Chris Hayes spoke with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad about using art and pop culture to convey the urgency of the climate ''crisis''
Live in Los Angeles, Chris Hayes speaks with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad about using art and pop culture to coey the urgency of the climate crisis.
During a recent podcast, cli-fi novelist Omar El Akkad (''AN AMERICAN WAR'') taught American media persomality Chris Hayes and Hollywood director and screenwriter Adam McKay what ''cli-fi'' means, [neither of whom had ever heard the term, they confessed, before Omar mentioned it during their chat !]
EXCERPT FROM TRANSCRIPT:
Chris Hayes spoke with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad about using art and pop culture to convey the urgency of the climate crisis. Here is some of what they all said.....
Chris Hayes spoke with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad about using art and pop culture to convey the urgency of the climate crisis. Here is some of what they all said.....
OMAR EL AKKAD: A couple of years ago, I read this essay, it was an essay on Dostoyevsky, but as an aside, the author mentioned that the word empathy has a very short history in the English language. It's only about a hundred years old. It comes from the German einfuhlung, which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing. But that literally translated, einfuhlung, means "to feel into."
''eín-fhoo-loong'')
And this is in large part I think, the purpose of literature, the purpose of storytelling at large, right?
I think we turn to literature, we turn to fiction, to escape the crushing delusion that life makes sense. That is your job, as a storyteller.
It is not to propose the right steps to take to avoid this problem, that is a policy arena.
Your job is to make people feel into. Feel into somebody else's experience. If you can do that, you've achieved your goal. And so, when I think of ''Cli-Fi,'' what they call ''climate fiction'' now, this new genre, ''Cli-Fi'' ...
CHRIS HAYES: I've never heard that term before.
OMAR EL AKKAD: Really?
ADAM MCKAY: I haven't either.
OMAR EL AKKAD: I hear it all the time,... and it exists. There's this kind of, because it's a new sort of genre, there's the sense that what are the rules? And overwhelmingly, as would come naturally, is the idea that it has to include climate stuff in it. Right?
ADAM MCKAY: By the way, that's the debate that we're having, which is how overt should you be, in what you're trying to make?
OMAR EL AKKAD: Right.
ADAM MCKAY: I mean, there is something to be said, that watching a movie as beautiful as “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” is as consequential as watching a movie that is “All the President's Men.” And what is that line between the two? Are you awakening emotion? Or are you giving a clear mission? And that's kind of definitely the debate that's going on here in Los Angeles.
Chris Hayes spoke with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad about using art and pop culture to convey the urgency of the climate crisis.
When I told this story to a top editor at the New York Times, he said "Wow, you'd think Chris Hayes would have heard of it by now, 2019 , and Adam McKay! Just shows how slowly new literary terms take to catch on w general public. Maybe 50 more years for cli-fi"
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