OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: The climate for a sequel

On a mild, bright and breezy midafternoon last week, on one of the prettiest days of the year, I strolled to the box office of the Cinemark Colonel Glenn movie plaza in southwest Little Rock.

I asked for a ticket to the “Al Gore movie.”

I’d heard that the very brief run would be ending with that 2:10 p.m. presentation, which was true. The film had been showing for only a few days, at 11 a.m. and 2:10 p.m., and there weren’t exactly lines for tickets.

“The what?” asked the attendant.

I quickly pondered the situation. The young woman looked to be about 20. She wasn’t born when Gore became vice president of the United States on the Democratic ticket with Arkansan Bill Clinton. She was a toddler when Clinton and Gore left office and Gore got robbed, kind of, of the presidency. She was in elementary school when Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out, warning credibly of global warming and drawing good crowds and winning a documentary Oscar.

So, I said, “I think it’s called An Inconvenient Sequel, or something like that.”

She found it and sold me a ticket.

Three other people joined me in the theater. We sat there until 2:30, a full 20 minutes past show time, with nary a preview, much less the film itself, on the screen. We beheld only a large image of a Chevrolet logo accompanied by bad songs played too loud.

I stayed busy with my phone, checking texts and emails and surfing the Web and social media. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten.

One of the others left the theater to remind officials to … you know … show the dadblamed movie.

I found the experience metaphorical. That the attendant had never heard of the movie’s subject or his film; that only four persons sat in the theater; that cinema personnel forgot to punch on the presentation — that’s the state of liberal Democratic politics in Arkansas, indeed the state of the political contemplation of climate change in Arkansas.

Our state lives by an economy tied to traditional energy sources. Our state remains relatively poor and thus averse to dramatic policy or lifestyle changes that would force us to do things differently. Our state has fallen under a red-state spell, vulnerable to big industry’s propaganda against climate change and to the conservative echo chamber’s message that any notion emanating from the left must be absurd or evil.

There were prevalent outside factors as well. The political aversion to an inconvenient sequel to inconvenient truth is hardly limited to Arkansas, but, in the Trump Era, nationwide. For that reason, the distributor had decided late not to give the Gore movie the previously planned wide and ballyhooed release nationally.

Not a lot of people venture inside from blue skies and 80 breezy degrees to watch any weekday matinee, much less a documentary.

So it felt almost subversive to sit there nearly alone, contemplating a reasonably compelling presentation about one of the three existential issues of our time.

Climate change, I mean. The others are religion-based terrorism and the decline of American civilization to the point that a dangerous clown like Donald Trump could become president.

It was just as well. In today’s political climate, Trump supporters in the theater would have been scoffing and yelling “that’s fake ice,” when Gore stood overlooking water pouring from a glacier, and “fake water,” when, in waders, he stood in saltwater covering streets in Miami Beach.

The movie was all right, but just that, and a bit too Gore-centric. At times, it was The Al Gore Story Told by Al Gore.

The sequel doesn’t advance any truth not made inconveniently in the first film. It’s a truth that, at this point, people either accept or not.

Most likely, I’ve decided, people accept it, but tend not to know of any additional action they might take individually that would do anything to change it.

They recycle. Their car is more fuel-efficient than the old one. That new refrigerator uses less power. The thermostat is up in summer and down in winter. About all they know to do after that is save the fuel required to transport them to an Al Gore documentary.

There’s no empirical polling to support this hunch of mine: Fewer people disbelieve the climate is changing than choose not to think about it because its dire effect is gradual and they have urgent matters to consider — whether the street is safe for their kids or the school any good or the college affordable or the job secure or the terrorist coming or the president sane.

Gore’s sequel climaxes with his and others’ heroic efforts to get the leading developed nations of the world on board with the Paris Accord in 2015 to work to reduce carbon emissions globally.

As a kind of epilogue, the movie reports that, in 2017, Trump pulled the United States out of the accord.

But even that turns out not to be an urgent matter.

Since Trump is not influential or respected in the world, no other nation followed his irresponsible lead. And, in the United States, business leaders and local government officials have said they will continue to do what they can — through product efficiencies and public policy — to reduce energy consumption and move into renewable energy sources.

I asked a young woman employee if it was true that the film I’d just seen was closing. She wondered why I’d asked — did I want to see it again?

I said I was with the newspaper and intended to write about it.

She told me I ought to write about another movie, the name of which I didn’t catch. She said people were lining it up to see it and that it was really scary.

I understood. Miami Beach being washed into the ocean is not the kind of thing that goes “boo,” and causes you to scream.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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