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Thoughts on the 10:10 film aftermath
10:10’s aborted short film ‘No Pressure’ was… an abortion. Not because of what it was – we see more shocking things on TV, the Internet and film all the time – but rather because of its context. It drove a brutal wedge into an already emotional ideological and political divide, which is entrenched in the West, especially in the US and UK.
People are understandably sensitive about suggestions that they should be blown up. Of course, I get that. And there is a difference between a PSA and an episode of South Park or Family Guy. Never mind that it was a comedy filmmaker – Richard Curtis – who was drafted in to do ‘No Pressure’. I doubt anyone expected polemic ‘edginess’ from someone best known for making us laugh by having a Hugh Grant stutter adorably and make up cute posh swear words like ‘shitting buggery bollocks’. Why couldn’t he have just used Hugh Grant again? Would anyone have gotten so upset if old Hugh had driven his gas guzzling Range Rover into a flooded Thames estuary only to be rescued by a smug Gillian Anderson in a rubber dinghy? Give the people what they want, Richard! You’re Four Weddings and a Funeral, not Brasseye.
I actually laughed the one and only time I watched ‘No Pressure’, because the exploding adolescents caught me off guard – like when John Travolta accidentally shot that guy when the car he was riding in went over a bump in Pulp Fiction. I laughed at the first explosion anyway, and then they just repeated it, eventually flogging a dead Gillian Anderson.
I guess I’m a bad person, desensitized by years of offensive television and horrific online videos. But, I implore you to believe me, it was also an embarrassed laugh, like I so often experience whilst watching Sarah Silverman or Snuff Box. The film also didn’t make any sense, which is always forgivable in comedy, but useless in a PSA.
Anyway, loads of people and organizations of all political and environmental persuasions came out against the video, a curious – but on second thought, not so strange – multi spectrum backlash. Some voiced objection probably for damage control, others certainly jumped on it to further their own agendas. The already sensitive debate heated up, at times revealing serious paranoia, but also the fact that we are not two monolithic blocks: ‘skeptics’ and ‘warmists’, but rather people with a variety of sensibilities, socializations and world views. Sure, we team up on big issues from time to time, but on closer inspection, we kind of don’t. Remember all the alternative protests and meetings by ecologists and proponents of the global justice movement at Copenhagen? No? Well to be fair they didn’t get 1% of the coverage as the UN talks, but they were there and they weren’t all about implementing cap and trade schemes or bullying developing countries either.
I, for one, sympathize with most ecologists, much of the ‘Left’ and the global justice movement, but I won’t stop reading PJ Rourke because he’s a Libertarian Republican. He’s smart, interesting and makes sense. I won’t stop enjoying and admiring brilliant feminist ‘cultural critic’ Camille Paglia because she’s a climate skeptic or even due to her recent statements that Barack Obama’s birth record should be looked into. We need smart people on all sides to articulate what all us stupid people think and why we think it. Many of us feel disenfranchised and misrepresented by those who claim to speak for us and need some help articulating and even some straight up provocation.
What the 10:10 film showed for me was a serious disconnect between its makers and the general public. It happens in Hollywood and obviously in London too. Hell, I can’t claim to be plugged into the vein of Middle America or anywhere else for that matter and I wouldn’t know what kind of climate change short film to make that would tap into the zeitgeist of the common folk – though I do think my Hugh Grant idea is pretty good. I’m taking calls, Franny Armstrong.
Tags: 10:10, climate, film, Gillian Anderson, Hugh Grant, No Pressure, skeptic
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Nah, I’ve been sympathetic and tried to understand, but this is a nonsense debate. Fake outrage, equating an obvious attempt at humor with 9/11 and terrorism is dishonest and absurd and just a political tactic by those who hate environmentalists.
Conservatism = maintaining social ecology. No one gets more threatened than the “haves” when someone suggests they don’t deserve everything they’ve got or may have to stop gutting the planet and living off slave conditions in the name of economic development. Any threat to this social ecology – no matter how plainly unfair and unsustainable it is – causes teeth to be bared and dirty fighting.
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As for skeptics being silenced: Fox News, The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, (hello! NewsCorp??) plus the armies of skeptics that descend and comment on any article relating to climate change. Or have you never read the Guardian comment section (?) Fossil fuel companies love skeptics and have the deepest pockets of all. Please get real.
Of course they don’t want to kill people, they wanted to draw attention to their cause.
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Graham: The impression I get is that climate change advocates simply want their opposition disappeared.
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Climategate provided numerous examples of the top climate scientists conspiring behind the scenes to rig peer reviews, refuse legal FOIA requests, destroy data, and, in one case, report the death of a skeptic as “cheering news.”
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I thank you for posting most of my comments, but I don’t think you have any idea how difficult it is to disagree with climate change advocates without having one’s comments relentlessly censored, deleted, and ridiculed. For those of us who have had that experience, the 10:10 video was disturbingly familiar.
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Deep down the climate change movement is authoritarian and anti-democratic. It does not wish to discuss; it wants to dictate. IMO that is the message of the “No Pressure” film and that is why the horror of the film was invisible to its creators and to many climate change advocates even today.
Graham:
How could I not draw a comparison between this video, 911 and other acts of terrorism?
This video was a direct threat to anyone perceived is being insufficiently motivated.
Children were blown up to get my attention.
That’s terrorism.
Graham – I agree with Jim Lad, as I think do the overwhelming number of responders on every blog I’ve come across, as did the former corporate supporters of 10:10. The critical distinction is the inherently promotional nature of the video. I think everyone is quite numb to the depiction of violence in cinema, TV and popular culture. We are all also very accustomed to the horrible, random death and injury we see in media coverage of real events. The difference here is the intent to persuade. The “No Pressure” video is frequently perceived as an “ad”, and 10:10 proudly has stated their goal to change broader public behavior (for its own good). Even the slightest suggestion of violent coercion would have been poisonous to that goal, and the video went well beyond. It was in bad taste, but it was bad taste with a clear threat to those that disagreed.
Jim Lad – When the film Independence Day was shown in theaters in the US and Republican sentiment was strong against Bill Clinton, many cheered when the aliens blew up the White House. I’m quite sure those same people did not cheer when the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11. What a ridiculous connection and insinuation. I shall try not to be outraged and offended as I would gain nothing from it.
I’m sorry you took the 10:10 film as a threat against your daughter, but you are the one who should be rational, for everyone’s sake.
I have watched the video too many times for my own good.
I just couldn’t find any message in it other than the complete obvious.
There is no wiggle room here. No way that those responsible could claim that they have been misread.
There certainly was no humour to be found.
Caught yourself laughing at the first child being blown up?
Really?
Did you have the same giggle on when the first plane hit one of the twin towers?
What I saw was a blatant threat, aimed directly at my six year old daughter.
Rationalize that.
Jim Smith–> The reaction to the clip betrays the underlying rage and hatred in the oil companies and other big pollutors fellowship and followers of their propaganda – commonalty is so easy to be manipulated.
Well, Jim, if you really think Richard Curtis wants to kill children… this would illustrate the that the makers of this film vastly misjudged the public and how the film would be received. Of course they don’t want to kill people, they wanted to draw attention to their cause. They sort of succeeded in that but obviously not the way they wanted. Don’t confuse a calculated process like filmmaking with some kind of Freudian slip that happens in the heat of an argument, i.e. “I wish you were dead!”. It’s disconnect and miscalculation, rather than mistakenly revealing some sinister agenda. I mean, look who’s involved :S
These videos betray the underlying rage and hatred in the ecological movement. They know their movement is failing to convince people so they want to introduce the message that people who oppose their movement should die. Yes, I get the humour and generally love macabre humour, however the humour betrays an underlying belief that people who oppose the movement are worthy of death. It is the killing of children that moots the argument that they just wanted to kill the “lazy people”. When people think killing children for humour is funny, it does indeed betray something deeply deranged and down right sinister.
Hi Herb. Thanks for your comment. I wouldn’t throw in the towel if I was in charge of 10:10. I think it’s a good initiative, besides, if they folded that would be heralded as a victory by their opponents too. It’s all about spin and PR, however, which is something that I have never been much interested in or fully understood.
I like your points Graham. What are your thoughts about the near future? It seems that skeptics/deniers will benefit from the continued existence of the 10:10 organization, as it represents a permanently embarrassed and vulnerable opponent. Conversely, the larger AGW movement would be able to move forward much more easily if 10:10 simply faded away and “took the fall”. Agree?
Just to note, having now watched the video for the 2nd time, it isn’t really “deniers” or “skeptics” being blown up, but complacent, lazy people who just can’t be bothered (who may also be skeptical – the office workers who might not be “quite convinced” in the words of their boss, could allude to skeptics).
A common reposte by “fans” or advocates of the video is that you’d have to be “paranoid” to think the Green movement really wants to blow up it’s opponents.
Why paranoid I ask ?
It is a common feature of extremists that they believe they are doing it in a good cause; that the ends justify the means. If your cause is saving the world, is it not logical that any means necessary are justified to achieve it?
We have a problem in my country with animal rights protesters who have taken to terrorist methods against businesses they oppose. James Jay Lee did it in America. Greenpeace recently used the “we know where you live” line to warn deniers. When Professor Ehrlich forecast the imminent end of the world through overpopulation in the 1970s (saying most of us would be dead by 2000) the US government went so far as to put pressure on developing countries to introduce mass sterilisation. Green philosophers like Linkola say much the same thing today.
People who think we should actually go that far are a small minority.
But its presence has an influence on the wider movement. There is a tendency towards intolerance and dehumanisation of dissent. An attempt to make it socially unacceptable, evidence of stupidity or malice, not worth listening to.
And it’s already happened. Teachers already do political advocacy for Green politics, and it would be a brave child who stood up against a teacher and the rest of the class to express a contrary view. Employers already do the same, mostly for more cynical reasons it has to be said, and there are few employees independent enough to speak up against the boss. No, mostly people will stick their hands up in support in public, and then ignore it in private. They don’t believe, but they’re not going to make their own lives any harder by opposing it.
But that’s just the first stage. Once you have made it socially unacceptable to speak in defence of scepticism, you can then introduce stronger methods of encouragement without anyone being able to object. Not execution, of course, but regulation and compulsion.
And that’s what scares people about this video – that it portrays a ridiculously exaggerated version of this already worrying tendency. We’re not worried that you’re actually planning to do it, we’re worried that you’re already in the mindset where you would find it funny. Where you don’t even seem to notice that the authoritarian message it sends is horrifying.
The scariest bit of the movie was not the explosions, but the teacher’s speech leading up to it.
I’m sure that next time a teacher or employer tries to get people to follow along, the words “no pressure” will make an amusing and useful riposte.