Images of dystopian worlds have long been a feature of our cultural history: God dousing the planet in flames, the giant crabs and butterflies at the end of the world in H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, the piercing heat of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and its huge mosquitos. More recently this has created a sub-genre known as cli-fi, where writers use fiction to imagine brutal societies damaged by climate collapse. One thing that threads much dystopian fiction is the image of a heated Earth, doused in unrelenting sunlight.
As we accelerate towards climate collapse, these images are no longer contained within the imaginations of artists—they consistently appear in front of us. The Australian bush fires that caused approximately 1 billion animals to burn to death and decimated polar ice sheets, the Kenyan drought that may cause 2.1 million people to starve, and flooding in America and Spain, are just a small number of examples of the extreme weather that will radically change our lives.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire was released in 1961, written by Wolf Mankowitz and Val Guest with Guest directing. The film follows depressed, alcoholic journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd); his career and life are in free-fall and his love for Fleet Street is shattered. Stenning works at The Daily Express alongside veteran science reporter Bill McGuire (Leo McKern) who is effectively keeping Stenning’s job by writing his articles for him. Guest and Mankowitz craft one of the most believable and fully realized depictions of a newsroom in cinema; the harried, hectic days where the writers live under the ever-constant glare of the deadline in a room suffused with endless thick smoke.
The film’s narrative is driven by the twin detonation of nuclear bombs by the U.S. and the Soviet Union at the same time on the North and South pole. What begins as a blast of extreme weather (we see tabloid front pages raving about the sunny summer weather, not too dissimilar from those of modern papers) soon turns increasingly apocalyptic. We first learn that the twin blasts have rotated the Earth’s axis by 11 degrees, rapidly altering weather systems across the planet, which is causing brutal heat to sear over London. It is then revealed that the bombs have in fact altered the course of the Earth’s orbit, sending it closer to the Sun, with Bill McGuire predicting there being only four months left of life.
What The Day the Earth Caught Fire offers is an intriguing and frightening glimpse into how society will react following a major climatic collapse, something that will happen this century if we do not overcome our addiction to fossil fuels. Water becomes a precious mineral, only available to people in small buckets collected in long quenes. Mad Max-style anarchy occurs, as individuals give into nihilistic abandon, stealing the water to engage in pitch black carnival street parties as they terrorize homes and people.
What is most interesting, and perhaps most terrifying, is the general social and political apathy that occurs. Daily rituals seem to continue unabated, such as Stenning and McGuire continuing to work at the newspaper. There is no revolution—the faceless government, only depicted in monotone and sickening RP radio broadcasts, continue without so much as a flicker of resistance. The decisions on how to solve the self-created dystopian crisis are made by the same closed-door leaders, unaccountable to no one.
Our current political situation reflects this: international corporations and governments have ransacked the planet’s resources for nearly two centuries, and the major political opposition has largely been contained within the sphere of activism. Yes, there is personal responsibility and liability—we consume too much, waste food and plastic and petrol. But this consumption is facilitated and intentionally created by those same governments and corporations. In the film, governments knew that the apocalyptic disaster was unfolding but the information only becomes public due to the investigative reporting of Stenning and McGuire. Likewise, oil companies have known about climate change since 1977, years before it became public knowledge, and spent the intervening years spending millions on promoting misinformation.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire contains some utterly beautiful depictions of a dystopian world; in the opening sequence, we see Stenning walking alone in a London surrounded by shattered windows and battered buildings, the screen cloaked in a deep amber glow, as the Sun shoots its rays onto the city without mercy. Yet, this is not what makes the film terrifying, it’s society’s acceptance of its fate without a virulent pushback against those who caused it. Climate collapse by nuclear weapons and fossil fuels are distinct but ultimately arrive at the same end, an inhospitable planet with nothing left but fatalistic remnants of modernity.
At one point, Stenning declares angrily to McGuire that the "human race has been poisoning itself with a smile on its face." In some sense he’s right. We walk into the supermarket happy that we can buy three different sizes of pre-packed mango chunks in single-use plastic, not thinking of the damage that causes, the things that kill. But as is brilliantly presented in the film, the real poison is the lack of desire we have to change power, to hold those who corrupt the planet accountable. Instead, we take it with the shake of a head and a sigh.
