Are More Films Featuring Climate Change a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | September 7, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | September 7, 2023 |

(Warning: Here be gentle spoilers for Afire and How To Blow Up a Pipeline)

It’s not a perfect film by any means—the intent and execution of its coda doesn’t entirely convince—but Christian Petzold’s recent drama/dark comedy, Afire, is probably the most powerful experience I’ve had at the cinema this year. The only other movie that comes close is How To Blow Up a Pipeline. Both films feature climate change as a core component, but despite that thematic commonality, there are some key differences in how they approach the subject matter that are interesting to unpack.

In its depiction of industrial sabotage as the only viable climate justice route remaining, Pipeline is a ticking clock thriller and a rousing call to action. ‘They will defame us and claim this was violence or vandalism, but this was justified,’ proclaims the saboteurs’ ringleader, laying out the film’s thesis. ‘This was an act of self-defense.’ The film doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of a world ravaged by climate change: Many of its characters are drawn from the frontline communities most affected by it, or they have otherwise been personally doomed by capitalism’s reckless drive for endless profit. It calls out the system, and it starkly draws the battle lines for the immediate future: It’s the corporations stacked against the people—and life on Earth in general. Pipeline is a fundamentally galvanising film. A call to arms born out of desperation.

Afire—which Jason so wonderful reviewed here—is a quieter film, initially following gentle Rohmer-ian rhythms, that eventually reveals itself to be a patiently simmering boil. It’s a sharp contrast to the violent conflagration of Pipeline, but despite that—or in fact because of it—it is the work that has burrowed and lodged itself deeper into my psyche. The four thirty-somethings who have met at the idyllic country house on the German Baltic coast in Afire spend their summer days there doing pretty much everything except worry about the massive, deadly forest fire that is creeping ever closer to their location. Author Leon (Thomas Schubert), photography student Felix (Langston Uibel), seasonal worker and literary scholar Nadja (Paula Beer), and rescue swimmer Devid (Enno Trebs), are all perfectly aware of the fire’s existence. How could they not be? It’s all over the news; helicopters roar overhead; and local warning announcements play over any medium available. But to them it’s always just over there, on the far side of the horizon, a problem for another time.

If Pipeline is the reclamation of agency then Afire by contrast is bourgeois inaction—and by extension complicity—in the face of mounting catastrophe. That’s not to say that all the characters therein are necessarily agents or members of the bourgeoisie, but that is the world they are embedded in. Our world—the world of Exxon and Shell and Amazon and their army of lobbyists and willing cronies embedded in all mainstream political parties—is one that has been designed, at great cost, to enable the destruction of our planet, to allow us to ignore the writing on the wall as long as possible. Many of Pipeline’s saboteurs have been brought to ruin by the system—the fact that one of the principal players is a member of a Native American community is no accident—they have nothing left to lose, and so for them the fight is the only option left. Through no choice of their own, it has become their be-all and end-all. The characters in Afire might be beneficiaries of a structural privilege that will protect them from the tide of climate catastrophe for a bit longer—they are (almost) all white, and live in Western Europe—but they nevertheless only a few steps behind those in Pipeline. In the end, the forest fire will not discriminate.

There are two images in Afire that are seared into my mind, and which have haunted me since I left the cinema. The first happens in the dead of night, roughly halfway through the movie, as Felix, Nadja, and Devid call Leon to join them on the roof of the house. Protesting, Leon eventually climbs up, and is struck into silence as he sees what the group have been transfixed by: The tree line, harshly silhouetted against the uncanny glow of a night sky dramatically illuminated by the forest fire creeping ever closer. It’s a moment of horrific stillness, as the catastrophe feels both near and far away at the same time, the mind not unable to fully grasp the situation’s full meaning, or accept its gravity.

The second image is the header picture of this article. It takes place closer to the end of the film. That is Nadja, bringing wine glasses to the dinner table outside in the garden, frozen in a gentle blizzard of ash. It’s an image both spine-chilling and beautiful in equal measure, the juxtaposition of its serenity and deadly implication enhanced by Nadja’s expression, both beguiled and afraid.

It’s 2023, and the sequence of extreme weather events thus far seen this year—from heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, typhoons, droughts, and more—is breaking a terrifying amount of records. Even those scientists whose life work it is to be immersed in the study of the Earth’s climate, and to predict where it is going, are finding themselves surprised at the speed at which things are now changing. We are entering a new era, and 2023 will likely be looked back on as a tipping point, a stepping over the threshold into a paradigm characterised by scenarios that paralyse the mind with fear. It will be fascinating to see how our storytelling evolves to keep track of this, and reflects it in our popular culture. In some ways, I’m relieved that it seems like there are more and more films and books and TV shows grappling with climate change. In other ways I’m anxious about it, as it feels like there’s a risk it might trivialise the issue.

More than anything else, though, I guess it scares the hell out of me because it means that I haven’t been dreaming all this time. There’s no nightmare to wake up from.

This is it.