Earthcare: An inconvenient Truth (2008)
Movie Review
By David A. Thomas Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus, University of Richmond (1)
Earthcare: An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
“This is not a political issue. It is a moral imperative.”
Al Gore Documentaries are quintessential social texts. Although they are movies, they are not just entertainment. Documentaries are nonfiction and journalistic in intent. They mean to inform us and persuade us to take decisive actions. Primarily concerned with conveying information or advocacy, they always try to incorporate as much cinematic interest as possible into their messages.
An Inconvenient Truth is a secular sermon about saving the environment. The movie opened in late May, 2006, on a limited number of screens and grossed less than $500,000 for the weekend, but over 200 reviews were published that ranged from 74 percent favorable (Metacritic.com) to 91 percent favorable (rottentomatoes.com). Political commentaries have been slower to come forth, but Al Gore commented with bemusement that even Bill O’Reilly seemed to approve of his message. Word of mouth is working: an estimated three million people had attended the movie by August, 2006; and as of that date, it is still in distribution and attendance seems to be holding its own.
One critic astutely noted that the movie is less a documentary than it is a rock concert movie without the music. There is something insightful in that comment. The documentary subject is a multimedia lecture that Gore has been giving around the world for the last several years. “Since the 2000 election, I must have given this lecture a thousand times . . . at least a thousand times,” he guesses in one aside. The camera follows him from campus lecture halls to civic auditoriums, showing him schlepping his own luggage through airports and hailing taxi rides to his speaking dates around the globe. There are close-ups of his concentrated facial expression as he gives interviews to local radio and TV interviewers of every ethnic complexion.
In this movie, Al Gore’s performance bears little resemblance to his previous wonky debater persona from his 2000 presidential campaign. Think instead of the opening public lecture scene of The Da Vinci Code, where Tom Hanks is using some great PowerPoint slides to explain his theory of “the symbology of the sacred feminine.” Instead, you get to hear Gore’s entire hour-long global warming lecture before the movie ends. Gore the public lecturer is every bit as loosely professorial as Hanks’ character, the Harvard professor, Robert Langdon. More importantly, Gore’s top notch multimedia presentation is equally state-of-the-art.
Jeff Skoll’s movie production company with a social conscience, Participant Productions, is the reason this movie exists. Skoll, a youthful billionaire EBay retiree, launched his new movie studio a year ago with a huge splash, releasing four movies, all of which figured in the Oscar races. Participant’s vision statement reads, “Changing the World One Story at a Time. Participant believes in the power of media to create great social change. Our goal is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all.” The firm’s first movies were Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Murderball, and North Country. All four of these movies received Oscar nominations, which has to be a record for a brand new movie studio’s initial productions. Importantly, as a whole, they also made a lot of money, proving that “message” movies need not be losers.
An Inconvenient Truth certainly meets one of the criteria in the company’s mission statement: it will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all. In fact, it may scare the socks off of you. Compared to Syriana and the other movies mentioned, though, it falls somewhat short of the “compelling entertainment” part—unless you are a retired college debate coach who tends to vote against Republican candidates, like moi. Personally, after all those years of sitting through hundreds of classroom debates, I can really get into a well crafted public policy argument. As lectures go, from any perspective, the Al Gore global warming slide show must be given high marks.
The movie begins—and ends—with a pastoral scene of the river on the Gore farm in Tennessee. An Inconvenient Truth uses nature in its unspoiled state as both the movie’s context and its goal. Immediately, the viewpoint shifts to the “rock star” Al Gore’s moment of truth just as he enters stage right, before he begins presenting his multimedia lecture to a college audience. “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States . . . [Audience laughs]. I don’t think that’s particularly funny.” Then he starts showing gorgeous slides of Earth taken from space, projected on a wall-high screen.
Before the movie ends, we will have seen his lecture in its entirety. But it will be interspersed with several flashback human interest scenes depicting Gore’s personal story of how he became so passionate about this project. The viewer must not overlook the crucial importance of these personal interludes in the flow of his argument. Naturally, this part of the movie career and especially his near-election to the Presidency, but the emphasis is not intended to restore his political viability for the future. It is much more about his lifelong interest in global warming that began before his political career. He makes it clear that he had pursued that specific issue throughout his service in Congress and the Senate. It has continued to be his full time pursuit since leaving public office. Through some family movie clips, we glimpse some of the critical life-events over the last six years that are at the heart of his new vocation as a freelance professional public environmental advocate.
The Global Warming Lecture. Based on my college teaching experience, I can testify that there is a huge difference between lecturing with the aid of PowerPoint and lecturing without it. Al Gore’s slide show is a model of multimedia lesson construction. A New York magazine movie critic was one of several who suggested that when readers run across a negative review of An Inconvenient Truth, they should look to the political affiliation of the writer. It is hard to fault the presentation unless you simply have it in for Al Gore. I daresay most such negative reviews, when they come forth, will not appear on the arts and culture pages of the newspaper. Rather, look for them as syndicated political columns and oped think pieces, since the movie targets the anti-environmental policies that undergird the present Republican worldview.
In this movie, Gore’s central arguments are that global warming is a scientific fact, and accelerating rapidly is a trend towards the point of no return. The cause of global warming is CO2 emissions. The consequences of global warming are dire. There are many direct effects of global warming, most all of them bad for human habitation. Gore focuses on changes in weather patterns resulting in bigger and more frequent hurricanes, faster melting of the glaciers and ice caps, drastically rising sea levels, and paradoxically, more widespread severe droughts. Many species of flora and fauna are endangered by climate shifts, while vectors of viruses and other diseases are mushrooming. Super diseases are springing up everywhere.
Almost all of the causes of global warming relate directly to human energy consumption patterns, namely, auto combustion exhausts and coalfired power plants. Another major source of CO2 air pollution is the burning of the rain forests as a land clearing technique.
All is not lost. The trend towards global warming can be slowed and even reversed. All of the chief solutions available to us entail major policy changes on a global scale. It is imperative to reduce the discharge of CO2 emissions by drastically regulating auto manufacturers’ mpg standards, cutting back on household energy use through more energy efficient houses and appliances, and by choosing to use less AC and heating power (thermostat setting). Getting serious about recycling will also make a significant contribution to energy savings. New carbon capture technologies for smokestacks must and will become mandatory.
Gore debunks the wishful thinking that all of this climate change is simply cyclical and will cure itself. He establishes that nothing in his lecture is controversial from the point of view of science. However, much work has to be done to change people’s attitudes towards their consumption patterns. He warns that if we don’t, we must suffer more Katrinas, more widespread droughts, more vanishing inland seas, and more eroding coastlines. All of these phenomena are increasing at an alarming pace, and we are already far beyond the stage when such things can be ignored as an acceptable cost of continued economic development. The action steps he mentions, and others, more draconian, are necessary for human survival on a global basis.
Two separate political issues are involved in bringing about change. First, we need to make major changes in our preferences and habits concerning our personal cars, housing patterns, and consumption patterns. This is true especially in the U. S. because our nation consumes the lion’s share of the world’s fossil fuels to sustain our rich standard of living. Other countries have already adopted stringent mpg standards. Yet the U. S. has resisted putting in laws that might hurt Exxon-Mobil and the General Motors Company.
Second, countries in the developing world must also reduce their aspirations. China, for example, is a nation of 1.6 billion people on the cusp of raising its economy to the level of the developed world. India is the same. Capital intensive growth in the underdeveloped world, such as modern transportation, housing, etc., calls for enormous investments in manufacturing, steel and building materials, more fresh water, expansion of power plants, and especially, burning the oil, gas, and coal fuels to make it all happen. Moreover, China has the largest coal reserve in the world. As China, India, South America, and the rest of the Third World continue to gear-up, America’s soon-to-come massive cutbacks in energy consumption patterns will seem very modest by comparison with their enormous expansion in the rest of the world.
From the scientific point of view, nothing in the movie is in question. It’s all true. Insofar as one lecture can be an effective persuasive piece of rhetoric, every claim Gore makes is backed up with credible, indeed, indisputable, evidence. Not only that, but with the high tech presentation tools he uses, his points are made with pictures and production qualities, and even humor that one would wish every teacher could learn to use.
From the political point of view, though, everything in the movie is controversial. Unfortunately, the movie makes it appear that only Republicans are opposed to the cures. There are brief sound bites from President Reagan (“It’s just the forests to blame!”), the first President George Bush (“Save a few owls and lose all our jobs!”), and Senator Imhofe (“It’s all a hoax!”) The present administration is mentioned in context of the global warming theme. Every country in the world signed the Kyoto Treaty except two, the U. S. and Australia. And Gore points out that although President Bush pledged to reduce CO2 emissions in the 2000 campaign, it was a pledge he has yet to keep. It’s a really, really frightening movie. That is, unless you believe, like President Bush’s political advisers and speech writers, you can make all of the scientific conclusions go away merely by drawing a red line through them. In a particularly damning clip, Gore shows a New York Times graphic news report of how President Bush’s environmental chief altered the Bush administration’s own EPA report to change a definitive scientific finding. He redlined out the report’s hard hitting conclusion, and revised it to say that global warming is merely speculative. The public disclosure of that dishonest—and dangerous—manipulation of the facts led to the man’s “resignation,” whereupon he moved to a higher-paying job with Exxon-Mobil the very same day.
The fact is, we are all guilty of living in denial about our culpability for the sorry mess we have created. It’s not just Republican leaders. We are all addicted to oil and gas and coal. But the day of reckoning will come sooner or later. At current rates, global warming will melt the remaining ice caps and raise the sea level by twenty feet, creating a hundred million refugees around the world in the near term, possibly within our lifetimes. What Can Churches Do? There are two basic categories of actions that churches can take. First, and most importantly, the churches must make global warming a topic of moral, ethical, and theological concern, and preach accordingly. Conservative churches that are now in the Republican fold on social issues like abortion must reject the bogus political connection between being environmental and being liberal. Environmental degradation must become a major focus of the church’s mission in the world. Preachers and theologians must make this connection unmistakably a Christian issue. God’s earth itself is in jeopardy, and that is the case as a result of man’s exploitation of energy sources to feed our consumption habits. We are all in the path of inevitable destruction.
The church is in possession of a “bully pulpit” that could be more effective than movies or politicians. Now is the time to begin incorporating environmental themes into the lectionary. (Perhaps this is special pleading from the “movie guy,” but consider also the value of sponsoring movie-discussion nights about this movie.)
Second, and equally important, the church as a social institution must look to itself as an energy consumer. Every practical step suggested for individuals or companies to do applies as well to the church. Consider how much electricity the church uses merely to provide heating and air conditioning in its sanctuary on Sunday nights. One major metropolitan church shut down all Sunday evening activities in its sanctuary, shifting its regular Sunday night services to its compact chapel facility. In that instance, all its members continued to be served with no loss in attendance; but its annual power bill went down over $100,000. Gas guzzling church vehicles can be replaced with smaller vans and sedans that feature more efficient engines, hybrids if possible, on the regular replacement schedule. Recycle everything.
Measures such as these must be thought of as the beginning, but not the entire solution. Denominational conventions should feature seminars and workshops to explore other practical measures aimed at energy savings. If thousands of churches took the lead in protecting their own corner of the environment, it would make a measurable impact on the overall picture.
1 David A. Thomas retired from the University of Richmond in May 2004. He now resides in Sarasota, Florida, and invites your comments at davidthomas1572@comcast.net.
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