Ecological Film Imaginaries and Environmentally (Un)Sustainable Futures: Case Study of The Age of Stupid (2009) and Zone of Interest (2023)

Abstract

As the world grows more and more out of kilter with wars and fake news, the climate crisis is being ignored, leaving eco-media scholars striving to uncover new ways of keeping it firmly in the spotlight. This paper draws on extensive scholarship across eco-film studies, using narratives I have not analysed before—The Age of Stupid and Zone of Interest—to speak to contrasting ways of representing and communicating the crisis. While in the academy and within particular strands of environmental communications (EC), eco-textual analysis is often sidelined and replaced with a focus on empirical audience and behavioural research, together with more political economy types of investigations. Nevertheless, there remains a central place for understanding and appreciating how stories and images function, both in stylistic and thematic terms, while deploying new creative imaginaries to represent the climate crisis and provoke debate over future, more sustainable models of living. These readings will be analysed through an ethics of care lens while being underpinned by environmental media literacy, which can be argued to drive pro-active engagement and consideration.

1. A Growing Environmental Crisis: Time and Space out of Kilter

Many eco-film scholars have argued that fictional movies that show the possible consequences of climate change remain useful for illustrating various global climate challenges and can even help catalyse radical transformation (see Moore, 2017; López et al., 2024). Narratives often function as simulations of fictional worlds in the viewers’ minds (Mar & Oatley, 2008), and hence, audiences can at least vicariously experience what it means to live in a radically changed climate. Or, as philosopher Dan Shaw asserts, film is a ‘wonderful medium in which to express ethical philosophies, because it can situate ethical concepts in a concrete context and show them in a positive or negative light’ (Shaw, 2017). Shaw has written extensively about ethics in film in his 2012 volume, proceeding to assert that such films can be seen as offering ‘utopian visions with politically transformative power, or as conditioning vehicles of ideological manipulation. The former approach focuses on the narrative content of a film, and the conditions of its production and reception; the latter highlights its symptomatic ideological meanings. Both help us to appreciate how movies can express ethical philosophies and attitudes’ (Shaw, 2017).

Another philosopher, Roman Krznaric, neatly summarises a core dilemma for addressing the climate crisis in ‘The Good Ancestor’ (2020), suggesting, ‘we treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please’. He draws a parallel with the British colonisation of his home country, Australia, which was built on a legal concept, ‘terra nullius’—‘nobody’s land’—to justify its actions. Krznaric suggests that we currently see the future as ‘tempus nullius’—‘nobody’s time’—which allows us to ignore the impact of today’s actions on tomorrow’s world (Krznaric, 2020).1 This tension is articulated by the films under discussion, while looking to the future of climate ecocide or even going back to our Nazi past, which, I argue, can help to re-awaken an urgent need for climate and ethical re-imagining.

Unfortunately, envisioning the possibility of a dystopic climate crisis future, much less securing consensus around genocide in war-torn areas of the world at present, is not high up on the political, social, or even cultural agenda at present—especially as witnessed in America, where the climate-denying Trump era has acquired a new lease of life. Short-term and insular thinking appears very appealing to many in power, ignoring the harsh reality of crossing so many precious planetary boundaries, much less recognising the need for global solidarity and multilateral co-operation in securing our future wellbeing.

The Age of Stupid faces this dilemma head-on through the lens of an empathetic archivist looking back over a troubled history, which has resulted in a dystopic climate future. Its fictional structure, I suggest, helps to support a powerful environmentalist thesis for our troubled times, recalling, for instance, Martin-Jones’ (2019) Cinema against DoubleThink. Kent’s (2021) review emphasises how it envisions contemporary ‘neoliberalism being positioned as the most recent stage of colonial modernity, which crushes the individual and their physicality’. Martin-Jones concludes his study with a return to the ethical stakes of the problem: ‘how can these films aid us in living a non-fascist life?’ Furthermore, he teasingly suggests that the ‘revelation that there are other pasts and alternative histories that undermine the doublethink of the Eurocentric and colonial narratives is vital in viewing the world anew’ (p. 214). Both fictional narratives focused on in this paper assist in varying ways with such necessary re-imagining, as the storylines strive to support a more benevolent ethics of care to help audiences address the climate crisis.

2. An Ethics of Care Coupled with Environmental Justice

The influential ethical theorist Emmanuel Levinas informs the growing literature in film studies, recalling especially the representational concept of otherness. Levinas (1906–1995) regards the demise of humanism, coupled with the horrific trauma of the Holocaust that marked the 20th century, (linked, of course, with the aforementioned ‘double-think’ neoliberal faux fascists and climate deniers of late), as fundamentally challenging to robust models of ethics. At the same time, over-rulers have always been profoundly wary of the so-called rhetorics of nature and of connectedness to place. For Levinas, ethics is precisely the disruption of egoism, of a life that centres on the self and is thus focused around decentring the subject. While also laying the foundation for the disruption of any ethical stance that places too much emphasis on the instrumental dimensions of the self’s relations with other human or other-than-human beings (Hatley et al., 2012, p. 5). Hence, addressing a deep ethics of care—even if framed ‘against the grain’ (see Kotsopoulos, 2001)—as evident by the (fascist) malevolent values and actions embraced by the main protagonists in this paper, can nonetheless help call attention to their absence and importance for a future healthy human eco-system.

For example, as illustrated in Brereton (2026), the comic parodic tropes embedded in Don’t Look Up (2021) initially highlight the lack of any form of ethics of care, which is ironically personified in a future American female president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep)—echoing the disquieting representational mother figure in Zone of Interest—playing a kind of GOP media ringmaster, pushing any concerns around consensual politics regarding the environment or other issues totally out of kilter. Reflecting a regressive transformation that is being expedited across many right-wing governments of late, filling the vacuum of a democratic deficit, which has infected otherwise stable political systems. Such political ruptures have mitigated against dealing with our ongoing global climate crisis, which in this case is coded by a more ‘immediate’ threat to life on earth with a comet about to strike. But the leader ‘of the free world’ is at best indifferent to the crisis, while only thinking of ratings, electoral strategies, and a reluctance to be the party pooper. Sounds familiar, yet by counter-intuitively coding female anti-heroes as embodying the worst excesses of patriarchal norms, rather than conventionally embodying a nurturing form of ethics of care, it calls attention to itself. Reading ‘against the grain’, one might go so far as to suggest that such negative archetypes speak more directly to mass audiences through ironic over-statement and might hopefully help to nudge viewers who are less easily seduced by more subtle (eco-feminist) narratives.

All of which, of course, is a long way from promoting an ethics of care that is frequently coded as female. Held (2006) cogently argues that emotions are typically considered and rejected in rationalistic moral theories that in turn tend to undermine universal moral norms. While drawing on eco-feminist studies, ‘the ethics of care appreciate emotions and relational capabilities that enable morally concerned persons in actual interpersonal contexts to understand what would be best’ (p. 11). By all accounts, justice and ethics of care need to be linked together, while drawing on ‘interweaving values such as sensitivity, empathy, responsiveness, and taking responsibility’, where we could ‘perhaps more adequately judge where the boundaries of the market should be’ (p. 119). Furthermore, the ethics of care ‘clearly implies that society must recognise its responsibilities to its children and others who are dependent, enabling the best possible bringing up and educating of its future generations, appropriate responses to its members in need of health care, and assistance with the care of dependents’ (p. 159).

Taking responsibility for global environmental wellbeing ought to become among the central concerns of a caring global policy. Traditionally, eco-feminist for instance, ‘offer an ethic of care for nature and call for a radically different kind of economic progress. They ask that development be sustainable, ecologically sound, nonpatriarchal, nonexploitative, and community oriented’ (p. 166). Consequently, the lack of care parodied in this eco-allegory might in turn serve to call attention to such necessary ethical values if we are to survive as a species.

3. Ecocide: End of the World Storylines

All the while, crudely constructed binaries that polarise postcolonial/Western positions, much less ideology/ecology, are no longer helpful in articulating or constructing more progressive forms of active environmental engagement. Such off-the-shelf binaries, as reified in Don’t Look Up, need to be re-appraised and re-evaluated, as world cinemas and storytelling protocols fluctuate across the three-dimensional nexus of local/global (glocal), indigenous/native, community/individual, or other cultural, environmental, and regional perspectives.

Scholars ought to approach environmental ethics and universal models of sustainability through a more refined lens, while engaging with human agents who are often (re-)presented at the cutting edge of care ethics.2 Furthermore, by developing a more productive and reflexive sense of place, especially through the lens of greater civic identity and environmental connectivity supporting an ethics of care, film can help re-imagine and even promote a more benevolent and co-operative set of practical protocols, mapped across our increasingly polarised planetary boundaries. Ostensibly, a clear sense of benevolent (environmentally productive) place is perverted in Zone of Interest, while all but obliterated or confused in The Age of Stupid, yet I would contend it nonetheless sets up a key element of both films’ appeal. Cinematic time and space are cogently addressed in both films. While Zone of Interest focuses on one specific (miniscule) space-time period, The Age of Stupid transcends both space and time, as it weaves its intersecting storylines across so many geographical spaces and time periods.

Within environmental discourse, academics refer to the ‘Anthropocene’, which speaks to an environmentally driven sense of time-space, while specifying a period in which human activity has ruled the earth. Yet, at the same time, it probably is of little use to reinstate a counter-totalising notion like, for instance, Lovelock’s Gaia, which will ‘wreck “her” mythical violence upon us as punishment’ because of our inability to protect the planet. This is called attention to in The Age of Stupid, with the director’s opening sequence of the making of the universe and our own fragile global struggle, suggesting that there is a mystery that cannot be reduced to myth. Perhaps this realisation would guarantee the first initial steps of global intelligence that could be placed over a form of global stupidity (Spariosu, 2004). While The Age of Stupid may not have clear responses to such concerns, at least it does enough by simply raising these issues.

Or recalling Geoff Mead’s review piece in The Guardian (30 April 2014) titled ‘Sustainability Needs New Narratives between Catastrophe and Utopia’, where attention is called to the deep ecology scholar Thomas Berry, who affirms, ‘[I]t’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into the world, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story’. At the same time, we also need to be cognisant of the dangers of striving to go back to faulty master narratives. This new (post-disruptive) story must involve a close connection with our fragile environment and looking beyond our own selfish desires.3 Some of the most explicit, albeit allegorical, Hollywood tales that address these environmental concerns over the last decade have been generically characterised as ‘end of the world’ narratives.

Recalling The Age of Stupid, Don’t Look Up, or even the more art-house Melancholia (2011), which clearly address the real and present dangers we face, by dramatically (re)presenting various forms of environmental ecocide (see Brereton, 2016, pp. 186–207). One of the aims of critical environmental analysis gets at the nature of the text in the double sense: it is a possible meaning (remaining conscious, of course, that ecocritical interpretation is always provisional), alongside its specific way of referring to the natural (scientific) world. The heightened romantic imagery presented in these environmental morality tales feeds off a long history of poetic and literary pastoralism, coupled with a measure of dystopic foreboding. These apocalyptic environmental cautionary tales speak to contemporary fears and worries that marry personal psychological and global planetary imbalances, using the dramatic shorthand of catastrophic environmental destruction, as most pointedly referenced through the malevolent agency of an American president.

Notably, a key component evident within the preliminary analysis of cinematic landscapes—both before and after a catastrophe—remains that of its characters’ inherent vulnerability.4 Protagonists remain particularly vulnerable through their own psychological imbalance, and it must be noted that they end up trying to cope with a radically unstable world, both globally and in more personal ways. As often suggested, an economic and social disaster being translated into profound and visible injustices is usually the antecedent of natural disasters and related humanitarian crises (Hewitt, 1983; Troon, 2024). This is also true of the specific tales examined in this paper.

Eco-film philosopher Adrian Ivakhiv remains most succinct in capturing the pleasures and tensions embedded within such narratives when he announces: ‘[I]f I claim that I have been moved by Melancholia—I have been moved along with that image and have in some sense lived and experienced it.’ It provides an ‘exercise of real imagination, which means the development of a kind of muscle that poises me for an engaged responsiveness to a certain present or future possibility’ (in López et al., 2024, p. 337).5 Melancholia certainly remains one of the most finely tuned examples of this form of creative engagement, which at the same time serves to provoke debate around environmental ethics. Nevertheless, attempts to extend examination to a more mainstream corpus of narratives and through a range of environmental and ethical lenses remain important in addressing so many interconnecting global environmental and ethical dilemmas.

4. Promoting Sustainable Ethical Development in the Media: Hitting the Audience’s Sweet Spot

Incidentally, the turn towards ‘solutions journalism’ is currently being mobilised at least across ‘broadsheet’ journalism’s response to our climate crisis (see Thier & Lin, 2022, alongside a range of recent publications).6 While audio-visual fictional storytelling has some way to go in codifying clear responses, as discussed in this paper, all the while acknowledging the challenges and limitations of such media artefacts. Pietari Kääpä, in a Special Issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, outlines how scholars like Benjamin Thevenin perceive the commercial roots of much eco-rhetoric as a potential fallacy, while recalling an ‘Adornian’ appreciation of the culture industry (in Kääpä, 2013, p. 110). There remains so much off-the-cuff criticism of commercially driven narratives that is not always helpful. In any case, eco-scholars ought to be shaken out of their (literary, high-cultural) textual fixation and develop robust new models of analysing film across a wide range of cultural and environmental perspectives. Recalling, for example, the work of scholars like the late Parham (2015), who clearly outlined the tensions between those eco-scholars who assert that almost all media texts can support an ecological agenda, as against those who privilege more avant-garde, or specifically what is characterised as slow cinema (see Boer, 2025) and its more explicitly ideologically leaning texts.

One wonders, for instance, if my eco-feminist reading of Katniss’s portrayal as an eco-warrior in The Hunger Games (Brereton, 2016, pp. 86–92) resonates in this way with audiences. Or, in a more understated manner, if one could insinuate that the otherwise crass opening exposition of Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) might critically speak to audiences munching their popcorn, as it (unconsciously) sets up a critique of fast food confectionery and unsustainable food consumption. A discarded branded chocolate wrapper is shown floating into the air-conditioning system, causing the genetically engineered dinosaurs to break free from their sterile environment. Or most recently, gauging viewer reception of the poorly reviewed latest instalment in the eco-franchise Avatar: Fire and Water (2025), with its ‘indulgent’ over three hours+ promotion of indigenous eco-warriors, literally fighting for their lives with the assistance of ‘raw’ digital nature and its amphibious creatures (see Wang & Li, 2025). Might such otherwise facile, big-budget examples correspond with how new generational audiences recreate a form of intertextual eco-gameplay?

More specifically, concentrating on the two contrasting narratives explored in this paper, which explicitly in one case and more covertly in the Nazi film also attempt to uncover a ‘sweet spot’ across the broad range of exposition around eco-narration coupled with audience identification. By all accounts, my ecocritical reading uses against-the-grain narrative analysis to help suggest a (deep) ecological and thematic preoccupation. Recalling Lacanian film theorists who tend to ‘call this process the oscillation between the unregulated desires of the Imaginary and the culturally sanctioned meaning-making of the Symbolic’ (McGowan & Kundle, 2004, pp. xi–xxix). At least viewing what can be characterised as environmental filmmaking from this so-called sweet spot, might continue to be regarded as deeply political, rather than being dismissed as ephemeral and not conforming to a predetermined psychological model of spectatorial activity.

In an era of accelerating ecological crisis and planetary interdependence, ‘the role of narrative in shaping ethereal relationships between humans’, much less with non-humans, has ‘become a critical concern across literature, film and environmental studies’. Going on to explore how storytelling techniques constantly address ‘ecological ethics by decentring anthropocentric subjectivity and reconfiguring narrative temporality and agency’ (Bobaru, 2025, p. 137). Most pointedly, eco-scholars like Morton and Garrard ‘have noted that when non-human elements are considered, they disrupt the old rigid ways of thinking’ (Bobaru, 2025, p. 138). I have also noticed this when re-examining the growing literature on animal welfare and care ethics for my revised Environmental Ethics and Film volume. All of which feeds into the call of empirical ecocriticism to investigate a core assumption of many ecocritics, namely ‘that environmentally engaged narratives have a positive impact on readers’ attitudes, feelings, and behaviour in relation to the more than human world’ (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020, p. 9).

As eco-film and media scholars deeply concerned with the protection of the environment, while specifically affirming the ethical rights of humans as victims of wars, genocide, and all forms of (climate) injustice, we strive to re-construct new modes of textual analysis and understanding that can engender an inclusive dialogue around eco-cinema, a dialogue that keeps us attuned to the sense of coexistence that is the hallmark of ecological thinking (Tong, 2013, p. 123).

Environmental and ethical scholar Holmes Rolston III continues to wonder out loud, can and should humans win or lose when they ‘do the right thing’ in caring for the flora and fauna of our planetary eco-systems? Recognising that within this contemporary world, life is often defined as reifying a utilitarian model of economic interaction, foregrounding value gain and loss. ‘There must be winners and losers among the humans who are helped or hurt by the conditions of their environment’. But we ought to counter-argue that caring ‘properly for the natural world can combine with a strategy for sustainability, a win-win solution… If we are in harmony with nature, everyone wins’ (Rolston, 1988/1994, p. 218). Of course, this somewhat simplistic and utilitarian correlation around use/benefit can also be problematised if not contested, as evident in (eco-)Nazi ideology, which often supports first-wave environmental strategy, by simply promoting conservation of nature and all its beauty, above all other care ethics.

Yet, where possible, such ‘easy gains’ must be highlighted more clearly in this ever-fractious and polarised world we live in, where ‘bad actors’ often can control the narrative with their one-dimensional, anti-environmental messaging. Unfortunately, like most areas of investigation, once you go deeper into environmental problem-solving—as, for instance, new forms of solutions journalism strive to address—the difficulties appear to proliferate and often further serve to deaden any resolve to uncover clear, systemic, much less consensus-driven solutions. As is evident, for example, on the global scale, with yearly COP climate meetings between countries struggling to come up with viable multilateral climate justice solutions.

Meanwhile, scientists and other specialist stakeholders continue to find it hard to understand the heuristics and dynamics of the public agora, beyond ascribing an often un-theorised notion that communications and media are needed to fulfil a ‘knowledge deficit’, in an attempt to proselytise various publics and stakeholders across the globe concerning the inherent benefits of protective environmentalism. While at the same time cautioning all stakeholders around simply replicating fears and concerns about the climate crisis. But of course, like Pandora’s Box, the creative imaginary of film remains an unpredictable and imperfect ‘Public Sphere’, or, as some describe it, a political ‘black box’ (see Martin-Jones, 2019), making it difficult to face up to the long-term consequences of climate change, which The Age of Stupid most explicitly engages with. This polemical film project was group-funded and driven by a deep environmental agenda, unlike most filmic productions, and thereby not controlled or bounded by an ever-present commercial imperative. At the same time, recognising that more benevolent and ‘independent’ art-house and public service media have their own intrinsic difficulties, often most pointedly not always appealing to a mass audience. All the while, one can proselytise both for and against an environmental agenda, while also sparking audiences to respond in sometimes contradictory ways and bearing little relationship to the original intent.

5. Smart Digital Environmental Allegories: The Age of Stupid (2009)

At the outset, it would appear that a more direct, even polemical approach is needed to break through the fog of polarising war narratives and fake news, as is evident with the relative success of Don’t Look Up (see Brereton, 2026). Meanwhile, the direct appeal of The Age of Stupid appears more prescient now in the current global crisis, where direct climate action is badly needed. It presents itself as a documentary fiction about ecological risk and environmental injustice across different geographical regions and begins with a voice-over by an aged archivist, played by the late Pete Postlethwaite. The storyline structure presents an apparently opaque historical-science fictional re-imaging of a dystopic future. ‘We are writing the year 2055, London is flooded, the Sydney Opera House is up in flames, the Taj Mahal is destroyed, and Las Vegas is literally drowning in sand; what is left of humanity lives a miserable life in make-shift shelters and refugee camps’. The audience is invited to accompany him on a journey into the past and ponder with him the two important questions that seem to torment him, alongside many environmentalists: ‘Why didn’t we save ourselves, when we could? And ‘What does that say about us as a species?’ (Weik von Mossner, 2013, p. 108).

Being ostensibly both hyper-smart and polemical, The Age of Stupid nonetheless portrays a futuristic, chaotic world, forged as a consequence of ignorance and greed. But this remains somewhat counterproductive, according to Mike Hulme, who argues that such narratives are primarily designed to frame climate change as a ‘mega-problem awaiting, demanding, a mega-solution’ (Hulme, 2009, p. 333). This dilemma is exacerbated across current geo-political scenarios by more contentious wars and global conflicts, as discussed earlier. Alternatively, one must appreciate and accept that human feelings and beliefs are thoroughly entangled with the longer-term dilemma of our climate crisis. Environmental problems and concerns for all, encompassing an ethics of care, are not simply a ‘knowledge deficit’ issue; if that were so, then the problem would have been solved decades ago. Hence, it is inferred that polemical modes of storytelling tend to be less effective in speaking to mass audiences, as climate-based complexities are not effectively moderated through such narratives. All of which belies the knee-jerk parodic influences of ultra-polemical films like Don’t Look Up.

Consequently, provocative eco-films should be excavated for their quotient of often unconscious engagement with the environmental crisis, emanating from a belief that these narratives tend to be more influential in the longer term, through building up a range of ethical protocols and engaging narrative cues. These cues tend to speak to majority audiences within their comfort zones, using tools of identification and empathy, and especially through narrative closure across a range of fictions. This strategy, for example, was examined in my eco-textual analysis across a range of Hollywood readings since Brereton (2005), and most pointedly, for example, in my reading of The Constant Gardener (2005), which ends with the apparent suicide of the main protagonist, but which I read as an eco-spiritual denouement (Brereton, 2016, pp. 151–158). Such films, including The Age of Stupid, speak across broad thematic concerns around (post)modern, smart, and other types of generic cinemas, as they foreground more open forms of engagement with human jeopardy in nature and the environment.7

Yet most pointedly, eco-scholar Mike Hulme concludes that we should consider climate change as just one of a range of global ‘wicked problems’, which ‘afflict open, complex, and imperfectly understood systems, and are beyond the range of mere technical knowledge and traditional forms of governance’ (p. 334). Hulme’s striking reconceptualization of climate change as an imaginative opportunity, rather than simply a problem to be ‘solved’, also suggests new directions for pro-active ecocriticism. This might be regarded as a core eco-textual interpretational axiom and strategy for the films explored in this paper, and future research might hopefully also help to feed into new forms of solutions journalism. By examining historical and cross-cultural perceptions of risk through analysing representations of climate change in the literature and film (without looking simply for the best and most effective model), it remains a major preoccupation (see Hulme, 2009, pp. 340–364).

I would further concur with Sean Cubitt, who insinuates ‘[T]hat attention to the past is especially necessary when the environment appears in crisis, a crisis that in various ways denies the possibility of a future’. Neither ‘apocalypse nor utopia will arrive the day after tomorrow. The process is longer, slower, more banal’. Welling up from popular media, however, ‘are visions and stories that unveil a common awareness of complexity. Sloganeering is no response. The yearning and the love are real enough, as are the fears, and most of all the sense that the world has grown into a fabulously interconnected web’ (Cubitt 139 in Rust et al., 2013).8 These eco-films addressed in this paper speak to Cubitt’s assertions, basically leaving the Age of Stupid more sloganeering in its response, while Zone of Interest appears more reflexive, albeit locked into a localised historical sphere of environmental ethical engagement.

Eco-film scholars constantly seek out and address what might be the most productive strategy, while striving to promote the deep ecological mantra that ‘everything is connected’, which in turn hopefully serves to kick-start a more effective, pro-active environmental ethical perspective. However, illustrating, much less proving, that film and all other forms of media have a measurable or direct effect on audiences, remains open to question.9

Most notably, Amitav Ghosh has written of the need for non-realist genres such as fantasy and science fiction to represent the global spatialities and long temporalities of the Anthropocene era (Ghosh, 2017, p. 24; Fay, 2018). In this vein, David Ingram suggests that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid anticipates this theoretical move, by drawing on the realist genre of expository documentary to present complex ideas about climate change, while also including a science-fictional framed story to add the necessary long temporal scale to its discussion about climate change (Ingram in López et al., 2024, p. 317).

Armstrong has explained that the original inspiration for her film’s structure was Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), a fictional film about international drug trafficking, which combines in separate storylines the perspectives of different people who never actually meet, but whose actions nevertheless affect each other. Basically, the idea was to uncover the interdependencies that connect the people who appear in the film, which in turn feeds into basic environmental literacy around how ‘everything is connected’. This random-complex structure intermingling documentary and fictional elements also feeds off contemporary ‘smart film’ aesthetics (see Brereton, 2012). But later in the production process, the director felt the series of random stories—including a focus on Shell Oil in Nigeria and their abuse of power regarding fossil fuel resources across a poorly developed region of the world, coupled with an entrepreneur who became obsessed with the idea of replacing all railroad travel in India with cheap air travel—needed a spine to link these isolated stories together. They came up with the idea of an archivist looking back on world history, which is encapsulated by the ‘age of stupid’.

Howell (2011) helpfully carried out some initial audience research on the film in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she randomly selected 244 people who attended the film for her three-part study. Her findings show that a significant percentage of respondents felt a ‘sense of urgency’ and that only a very small percentage (about 10%) ‘expressed a sense of depression’ on experiencing the film (Howell, 2011, p. 181). These results appear to suggest that the inclusion of a fictional frame narrative that visually represented a devastated future Earth made a strong impression on viewers. But as Weik von Mossner noticed, there remains a problem, since her audience sample remains atypical of the general public in that they already exhibit high levels of concern about climate change in choosing to seek out a film on the topic. Furthermore, the effects of the film tended to be short-lived, as illustrated when Howell sent a follow-up questionnaire 10–14 weeks following the screening (p. 115). More generally, commercial eco-films do not wear their environmental credentials on their sleeve, so that they can be more successful with broader audiences.

Consequently, a key preoccupation for this paper is to read such films ‘against the grain’ to help uncover their aesthetic and narrative strength in addressing the complexities of the climate crisis in particular. All the while acknowledging that The Age of Stupid’s explicit eco-narrative drive—including so many innovative textual elements that scholars have alluded to—rightfully remains a key marker of progressive environmental filmmaking. Meanwhile, Zone of Interest’s ecocritique of Nazism presents a very different format for alluding to the climate crisis.

6. Confronting the Rise in Eco-Fascism: Zone of Interest (2023)

Within the literature, there has been a surprisingly close correlation between the evolution of fascism and ecology, recalling how many Nazis were also fervent environmentalists in that they craved good, healthy natural food and instinctively almost would not harm animals—non-Aryan humans were a different matter. Care ethics ostensibly reached a new zenith in this fascistic worldview. Not forgetting their popularisation of ‘lebenstraum’ (Living Space) to help rationalise their expansionist nationalist project, which of course underpinned Hitler and the Nazi’s pernicious rationale and justification for World War Two.

While of late, as theorised by many scholars, neocon proto-fascist leaders have little or no concern for environmental protection, much less the common good. As I suggested in a 2001 paper in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, ‘there continues to be a dominant and negative ideological critique of “nature” in fiction film and to a lesser extent documentary, with many cultural histories predicating their analysis of Fredric Jameson’s assertion that “mass culture” articulates social conflicts, contemporary fears and utopian hopes and (more contentiously) attempts at ideological containment and reassurance’ (p. 31). The situation around the climate crisis has certainly gotten worse since asserting this. Yet despite a growth in eco-film scholarship, I believe much less academic effort is given over to understanding and appreciating, rather than simply dismissing, the utopic ‘feel good’ spatial and temporal aesthetic that permeates commercial Hollywood film. Cultural criticism should continue to actively analyse ‘both the social hopes and fantasies, as well as the ideological ways in which fantasies are presented, conflicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties are managed. It is from within this inclusive strategy that representations of nature can most fruitfully be analysed from a utopian perspective’ (Brereton, 2001, p. 33). But the current disruptive political and performative ideologies are essentially pulling against the ratification of any form of care ethics.

While The Age of Stupid explicitly seeks to address these concerns through a critique of various forms of totalitarianism as a disabling yet controlling feature of world history, Zone of Interest unusually appears to avoid historical explication in its micro-study of Nazism, through one insider’s family’s story. Acknowledging, of course, that many Nazis were animal lovers and prototypical environmentalists, with a great love of wild nature and exotic mountains in particular—recalling the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl (see Andres Veiel’s 2024 documentary on the director). Yet heralding and accelerating these pernicious transformations ‘is an altered promotion of national belonging, called by turns eco-nationalism, eco-bordering (Turner & Bailey, 2022)’, or, one might add, outright eco-fascism. This tale constructs a more subtle and reflective filmic semiosis, as opposed to the blunt critique of a totalitarian ideology embodied by an American neocon president in Don’t Look Up.

7. Illustrating a Perverse Anti-Ecological Ideology!

As Wendy Ide’s (Guardian, 4 February 2024) review of The Zone of Interest pronounces, ‘the constant pall of smoke, and a dread-inducing soundscape tell of the horrors beyond the wall as the idyllic life of the commandant of the death camp and his family rolls by in Glazer’s Oscar-nominated film’. Ide’s review continues how the ‘walls are a crucial component of this film, which shows the daily details of the life of an upwardly mobile Nazi couple—the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller)—and their five children. The Höss family is raised according to the tenets of the Artaman League, a German anti-urban, back-to-the-land movement that advocated an agrarian ideal and respect for the natural world. For instance, Rudolf, a man who presides over the murders of thousands of people each week, dictates an aggrieved memo about the lack of respect for his prized lilacs.

The family enjoys wholesome, halcyon picnics by the river ‘(predominantly captured, like most of the picture, in dispassionate mid and wide shots) and idyllic days in the lush, lovingly tended garden of the Höss villa, a source of considerable pride for Hedwig.’ We never see beyond the walls that separate her cherished roses and dahlias from the industrial death factory on the other side. ‘But through Johnnie Burn’s incredible, immersive sound design, the ambient noise generated by the horrors within the camp is evoked with a suffocating intensity that matches the choking pall of smoke billowing continuously from the Auschwitz furnace chimneys.’

Overall, reviewers tend to agree that the loose adaptation of the novel by Martin Amis remains ‘[U]nshowy but impeccable in the two main roles, both Friedel and Huller excel. Friedel plays Rudolf as a pedantic, mid-level bureaucrat with a thin, needling voice and a despot’s haircut, whose unquestioning efficiency and commitment to the cause of National Socialism has facilitated his rapid ascent within the SS. And Hüller’s Hedy chortles over her good fortune as she cherry-picks the choicest possessions of murdered Jewish prisoners, parading her newly elevated status like a purloined mink coat. Nowhere is the understated brilliance of Hüller’s performance better demonstrated than in the delivery of a single line of dialogue, said to her housemaid: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.” It could be wielded like a deadly weapon, but Hüller says it conversationally, almost pleasantly. The impact all but knocks the breath from your body.’

Amy Herzog’s incisive reading in Film Quarterly (Herzog, 2024) cites Arendt’s iconic evocation of ‘The Banality of Evil’ in characterising Nazi Holocaust atrocities. The film certainly captures this aspect of Nazism by using a fleet of cameras remotely operated by focus pulling from a nearby bunker, leaving the cast to perform in real time with no artificial lighting, resulting in images that are strangely detached and flat. Great attention was taken in re-constructing the site of the Nazi atrocity for the filmic recreation. All of which, Herzog argues, leads to ‘increasing levels of voyeurism, extended takes, and unstable points of identification which create an ethical crisis for the viewer, who is left questioning the mechanics and the limits of empathy.’ Coincidentally, this is also evident across the horror genre; for instance, where what is not shown or highlighted tends to be the most effective in connecting with audience identification.

From a more philosophical and ethical perspective, Laurence Kent, affirms that ‘true empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the other’s shoes, but an encounter with empathy’s own limits, the impossibility of access to the other’s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance.’ This speaks to audience engagement with such malevolent figures. Again, recalling Martin-Jones’s (2019) diagnosis of a trend in world cinema, namely ‘to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity’ (Kent, 2021, p. 194). Such opaque and reflexive eco-films strive to at least open up debate in this manner.

Most notably from an environmental context, the idyllic scene by the river Rola comes to mind. In one scene, Rodolf’s fishing line gets caught up by the hidden remains of a human jawbone. This leads to shock, not just at a human level, but mainly focused on how the corpse might contaminate his family. After rushing the children out of the water and bringing them home, ‘where his wife and house staff scrub them clean’ (Herzog, 2024, p. 14). Yet most surprisingly, later, his wife Hedwig is not willing to leave her beloved house and garden paradise, when her husband is asked to move to another concentration camp.10 All of which reflects the purification of this domestic Polish outpost. Herzog articulates primarily for a more astutely invested and critically literate audience when asserting that her garden ‘is a microcosm of the Nazi “blood and soil” ideology, feeding off an agrarian romanticism marking a genocidal land grab’. By all accounts, the acquisition of fertile farmland was held up as the ‘life blood of German survival’ (p. 15).

This corrupt fixation on ‘perfect flowers and vegetables’, visualised in full colour, having witnessed such atrocities, infers that even nature conspires with such truly awful massacres. Or at least a romantic, nature-focused analysis might seek to uphold this interpretation. Consequently, the storyline paradoxically serves as an art-house cautionary tale about extreme forms of environmental expression and activity vis-à-vis ethical human behaviour and calls attention to the need to constantly question and critique the veracity of eco-stories from various perspectives through the use of provocative creative imaginaries. Such eco-films, in their very different ways, speak to such tensions and debate, while one hopes to provoke extreme reaction, alongside active engagement with what it means to be so terminally out of synch with our holistic natural environment.

8. Concluding Remarks

As environmental communications scholars, we need to constantly explore how a broad range of filmic texts might encode various shades of environmental and ethical expression and, over time, also take on the much more difficult project of empirically assessing how they might address the climate crisis, while measuring audience responses to film and eco-media generally. Initially, however, gauging the mass psychological, emotional, and cognitive responses to such global environmental challenges is necessary in framing and understanding the potential power and impact of fictional (as well as documentary) texts, especially as they extend their reach and appreciation around broad-based environmental themes focused on an ethics of care.

I tend to agree with Mittman (2009, p. 216) that unless the emotional energy created by a documentary or fictional film ‘is mobilised into action, the power of film as a force of environmental change will remain ephemeral at best’. Nevertheless, the creative imagination of film expression can at least help bring into focus many of these complex issues and concerns. This is evidenced in contrasting ways by the films explored in this paper, using aspects of environmental care ethics through the deployment of cautionary tales, anchored, for instance, by the controlling eco-vision of an archivist, looking back over a dystopic time period that is allegorically, if not accurately, characterised as an Age of Stupid. This complex unpacking of a long time and spatial period, coupled with our historical culpability in the worsening ecological disaster, is contrasted with the 1940s and Nazi Germany in Zone of Interest. Honing in on a time and space that appears ecologically benevolent on the surface, with its beautiful gardens and river, but which is bounded by a high wall, hiding in plain sight a concentration camp and the horrors of human abuse. A site that remains the ultimate expression—like Gaza of late—of anti-ecological and fundamentally unethical human behaviour.

One hopes this form of learning through association and critical reflection around unethical human action will be continued and expanded through more engaging creative imaginaries, especially as the corpus of what is characterised as eco-cinema expands into the future. More concrete as well as oblique metaphors, motifs, parodies, allegories, or objective correlatives around contentious environmental issues are badly needed. These should be coupled with a close consideration of global justice and environmental ethics that must be further highlighted and catalogued over time to assist humans towards appreciating the full extent of the truism that ‘everything is connected’. We must learn if sometimes ‘against the grain’ from history and from all our different academic disciplines and various other forms of knowledge, as we strive to face up to the biggest challenge of survival on this planet. Such critical engagement in itself can help to create a more actively engaged and environmentally sensitive framework around eco-citizenship, which instinctively believes in and upholds the common good for all of nature. At the same time, this urgently needs to be coupled with an appreciation of effective systems of political praxis, closely underpinned by an ethics of care.

Incidentally, such reflections might also prompt and challenge the creative screen industries to redefine their environmental advocacy practices, moving far beyond lazy commercial nature-based romanticism and clichés, while not forgetting the perennial dangers of greenwashing. Most especially, the media industry must strive not to succumb to a tendency within commercial media and its endorsement of the so-called green revolution, which, as Vaughan (2019, 2025) cautions, might fall into the trap of being characterised simply as a façade that obscures the material impacts of digital screen practices.