As climate change continues to be a pressing reality, its presence has invaded almost every aspect of our lives, not excluding film and television. I’ve personally seen an influx of books and movies that include the climate crisis in their storylines, some of which make the environment a core theme.
With this comes the question of the role that art and media play in depicting the climate crisis. Do artists and filmmakers have a responsibility to include a message of environmental advocacy in their work?
I’m sure many people are aware of the Bechdel or Bechdel-Wallace test, a set of criteria that evaluates the representation of female characters in film. The typical criteria of the Bechdel test are that at least two named women are featured, and these women talk to each other about something other than a man.
This simple test has been instrumental in prioritizing adequate female representation and holding filmmakers accountable in how they utilize women in their stories. Inspired by the famous Bechdel test, a new test has been created by climate change storytelling consultancy Good Energy. It’s called the Climate Reality Check, and it originally aimed to measure the presence of climate change on screen by evaluating the 31 feature films nominated for this year’s Academy Awards.
However, it’s a tool that can be applied to any work of fiction. As the website states, the Climate Reality Check “will allow writers and industry professionals to interrogate their own stories, audiences to see whether Hollywood is representing their reality on-screen, and researchers to measure whether climate change is included in any group of stories or if representation is increasing over time.”
There are only two criteria in the Climate Reality Check that a piece of media must meet: within the story, climate change exists and at least one of the characters knows it. Additionally, to be considered for the Climate Reality Check, the story must be set on Earth in the present or in the future. Of the films nominated for the Academy Awards, 23% (three films) passed: “Barbie,” “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” and “Nyad.”
Even a single line may qualify a film to pass the Climate Reality Check. For example, the character Sasha in “Barbie” has a line in her monologue, “You are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism!" that meets both criteria for the test. Even though the words, “climate change” weren’t used in the film, this single line brings the climate crisis into conversation with feminism, the movie’s main theme and connects climate change to one of its root systemic causes.
The creators of the test have admitted that it has its blind spots, such as excluding films that may not mention climate change directly but instead point to it through allegory. A movie may show sustainable behavior or model climate change through fantasy or sci-fi, and the test is not yet adapted to catch these exceptions. Nonetheless, it’s an ambitious start.
Although it’s still in very early stages of use, the emergence of the Climate Reality Check signals a new era of climate awareness. To say that the film and television of our era should recognize climate change within their respective cinematic universes is to cement it as a reality that won’t change in the near future. While that is true, it’s also disheartening.
So many people use movies, TV shows and other media as a form of escapism. I know I’m certainly guilty of using books and movies to shut out reality. Recently, a friend and I were discussing how pop culture references in books often throw us off and take us out of a story. Not only does it date the piece, it drops you back into the reality that you’re looking to take a break from. This is amplified with the conditions of the Climate Reality Check, which in some ways asks us to saturate our climate awareness into day-to-day life.
However, climate change is our reality, and there is a certain responsibility to accurately represent it. Additionally, it can serve a broader purpose than just climate awareness, the Climate Reality Check can be a vital tool for researchers to see how representation changes as the climate crisis persists. Also, as an anthropological tool, looking back on this era, the representation and magnitude of climate change don’t add up. Historians may look back at the media we produce to see what was among our top priorities in the year 2024.
As the Climate Reality Check website emphasizes, climate change is happening here and now and extends to every aspect of our lives. Although movies and television can function as a form of escapism, they’re also a documentation of reality. The test aims not only to measure representation in our narratives but also makes audiences and industry professionals look at the media they consume and produce and question if it lines up with our reality.
