Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction

by E. Ann Kaplan

Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu , as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story.
 
Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. 
 
Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli , Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness , The Happening , Take Shelter , and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.    

Genres: Climate Change, Environment

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 25, 2015

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction has been on my to-read list for a decade, but only recently did I track down a copy. I think the political and cultural context of climate change has evolved a bit in the intervening time. Nonetheless, I appreciated the examination of what popular films with apocalyptic and/or dystopian themes can tell us about dread of climate change. The films discussed include several adaptations of novels: Blindness, The Children of Men, and The Road. Although I'm familiar with all three, I haven't seen several of the other films: The Book of Eli, The Happening, and Take Shelter. Kaplan provides sufficient detail that having watching the films isn't necessary to follow her points. She conveys the experience of each film well, which made me want to rewatch Children of Men (as I think the film is better than the book) and reread Blindness (as the film and book are both excellent, I just like the book more).

Although I enjoyed the in-depth film discussions and found Kaplan's writing style clear and straightforward to follow, I was not convinced by her main thesis. She suggests that people experience 'pretraumatic stress disorder' as a result of the looming fear of climate chaos. This is reflected in films depicting scenarios of environmental and social collapse. I think the phenomenon she describes is a decent idea, however I'm not convinced that trauma is the most useful word for it. Her justification for using the term is as follows:

Understanding this kind of cultural witnessing and its implications requires theorising how cultural trauma functions and how we can generalise for a collectivity. Humanists have had trouble defining collective trauma. From a Freudian and specifically clinical point of view, trauma can only be known by its belated return in symptoms such as nightmares, phobias, hallucinations, panic attacks. No event, then, is inherently traumatic; it only becomes so in its later symptomatic return. Yet we talk of events themselves as being traumatic. [...]

Nevertheless, to abandon trauma is to lose the resonance and aura, if you like, that the word carries.We know we are talking about something atrocious, almost beyond understanding, if we call an event 'traumatic'. [...] So I use the term trauma culture, loosely but (I'd argue) effectively. Other words do not communicate as much as the term trauma does.

This is an interestingly honest explanation for using a word: basically, for vibes and shock value rather than because it is accurate. For once, I think a theorist would do well to invent more neologisms, rather than stretching a not very elastic clinical term. Kaplan has interesting things to say about the themes and imagery of the films she discusses, however I don't think it all adds up to a single robust theory. Surely it doesn't really have to; films can be put in dialogue with one another without such a thing emerging. In the afterword, Kaplan seeks to articulate what climate trauma means in the context of these films, but doesn't manage it to my satisfaction. I have an ongoing fascination (obsession?) with defining the boundaries and overlaps of the utopian and dystopian; Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions is the most thorough treatment of this topic I've read. Here, I found only brief comments citing another author:

Kitch has argued in favour of resisting the utopian/dystopian duality endemic to the fantasies I have studied here and of finding a third kind of thought, which she calls 'realist'. Problematic as this term is, what Kitch means here is that social thought would put 'less stock in principles and ideas alone' and would allow for the complexities and vagaries of human action.

I don't think either Jameson or I would agree with this point, which strikes me as an elision of the ideological and artistic to the point that the words are no longer useful. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction did not engage deeply enough for my tastes with the nature of utopian and dystopian depictions, which are no simple dichotomy that realism sits beside. Thus I think this book is among the rare few that I appreciate in the specific, but not the general.

[Ryder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I’ve always found dystopian and apocalyptic fiction stories compelling I never really understood why until reading this book. Kaplan has an excellent apprehension of how this genre of film and writing reflects our cultural fears and vulnerabilities. Her specific analysis of selected books and novels about apocalypses and climate disasters is what makes Climate Trauma particularly unique and influential. Kaplan’s introduction explains the concept of “pre-trauma,” a condition with symptoms similar to PTSD but pertaining to events that have not yet occurred. She uses this disorder to build a framework for understanding our psychological responses to future catastrophic events and how these anxieties can manifest in art. This is easily my favorite book on the intersection of film/fiction and climate change and is a great starting point for those interested in exploring this topic further.

“If people can be attracted to the horror, as it were, isn’t that better than not looking at all?”

“The subgenre of dystopian films is a genre, then, which serves as a future-oriented memory for audiences watching: we are invited to live for two hours in desolated environments, experiencing desperate humans who seek to survive the total collapse of infrastructures on which we humans depend. This offers spectators a way to remember what we have now and what we should not lose. The invitation aims to mitigate future tragedies, but there is the question of how identifying with such future traumatic selves may impact the viewer’s psyche.”

[Steve Raney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof. Kaplan is one of the pioneers in this new and very important academic field. Very important because so much of today’s art is dystopian and pessimistic. Do these warnings motivate us to act to prevent dystopia? Or do these warnings make us so anxious that we are overwhelmed? She makes numerous original contributions to this field. She applied her vast expertise in related fields and undertook an immense amount of research to bring us this book.

This is a dense academic book. The endnotes are very informative, so much so that I would have preferred them to be footnotes so I could more easily hop back and forth between the text and notes. With this book, you can quickly develop a sophisticated frame (that would take you 4,000 hours of research to develop on your own) with which to critique new dystopian films, streaming series, books, comics, and video games. Kaplan provides a helpful taxonomy with which to sort new dystopian works. Her feminist critique belies the notion that we can fully benefit from male-gaze works.