Weirding Climate Realism in Sunshine and Ex Machina

Avoid the term "global warming." I prefer the term"global weirding," because that is what actually happens asglobal temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weathergets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter,the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.Thomas Friedman, "Global Weirding Is Here"

When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman made a call for replacing the phrases global warming and climate change with "global weirding" in 2016, he was effectively critiquing the climate-science community's inability to represent the reality of climate change in ways that do justice to its catastrophic effects, unevenly distributed intensities, and disruptions.¹ More recently, scholars Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman returned to the phrase as a productive space for literary-cultural analysis, invoking its potential to enter literary, artistic, philosophical, and scientific communities into a dialogue concerning how to conceptualize our ecologically unstable times. For their special theme issue published in the journal Paradoxa, Hageman himself facilitated a cross-disciplinary conversation between ecophilosopher Timothy Morton and author Jeff VanderMeer, a key figure in the literary movement of the new weird (a genre that came into existence following the alter-globalization movement in Seattle and later made anthropogenic climate change one of its main concerns).² Their musings, as well as other conversations in the issue, crystallized a definition of the weird as a particular iteration of the real, perceived in the era of climate change as something porous, difficult to grasp, and resistant to cognitive capture. They also imagined the twenty-first-century weird as encapsulating a prevalent affect or gripping sensation related to the expansion of awareness and anxiety of "a necropastoral world" brought into existence by human agency.³ In this article, we continue the work of thinking the weird and climate together, specifically in the context of climate-realist imaginations in cinema. We are interested in how the aesthetic economy of climate change both necessitates a concept like weirding (already containing its effects) and finds resonance in recent climate fiction films.

Climate realism is an emerging approach in climate science, one that is trying to move past an alarmist tone (which gives the public apocalyptic warnings about an inevitable dark future and cultivates a zeitgeist of political helplessness) toward helping society face the everyday realities of living with climate change. In critiquing catastrophism and collapse narratives as well as constructivist and denialist approaches to climate change, scholars like Andreas Malm, Robert J. Antonio, and Brett Clark have acknowledged the need for climate realism from within the realm of the humanities and social theory.⁴ Finding climate realism to be "entirely compatible with a passionate interest in representations of climate change," especially in the realm of climate fiction, Malm has further embraced diverse (at times scientifically not-so-reliable) articulations of climate change within literature as inspiring expressions of the approach.⁵ It can be argued that in the context of cinema, climate fiction and its attempts at depicting massively distributed objects such as sea level rise, terminal landscapes, mass species extinctions, and geological timescales have also led to a revival of realism, this time as an aesthetic framework that has roots in twentieth-century analog cinema (often associated with humanist realism via Bazin), yet diverges from its anthropocentric moorings significantly in order to speak to twenty-first century ecological imperatives. As Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Clair La Berge argue, "Realisms of today do not operate in the same world of conditions and demands" as those of the nineteenth (or even twentieth) century.⁶ Twenty-first-century realisms have to take into account the fact that the world as we know it is in the course of being irrevocably altered and ecologically destabilized. Beasts of the Southern Wild's (2012) magical realism, which maps a little girl's anxieties about the rising waters in Louisiana onto the image of extinct animals magically coming back to life from melting ice caps; Déjà Vu's (2006) capitalist realism, which sets a terrorist threat in post-Katrina New Orleans, a...