

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.