Lately, we're all stressing about climate change, so why don’t we see it on the big screen? Introducing the Climate Reality Check – a new Bechdel test for the planet.
Climate anxiety is keeping us all up at night, but you’d never know it from watching a Hollywood blockbuster. Our guest, Anna Jane Joyner, is the founder and CEO of Good Energy, a non-profit that advises filmmakers and showrunners on how to weave in climate narratives – without killing the vibe. She talks about growing up with a climate-denying dad, how rarely climate change shows up in entertainment and how a simple climate reality check – a new kind of Bechdel test – can help.
Also, Vass and Katrina consider buying the Batmobile now that it’s electric.
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The show is produced by Andrea Varsany.
Our sound designer is Cameron McIver.
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Katrina Onstad [00:00:00] We're just getting started on Lately and we'd love to get your opinion. There's a brief survey at the end of the episode, and as a thank you for taking it, we'll give you a chance to win some prizes. More details at the end of the show.
Vass Bednar [00:00:14] I'm Vass Bednar and I host Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:16] I'm Katrina Onstad, the executive producer of Lately. Vass, how do you feel when you see product placement in a film or a TV show?
Vass Bednar [00:00:24] I kind of hate it because it feels a little bit sneaky. Like a sneaky workaround of false and misleading advertising standards under the Competition Act, which, you know, I'm like a bit like obsessed with.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:34] I like that you have a competition act memorized, by the way. Well done. Keep going.
Vass Bednar [00:00:39] Thanks. I guess the bee in my bonnet is that we hold online influencers who have, like, a free bottle of Fiji water that they don't label as sponsored or gifted to a higher standard than we do the products placed in film and television. And that's where there's a bit of a divide for me. But it's been happening in film and television for so long that we sort of let it slide, and at the same time, it just it makes me worried that everything is kind of an ad.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:07] Yeah. Like I always think of this episode of Gilmore Girls where Rory and Lorelai are on the telephone and they're each watching a Roomba go across the room that they're in, and it's just agony. I think about that scene constantly for no good reason.
Vass Bednar [00:01:19] Well, that Roomba is actually pretty big business. In 2024, product placement revenues worldwide will amount to an estimated 32.73 billion. That's in US dollars. And as film and television lose ground to streaming services, and viewers skip right through ads, networks and producers are sort of scrambling to figure out how to pay for their content. Like how many Dell computers did they use on succession, as if they're not Mac people?
Katrina Onstad [00:01:45] I know, so annoying. Well, today we're talking about a different kind of embedded marketing, the marketing of ideas, and one in particular, how to get people talking and thinking about climate change by pulling the levers of the entertainment industry.
Vass Bednar [00:01:58] Our guest is Anna Jane Joyner. She was in Los Angeles when we spoke. She's the founder and CEO of a US nonprofit called Good Energy, which bills itself as a story consultancy for the age of climate change. And what they do is they work with TV and film creators to help them build stories that, as they say, honestly reflect the world we live in now, one that's in a climate crisis.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:19] Yeah, they come at this problem sideways, though. They work with creatives on how to craft good climate related plots and characters, but they aren't necessarily recommending that anyone build an entire project around these themes. Like, you're not going to see a movie called Sad Polar Bear the Movie. It's almost the next iteration of product placement, like product placing our climate reality. So they came up with this test, it's quite interesting, that aims to measure the presence of climate change on screen. It's called the Climate Reality Check. You're going to unpack what that means. And they replied their test to the recent Oscars and found out that of all the nominees, only three movies passed the test and actually referenced our climate reality. You're going to find out what three movies those are. There's a little Easter egg.
Vass Bednar [00:03:05] Spoiler alert. It is kind of surprising to me that there were only three, considering that most of us are thinking about climate change a lot. Three out of four Canadians are anxious about the climate, according to a recent survey. And yet, part of why good energy started is because climate change was almost never showing up in entertainment.
Katrina Onstad [00:03:25] I do think that some of our listeners might be a little skeptical about this, worried about art that feels didactic or compromised by agenda setting. But if you believe we're in a climate emergency and the UN environment program says that we are, then how do you get people to pay attention, right? Good Energy's position is you start with narrative, with story, you get awareness and then you might change behavior. You Trojan horse it in.
Vass Bednar [00:03:49] Yeah, like EVs in popular culture. A 2023 study found that over the past five years, the appearance of EVs in films was up 140%. And don't forget, did you notice this? The latest Batmobile was electrified. And I just think that's really kind of cool and aspirational and powerful to see that in a film, even if you can't leave the movie theater and head to the Batmobile showroom and get one of your own. Right? So-
Katrina Onstad [00:04:12] What you didn't? You didn't get one?
Vass Bednar [00:04:16] I got a really small one. Expectation versus reality online. Yeah. I don't know if Good Energy's working with Batman or sorry, Bruce Wayne or any other superheroes, but Anna Jane did consult on the network drama Madam Secretary, and she actually became the inspiration for a character, a young activist who's at odds with her evangelical father. True fact her dad is a megachurch pastor and a climate change denier, and she shared a little bit about what it's like to navigate that.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:48] Yeah, it was so interesting. Also seems like the ultimate test of one's storytelling chops. Like, can you use story to persuade your father that climate change is real? I think that's Thanksgiving for a lot of people.
Vass Bednar [00:05:00] Let's get a climate reality check on the big screen. Welcome to Lately. I want to ask you to reflect on your cinematic diet throughout your whole life. Maybe you remember a movie or television show from when you were young that made you think about the world differently? Does anything come to mind?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:05:35] Yes it does. From when I was a kid my favorite movie was The Newsies by Disney. It's a musical.
Vass Bednar [00:05:42] Nice.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:05:43] And I probably watched it 100 - 150 times. I can till this day sing every lyric. And it's this beautiful story about the newsboy strike in the early 1900s. And it was this great story about a group of kids who were newsboys, and they came together and organized to go up against the big newspapers at that time, which are Pulitzer and Hearst. It was this beautiful story of young people with no political or economic power, you know, really just kids going up against this impossible kind of David and Goliath story. And they won. And it was the beginning of child protection labor laws. So I knew a really powerful story of what it felt like and looked like to go up against impossible odds and really powerful people and still win.
Vass Bednar [00:06:34] I'm going to have to look for a VHS or a DVD of Newsies and catch up.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:06:38] Oh, you have to. It's Christian Bale. It's an awesome story.
Vass Bednar [00:06:43] You're one of the creators of the Climate Reality Check. It's a Bechdel style threshold. Can you refresh us on what the Bechdel Wallace test is?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:06:52] Yes, the Bechdel Wallace test is this super famous tool that's used within the industry and beyond to measure female representation on screen. And it started as a comic strip that Alison Bechdel did 39 years ago. It came out the year I was born, so 1985. And the questions were, do you have two female characters who are named, and do they have a conversation about something other than a man? So very baseline, and you would be shocked how many films and TV shows don't pass that test even today, although it's gotten a lot better.
Vass Bednar [00:07:28] We're passing the test right now.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:07:30] True.
Vass Bednar [00:07:31] That's a good feeling. I love to pass a test. So how does the climate reality check work?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:07:37] Yeah. So the climate reality check we co-created with Dr. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, who's this incredible academic who has studied climate narratives before. Basically, we wanted to create a baseline test. So it's not a commentary on the nature of the stories themselves. And the two questions are, does climate change exist in the world of the story, and does a character know it?
Vass Bednar [00:08:01] Can you give us some examples of films and television shows that pass this test?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:08:06] Yeah, so we applied it, Matthew and his students, applied it to the Oscars and looked at every Oscar nominees set on Earth now or in the future. So that excludes high fantasy and historicals. And three of them did acknowledge climate change. That would be Barbie, the New Mission Impossible and Nyad. And the way that we talk about climate representation on screen is across a spectrum. So we have climate placement, which is basically when a solution or an impact shows up in the background, but it's not even discussed in dialog. So it might be an exterior shot of a house with a solar panel, or a car scene with an EV. Or one example that I really love is the movie Parasite, which did win the Oscar, and it has this great story line where there's a huge flood and it really negatively impacts the poor family, it destroys their home, and then the wealthier family it just inconveniences their camping trip. So you kind of see the economic injustice of a lot of climate impacts, and that is a real impact happening in South Korea. Climate mentioned is when it just comes up in passing and dialog. A good example of that would be Barbie. So there's this one scene, and I love that it was included here because it's a really big character moment. It's this little girl who's one of the main characters, and Barbie walks up to her when she's at school, kind of thinking that she's going to be adored as this feminist icon, and the little girl just goes off on her.
Sasha [00:09:35] You set the feminist movement back 50 years. You destroy girl's innate sense of worth, and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.
Barbie [00:09:43] No, I'm supposed to help you and make you happy and powerful.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:09:48] The reason that we chose to include that one was because when the students reviewed that mention, they felt that in today's day and age, it was not possible that a character in middle school would have referenced killing the planet without it being about climate change.
Vass Bednar [00:10:06] Interesting.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:10:07] So if that story had taken place 20 years ago, it might not have passed the test. But the student reviewers who are Gen Z felt like in this context, it definitely would.
Vass Bednar [00:10:16] Okay, let's talk about Barbie for a second, though, if you don't mind, because there are some irony there, right? In terms of a film that's all about a doll who is plastic passing this test because of this very minor element in a powerful monologue. How does Climate Reality Check kind of reconcile that tension?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:10:35] I mean, it's a climate reality check is a baseline. You know, we weren't commenting on the nature of the story. We were just commenting on whether or not climate exists in the story. And that is really important. Those passing mentions, especially in $1 billion film, one of it not the most popular film of last year, just for normalizing conversations around climate. You know, it's really important to communicate to audiences, even in passing, that their thinking about climate, their experiencing of climate, their worrying about climate is a normal response to this crisis. And, according to Yale's most recent research, over 70% of American adults are now worried about climate. So somewhere on the scale of kind of mildly concerned to alarmed and the alarmed are the biggest of the audiences that they study. And yet only 1 in 8 people ever talk about it on a weekly basis. We feel very isolated and very alienated, which can contribute to climate anxiety and depression and these negative mental health impacts. So we know from all kinds of other research that parasocial relationships with characters on TV can help to encourage and inspire conversation in real life. So that's why those mentions are really important, even in stories that aren't grappling with climate in a storyline.
Vass Bednar [00:11:56] Another element of passing the test is that shows or movies have to be set on earth and be in the present, and this means that allegory or sci fi can't be captured by the test. Avatar would fail by this measure. Aren't those powerful genres for climate change stories, too? Why not include them? Or do you think they might get included in the future?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:12:16] Yeah, it's a great question, and I should say it's set on Earth now or in the future. Not necessarily like a thousand years in the future. I think we did 100 years in the future was the qualification. But yes, there are great allegories that are super meaningful to climate. We certainly want to see more of those. We are focused on climate grounded in our world and universe as humans are actually experiencing it. Just because that was where the biggest gap was. There really just was barely any TV and film that was coming out that acknowledge the reality of climate changes as we're all experiencing it now. Previously, we did a study with USC's Media Impact Project, where we looked at over 37,000 scripts that aired between 2016 and 2020, and in those only 2.8% even mentioned climate change, let alone had any kind of story about it. And we looked at all the various ways you could say climate change, but also all these keywords like sea level rise and solar panels. So obviously that is way, way too low. So that's why that is the focus for this test.
Vass Bednar [00:13:18] How did you come up with this whole concept of bringing the climate change story to Hollywood?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:13:23] I went through a really dark period after the 2016 election. I had also just moved to the Gulf Coast of Alabama, which is where my mom's family is from, and I live on this property that's been in my family for five generations, that's on the water. And I wanted to move down there, partially because it is this place that's very sacred to my family, that's on the frontlines of climate change. Even if we cut all fossil fuel burning tomorrow, the Gulf Coast of Alabama is is not going to survive in any way, shape or form that I know it as. So really just holding all of those really hard, difficult emotions where I turn to find courage and inspiration and a sense of solace and meaning is stories. And I could just recognize that I wasn't seeing my world and my friends and my experience on screen. You know, stories are where humans have always turned to find meaning and to get through existential crises. It's a deeply ingrained evolutionary part of what it means to be human. You know, I've been working on climate for 20 years, and I'm also a writer, I come from a family of writers and artists. So finding those emotional truths, the places where we can really move people on a heart level, on an emotional level, and not just an intellectual level, has always been a big part of my work. And of course, Hollywood is the biggest storytelling engine in our world. It has incredible reach and impact, and there's lots of research on how Hollywood has positively and negatively impacted our world on a variety of issues, everything from seatbelts and drunk driving to perpetuating the gas stove through Julia Child's cooking show, which we know is not good for climate and was also paid for by the American Gas Association.
Vass Bednar [00:15:10] Oh hey, now I didn't know that.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:15:12] Yeah.
Vass Bednar [00:15:13] I would say that's an interesting fact. It's not a fun fact because it's not fun. But for now, I want to- I want to get in that writer's room with you. Good Energy gets to not only review films and let us know whether it's reflecting climate realities back to us, but you also get to consult, right? You get to consult with film and TV writers. What is it like?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:15:35] We've had incredible success and demand more than we can handle from different TV and film writers and executives as well. So that's been really encouraging. And that's been true from the beginning when we launched in 2019, but it's been a sea of change in the past five years. But we're very rigorous in how we offer our consulting services. So all of it is based on that qualitative research. So everything we do is designed in consultation with our audience of screenwriters and executives. We do a lot of research briefs on a variety of climate issues. We do a lot of world building research. We do a lot of script reviews and we also do a fair amount of story consultation. However, we don't give creative notes unless it's requested from the writer. Just one, I think it's disrespectful to the fact that these are the experts in storytelling and two, that's not something that writers respond well to, because nobody wants to be told how to do their job.
Vass Bednar [00:16:35] We're speaking with Anna Jane Joyner, the founder and CEO of a climate nonprofit called Good Energy. Madame Secretary was a political drama that ran for several seasons on CBS. Tell us about your relationship to that show.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:16:51] So Madam Secretary was the first television project that I worked on, and it was pre-Good Energy. It's really what inspired Good Energy. And it was in late 2018, basically, there was a writer, Alex Maggio, who's now one of our advisors and a really good friend, who wanted to tell a story about a young woman challenging her powerful evangelical father on climate change. And he was doing research. And my father is a conservative evangelical megachurch pastor, also a climate denier. And so.
Vass Bednar [00:17:22] Wow, wait a minute. Your father's a climate denier. You were sleeping on that fact. You're telling me about Julia Child's gas stoves.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:17:32] Um yes, that is the true story. You know, I am the daughter of an evangelical megachurch pastor. I have been working on climate for 20 years, my whole adult life, since college. And my brother is also a filmmaker. And so all through film school, I had read his scripts. I'd given notes on scripts, I read some of his friends scripts. So I was really familiar with the process of screenwriting and the process of script reviews. And so Alex reached out to me, and because of that, we were just an incredible partnership. And so I really helped craft that character. There's even like little tidbits in the character that are like, based on my real life story that you wouldn't know unless you know me really well, which is fun. One piece that I really love that definitely resonated with me, in the last scene, she's pulling up to her parents house, and she kind of looks in the window and sees her dad, and there's just this very like, pensive, reflective moment where, you know, it doesn't kind of wrap up in a nice bow, but it leaves it open ended. And I know that feeling of loving someone who is doing something that you think is, is really harmful, and not being sure how to handle that. Certainly, I think I would be working on climate even if my father was not a part of the picture, but I do think there's probably some part of my drive that's trying to offset, you know, his influence by telling stories that are helpful when it comes to climate change. And so, Madam Secretary was just such a great experience. And through that I was like, Alex, can you just introduce me to all of your friends who are screenwriters so I can get on the phone with anyone who will talk to me and see why we're not seeing more climate in TV and film and what we could do to change that.
Vass Bednar [00:19:11] How has this worked with your dad?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:19:13] Me and my dad have a very complicated relationship, as you can imagine. We do still love each other a great deal. And in a lot of ways he's been very supportive of my career and in a sort of strange, roundabout way I think he is proud that we've had a lot of success. And, you know, he is a storyteller. He's a pastor, which of course is a form of storytelling, but he's also a writer. He's working on his 100th book. And I do think growing up in kind of an intense religious setting, you kind of innately understand the power of story. Just because religion does consist of a bunch of stories, and it dramatically impacts many people's lives and our whole world in good and bad ways.
Vass Bednar [00:19:53] You know, you just have shared a lot of really deep reflections. And believe it or not, I want to ask you about like, movies and cars for a second.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:20:01] Let's do it.
Vass Bednar [00:20:02] So literally shifting gears, figuratively shifting gears.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:20:05] Oh my God love it.
Vass Bednar [00:20:07] So EV ownership can make a huge dent in global carbon emissions. I personally loved it when Regina King drove an EV through a squid storm in Watchmen. But cars in movies have a rich history. They symbolize sexiness, fantasy, escape, rebellion, you know, driving off into the sunset and Fast and the Furious is this kind of ultimate example, right? A monster franchise, has made over $7 billion at the global box office. How do you eco that kind of franchise without wiping out all the things that people love about cars in the movies? Basically, what would you say in the Fast and Furious writers room?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:20:48] I mean, there are a lot of companies and productions that are switching to EVs now. Like for example, Netflix, just committed to using EVs and all of their in-house productions where there's car scenes, which is really huge. But yeah, I mean, at this day and age, EVs are becoming as powerful as gas powered cars. So they are the future of sexiness and rebellion and escape. And so why not start to bring it into the story? Because the reality is that is where racing is headed, right? So if this was happening in the real world, we would be seeing that shift or they would at least be talking about it. And also, you know, depending on where the story is set, there's going to be climate impacts that will affect the nature of the story and the racers. We call it the climate lens analysis, like how would this industry and this place be impacted by climate? How would it be maybe affecting the character's psychology and mental health? And so we just look at the body of a story and just pick out all of the different ways that climate could be authentically showing up in the story, whether or not that's in the background, like having EVs, not even talking about them. So I don't want to diminish the impact of just showing these solutions in the background, right? It demonstrates behaviors that we do want to see audiences adopt more of. And there's lots of great research on how that kind of placement can influence the behaviors and the actions of an audience. And that's super positive. We need to be normalizing these solutions even when we're not talking about them. We need to be making them sexy and desirable. And the fossil fuel industry has been in Hollywood since the inception of Hollywood, and they've really used it intentionally to create this narrative that we all now live under, which is these high emission lifestyles are what we should all be aspiring to. So we really need to look at how do we counter that and what we show as desirable in television and film?
Vass Bednar [00:22:50] I want to pick up on the background element for a second, because it strikes me that there's kind of two ways for climate responsible technologies to show up in entertainment. The first is this kind of organic, intentional, embedded situation where it's, again, being part of the writer's room and a character arc. And the second is through paid marketing, right, or an affiliate agreement. You mentioned the Netflix and General Motors announcement that it's going to increase the presence of EVs in Netflix produced TV shows and movies, and like on the one hand, yeah, it's a step forward and it's great. And on the other hand, it strikes me that there's like a financial arrangement that hasn't quite been disclosed or articulated to viewers. Will viewers feel duped or is this all just good energy because it's climate forward?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:23:44] Well, I mean, the reality is that Hollywood is a business and they have to make a profit. Like if these stories don't make money, they're not going to get made. And so I think that anytime we can financially incentivize more climate solutions and more climate stories on TV, that is definitely a net benefit for our work and the whole world. I wish more clean energy companies and sustainable brands would do product placement in TV and film. I don't think it diminishes the kind of authenticity, because if that were the case, then people would get upset anytime there's product placement in television and film, which is most of the time, and most of the time you don't even see it. In fact, if you notice it, it's probably a sign that it's not being done well.
Vass Bednar [00:24:26] On the we need more of it. I think of Don't Look up the 2021 Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence film. It had a very successful outcome on the climate reality check, but some of the more negative reviews of the film kind of complained about a heavy handedness.
Kate Dibiasky [00:24:42] We have precisely six months, ten days, two hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds until a comet twice the size of Chicxulub tears through our atmosphere, and extincts all life on Earth. I'm just crying five times a day. I'm scared.
Dr. Randal Mindy [00:24:56] Hey! Come on, come on.
Vass Bednar [00:24:59] Given that many people turn to a screen to escape. Is there a way in which too much of a reality check turns people off?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:25:11] Don't Look Up, yes, especially in the climate world there's a lot of mixed feelings on if that story was more beneficial than not. However, that was the most watched film in Netflix history for weeks. It's still one of the most watched films in Netflix history. And so just the doors that it opened to show that these stories can be commercially viable, they can attract an A-list cast and some of the best writers in the world. I love Don't Look Up because I really related to Jennifer Lawrence's character, because the first ten years of my career, it did feel like I was going crazy. You know, it felt like there was a comet headed towards us, and nobody in my life seemed to care. And that is crazy making. And I did turn to a lot of negative coping mechanisms, as Jennifer Lawrence does in that story. And not only that, I had a bunch of friends who were climate leaders and climate scientists who were texting me saying the same thing. It was just so cathartic to see this experience that we could all relate to in this beautiful, funny, very real story for us. I mean, there is always going to be stories that don't work. That is the risk of any kind of creative endeavor. I haven't seen any evidence, either anecdotally or in research, that this is something that is going to turn audiences off. For example, in the research that we did with Matthew and his students, we found that the films that passed the Climate Reality Check were 10% more profitable. And we'd need a lot more research before we could do a causal link that that is why they were more profitable. But certainly it's not hurting the profitability of these stories to acknowledge that climate is a part of our world.
Vass Bednar [00:26:52] So where do we go next with this test? Do we need a special climate reality check emoji on Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd? What's next for signaling that this value is being met?
Anna Jane Joyner [00:27:05] Yeah, I love that. I'm going to put that into the the hopper of ideas. Our goal is that by 2027, 50% of qualifying TV and films pass the climate reality check. So I think we're trending in the right direction. It's ambitious, but achievable.
Vass Bednar [00:27:22] It was fantastic to speak with you and thank you for making the time for this chat.
Anna Jane Joyner [00:27:27] Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having us.
Vass Bednar [00:27:42] You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Andrea Varsany and our sound designer is Cameron McIver. I'm your host, Vass Bednar. And in our show notes, you can subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
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