Movies and Messaging: How Hollywood Can Better Spark Climate Action
As an increasingly pressing global issue, climate change is no stranger to modern media coverage. While the majority of climate change information in the media is transmitted through cable news outlets and major daily newspapers, the presence of climate change in Hollywood films and TV shows is often overlooked. The recent release of Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, a climate change allegory starring an all-star ensemble cast led by noted environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, has reignited the conversation around climate change in the world of TV and film.
Analysis: Cinema and television are powerful messaging tools that can reach a very large audience. The current filmography of climate change is oversaturated with negative messaging in the non-fiction genre and severely lacking positive messaging in the fiction genre, which inadvertently contributes to individual inaction on climate change.
Climate change in the nonfiction genre is dominated by documentaries. Films such as An Inconvenient Truth and Six Degrees Could Change the World are fantastic documentaries that have helped educate people across the world about the dangers of climate change. While these films are certainly scary, and at many points bleak, they accomplish their goal of connecting with their audience and informing them about the dangers of climate change. However, the list of alarmist, doom-and-gloom documentaries on climate change is incredibly long and overwhelming. This is not to criticize these types of documentaries, as they are necessary for public education, but to point out the dangers of too much negative messaging around climate change. Studies show that negative messaging around climate change, such as fear mongering, have minimal impact on encouraging an individual to act on climate change and in some cases, further cause disillusionment with the world’s ability to successfully fight climate change.
Nonfiction cinema is rooted in facts and real events, which is why the majority of climate change TV shows and films in the genre are so bleak. The Earth is struggling to deal with climate change on many fronts, and nonfiction works reflect this reality. This is where the fiction genre can help create positive, hopeful messaging around climate change. Research has shown that both hopeful and positive messaging increases public engagement with climate change issues. Fiction is a genre where we can escape reality and imagine a future where global society overcomes climate change. However, all too often films and TV shows set in the future, such as Interstellar, Wall-E, and Snowpiercer, are grim/post-apocalyptic versions of the future where society is grappling with consequences of humans destroying the planet via climate change and industrialization. All these fictional stories further oversaturate cinema with negative messaging around climate change. These films and TV shows that continue to further narratives of future climate change induced apocalypses may cause people to just accept that fate instead of rallying now to stop catastrophic climate change before it happens.
Messaging around climate change is an incredibly complex topic, and there are countless factors to consider when crafting climate messages such as the targeted audience, strong emotions, scientific literacy, political biases, and alarmism. As previously mentioned, positive messaging can be an effective tool in sparking individuals to take action to solve climate change, while negative messaging is less successful at generating meaningful action. However, using both positive and negative messaging based on situational context, such as positive messaging around benefits of renewable energy and the negative effects of increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, is very successful at persuading individuals to take action in support of climate change mitigation actions. Starting With Us believes that this is the most successful messaging tactic, as too much positive messaging may lure an audience into complacency, while too much negative messaging may cause hopelessness.
Conclusion
Overall, Hollywood can better balance climate change messaging with documentaries conveying climate change dangers and further emphasizing possible solutions, while fiction can use imagination to show what a better world we can create and explore storylines in a future where we solved climate change. This strategy balances both positive and negative messaging to help spark passionate action from the audience that supports addressing the urgent climate crisis our society faces.
Bibliography
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