Gonna tell my kids this was HBO/HBO Max/Max
Welcome back.
This week I wrote about a groundbreaking and essential new study that — thank christ — is not actually about which seemingly reasonable dietary supplement will definitely extend/tragically cut short your life.
It’s about 🍿 film, and after you’re done reading, I’d love it if you replied to this email with some favorite movies that moved the needle for you in some way. We’ll share the list with everyone soon.
— Quinn
Listen to last week’s essay now 👇
I’m Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit.
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GIVE ME THAT GOOD ENERGY
Last August I wrote an essay about how my ten-year-old — who was still, literally, soaking wet from hours of playing in the ocean, and who had every intention of going right back in the waves after dinner — really wanted to watch Jaws.
Our conversation inspired me to write about — because he loves the ocean so much and because it’s an incredible, layered movie about, but not exclusive to, dads and local government — how doing this would be both a terrible and a wonderful idea.
In both cases, the experience would be irrevocable. Of course, all the best movies and TV are.
I used Jaws in that essay as a jumping off point to talk about how making and experiencing intentional art can remind of us what we’ve accomplished, together, and how we can affect the world back. How we need to celebrate our wins, and how the job is never done.
How Jaws, but even more so, how Saving Private Ryan, and 9-5, Tootsie, Selma, Do The Right Thing, Abbott Elementary, Home Before Dark, Hidden Figures, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation tell us in no uncertain terms that “shit is hard, it doesn’t have to be this way, we can do better, but it’ll take all of us“ and, like I emphasized last week, “We have to act right the fuck now.”
This week, Good Energy, the consultancy non-profit founded by Anna Jane Joyner and for which I advise released the results of a new study for which they co-partnered with Colby College.
The study question was simple:
How many of the 250 most popular films of the last decade passed the new “Climate Reality Check”?
Before I tell you the answer, a brief reminder from Fast Company about what the Climate Reality Check is, and its legendary inspiration:
“(It is an) environmental equivalent of the Bechdel Test.
It’s a quiz as simple as Bechdel’s famous measure of whether a film treats women as humans, asking just two questions:
Does climate change exist in the world of the movie, and do any characters know that?“
The criteria for each film, besides being ranked on IMDB as a top 25 film (YMMV) in a year since 2013, were:
Be set on Earth
Be set primarily between 2006-2100
Not really involve itself with high fantasy
(to note, I love high fantasy, historical fiction, and science fiction, but the goal with this study was to understand if movies depicting a grounded “here and now” (or relatively soon) representation of the world we’re actually living in. Which is vitally important, because even as far back as 2001, 55% of Americans were “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change)
The result?