As I did with Davis Guggenheim’s recently released
Waiting
for Superman, I found that Ondi Timoner’s
Cool It tempted me to say that the movie is more revealing
of the character and thought of the movie-going audience today than
it is about its ostensible subject. That may be a bit of an
overstatement, but not much. For both films are clearly designed to
present to the hard core liberals and progressives who they
(rightly) assume make up the overwhelming majority of those who
will see or are ever likely to see them, what the film-makers hope
will be the acceptable face of certain conservative ideas that
otherwise they would never be willing to consider. Thus Mr Bjorn
Lomborg, the hero of Cool It, believes devoutly, almost
passionately in man-caused global-warming — even as he trashes
both the Al Gore movie on the subject, An
Inconvenient Truth, and the Al Gore approach
to a remedy for global apocalypse through cap and trade legislation
and other measures to reduce carbon emissions and wreck Western
industrial economies.
That’s rather a lot for a liberal audience accustomed to
idolizing Mr. Gore to take on board. It is also the reason, as I
take it, for occasional human interest passages and excursuses by
Miss Timoner. In one such, Mr. Lomborg engages in a bit of
self-psychoanalysis by positing that he is not a victim, like Mr.
Gore, of global-warming hysteria because “I feel secure in the
world; I know I am loved. That’s my mom.” And there then follows a
heart-warming passage in which we see him visiting his mom, who has
Alzheimer’s disease, in the home where he has deposited her and
taking her, smiling for all she is worth, for a lovely outing on a
bus. How bad can he be, this man who has been denounced by some of
the world’s leading scientists as a charlatan or worse, if he loves
his mother? He also rides a bike, has been a vegetarian since the
age of 11 and green seemingly from birth — and (though the film
doesn’t see the need to tell us so) is openly gay. Talk about
reassuring your audience!
Yet this nerdy, personable, unthreatening Dane turns out
to be an old-fashioned can-do American-style proponent of
geo-engineering to offset the warming effects of greenhouse gases
— such as painting the black surfaces of our urban “heat islands”
white to reflect more sunlight than they absorb — and to protect
coastal areas from rising sea levels by the use of dikes and tidal
booms of the sort that have protected Holland from the sea for
centuries. Moreover, he believes in dismissing the liberal
fantasies of Kyoto and Copenhagen. One of the film’s few funny
moments is played straight when we see President Obama addressing
the Copenhagen conference, as useless as all the others, and
sternly noting that it was time “not to talk but to act.” Mr.
Lomborg is also big on alternative energy sources, but his big idea
is that we can take some of the money that would be thrown away on
cap-and-trade and other futile schemes to limit carbon emissions
and use it to deal with the world’s other big problems — such as
providing clean drinking water and fighting HIV/Aids and malaria —
where much smaller amounts of money would do fantastically more
good.
One of the film’s interviewees puts the case against
An Inconvenient Truth and the vast global-warming industry
it and Nobel Peace prize-winning Al Gore have helped to spawn in a
nutshell: “If you want to get people’s attention, you scare the
pants off of them.” In Cool It, both at the beginning,
over the opening credits, and during an extended passage later in
the film, we see British school children, in response to Mr.
Lomborg’s questions, spouting the alarmist rubbish they have been
taught in school, obviously frightened half out of their wits.
These scenes are juxtaposed with ones in which he interviews some
obviously less-pampered though not necessarily less-propagandized
Kenyan school-children whose up-close and personal acquaintance
with frightening realities — like poverty, hunger and disease —
and not just fantasies has given them a rather different set of
priorities.
The aim of most documentaries in the Michael Moore era has
been, as it is with An Inconvenient Truth or, more
recently, Inside
Job, to inflame opinion against something or
someone, to excite anger and fear, not to find anything out or
learn something the audience didn’t know before. People who watch
these docs seem only to wants to be told again what they already
know, or else to told that the bad people they have already
identified as such — corporate America, the Bush administration —
have brought the world to the brink of destruction. Well, maybe
liberal movie audiences are finally getting tired of being
alternately stroked and frightened by partisan hacks with axes to
grind. At one point, Mr. Lomborg puts the starkest of questions to
an audience of college students in the U.S., who may stand in for
the liberals and other fantasists that will mostly make up the
audience for his movie. Do you want to feel good — by largely
meaningless gestures like driving a hybrid or using those new curly
light-bulbs — or to do good? As one earnest young man is seen
nodding at this reality check we may think to ourselves, as with
Waiting for Superman, well, it’s not ideal, but it’s a
start.
