Narratives of Green Growth and Degrowth in Popular Hollywood Film

Over much of my academic career, I have remained preoccupied with how fictional (and documentary) narratives serve to address the climate emergency.

Alongside breaching so many Planetary Boundaries, film and media must address the dilemma of Western over-consumption and the consequent need for economic degrowth - or at least some form of green growth, which the EU have been promoting up to recently.

This economic turn remains counter-intuitive for many in the film business, being ostensibly premised on mass production and conspicuous consumption.

Yet, I tentatively argue that Hollywood's ongoing fixation with 'saving the planet' is especially evident through cautionary science fiction storylines that often call attention to problems around over-consumption and the urgent need for degrowth.

Examples include WALL-E, Downsizing and the Avatar franchise, while being most pointed in the Netflix hit Don't Look Up.Serving as a structural mechanism or machine for simultaneously staging and containing ecological anxiety (Jameson 1978), eco-science fiction blockbusters can, at the same time, foreground various environmental cautionary tales to help actively engage audiences.

Reflecting on my doctoral thesis, Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2005), I will re-examine these canonical texts, together with more recent iterations, to assess Hollywood's ongoing environmental influence over the intervening decades in reflecting the sometimes-covert seepage of radical environmental representations around degrowth.