Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 
Author Message
PostPosted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 5:18 pm 
Offline
Site Admin

Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2003 1:50 pm
Posts: 4859
Location: California/NYC
"Its all-hands-on-deck time"*

Narrated, produced, and spearheaded by Leonardo DiCaprio, this documentary about how humans have damaged the earth and what chance we have of reversing the destruction before it's too late is hard to summarize, since it's a breathless amalgam of fact and opinion from dozens of experts and pundits. But here's a try. The planet is nearing meltdown. It's not just global warming. It began with the industrial revolution, when we started mistakenly looking on nature as external to us and endlessly exploitable. Forests have undergone major destruction. The ocean is turning stagnant. The soil itself is largely damaged everywhere. Worst of all, 50,000 species a year are becoming extinct, and no ecosystem can be identified as improving. Not to mention the fact that humans suffer from increasing numbers of diseases our pollution causes. At fault is the overproduction of non-sustainable manufactures, the immense waste and destruction, and the existence on the planet of vastly more people than it can sustainably support. Behind all this the primary cause is the fuels we use, above all petroleum.

So far, the process can still be slowed, perhaps reversed. We have the technology, though nature itself rather than any man-made "thing" is the greatest resource, and the solution is in harmonizing ourselves with it, not further dominating it. In a few years, we will have reached the point of no return. This is not just the 11th hour, but the last few seconds of the sixtieth minute of that hour. Within this new century, if nothing effective is achieved, planetary damage will be dramatic and total in every area. It's impossible to predict, but extreme disaster could come very rapidly, once the balance is decisively tipped in the wrong direction, and it will happen everywhere. Nowhere is safe from it.

As one reviewer has said, if we don't slit our throats after hearing the first half of this story, "the cautiously optimistic last third offers some intriguing options." Various speakers believe that while humanity may not survive, without a reversal of the trend, life on earth probably will. (Welcome to Insectopia.) But surprisingly enough, though everything we do has to be changed radically and totally, things needn't necessarily look wholly different. The difference will be inside. An 85% efficient train car looks just like a little old train car, but its interior works will have changed. A wholly self-sustainable skyscraper still looks on the outside just like a skyscraper: the new Bank America building in New York resembles the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, only with more glass.

Not only are the technologies all available, but there are many plans about how to use them, and doing so can be immensely profitable even for existing businesses, if they alter their products and raw materials. The obstacle is resistant mindsets, and above all a lack of leadership. There's another obstacle--well, many; and they're mostly in the United States. The large corporations in whose interest it is to go on gobbling fossil fuel (or as writer Thom Hartman calls it, "ancient sunlight") rule our world, and our American leaders are their marionettes. The average working guy doesn't think beyond the morning traffic report. We're too deeply locked into the consumer lifestyle. We all need to learn to care. But we can do that. Dippy as it sounds, all we need is love. And we can act fast when we want to--look at the American performance in WWII.

Al Gore has greeted The 11th Hour as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. In a sense it is that. In David Guggenheim's Oscar-winning film Gore demonstrates why and how global warming is a reality and a cause of grave concern.** The 11th Hour sets this event in a larger context, warns further of the urgency of acting now, and, unlike Inconvenient Truth, goes into detail about practical solutions. The 11th Hour, unfortunately, isn't as polished and effective as An Inconvenient Truth. The latter is unified by Gore's personality. DiCaprio provides an appealing sort of youthful everyman voice (even a Hollywood superstar becomes an everyman in this context), but he doesn't hold The 11th Hour together. In fact there are too many faces in too rapid a succession for anything to hold them together. It almost becomes a joke, because even during the 11th hour of 11th Hour, so to speak, new faces keep appearing, and it's quite impossible to take in all the names and credentials. Luckily there are a few strong and unmistakable voices, like the broadcaster David Suzuki; Stephen Hawking; Mikhail Gorbachov. The soft southern accent of Interface founder Ray Anderson, a "good" corporate CEO, is familiar from the Gore film.

Sometimes information and animated diagrams go by with ridiculous speed. It's as if the filmmakers were afraid of omitting something. This would work on a DVD where you could freeze-frame to check things out; it doesn't in a theater. Speeded-up urban sequences look like some really sloppy version of Koyaanisqatsi. All this makes one nostalgic for Gore's measured tones. His detractors called Truth "a glorified Power Point lecture." But that's much better than sounding, as DiCaprio occasionally does, like the narrator of some high school educational flick. Consequently it's not too surprising that 11th Hour has fared less well critically than Truth, despite some significant champions--the critics of some of the major US papers, and smart writers like Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com, David Edelstein of New York Magazine (see also here), Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader--and one could go on--who acknowledge its faults, but signal its importance.

Attacking 11th Hour ultimately feels unwise: like killing the messenger. Conners and Peterson and DiCaprio and all those bright people have important things to say. Is the quality of this movie really such an issue? The true issue raised is this: sure, we can "vote" by buying low-watt bulbs and recycling and reducing our individual "carbon footprints." But to act collectively, we'll need that so-far-missing leadership. Where is it going to come from?

________
*The words of David Orr, director of Oberlin College's Environmental Studies Center.

**A 2003 Pentagon-commissioned study on "abrupt climate change" provides some possible worst-case scenarios for the new century. Peter Schwartz and fellow futurist Doug Randall, who authored this scenario, have acknowledged that it's "drastic," but believe it could nonetheless "play out" in "the next five to 15 years."

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 

All times are UTC - 8 hours


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Bing [Bot], Google [Bot] and 143 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group