Children of Men (2006) and the Eco-Hero

Both The Day After Tomorrow and Children of Men (2006) illustrate similar visions of the new eco-hero. In both films, heroic roles are filled not by tragic pioneers or even bumbling comic heroes, but by fathers seeking to save their own children or children they adopt as their own from an environment that humanity has made toxic in multiple ways. In The Day After Tomorrow Jack Hall attempts not only to save the world from global warming but to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) from a flooded and frozen New York City library. In Children of Men, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) agrees to help an activist group transport Kee (Claire-Hope Ashite) and her soon-to-be-born child to a group of benevolent scientists on the coast, saving the only surviving baby in a dying world. In fact, in the film’s opening, crowds of people mourn the loss of the youngest living person, a teenager murdered by a fan.

This new breed of eco-hero fails to fit in categories of tragic or comic heroes as defined by either Aristotle or Joseph W. Meeker. Meeker expands Aristotle’s categories to include the natural world in his eco-critical approach to Classic literature. Meeker’s tragic heroes in the natural world are the ecological pioneers, “the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (“The Comic Mode” 161). His comic heroes build community. Meeker argues that once ecosystems mature, heroic solitary pioneers become not only unnecessary but also subordinate to the group. In a mature or climax ecosystem, “it is the community itself that really matters, and it is likely to be an extremely durable community so long as balance is maintained among its many elements” (Meeker “The Comic Mode” 163). Comic heroes emerge from these climax ecosystems. 

Jack Hall and Theo Faron serve the community while maintaining solitary quests, however. In Children of Men, Theo transports Kee to a haven at sea to save her child and, ultimately, the world. But Theo chooses to act because his ex-wife, Julian Taylor (Julianne Moore), reminds him of the loving family life they shared when his own son lived. In Children of Men, both mother (Julian) and father (Theo) die during the undertaking, but our last glimpse of life in the movie shows us Kee and her baby floating in a boat while a ship in the distance comes closer to save her. The focus is local rather than global in this well-shot film, with long takes emphasizing the individualized perspective of the hero and his acts. 

Yet neither of these heroes act like pioneers attempting to conquer an opponent, even if that opponent is the environment or an ecological disaster. They don’t fight against the disaster but against the forces that caused it. And they fight most intensely not for all those affected by the disaster—as do most eco-heroes—but only for sons, friends, and a helpless child. The new eco-hero is not a tragic pioneer, who sacrifices him or herself for a species. Nor is this hero a comic hero, who bumbles and succeeds only communally. This hero acts alone, but only at a local level, not seeking control of a landscape or species but seeking to save new and renewed relationships, just as Theo saves Kee. It is up to Kee to save the world.

The Day After Tomorrow and the New Eco-Hero

The Day After Tomorrow highlights a different way to envision evolutionary narratives and the heroes that drive them. In cli-fi films from the 1970s and eco-comic disaster films from the 1980s forward (such as Eight Legged Freaks [2002] and Warm Bodies[2013]), disaster plots are driven by two different kinds of heroes: tragic pioneers and comic community builders. The Day After Tomorrow,on the other hand, relies on a different kind of hero, one that arguably combines both tragic and comic characteristics. Our reading of The Day After Tomorrowattempts to make the idea of the new ecological (eco)-hero more transparent rather than rearticulating the obvious ecological messages on display in the film. In The Day After Tomorrow, heroic roles are filled not by tragic pioneers or even bumbling comic heroes, but by a father seeking to save his own child from an environment that humanity has made toxic in multiple ways. In The Day After Tomorroweco-hero and father Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) attempts not only to save the world from global warming but to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) from a flooded and frozen New York City. 

This new breed of eco-hero fails to fit in categories of tragic or comic heroes as defined by either Aristotle or Joseph W. Meeker. Meeker expands Aristotle’s categories to include the natural world in his eco-critical approach to Classic literature. Meeker’s tragic heroes in the natural world are the ecological pioneers, “the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (“The Comic Mode” 161). His comic heroes build community. Meeker argues that once ecosystems mature, heroic solitary pioneers become not only unnecessary but also subordinate to the group. In a mature or climax ecosystem, “it is the community itself that really matters, and it is likely to be an extremely durable community so long as balance is maintained among its many elements” (Meeker “The Comic Mode” 163). Comic heroes emerge from these climax ecosystems.  

Jack Hall serves the community while maintaining a solitary quest, however. This new eco-hero combines the best qualities of the tragic and comic heroes to build a better world community while also saving children who are closest to them. As an intellectually driven hero seeking to save the world from the consequences of climate change he endured at the North Pole, Jack looks like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth when he explains global warming to a world delegation but like Thorn when he saves himself from a glacial collapse. In spite of these two daring acts—one physical and the other intellectual—Jack’s many weaknesses are also on display in the film. When he returns from his latest Arctic trip, his house plants have nearly died, his son has failed calculus, and his ex-wife has lost faith in his ability even to pick up his son in time to get him to the airport for a scholastic bowl tournament.  

These everyday events, however, are juxtaposed with images of worldwide eco-disaster. Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), an oceanographer, discusses the possibility of a new Ice Age, and reports of its oncoming effects soon come in from all over the world. Pieces of ice fall from the sky in Tokyo, destroying cars and killing any people they strike. Snowstorms drift into New Delhi. Storms hit Jack’s son Sam’s flight, on its way to New York. And when Sam and his friend Laura (Emmy Rossum) reach the city, they watch from their taxi as flocks of birds migrate away from the city, seemingly disturbed by climate change. When Jack enters Professor Rapson’s data into his climate model, the results are devastating. According to their conclusions, the Earth will be in a full-scale ice age in six to eight weeks. 

More disastrous events point to this upcoming ice age: frozen helicopter pilots in Scotland, and massive flooding in New York City with tidal waves catapulting down its broad avenues. Sam and the rest of his scholastic bowl friends make their way into the New York Public Library, and the father/son narrative takes center stage. Sam finds a water-logged pay phone in the library, calls his father, and hears his father’s promise: “wait it out and burn what you can. I will come for you. I will come for you.” The rest of the film revolves around Jack’s quest to save his son, and his son’s and ex-wife’s evolution into new eco-heroes like Jack. 

The family melodrama becomes the main focus until the film’s end, even though it is occasionally broken with more global concerns, like the death of the President and the fate of American refugees in Mexico. Jack’s ex-wife Lucy’s (Sela Ward) heroism is highlighted when an ambulance arrives to save her and a young patient, Peter, whom she has refused to leave alone. And when Sam gathers penicillin and food from an iced-in Russian ship, he too demonstrates his potential as an eco-hero. Jack serves as the most daring eco-hero, when he saves his son and the remaining New York survivors from the library. As Jack explains, “I made my son a promise. I’m going to keep it.”

This eco-drama ends with father and son reunited (and possibly husband and wife). The cli fi-disaster looks like most disaster films in every way other than the way the image of the hero is constructed. In The Day After Tomorrow, the hero is a true eco-hero, attempting to save the world from environmental disaster, but his most heroic act is localized and less than self-sacrificial. Jack makes his heroic journey not to save the world—as we might expect an eco-hero and a climatologist to do—but to save his son. And both Lucy and Sam act heroically for similar reasons—to save the individuals they love, not the world, the nation, or even the community.

Early Cli-Fi: The Day of the Animals and the Ozone Layer

The Day of the Animals (1977) addresses the Greenhouse Effect more blatantly than films from the era like Frogs, while also anthropomorphizing the animals that seek vengeance against humanity for its mistreatment of nature. The film’s opening title cards explicitly states it’s focus on humanity’s contribution to Earth’s damaged ozone layer and suggests that The Day of the Animals serves as a warning regarding the possible negative consequences of our environmental exploitation:

"In June 1974, Drs. F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California startled the scientific world with their finding that fluorocarbon gases used in aerosol spray cans are seriously damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Thus, potentially dangerous amounts of ultra-violet rays are reaching the surface of our planet, adversely affecting all living things. This motion picture dramatizes what could happen in the near future if we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet."

In The Day of the Animals, humans are constructed as villains when dropped off for a hike in the mountains. In response to a chemical imbalance caused by the depletion of the ozone layer, animals from condors and vultures to bears, mountain lions and wolves attack the hikers as their known enemies. In The Day of the Animals, then, animals have become more like humans, able to determine the cause for their possible demise—a human-caused hole in the ozone layer.

The film illustrates humanity’s culpability by constructing at least some of the hikers as monstrous. Advertising executive Paul Jenson (Leslie Nielson) embodies all the negative qualities that have led to the animal attacks. In one scene, he even exclaims, “If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jackass out of me for years. Neville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!”

Uncredited hiker Sam (Walt Gorney), on the other hand, explains why nature is assaulting them when he declares, “God sent a plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no good fellers.” Ultimately the only defense against these animal executioners is military intervention, but the film makes a case for changing our destructive behaviors to preserve nature and ourselves. The "cheese" may cause more laughter than thrills, but the message of The Day of the Animals is clear: climate change may have dire consequences, so we better clean up our act before the animals fight back.