Description
The ongoing climate crisis represents one of the most pressing and challenging threats to global security. While much scholarship is – rightly – focused on the science of climatology, environmental security, and the policy of prevention and management there has been much less on how cultural media represent, create, and circulate particular meanings of the Anthropocene. This paper starts with the argument that popular culture generally, and Hollywood movies specifically, contribute to the creation and circulation of meanings regarding climate change and its possible solutions through the inducement of highly intensive, embodied, and affective encounters between screen and audience. The emerging sub-genre of cli-fi (climate-fiction) will be interrogated through movies such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Snowpiercer (2013), and Geostorm (2017) to ascertain what role popular culture plays within the creation and circulation of the meanings, causes, and solutions to climate change. It will be argued that these movies represent two possible outcomes to ongoing anthropogenic climate change – disaster or technological salvation – and by so doing, close off the potential to engage with the possibility of the radical social, political, and economic change that is necessary to halt the effects of a changing climate.
