‘Turning up the Heat’ A Story Device for Addressing Climate Change
By: Cameron Catanzano
Tags: Storytelling, Climate Change, Psychology, Film, Environment

‘Turning up the Heat’ A Story Device for Addressing Climate Change

A Conventional Symbol Applied to a Novel Problem

Photo by Aay Kay on Unsplash

Hot weather — and the many ways we’ve learned to communicate it — has come to play many important roles in our stories. We often use Heat to build a juxtaposition of worlds, communicate a character’s disorientation, or symbolize an unavoidable reality demanding our attention.

Juxtaposition:

Florida Project gives us an example of Heat’s visual juxtaposition turned towards the film’s larger class critique. In Florida Project, we spend the whole movie focused on a motel community caked in constant Florida-style sweat, all while living next to the dream-like Disney World.

The one time I distinctly remember characters without such apparent sweat is when a couple accidentally ends up at the motel during their honeymoon to Disney World. The couple was truly of some other world than our main characters, and it is self-evident that ending up in this motel was a big problem for them. So, as quickly as they enter the film they get the heck out of that motel.

However, no one does class critique better than Parasite and Heat plays an important role in communicating the juxtaposition of Parasite’s upper and lower class worlds. The rich are well-dressed and picturesque with AC shielding them from sweat, but the poor do not have such luxuries. Instead, they wear noticeably old sweat-stained clothes as they huddle next to loud ineffective fans, using pizza boxes to fan themselves off.

Disorientation:

I tend to focus heavily on movies (It’s a blessing and a curse), but Heat has also been used in written stories. One of my first and most memorable experiences thinking of Heat in a story comes from reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger in a high school English class.

Heat (and the baking sun) builds on the book's larger existential themes as it displays a disorienting reality for The Stranger’s main character Meursault:

“The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations — especially in my forehead, where all the veins seemed to be bursting through the skin.”

Unavoidable Reality:

One of the most compelling uses of Heat I’ve seen recently is to symbolize an unavoidable reality. In this way, the Heat runs parallel to something else in the narrative which demands the characters’ attention.

In a very physical sense, Heat is often a hard thing to avoid. I’ve experienced my fair share of scorching hot days, and if you don’t have AC, there’s just no avoiding the fact that you are going to be HOT when the planet says so. In this way, Heat serves as a very effective symbol to run parallel to all those other things our characters can’t escape either.

Sydney Lumet’s film 12 Angry Men is a prime example of this. The story follows 12 jurors stuck in a deliberation room as they come to a unanimous decision regarding the guilt or innocence of a young kid charged with the murder of his father. All the while, each character becomes caked in more and more sweat as New York City sees a truly scorching day.

Occasionally, their debate pauses as the characters are exhausted by the tension. Some jurors turn to small open windows for some breeze or go to the bathroom to wash off their face, but any attempt to find relief from the heat and tension of the deliberation room can only last for a short second.

There’s no escaping the deliberation room and its oppressive Heat until every member faces the conflicting facts of their case and comes to a unanimous decision.