i really liked the new yorker review of ‘an inconvenient truth’.
so, here it is.
-moby
p.s-if you haven’t seen ‘an inconvenient truth’, you should. global warming is a monstrous issue, regardless of your political affiliation. in fact, i really don’t know how the oil companies have managed to convince the right-wing in america that carbon dioxide and global warming are the by-products of a righteous and christian society, and should be defended and protected against infidels like al gore…
from the new yorker:
anyone in possession of a major truth that h can’t get others to accept begins to feel tha he’s losing his mind. the skepticism he meet turns him into a soreheaded obsessive. after while, he becomes “pedantic,� and then inevitably, “condescending� and “humorless. al gore has been in possession of a major trut about global warming for more than thirt years, and he has suffered the insults o political opponents, the boredom of ironists and, perhaps most grievously, the routine taunt of a media society which dictates that if yo believe in anything too passionately there mus be something wrong with you. as man commentators have noticed, there are self-serving elements in “an inconvenient truth, the epochal documentary that gore, with exper hollywood help (the director is davi guggenheim), has put together about hi obsession. he appears as the noble-browe warrior of enlightenment, brooding over th ravaged earth and the weakness of man, onc or twice too often. he mentions famil tragedies, which were moving to me, but whic strike some viewers as maudlin notes from campaign biography. yet the faults of th movie, semi-excusable as self-vindicatin ploys, are nothing compared with its strengths
for long stretches, gore is photographed talking before an audience with the aid of slides and charts. there are side trips to fissured ice caps, disappearing glaciers—the snows of yesteryear—and expanses of newly parched and broken terrain. the science is detailed, deep-layered, vivid, and terrifying. every school, college, and church group, and everyone else beyond the sway of general motors, exxonmobil, and the white house should see this movie, and, with luck, they will. it’s great propaganda, but there are also passages in which gore, off camera, speaks in an intimate voice that we’ve never heard before. he talks about lying beside a river on a lazy summer day—the commonplace idyll of a lone person in a tranquil ecstasy, utterly at home in nature. “an inconvenient truth� begins that way, and each time gore returns to this enraptured mood, after a procession of nightmares and dangers, it has greater resonance. he knows that people find him exasperating, and he has learned to modulate his voice; one has the impression of a complex personality that has gone through loss, humiliation, a cruel breaking down of the ego, and then has reintegrated itself at a higher level. in the movie he is merely excellent. but in person—he is on a speaking tour to promote the movie—he presents a combination of intellectual force, emotional vibrancy, and moral urgency that has hardly been seen in american public life in recent years. it will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with gore’s bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.