Earth Protectors (de Carbuccia, 2023)
There is a scene in Season 3 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom where Will (Jeff Daniels) interviews an Environmental Protection Agency official about climate change. The news anchor repeatedly tries to pivot from the alarming facts of the story to a glimmer of hope or even a last-minute call for drastic measures, but his guest repeatedly rebuffs the attempts, insisting that the situation is now hopeless. He compares the human population of the earth to a human, in a locked garage and a running car, already unconscious from the carbon monoxide but not yet dead. Absent some external intervention — someone on the outside breaking into the garage — the person will die. He is past the point of being able to do anything to save himself.
Earth Protectors appears to argue at times that we are all akin to the man in the car — dead men and women walking. That may well be true, but if it is, what is the point of art installations designed to proclaim that fact?
I have said frequently and for a long time that it is not the documentarian’s responsibility to solve the problems he or she depicts. And it’s not. But…
I do have climate change fatigue. And gun violence fatigue. And racism fatigue. Years of documentaries and true-life stories about poverty, about hunger, about environmental collapse, about child soldiers and political prisoners, has left me more numb than galvanized. If an artist or movie wants to tell me that climate change is “real,” well, that message has been received. And if I am living on borrowed time, I may not want to spend it listening to harbingers of doom counting down my final seconds.
In both the film and its press kit, Anne de Carbuccia claims that there is something empowering about the message that humans are a geologic force. If we have impacted the planet for the worse, that means we can impact it for the better. Yes, maybe, I guess. But the director’s statement claims we could do so “overnight,” and the witness of the film is that it has taken years to make the impact on the climate that we have and that tipping points may have been past. Hitting the brakes on a train that has already barrelled over a cliff doesn’t slow its fall.
Films like this can come across as if they are critic-proof, and they may well be. There is a built-in rebuttal to any criticism. Is it boring and repetitive? How can you care about such things when presented with a message of such an urgent message? Does it offer no concrete steps to mitigate the impact of climate change nor any specific hope (beyond banal generalizations) that the impact can be mitigated? All the more reason we should sit up and take notice.
As one person watching the film with me asked…who is the audience? If it is this bad, we don’t have a moment to spare, much less 95 minutes to watch a film that tells us what we already know. If we don’t know…or are climate change skeptics…will this change the way we think about it? There are some decent tidbits about the creative process when de Carbuccia articulates decisions about particular installations (such as not putting flowers in one because she doesn’t want it to have any hope), but for the most part, this is the cinematic equivalent of doom scrolling.
