The Age of Stupid – a review of the new, essential climate change movie

Published September 22, 2009

by dbazely

In the run up to Copenhagen, the new movie, “The Age of Stupid”, which was shown on multiple screens around the world last night, is this year’s “must-see” film about climate change, just as “An Inconvenient Truth” was a couple of years ago. But, it takes a very different tack. Franny Armstrong’s engaging dramatic documentary looks back to the present from 2055, when the world has dissolved into chaos, due to the irreversible run-away effects of climate change, to ask why, despite all of the signals, people let it happen. Peter Postlethwaite acts as the “curator” or keeper of the Global Archive, a vast tower-like warehouse, somewhere in the arctic. The treasures of all the world’s museums have been stashed away in this lonely place. We see a King Tut-like sarcophagus to the left of curator’s computer screen, where he is pulling up fragments of film from his media-archive.

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These film clips feature the stories of a young woman in Nigeria, who wants to become a doctor, and who turns to trading in the diesel black market to raise her tuition fees, a wealthy young business man starting up a cheap airline, India’s version of Ryanair, because he believes that this is the way to “help” poor people, an incredibly fit, 82-year old French mountain guide from Chamonix, who has watched the glaciers recede, and a young British family, in which the dad builds wind farms and who is seen trying to combat a most excruciatingly civilized case of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) in Bedford, UK, from a group of well-heeled fifty and sixty-year olds who hold the view that windfarms ruin the aesthetic of the landscape, but who all feel that “we are doing our bit for the environment in other ways”. These interviews made me grind my teeth and want to put in an order for Che Guevara type T-shirts with the face of the woman, (pictured below right), who was the chief spokesperson for the anti-wind farm protestors on the front, and the slogan “Supercilious, Selfish, Sententious” emblazoned across the top. I see this as being my hommage to the “I am not a plastic bag” campaign of last year or so, which also made me grind my teeth a lot, in terms of its shallowness.

I left the movie feeling really upbeat, because I just love these doom and gloom docs and lectures about climate change. They make me feel quite cheery, because after including the topic of climate change in my ecology courses for nearly 20 years, anything about climate change, coming from anyone else, that might actually grab people’s attention and engage them enough to make them change their behaviour, makes me feel less lonely! The movie does a great job of explaining how everyone in the Global North needs to go on a strict carbon diet, as well as giving a superb Monty Pythonesque animated overview of Homo sapiens' historical tendency to make war over resources. OK – so mine is probably NOT the average reaction to this movie, but then not many people had a Master’s supervisor who was on an IPCC working group, either, and who was discussing climate change with them in 1984.

Dawn R. Bazely

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