I’ve written a few bits and pieces about climate change in film, but I must admit I often see climate change in films where it was never intended to be a focus. It can’t be helped, that’s what happens once you have a degree in climate change. If you talk about or depict the planet’s climate over the last hundred years or so, that depiction can be compared to other climate normals to see how much our climate has changed since then. Sorry. I swear I’m fun at parties.
But I see the Sandra Bullock classic, Miss Congeniality, to be a film that unintentionally invites a discussion of our changing climate. This will make sense, I promise, stay with me. So, there is a brilliant scene in Miss Congeniality where Miss Rhode Island is instructed to “Describe your perfect date.”
“That’s a tough one,” she responds. I’d have to say April 25th, because it’s not too hot, not too cold. All you need is a light jacket.”
It’s a wonderful joke. Brilliantly delivered and very funny. The joke is that Miss Rhode Island is a dopey, yet deeply endearing, beauty queen and she didn’t understand the question. But there’s a secondary assumption in her answer that I think a lot of people assumed back in the year 2000, despite (possibly) knowing better.
While April 25th is a fixed day in the calendar, sure to come around every year, the temperature and weather we see on April 25th not fixed. There’s normal variation, of course, and there’s climate change. Since our climate is changing, our weather and seasons are changing with it. We are seeing hotter weather, sometimes much drier, sometimes much wetter, and longer springs and summers. Shorter winters. Generally. The world is warming and the April 25th of twenty-four years ago, when that film came out, is not what can be expected thirty years from now. In all honestly, it is not likely representative of the next April 25th and the one after that. Our delightful Miss Rhode Island is unaware of the existence of climate change, which was not unheard of in 2000, but hadn’t quite the mainstream, either.
Let’s take a quick look at my hometown of London, Ontario. Looking back through temperature data (this stuff is really easy to find, it’s just old weather data) you can see the mean temperature for April 25, 2003, was 9.6 degrees Celsius. Like Miss Rhode Island said, light jacket weather. April 25th, 2012, it was 6.8 degrees. So, is climate change a lie? No, there’s natural variability. Maybe it was cloudy that day. April 25th, 2016, was 10.5 degrees. Hmm. April 25th, 2021, was 12.7 degrees. April 2nd, 2024, was 22.1 degrees. Wow.
Miss Rhode Island’s joke exists in a very different context in 2024 than it did in 2000. And that’s not mocking her or criticism of the film, the filmmakers likely didn’t know how our climate was going to change or how severely it would change. I do not for a moment believe in ‘presentism’ where you judge people throughout history with today’s foreknowledge and moral high ground. So, no point giving them grief about it. People in the 2000s didn’t know very much about climate change. The science has improved by an order of magnitude compared to 24 years ago.
But April 25th is changing along with our climate, and I wouldn’t advise assuming it’s the perfect day for a light jacket anymore. It can still be a perfect day, it’s sunny with a high of 11 degrees where I am, but don’t assume it will be like the April days of yore.
Alex Colvin 