End of the Road or New Beginnings? Stephen Lee Naish Reflects on the Post-Catastrophe Film’s Relationship to Climate Change

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Stephen Lee Naish is a long-time fan of the 1990s blockbuster disaster movie, so when he came across trailers for more recent films like The Domestics, Awake and The Silence, he was eager to experience the action. But the films were not what he expected. They were slower. “The level of destruction was scaled back or totally absent,” he says. As surviving a world-changing catastrophe took centre stage, the films themselves became meditations on the human condition. “They were, perhaps unknowingly, proposing a warning of what is to come and offering a roadmap away from it,” he says.

Recognizing that films like these occupied a moment that was neither full-out disaster nor post-apocalypse led to the writing of Post-Catastrophe Film: Cinematic Visions in the Aftermath of Disaster, published in May by Intellect Books. In this recent email exchange with Mary Baxter, one of NiCHE‘s editors, Naish discusses his book—the Kingston, Ontario media critic’s tenth—and why the post-catastrophe genre is so handy for creatively exploring climate change adaptation.

Mary Baxter:  What is the post-catastrophe narrative in a nutshell?

Stephen Lee Naish: It is the messy, often humdrum bit between realizing you are screwed and finding a way to deal with it. The narratives of the films I discuss in the book begin immediately after a catastrophic event and involve characters adjusting towards a new reality without fully arriving at that new reality.

Baxter: Why do we need to distinguish this type of narrative from its companions, the disaster and post-apocalyptic narratives?

Naish: What is interesting about post-catastrophe narratives is that they explore the immediate reaction and confusion to a disaster in a real and relatable way and then proceed with the work that has to be performed in order to create a livable, or in most cases, just survivable future, again in a way that is realistic to the audience. In a typical Hollywood disaster movie, the route to survival is always to fight against the event, be heroic, perform superhuman feats, and attempt to re-establish life as it was. Deep Impact and Armageddon are good examples of that. The post-apocalyptic film usually takes place way off in the future. The social constructs have been established, and they differ wildly from our current forms of government and society. In most cases the post-apocalyptic future is bleak and authoritarian , but there is an exciting story that involves a scrappy underdog that challenges that construct. Films like The Hunger Games, or Mad Max: Fury Road present this futuristic existence. Post-catastrophe narratives show us the part that leads from a disaster towards a post-apocalyptic future. The world they present on screen is very much like our own— and right now, with climate destruction, degrading infrastructure, AI uncertainty, precarious work, and economic instability, it can feel a bit like living inside one of these narratives.   

Baxter: What is your favourite post-catastrophe film and why?

Naish: I have a real soft spot for director Mike T. Nelson’s The Domestics, which I discuss at length in the book and is really the film that signaled the whole concept to me.  The film takes place after a chemical is released into the atmosphere that indiscriminately kills half the population of the United States. The ” disaster” moment is addressed only in a prologue and shows a formation of airplanes pumping out trails of toxic black smoke against a clear blue sky. It’s a striking image. The rest of the narrative follows society’s fall into barbarism through the lens of a young suburban couple traveling across the county. It’s quite a wacky film with lots of elaborately dressed up gangs that roam the desolate landscape, but it also endeavours to show that some folk will try and create a better future and some normalcy out of the misery they are placed in.

Three children with their backs to the camera stand at the entrance of an elementary school. They are watching several large planes above spraying a smoky gas. This is a still from the 2018 film, The Domestics.
Plumes of toxic gas pour across the United States  in a grand societal reset, Mike P. Nelson (dir.),  The Domestics, 2018. USA: Orion Classics. 

Baxter: Your discussion of the marginalization of the genre that so frequently tackles climate change is really interesting. Speculative narrative often gets a bad rap and yet many of our most treasured creative works are speculative. It is as if they achieve their classic status by somehow being extracted from their genre as they are beamed up to the spaceship High Art. What are the implications when the genre that is most suited to creatively treating climate change is devalued in this way?

Naish: I love Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement and I cite it in my book several times, but I also take issue with its dismissal of the speculative science fiction and horror genres to communicate ideas and scenarios that give us pause for thought. I just read Tim Weed’s speculative sci-fi novel The Afterlife Project and it was one of the most profound books I’ve read in a long time. Of course, the book sits within the sci-fi genre so it may not have the reach it could if it was designated as “serious” literature. There is a shift occurring though, which I think is worth commenting on. The horror genre, which some of the films I discuss in my book fall into, is gaining serious critical praise for showing how it can comment on our contemporary fears about AI, capitalism, and climate change. Studies such as Capitalism Hates You by Joshua Gooch offer a brilliant insight into the genre’s power, and horror films are lighting up the box office right now. 

Baxter: Throughout your book you emphasize film’s materialities–the characters used, the type of scenes depicted, the elements used to compose the scenes. Watching f ilm is a more immersive and sensory experience than reading—there are images, sound and music. Its making also involves a greater breadth of material concerns : actors, sets, props, film equipment, special effects, editing suites, money changing hands, physical locations. Both filmmaking and climate change are the outcomes of myriad factors and processes of which we are not fully aware. Is there a relationship between the complex substance of film and its potential to address our relationships to climate change?

Naish: That is such an interesting question. Film has the best opportunity to convey the negative impacts of climate change. It has the furthest reach in terms of audience share. It can be understood on a purely visual basis. It can change hearts and minds through storytelling. It is also a moment you might have a communal experience if you happen to watch it in a cinema. You are right that a film involves a multitude of people and places for it to be made, yet it is often referred to as a singular auteur vision from one individual director. That’s our method of understanding the complexity of the medium. It is too hard to comprehend the hundred or so people that contributed, or the timescale in which the film was made. The same could be said for the climate crisis. There are too many involved factors to consider. It takes a long time to reveal itself. There is not just one climate emergency, there are many and it fluctuates. We risk losing our grasp of it because it is so monumental. 

“Film involves a multitude of people and places for it to be made, yet it is often referred to as a singular auteur vision from one individual director. That’s our method of understanding the complexity of the medium.

“It is too hard to comprehend the hundred or so people that contributed, or the timescale in which the film was made. The same could be said for the climate crisis. There are too many involved factors to consider. It takes a long time to reveal itself.”

Baxter: The volume of films that tackled the aftermath of a plague catastrophe which appeared three years ahead of the COVID epidemic, a point you tackle in your book, is astonishing. What do you make of that?

Naish: Because of globalization and rapid urbanization, we have been warned for decades that we were overdue a global pandemic and we were even given brief flashes of what one might look like with the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak and the 2009 swine flu pandemic, so I think it has been in the collective subconsciousness for a while. Of course, plagues and epidemics, much like climate breakdown, have been happening in places outside of most people’s news sphere for decades, so it was a shock when the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe and we in the West were suddenly affected by lockdowns and quarantine measures. I recall people on social media at the time posting about watching films like Contagion, 12 Monkeys, and It Comes at Night to gain some insight into the pandemic, which I think is a testament to how films can give us understanding. My emphasis within the book is to take a film’s message seriously and implement those ideas now as opposed to rewatching in light of current events to find lessons that we chose to ignore. 

Publicity photo of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner as Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk from the television program Star Trek. In front of them is a model of the popular series Starship Enterprise.
Publicity photo of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner as Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk from the television program Star Trek. Source: NBC Television

Baxter: Where is the hope in the post-catastrophe narrative ?

Naish: The films I cover in the book often emphasize the hopelessness of the situations they present, however there is always a small thread, often related to human connection, community, and love for one another that could lead humanity to a livable future. That is the hope that must be grasped within these films, but also within our own lives. In the book I devote a whole chapter to the world seen in the Star Trek franchise as one attainable future. Really the only hopeful one I could offer. It presents a post-apocalyptic utopia built upon numerous past disasters of war and environmental destruction and a prolonged post-catastrophe era that led to it. It shows that we can problem solve and work our way out if we can move together, not as citizens of nations, but as a global species. 

This exchange has been edited for clarity and length.

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Mary Baxter

MARY BAXTER, is a PhD candidate in The Department of History at Western University and a journalist and editor. She specializes in the history of the Great Lakes region and in issues to do with agriculture, rural affairs, the environment and southwestern Ontario.

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