Clean energy in film
In the contemporary cinema, clean generation technology is a silent protagonist — a background marker of independence and sustainability. Sometimes, though, towering machines like windmills are presented as mis-perceived monsters.
The clip above is from Don Quijote (TVE, 1992, with Fernando Rey and Alfredo Landa). The story was published in 1605, and this film was released well before modern electricity-generating wind turbines were a recognised feature of the landscape.
An unfinished film, entitled ‘Turbines’, directed by Igor Breakenback and Shane Borza, has been in pre-production for many years, and isn’t likely to be finished. The premise is less subtle but genuinely original: a fleet of modern wind turbines are terrorising migrants using inaudible sound waves.
Flick through the movie’s Facebook page and you’ll see a few links to articles about ‘wind turbine syndrome’ — a disease hypothesised by wind farm opponents, and unsupported by the medical community - that’s fine. A fictional disease is well suited for fiction.
Clean technology as a villainous antagonist isn’t a particularly compelling concept. There’s a reason this hasn’t taken hold in modern cinema — it doesn’t reflect modern fears about precisely what it is that threatens us.
We’re threatened by a looming fear of karmic apocalyptic obliteration. This is why clean energy crops up as a subtle and partial solution to our fear of impending doom. A world damaged by humanity is more compelling than a world damaged by clean energy.
Over-consumption makes us nervous, and we love fictional absolution. More recently, cinema is telling us that human ingenuity, engineering and science can serve as tools to avert the apocalypse — a contemporary analogy for the contemporary threat of climate change.
Mad Max: Fury Road
George Miller’s latest installment in the Mad Max series incorporates the same DNA as previous films: insanity inspired by scarcity:
“My name is Max. My world is fire and blood. Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me, or everyone else”
The films begins with a thrilling, kinetic sequence — Max is pursued by wide-eyed, off-white ‘War Boys’, and ends up in the temple of the antagonist, Immortan Joe. Max fights off the War Boys, but is subdued. He catches a glimpse of a green utopia, as he emerges from the dark, fiery tunnels:
Electricity is absent from Fury Road - ‘guzzolene’, water and human life are presented as precious resources, wasted by the powerful. Wind power still features as a tantalising mirage, among greenery and plentiful water supplies. Immortan Joe wields power through sole control of the water supply, cruelly pouring it directly onto thirsty crowds:
It’s not a major theme in Miller’s film, but it does remind me of the contemporary focus on the democratisation of energy. Many see broad, distributed access to electrical power as an inherent improvement on our current centrally-controlled system. That certainly fits with Fury Road’s fairytale narrative — of the liberation of the townsfolk from the mean-spirited ruler.
Interstellar
Christopher Nolan’s beautiful science-fiction film features clean technology in a couple of scenes. In Insterstellar, Earth grows uninhabitable due to a catastrophic crop blight. Wind turbines spin in the background, as Cooper and Murph tear the solar panels from a hijacked self-sustaining drone.
“It’s an Indian air force drone. The solar cells could power an entire farm”, says Cooper, as they chase down the machine.
Resources are scarce, but in Interstellar, clean technology isn’t enough to address the major problem: the need to find a new home. The antagonist is physics: the crops refuse to grow, and gravity refuses to allow escape to another planet.
Nolan was inspired by the 1930s ‘Dust bowl’ event — an artificial disaster that came about through environmental meddling and had severe consequences on food production. Donald, Cooper’s father, attributes the film’s disaster to over-consumption:
“When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some, gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas. But six billion people, just imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all.”
It’s a neat metaphor for the artificial disaster we’re burdened with in reality. The impacts of human-caused climate change will be catastrophic, if greenhouse gas emissions are not limited some time soon. Interstellar reminds us that scarcity isn’t the only downside of an apocalypse. The simple tyranny of physics is present, too — rendering clean energy somewhat impotent as a protection or solution for the problem.
The Man with the Golden Gun
With the 1973 oil crisis as a backdrop, this Bond film presents solar power as a immensely powerful destructive technology (if you saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you may have noticed something similar).
I don’t think it’s fair to say clean energy is an antagonist here, in the same way as it is in Turbines or Don Quixote. It’s simply a source of overwhelming and boundless energy, used by an antagonist (Christopher Lee).
The interesting thing about The Man with the Golden Gun was the presentation of solar power as a potent, powerful source of energy, manifesting here as a destructive force. In more recent films, clean energy is presented as an ambivalent and passive player — here, it’s just as merciless and boundless as any other fictional super-weapon.
It was an alien concept at the time — that solar energy was bountiful and energy-dense. It came at at time when relying solely on fossil fuels was starting to have serious consequences.
The Martian
Ridley Scott’s latest science fiction film features something of a personal apocalypse — Mark Watney is marooned on Mars, after a failed NASA mission. He uses modern NASA technology to power his habitat and his rover — a collection of solar panels.
Watney also nabs a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator RTG), another real NASA technology. These devices convert the heat from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electrical power. The Martian does a good job of presenting the benefits and disadvantages of both solar power and RTGs — Watney has to charge his rover during the day using solar power, and he heats his cabin using an unstable and dangerous RTG.
How do we make electricity when we can’t reach beneath the ground and extract energy-dense fossil fuels? NASA’s space-faring solutions to this problem are going to lead the way into the future — assuming we’re successful in colonising the moon, or another planet.
We’ve already reached the point where we ought to cease extracting fossil fuels from the ground. Using them means we tip the Earth’s climate system into dangerous territory — Mark Watney’s problems on the Martian surface are problems we face, too, and we really ought to science the shit out of them.
The Simpsons
Remember when Mr Burns got shot? In that episode, he tries to build a gigantic sun-blocking shield, to create artificial scarcity and maintain sole control of the city’s power supply, from his sinister, looming nuclear power plant.
In the episode, Groundskeeper Willie also strikes oil in the school’s playground (after burying ‘Superdude’, the class gerbil) — which Mr Burns immediately requisitions through a slant drilling operation. The underground acquisition closes Moe’s Tavern due to fumes, destroys the retirement home and Bart’s treehouse, and injures their pet dog, Santa’s Little Helper.
Again, the episode touches on some long-running issues around energy. Mr Burns’ absurd idea of blocking sunlight doesn’t seem all that ludicrous, considering the length that incumbents have gone to to block clean energy, in America and Australia.
And the surreptitious and irresponsible stealing of a resource through underground drilling seems immediately like the modern issue of fracking — something covered in a 2014 episode of The Simpsons, ‘Opposites A-Frack’. The 90s energy concerns seem focused on corporations, whereas the contemporary focus is more on community action.
Mr Burns doesn’t need to win social licence for his nuclear power plant, or his oil well. Protest is non-existent in 90s Springfield, but prominent in 2010s Springfield.
Clean energy features only briefly in The Simpsons, in ‘The Squirt and the Whale’. Homer builds a wind turbine in his backyard — outraged that excess power from his turbine goes back the grid, he disconnects, but can’t rely on the power. Honestly, I don’t get what the point it — the show has lost much of its edge in recent years, and this seems like an awkward plot device rather than clever social commentary.
28 Days Later
In 28 Days Later, a zombie apocalypse has ravaged the UK. It’s a great film, with a particular focus on creating a stillness from a once-kinetic landscape. In the opening, a man wakes up from a coma and stumbles through an empty city. Later in the film, they drive past a still-functioning wind farm — the only moving part of a dead landscape.
The imagery here is pretty clear: so much of human activity depends on exhaustible resources, but these machines exist in perpetuity. Solar power is also used in The Walking Dead, one of my favourite imaginings of the zombie apocalypse.
The interesting thing is that, of course, manufacturing a solar panel or a wind turbine, and maintaining their operation, requires human input (though, far less than other types of generation). All forms of technology need maintenance, so isn’t ‘free’, but certainly well suited for times of need.
Clean Technology and Impending Doom
Clean energy seems to crop up in films during times of strife. Some insurmountable problem spurs human conflict, and this technology sits silently in the background, offering a tentative and partial reprieve from the struggle.
This accurately reflects a contemporary anxiety — we’re constantly fearful that the end of our comfort and peace is just around the corner. That over-consumption and a love for excess is a loan that we’ll soon be forced to repay, perhaps through catastrophic climate change, or some new unknown threat.
We’re already being forced to rethink the way we extract and convert energy from the universe. We’ll be without the bountiful (but harmful) excess of fossil fuels soon, particularly if we venture into the colonisation of other planets.
Clean energy’s subtle presence in modern cinema and television presents us with a warning, tinged with hope: if we empower communities, scientists, governments and individuals, we can engineer our way out of our addiction to fossil fuels, and hopefully, prevent the apocalypse we suspect is just around the corner.
