CHRIS THURMAN:: Don’t look down: water everywhere and nowhere

Now that the hubbub caused by the love-it-or-hate-it responses to Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up has quietened down, the film’s popularity (360-million viewing hours on Netflix within four weeks) merits a cool assessment.

Is it the star-studded cast? Is it that viewers recognise only too well the Brexit- and Trump-era politics/media/tech circus that has repeatedly persuaded people to “choose stupid” and act against their own best interests?

If Don’t Look Up occasionally verges on the hammy, this might be because it’s impossible to sustain sharp satire when the absurd excesses of the wealthy and powerful are so outrageously self-mocking, so brazen, that they preclude lampooning. In such circumstances, anger at the diabolical often pushes the satirist into the hyperbolical.

Still, Don’t Look Up appeals (or annoys) on a subliminal level: it’s not only the finger-wagging and the bitter laughter at the Big People, but also the critique of us small people and our everyday denialism regarding the threat of mass extinction. Life on Earth won’t end because of an asteroid collision, but life as we know it may end because of planetary ecological destruction. The analogy is an obvious one, but it is potent nonetheless.

Climate change is not so much imminent as immanent – that is to say, it is not a future threat but a reality we now live with. When Gautengers face long grey weeks in the middle of summer, and the Free State-KwaZulu-Natal corridor is repeatedly struck by flooding, and the Western Cape undergoes a series of heatwaves after unseasonal rain, we tell one another around the braai that it’s El Nino (or is it El Nina?). Or we say it’s an anomaly. Or just a variation on a theme. “It was like this when we were growing up,” is a favourite source of adult comfort and self-delusion. “These things balance out — remember the drought a few years back?” is another.

In SA we have had a taste of severe or even catastrophic weather-related events over the past decade. Worse is sure to come, as it already has in other parts of the world. There is the drama of fire and flood; there is the insidious creep of slowly rising average temperatures and water levels. Yet we do nothing — or only a little, which is almost as bad — and are not entirely dissimilar to the comet deniers.

The warning conveyed by an entertaining big-budget movie such as Don’t Look Up is likely to get lost in its own noise. Perhaps quieter, smaller stories have a better chance of sharing a behaviour-changing message.

Have you heard about Tangier Island in Virginia? This landmass in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, about 150km southeast of Washington, DC, is sinking. The population of the town of Tangier has shrunk to about 500 souls; within a few decades, the island will have disappeared beneath the waves entirely.

The town became a surprising home-from-home for French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada after she moved from Tangier in the Maghreb to the east coast of the US. She was very much an outsider to the island community but its name was enough to give her a sense of belonging — and its unusual idiom-rich English dialect gave her a title for her latest exhibition: She Could Talk a Flood Tide Down.

Indeed, the thread that connects the various works in the exhibition is linguistic as much as it is visual: Barrada is interested in language games, both for their own sake and as employed in educational settings. A good example is her bilingual navigation of French and English mnemonic devices — which, removed from the classroom, are silly but somehow retain a “real world” valence.

Barrada’s playfulness belies a serious preoccupation with water and our relation (as land-bound creatures) to it. In her paintings, land and water are by turns invertible binaries and merging forms. By contrast, in the Plumber Assemblage photographic series and the film collage Continental Drift, Barrada’s attention is not on sinking Tangier Island but her own beloved Tangier. Here we are reminded of the politics of occupation: who gets to live where in our water-logged, water-scarce planet.

• She Could Talk a Flood Tide Down is at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg until 17 March.