An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim)

I'm starting the series with a movie that's hardly even a movie, but I thought I'd try to be sneaky. Indeed, in light of my discussion of movies as "product," this kind of movie is almost like "movie as news bulletin." I didn't go see An Inconvient Truth for the cinematography, if you know what I'm saying. But this raises the question about what makes a movie "important." It's possible that if the human race manages to outmaneuver its own idiocy and survive global warming, this movie will be looked back upon as the most important film of its time. Certainly after seeing it, I realized how puny most movie subjects really are. But that doesn't necessarily make An Inconvenient Truth a great "film." In short, documentaries are weird.

Having said that, I think there are certain ways to judge the effectiveness of a documentary (where the usual standards of film criteria do not apply), mainly: Did the film persuade me of its argument? The answer is yes and no. I think the film essentially has two arguments, and I agree with one and not the other.

The first (and more overt) argument is that global warming is really happening, and that scientists agree on this already, and that companies have tried to stall by pretending that the issue is still up for debate. The movie basically convinced me of this. I think they should have left out the scenes about Al Gore's "personal post-election journey," not because they bothered me, but because they might have bothered someone else. The absense of those scenes wouldn't have diluted the potency of the argument, and as they stand now they could potentially alienate less open-minded viewers. One of those scenes, however, was very effective: Gore explains how his family used to farm tobacco, but when his relatives started dying of lung cancer from cigarettes, they sold the land and changed their ways. Metaphor to the rescue!

So yeah, Al pretty much had me (even though I was already inclined to agree with him anyway). He brought up every counter-argument you could think of, and he carefully explained why each one was complete, moronic bullshit. So hey, it's good to be informed.

But the film had a second argument, and it's with the second argument that I'd like to pick a bone. It was not a blatant argument, so I wouldn't blame anyone for missing it, but to me it seemed unnecessary. That second argument went something like this: We should be really, really afraid of global warming, and we're all gonna die, and humans have done something incredibly wrong.

Well wait a minute buster.

The film's tagline is: "By far the most terrifying film that you will ever see." I'm not sure fear is the appropriate reaction to global warming. Here's what I'm thinking: OK, so humans are altering the weather patterns of the earth. So what? “Well, that will be really bad for mankind.” Why? “Because people will have to move from the coastlines, and storms and droughts will get worse, and it's just going to be a big fat hassle for everybody.” Yeah, but what are humans in the course of the whole universe? It's just one planet out of an apparently endless number.

It seems to be a given that humans fucking up the earth is an absolutely negative thing. But in a sense, it's basically neutral. Humans are on this planet, after all. This is obviously the natural course of our development, because hey, it's what happened. If humans really fuck up their existence, who cares? I mean, I understand why that might be a bad thing for humans, but as far as the universe is concerned, it's just a little splotch on the windshield. There's this idea that nature is (and always was) a static thing, and that if global warming were true, it would be like we somehow altered the “natural” course of everything ever. Obviously if it's happening, then it's “natural.” There never was any fixed “natural.” We haven't really altered the matter of the universe. What about the birth of the planet, huh? Humans couldn't live on hot lava, could they? Catch my drift? The truth is that nature is always changing. Obviously it's impressive how rapidly we've managed to alter the ice caps and the seasons and everything. But it's not inherently negative. It's not written in stone somewhere that the human race must survive and reproduce and do its thing until the end of time. A lot of this environmental panic is driven by the fear of “preservation”: we must preserve our current way of life – the way that's always been. But it hasn't always been that way. And there's no way it can stay that way.

Basically, it's up to us. Do we want to stick around, or do we want to fry on the BBQ? I'm pretty ambivalent about these sorts of things. So maybe I wasn't really the target audience for this movie. Still, I'll help out while I'm around, I guess. I mean, if it won't take that much effort to slow down this ridiculous process, then we might as well make the effort. Otherwise, it's just laziness and greed. Even if Al Gore's wrong, what do we have to lose? So some CEO has to find a different job. Boo freakin' hoo, you know what I'm sayin'?

Personally, I don't think there's too much that I can do differently. I don't own a car. If I ever have to get one, though, I guess I'll try to get a hybrid. Maybe I should turn my computer off more often. I'm not sure if that really does anything. And I'll vote, of course. But voting in San Francisco is kind of like pissing in a bucket. I'll just try to go on about living my normal life. I think the important thing is awareness, anyway.

If anything, the "scariest" part of the movie was all those satellite pictures of the Earth. Those always creep me out. It's like looking at the satellite photos on Google. There's something about it that makes me think, “This photo isn't something I should naturally be seeing.” And then to see all these photos change so rapidly...it's somewhat disconcerting.

Actually, now I know what the scariest part was: it was that Melissa Etheridge song at the end! Holy Mother of God! If global warming at least destroys Melissa Etheridge, then maybe it won't be so bad after all.