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ISBS Movie Review: An Inconvenient Truth
By Brian | May 2, 2007 | Share on Facebook
There have been two movies in my lifetime that people kept insisting I must see. The first was Schindler’s List, which Spielberg expertly released right before the Jewish High Holidays, so that every rabbi in America would entitle his sermon, “You must see this movie.” Pretty powerful marketing strategy. As it turned out, I didn’t see it until years later, half out of defiance (I’ll see or not see whatever movie I damn well please, thank you very much…) and half out of the fact that I’ve really seen enough Holocaust movies to understand how awful it was, and really didn’t need another. They eventually put it on network TV, uncut and with no commercials, so I saw it then.
The second “must see” movie was An Inconvenient Truth. This one also waited about a year. Again, half out of defiance, but now half out of the fact that if my wife and I get a babysitter on a Saturday night, we’re going to see something more entertaining than Al Gore. Yes, even if it means destroying the planet. If you have young kids, you understand. This week, though, brought a business trip and a stop at Blockbuster (not in that order). So I watched the movie while sitting in a plane which flew up near the atmosphere and spit nasty, harmful chemicals at it. Take that, you green-niks!
I’m just kidding. In fact, the movie pleasantly surprised me. See, here’s the thing: Gore is working very, very hard to prove something that has already been proven true. And as anyone with any public speaking experience knows, when you’re backed up by the truth, you can speak for hours and make many compelling arguments in favor of your point of view. The result is a presentation that convinces everyone in the audience of something they already believed when they walked into the room. And as silly as that sounds, the communal “YES!” that comes along with it is very powerful.
What surprised me about the movie was how, well, moderate it was. Gore’s only point is that the earth is getting warmer, and that this is being caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide, and that this is being caused by the presence and activities of billions of additional humans, who generate carbon dioxide while doing everything from breathing to driving their cars. Gore does not advocate shutting down the airline industry, outlawing gasoline, or limiting the amount of toilet paper available per…um…sitting. (Note to Sheryl Crow: Yes, I know it was a joke. If you’re going around the country to clarify an issue that has been intentionally muddled by political opponents, how about you lay off the jokes, ‘kay?) All Gore wants us to do is understand that the problem exists, and do basic things to mitigate it. Things like conserve energy, use less gas, learn how to work your thermostat, etc.
Based on that message and that message alone, I think an objective view of the facts would suggest that he’s succeeding. Hybrid cars are appearing everywhere, major cities and large corporations alike are “going green,” and being personally enviro-friendly is becoming as chic as being anti-aerosol or anti-apartheid used to be. But an entire industry has developed around the cause, and the stakes have increased. In the movie, Gore quotes Upton Sinclair as saying, “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Given the current state of the Global Warming debate (and, by the way, Gore refers to it exclusively as “Global Warming.” He never utters the term “Global Climate Change”), I think we can also agree that this is true: “It is difficult to make a man believe that a problem has been solved when his salary depends on him working to solve it.”
If I had any problem with the film, it was Gore’s pathological need to be more than just right. He needs to be dramatic as well, even to the point of twisting the facts to do it. This, I believe, is what ultimately sunk him in his 2000 election bid, and it’s presence here is palpable. First, there are the truly inexplicable asides about the hardships he has endured in his life. We cover the near death of his son at the age of six, his controversial loss in the 2000 election (Yes, he lost. Please spare me the snark), 9/11, and the death of his sister, daughter of a tobacco farmer, due to lung cancer. All of these things, he says, made him dedicate his life to solving the global warming crisis. Of course, these things happened over a period of 30-40 years, during which time he was consistently advocating for global warming anyway, so we can only conclude that these scenes are in the movie purely to tug at our heartstrings. They are sad, yes, but I found them distracting. Also, I had to laugh at the various scenes of Al Gore “studying” global warming data on his laptop. A closer look at the machine clearly shows that he’s working in whatever the Mac’s equivalent of PowerPoint is, and he’s editing slides, not studying data. Setting aside the fact that he says he’s given this slide show over 1,000 times, so the slides are probably already set, I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money on the fact that Gore didn’t create any of these slides himself. Once again – dramatic effect over substance (or even honesty).
Turning more toward content, I noted the order in which he presented his data. First, the carbon dioxide levels, then the temperature, then the polar ice caps, drying river beds and horrific floods, and then the population explosion (for those who haven’t seen the movie, he points out that it took thousands of generations for the earth’s population to reach 2 billion, but in only three or four generations, it will go from 2 billion to 9 billion). It occurs to me that if he had shown this slide first, the entire argument changes dramatically. Everything else becomes a function of how many of us there are, and since no one is advocating for killing off 7 billion people, we almost have to look at ways to adapt to this new reality, rather than ways to stop/reverse it.
Also on the questionable content side was the much-previewed simulations of the highly populated areas going under water if nothing is done. Two examples caught my eye: Holland and the World Trade Center memorial site (note that it’s not Manhattan that goes under water, it’s the WTC memorial site – much more dramatic that way). These are ironic because both sites are currently below sea level, and both have been protected by technology that was invented decades ago. Holland has a much heralded system of levees that protects its sub-sealevel cities, and the World Trade Center was built inside a concrete “bathtub” that kept the water from rushing in. In fact, the land excavated to build the WTC was appended to Manhattan island and now supports the World Financial Center, all despite the fact that the water level around the WTC site is higher than the ground.
There are other, smaller things too (his citation of escalating insured damage in storms, which depends as much upon the value of the property in the storms’ path as it does on the strength of the storms, his criticism about our rejection of the Kyoto treaty, despite the fact that the economic impact on the US was so severe that the Senate rejected it by a vote of 99-0, and his criticism of an economic impact slide which he claimed weighed the desirability of gold bars against the entire planet, when clearly the graphic was meant to discuss economic impact vs. environmental impact – a legitimate topic no matter what side of the issue you’re on).
But again, these are minor criticisms, and speak more to Gore’s affinity for hyperbole than his overall point, which is that global warming exists, and we need to react to it. On that point, he was very convincing to just about everyone who watched the movie, except perhaps those who adamantly didn’t believe it going in, and who likely walked away unconvinced.
What’s important now that the movie is out there, is how we respond. The current strategy seems to be purely political – disparaging everyone who disagrees with anything Gore says, rather than discussing reasonable alternatives (or even, heaven forbid, market opportunities) for how to deal with the issue.
I’ve compared global warming to Y2K before, and I remain convinced they are similar. In the coming years, steps will be taken to address the issue. These steps will prevent the predicted calamities from occurring. And fifty years from now, someone will look back at the movie and call Gore an alarmist who predicted massive flooding, population displacement and death that never came. And like the thousands who worked so hard to address Y2K, he will have provided an invaluable public service that will go largely un-thanked.
Such is the way of things, I guess…
Topics: ISBS Reviews, Movie Talk | 1 Comment »
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