Intermedial Apocalypticism and the Growing Anthropocene Crises
Intermedial Apocalypticism and the Growing Anthropocene Crises

Summary/Abstract: The central concern of “Intermedial Apocalypticism and the Growing Anthropocene Crises” is to understand the complexities involved in answering why, despite the saturation of filmic media with progressive messages about the environment, things continue to get worse. The observations primarily grow out of discussions of the 2015 Disney production of Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland and, to a lesser degree, of a segment of the NBC fantasy comedy series The Good Place, and it uses other material as relevant. Expanding upon one of the steps in Jørgen Bruhn’s proposed three-step methodology for intermedial ecocriticism, this article suggests that in addressing the formal qualities—the music, the acting, the editing, the cinematography, and so on—of film, questions about scale, physical and ethical proximity, and narrativization are, perhaps, critical. Understanding how media present these may lead to a better grasp of how and why some media strategies are effective at inspiring changes in behavior, and others perhaps less so.

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