Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Bridging The Political Deficit: Loss, Morality And Agency In Films Addressing Climate Change, Philip Hammond

Philip Hammond

This article examines the emotional rhetorical strategies of three films – The Day After Tomorrow (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and The Age of Stupid (2009) – which attempt to create engagements with the “post-political” problem of climate change. In all three films the experience of personal loss, the potential for future loss, and the emotions associated with loss are fundamental to affective engagement. The emotional loading of representations of environmental problems derives partly from concerns about human political agency and subjectivity. It is not so much that emotional or moral appeals are simply added on in order to bolster …