Tourists don’t visit Dubai in summer, says a taxi driver in Josh Appignanesi’s documentary Colossal Wreck: the heat makes life unliveable. The director is travelling to Dubai to show his film My Extinction, at the 28th UN Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in 2023. My Extinction is about Appignanesi’s climate awakening and involvement with activist groups, especially Extinction Rebellion. It is funny and personal, and shows him grappling with the existential horror of climate change.
At the centre of Colossal Wreck, which documents his experiences in Dubai, is his feeling of inadequacy at COP28. He goes to cocktail parties to network, but people are too busy to speak to him. He finds himself by accident in a meeting about climate finance and realizes he is way out of his depth. The audience for the screening of My Extinction is thin, so he goes off to find another cocktail party, where he drinks too much. He meets an acquaintance called Paul Goodenough, a film producer and successful climate entrepreneur – the irony is perfect. Appignanesi does not feel half good enough, and is bewildered by the anaesthetized spectacle of COP28, most of which seems to be given over to precisely the culture of tech and consumption that he opposes. His camera jogs as he walks around, point-of-viewing his inability to transform his deep anxiety and pessimism about the climate into anything meaningful.
The collision of his pessimism with the spectacle of Dubai, a vast, eerie techno-dystopia of consumerism built in a hostile desert, gives Colossal Wreck its mesmerizing energy. It is as if Schopenhauer had made Blade Runner. The film brilliantly evokes the conference atmosphere, an unfocused jamboree of policymakers, lobbyists, financiers, entrepreneurs, politicians and journalists, of scrambles to get into the best parties, of endless speeches enumerating the same basic sets of facts, the suffering of the Global South, the scientific consensus, the political intransigence.
The Dubai “green zone” is fronted by a colossal, energy-guzzling LED display. In a central domed conference space, another enormous LED display is given over to ocean life, toe-curling when you consider the habitat-wrecking desalination plants on which the city depends.
How could any voice cut through this situation and make a difference? Catastrophic flash floods had wreaked havoc in Dubai a week before, yet not a trace of the damage remains as the conference opens. Appignanesi wonders whether, in the face of all this, his belief in the redemptive power of film-making is misplaced. He nevertheless clings on to his instinct that somehow culture has a role to play. As one of his interlocutors says, the “green zone” of culture is the only way to dispel our fixation with victims and perpetrators, and to remind us that we are all in this dire situation together. Culture provides a space where voices can be raised and heard.
This happens most remarkably when Valdelice Veron, wearing a magnificent feathered headdress and robe, speaks of the plight of Brazil’s Guarani Kaiowá community – being wiped out by government-backed militia. There is no difference between genocide and ecocide, Veron says, before describing the latest traumatic attack by gunmen on her village as she was leaving for Dubai. When it is the police who are attacking you, where do you go? Where do you have a voice?
She ends with a faltering song in her own language. There could be no more moving reminder of what the front line of climate change means for millions of people outside the West: not only the depredations of heat and floods, crop failure and unliveable habitats, but also the violence and oppression that come with the struggle for resources and land. Away from the high-level meetings and endless discussion on the wording of documents, Veron’s voice cuts through to the terrible reality.
Appignanesi attends the launch for a book by the marine biologist Tom Mustill, How to Speak Whale, at which Mustill asks his audience to close their eyes and listen to recordings of whale song – like listening to the planet itself, he suggests. Whales can live for 200 years, he reminds his audience – as long as we have been polluting the atmosphere – and are a vital part of our biosphere, transporting nutrients around the ocean. The plaintive sound weaves around the city, viewed by Appignanesi from the top of the tallest tower, a glittering spectacle summoned from desert dust.
What will remain of all this, the filmmaker asks, in 100 years’ time? Shelley’s “Ozymandias” provides the title: “Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch away”. He descends into full Schopenhauerian pessimism with the thought that we are all too much in love with the pleasure of this spectacle, with our gargantuan creation of wealth and luxury, with the blandishments of techtopia, to care that the planet as we have known it might be coming to an end.
But such conclusions are perhaps too easy. Appignanesi returns home to his wife, the producer of the film, Devorah Baum, and their children, and realizes that the hardest thing of all is the uncertainty – the not really knowing exactly where it is all going, how the predictions of climate scientists will pan out, or whether we will all, in the end, be able to accept responsibility and change, or at least to adapt. And that this uncertainty is also where we can find hope.
John-Paul Stonard’s most recent books are Creation and Arcadia, Now, both 2021. His next book, The Worst Exhibition in the World, will be published in 2026.
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