a review by Kenneth R. Morefield
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Director – Davis Guggenheim
Producers – Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns
Paramount Classics and Participant Productions. 96 minutes. Rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). Some of the subjects discussed might be upsetting.
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An Inconvenient Truth is a one-hundred minute documentary hosted by Al Gore and designed to confront the audience with one insistent point:
Global warming is not coming – global warming is here.
The consequences of the film’s thesis being true (though not necessarily of it being false) would be worldwide, so the film’s participants and defenders can’t quite seem to fathom why the responses to that thesis are so polarized along ideological and party lines. I can’t quite understand why either, but I have my suspicions.
Someone – okay it was Meredith on Grey’s Anatomy, so sue me – once suggested that people will procrastinate until the pain and discomfort of inaction is greater than the fear of what honest inquiry into the source of that pain will reveal. That got me thinking: what’s at stake here that would cause viewers to resist this message? Gore himself argues that the economic and personal benefits of being ahead of the curve in responding to climate change are most likely to benefit the societies that are quicker to adapt than the ones that drag their collective feet.
Might one answer to that question be that what is at stake, at least for Christians, is their unresolved relationship to and distrust of science? It’s one thing when Gore shows scientists measuring pollution, year by year, in layers of ice. It’s quite a different thing when he puts up graphs of the last (seven? ten?) ice ages and speaks about the age of the earth as an established scientific fact.
Maybe it is, and maybe so is global warming. But I’ve read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man enough times to know that science has reached consensus before–complete with scientific data to browbeat skeptics–about facts that turned out to be, well, not quite so factual. Gould concluded his book with a confidence that I didn’t share that scientists could avoid allowing personal prejudices or preconceived notions to influence their findings in the future, even if they had a pretty poor track record of doing so in the past. I didn’t share that confidence in part because Gould was so eloquent and persuasive about his contention that the misleading results of empirical research were less often a matter of scientists being deliberately dishonest as they were of scientists being swayed, perhaps unconsciously, by their preconceived notions.
Personally, I’m ready to invest scientific knowledge with enough trustworthiness to speak authoritatively about changes in contemporary weather patterns and to hypothesize pretty darn convincingly about some of their causes. (It didn’t hurt the film’s credibility in my eyes that the Northeast United States was viciously flooded the week after I screened it.) I suspect, though, that there are some Christians, even relatively urbane ones, who are afraid that letting science (especially branches such as Geology and Astronomy) speak authoritatively about anything other than the effectiveness of penicillin is letting a Trojan horse into our midst that will eventually affirm a set of facts that is impossible to even remotely reconcile with Creationism or a belief in the Bible as an historically accurate document (rather than some sort of allegorical or mythical dramatization of what actually happened).
I could be wrong about this interpretation of the resistance to the film. My wife tells me she thinks I am. Still, most accounts I read that try to explain the recent success of the Republican party beginning with, say, Ronald Reagan, usually tend to express somewhere that part of that success came from getting evangelical, conservative (socially, not necessarily theologically) Christians to consider the Republicans as their party and the Democrats as being godless. Isn’t there currently a book with that thesis as its title? For that reason, I found myself wanting Guggenheim to explore-or at least acknowledge-the ways in which faith and science interact so that viewers weren’t faced with what felt like an implicit “either/or” choice between them.
If I have doubts about whether the non-treatment of religion is one polarizing factor, I have none that the presence of the former vice-president is. When teaching rhetoric or composition, it is customary to suggest that persuasion is usually some combination of logos, pathos, and ethos. “Logos” is the appeal to logic; is there evidence to support the contention and does its presentation avoid logically fallacies? “Pathos” is the appeal to emotion; does the speaker or writer make you care about the topic? “Ethos” is an appeal to the authority of the speaker or writer himself; do you trust the source of persuasion?
Al Gore doesn’t have a pre-existing negative ethos in my mind, but there is something in his presentation style that bugged me and that, I think, contributes to the polarized responses to the film. In some liberal venues-yeah Jon Stewart and Gary Trudeau, I’m thinking of you-it is customary to mock or tease President Bush because his communication style and cadence, his delivery, often comes across as dissonant with the substance of his message. His plain, folksy style and plaintive cadence work well for sound bites but can come across as oblivious to the nuances or rhythms of prepared speeches. Listening to President Bush give a speech can sometimes remind one of listening to Keanu Reeves do Shakespeare; it is easy for the audience to come away with the impression the speaker doesn’t quite grasp everything he is saying, even if/when there is evidence to the contrary. Conversely, in conservative venues it’s customary to speak of Gore as robotic or emotionless. It as though his innate fear of the manipulative powers and abuses of rhetoric makes him reluctant to express strong emotions such as outrage, disgust, or urgency.
When Gore talks with disdain about the Bush administration’s science advisor, it comes across more as a sound-bite punch line than a true expression of exasperation. When he follows up the laughs after his self-deprecating “I used to be the next president of the United States” by saying that this punch-line hurts a little too much to be all that funny, it comes across more as ironic detachment than true anger of a degree one would expect another to feel if he truly believed he was cheated out of a lawful victory. I mean, gosh, one saw more anger from Mark Cuban for getting jobbed out of an NBA finals victory thanks to a questionable foul call than one will apparently ever hope to get-publicly at least-from Al Gore for coming out on the wrong side of a questionable election result. Even when he speaks of his sister dying of lung cancer as an example of how intelligent people can refuse to heed scientific warnings with disastrous results, he holds the audience at arm’s length from his emotions. “That’s not a way you want to die,” he says of lung cancer, and we sense there is a reservoir of feeling there that, were it to be harnessed rather than suppressed, would make Gore a charismatic advocate rather than just a convincing one.
Gore’s reluctance to show emotion causes the film to suffer from what I call, for lack of a more elegant phrase “Neil Postman Syndrome.” Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that it was a rule of television news that however horrific or disturbing the news being reported, the talking heads must not show emotion when delivering it. Postman also speculated that this lack of affect in news reporting, over time, would have the effect of making it hard to take it seriously. How, he suggested, can a viewer really take the delivery of some piece of urgent news-such as an increased likelihood of nuclear war-seriously enough to be disturbed by it when the very person telling the viewer about it doesn’t appear to be distraught by it? (Or, Postman adds, when it is followed by a commercial for Burger King and some other, non-related piece of information.) In watching An Inconvenient Truth, I really had to struggle to get past the disconnect I felt between the urgency of Gore’s information and the ease of his delivery.
Towards the end of the film, Gore says he is surprised at how many people, when presented with his information, jump directly from skepticism to despair. I’m not, because I’m one of them. I have a melancholy and cynical disposition by nature. I think people are selfish and short sighted and that carbon emissions are more likely to be dramatically reduced by avian flu or some other catastrophe wiping out big chunks of the population than by Americans suddenly and corporately deciding to carpool.
I grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., and my favorite landmark to visit was the Lincoln Memorial. On one wall inside the monument there is inscribed the words from the Gettysburg address. I was always drawn to the other side, though, that had a less famous but equally moving excerpt from Lincoln’s second inaugural address. In it, Lincoln speculates that perhaps the immense human cost of the Civil War could be interpreted as part of God’s scourge upon our nation for the evils of slavery. I thought then and I believe even more firmly now that were a contemporary American president to speak so openly and plainly about a belief in a providential God who was not merely on our side but to whom we were accountable, he would have great difficulty getting elected. I didn’t necessarily think then, but I do think now, that were a contemporary American politician to dare to suggest that some measure of our suffering has been caused by our own selfishness rather than some evil imposed upon us that he would be vilified as unpatriotic and effectively end any chance he had at higher political office.
“If only,” I thought while meditating on the film, “some leader had the capacity to address our most serious problems from within a faith perspective. If only there was someone who didn’t just have a representative faith that was part of his platform to get elected but a prophetic faith that was capable of informing his approach to those problems. If only faith could be, at least occasionally, in our political and social landscape not the thing that assured us we were right but the thing that challenged us with how often, in our fallen-ness, we are so very, very wrong. Boy, this cynical, gen-x doubting Thomas could sure get jazzed about such a leader.”
Where have you gone, Honest Abe? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to look for you.
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Postscript: After the film, I resolved to: 1) renew efforts to carpool to work when the Fall academic semester begins; 2) research the feasibility of replacing the second family car (which I suspect is now on its last legs) with a Vespa or some more fuel efficient alternative for running errands; 3) search for information about local or national candidates for whom I am considering voting to see if their platform supports America signing the Kyoto Accord or endorses other, specific conservation measures. I’m pessimistic about whether my efforts will make any difference in the face of such a large problem; as I said, by nature I am gloomy and prone to despair. But that’s no reason to not try, is it?
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Kenneth R. Morefield is an Assistant Professor of English at Campbell University.