High GHG Drifters

The original Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) mixes anti-war sentiments with genocidal fascism. Klaatu tells Earthlings to shape up - give up war and immediately start to learn and practice peace - or the galactic robot police will kill everyone:

'This Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder.'^[1]

The hapless 2008 remake didn't seem to know what it was saying by the end, but it had two basic novel ideas:

• Extend the galactic police force's powers so that they can kill all the humans without toasting (and in fact pointedly, pristinely preserving) the rest of the planet
• Broaden the aliens' essential interests from galactic order to order down on Earth as well, i.e., the remake's aliens damn humans not just (or even especially) as unrepentantly aggressive and dangerous generally but also as environmentally cavalier/dangerous to other life on Earth specifically

Richard Curtis's ghastly, self-defeating 10:10 campaign film:
expresses the same genocidal fascist fantasy/temptation as the two DtESS films, and even shares the 2008 remake's exact emphasis. Yet reactions to the DtESSs have always been muted, whereas Curtis's film was an overnight, sensational disaster. Why?

On the one hand, the details almost certainly make a difference: we don't see Klaatu and Gort et al. butchering kids. And presumably the lifespan of Curtis's film would have been extended if Curtis had eschewed direct, Cronenberg-style explosion shots in favor of, say, just 'horrified reaction' shots (thereby leaving us to infer what happened), let alone if Curtis had told a much less (or even non-)violent story.^[2] On the other hand, genocidal violence, whether eco-inspired or not, just does seem easier to take when the Final Solution-bearer is external/impartial rather than one/some-of-us. We've plenty of cultural practice with the former case from the Torah and Old Testament generally, but that practice absolutely doesn't transfer to righteous, eliminationist forces that are one/some-of-us. Rather, it's conventional wisdom that some-among-us will always fancy themselves as Jehovah/Yahweh-figures judging and damning us all, and that such people always have to be monitored and, if necessary, stopped. The moral seems to be that while environmentalists can try to point to Nature's judgment on human civilization, say, they can't, with profit, be caught imagining that they are avenging angels of that judgment.^[3] That said:

or even this. Slightly illicit, avenging angel fantasies are big business, and a big part of the business in which Richard Curtis makes a living in particular.

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^[1] Update: imdb's ecarle reminds me that Klaatu depicts his home world as ruled by pervasive terror of summary execution:

"For our policemen, we created a race of robots...In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor... The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies"

Dirty Harry raised to the power of Robo-cop on every corner. Very peaceful, no fire-power in that picture, no sir.

^[2] E.g., suppose the 'no pressure' speeches mention the superheated, acidic surface of Venus as a model for a high-GHG earth. When the red-buttons are pushed, people simply disappear. Later it's revealed that they've been teleported to:

INTERIOR OF ROOM ON VENUS

The 20-25 people inside the room, including many of those we've earlier seen disappear, are gathered nervously around the room's single large window. 3/4 of the room is fairly empty, but every few seconds, a new person pops into existence including - Bing! - one of the schoolchildren from earlier.

EXTERIOR VENUS HELLSCAPE

Close up on an external digital thermometer with dual Celsius and Fahrenheit displays. It ticks over from 460 to 461 °C, 860 to 861 °F. Some more droplets of sulphuric acid rain hit the thermometer's exterior, melting part of the Fahrenheit display. Focus drops back (or Cut) to regretful faces of climate change skeptics of various ages pressed up against the large window. We hear the sound of another person popping into existence behind them. Bing! The heavily accented Tottenham Football coach from earlier starts in mid-prattle.

CLOSE UP LOOKING IN THROUGH LOWER HALF OF WINDOW

Faces of horrified school-children, including the child who just materialized pushing in past adult legs to get a view out. Their eyes widen as more sulphuric acid rain and smouldering, dissolving crud spatters and slides down the window in front of them while, from somewhere behind them, the adult, know-nothing, Football coach voice prattles on...

^[3] To be sure, lefties, let alone enviro-lefties in particular, are probably a minority of apocalyptic fantasists, especially in the US. The Timothy McVeigh/far-Right/quasi-secessionist end of US political life is currently booming, much as it did during the Clinton years.

Welcome to the Tangent Universe

In 1988, at least with hindsight, there were three big, political stories:

1. The Soviets finally gave up in Afghanistan, and Gorbachev disavowed the Brezhnev doctrine (which had officially claimed Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet Union-administered, wider empire of international socialism), thereby in principle allowing the countries of Eastern Europe to go their own ways. 1989 would put all of that into shocking, explosive practice, and triumphalisms of various sorts (‘The end of history’, ‘We mujahadeen can defeat and destroy empires’) emerged fully-fledged by mid-year, and were commonplaces by the time the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified in November/December.
2. The first round of ominous data about climate change led to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was tasked to produce its first report by 1990. (Al Gore held the first US Congressional hearings on the topic in August 1988, but was really more interested in his abortive Presidential primary run.)
3. Japan Inc. appeared to be winning at everything, and was buying up large chunks of everywhere on the strength of its asset prices, etc.. See Die Hard (1988) for a representation of the fear that provoked, although Mitsubishi's purchase of Rockefeller Center in NYC in 1989 was probably the high-water mark of the unease (and Japan's asset bubble continued to inflate for another couple of years).

2010 feels much like 1988 (although maybe 2011 and 2012 will bring us closer still), only now:

• It's the US playing the role of economically-troubled-at-home-exhausted-loser-abroad in Afghanistan
• Averting massive climate change seems quite impossible (without truly staggering scientific breakthroughs in carbon sink tech) given how little progress has been made so far and how much worse the terms and conditions of any solution will be after adding another 2 billion+ people ('another 2 Chinas') to the planetary pop. over the next 30 years. The richest people on Earth probably can make things a little less bad globally than they'd otherwise be, but that's about it, and achieving even that much seems likely to require near penetential falls in living-standards: compulsory vegetarianism, small, sealed-up houses, minimal private transportation, minimal travel, and the like, i.e., much less economic activity and life generally, e.g., as summarized here)
• China is the rising power, the one with the gold making the rules (the real golden rule)

In sum, the US is the new USSR, China is the new Japan, and climate change, always a bear, is now most definitely the bear that eats us.

Right in the middle of this 1988-2010 period, Donnie Darko (2001) nicely captured or expressed some of its spooky, 'only the labels change' stasis. DD is set at the end of 1988 and tells of the formation of a tangent universe/alternative reality, which we see collapse at the climax of the film. The real world in 2010 does indeed feel a little like a formed-in-late-1988, tangent universe. The notable exception to 1988-2010's loopy, through-the-looking-glass-and-back stasis is the seemingly Millennial rise of the internet/networked economy and culture (which, of course, have their own temporal rhymes and structure). Maybe only the internet is preventing some underlying wormhole from collapsing, revealing that there's still all to play for in the 1988 Presidential election. Tell 'em George. 28 days... 6 hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds.