Inconvenience/Truth, 2024.
I’m glad to see culture’s much-needed reckoning with climate catastrophe and smaller-scale battles between environmental safety and the almost foregone conclusion of capitalism. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 and is more known now as a center-left do-gooder’s Cassandra vanity project than as a successful call to action. Since then, sea levels have risen and global surface temperatures have increased. It took years for the residents of Flint, Michigan to have potable water that wouldn’t make them sick, an accomplishment that only came to pass out of the sheer tenacity of the environmental justice movement and the social media attention the cause garnered. And although retailers like the downmarket Shein have a chokehold on purchasing habits in a hyper-inflated economy, there’s now a wave of mainstream pushback against such businesses’ human rights violations and ecological impacts.
The HBO/Max presentation Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion, one such pushback, felt like two documentaries soldered together. But the first — primarily dealing with the exploitation of the young women roped into a hot millennial teen brand — was smartly if disjointedly attached to an investigation of the downstream ramifications of all the product we manufacture and discard at alarming rates, both in terms of the burdens faced by the people of Ghana and Kenya in processing the “dead white man’s clothes” and the harmful effects on local water supplies resulting from the endless textile labor the global North has foisted upon them.
At the movies, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s quietly emotive new feature Evil Does Not Exist is a sly warning shot against resource-extractive cash grabs, in particular a glamping site developed in a rush by a mediocre talent agency on a deadline to spend Covid grant money. Hamaguchi’s community protesters are not NIMBYs and they’re not bound to deep-reaching tribal tradition; they’re a variety of modern people in a serene but not isolated Hudson Valley–like area that values its forests and clean spring water, and they grudgingly accept the project as a done deal but show up at the meeting to put the out-of-their-depths representatives on notice that changes must be made.
Evil is a far more nuanced environmentalist David v. Goliath story than Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), currently running at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre and starring Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli. I didn’t much like the stridency and condescension of Enemy when an activist family friend revived it upstate years ago as a protest against Indian Point, and I still find it an extremely flawed play, and the execution here is shaky. But its message resonates in 2024 in many senses; whether it means to be or not, it ends up not merely being a throwdown at polluters and their enablers.
Enemy’s characters have their own reasons for needing Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s discovery of contaminated water to stay suppressed, and invariably those reasons are about continuing to benefit financially or retain their social standing. There are parallels with America’s bungled Covid response, to be sure. But the timing of the Circle in the Square production dovetails with the current situation on college campuses across America, as the status quo of capital and access to it is of paramount concern to the top brass, and students who’ve taken to the quads get punished for urging their schools to divest from the war machine. (The war machine is not great for the environment either.)
