The coming attractions for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary about climate crisis, elegantly directed by David Guggenheim, offers a glimpse of the man you would meet today in a social situation or, in my case, a sit-down interview. He’s relaxed, impassioned, articulate, self-deprecating and funny. So why do political journalists spend so much time claiming he's not? Spending half an hour talking to Al Gore a few weeks ago, I got a glimpse of someone who’s learned not to corral his passions and beliefs; a man without percentage-driven political consultants, that is. Without addressing the scary scenarios presented in the film, corporate consultants have begun a series of ad hominem attacks on Gore, with vicious comparisons to Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler spewing forth. Audiences have a different perspective; in only its second week, the movie’s brought in almost $2 million, and An Inconvenient Truth was the ninth highest-grossing movie of the past weekend, with the highest per screen average, $17,615 at 77 screens. (By comparison, the current top-grossing movie, The Break-Up grossed $12,759 per screen.) I spoke with Gore the sunny afternoon of May 3, in a conference room atop the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago, accompanied by photographer Leah Missbach Day. Along with issues raised in the movie, we talk about keeping the internet free from a corporate takeover; the legacy of investigative journalism; "the democracy crisis," television metanarratives and "information ecosystems."
PRIDE: As a son of Kentucky to a son of Tennessee, I have to admit that of all the moving or daunting things in the film, the last shot got to me. Made me teary.
GORE: The river.
PRIDE: The meandering, muddy, pastoral river, which could be lost to climate change.
GORE: Looks like scenes you’ve seen…
PRIDE: [looking toward a nearby poster] And this is a scary poster.
GORE: It is, isn’t it? The poster and the trailer are both different from the movie and the book, but they do their job.
PRIDE: The trailer has people talking, they ask me, is it really as interesting as the preview makes it look?
GORE: It’s a terrific trailer. It’s a whole different group that makes trailers than makes movies. I’ve been fascinated to learn about these things a little bit.
PRIDE: I always joke that trailers are the most expensive art form… If the movie costs $100 million, the trailer costs something like $100,100,000.
GORE: [laughs] Yeah, the [cost of] raw material!
PRIDE: The biggest laugh in the screening I saw came from the Upton Sinclair quotation. [“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”] Could you talk about that quote a little bit?
GORE: Yeah. People who learn all these facts, sometimes for the first time, immediately want to know why are our leaders in the White House, and in the Congress, not reacting as a rational person should react? And the reason they laugh at the Upton Sinclair quote is that it does supply one of the possible explanations—[laughs]—for why people reject truths that are inconvenient. If you try to get somebody to understand something and his salary depends on him not understanding it, that can be a laborious process. George Orwell once wrote that, I can’t get this quote exactly right, but Dr. Google will supply the accurate version of it, he said we have the capacity as human beings to deny the truth long after it becomes abundantly obvious to any reasonable person that it is the truth. Then he said that when nations form policies based on that approach, he said, sooner or later, there is a collision with reality, often on a battlefield.” [Gore lowers his voice dramatically.] It’s a chilling quote. Actually, the temptation to create one’s own reality and exclude inconvenient truths that conflict with the desired artificial reality, is what got us into Iraq. It’s what created these deficits. It is also why the United States of America is one of only two nations in the advanced world not to ratify Kyoto. And the only nation with leaders who have their heads in the sand and refuse to see the reality of this planetary emergency. So we have to find a way to build, to quickly build a sufficiently widespread recognition of the truth among the people of this country. So that they will demand of the political leadership in both parties that we react, and confront the crisis.”
PRIDE: And the presentation is relentlessly visual, in the best possible way, building the case. "You think I’m being hyperbolic? Nope, here’s the evidence."
GORE: The old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words is true and a thousand pictures—[Gore laughs]—make a big difference, particularly when they’re ordered in a sequence that takes you logically from one moment to the next. I tried to tell the story for thirty years, and during all of that time, I personally have had a long series of ‘A-ha!’ moments when I realized these dots connect to these dots. What I do in the slide show, very simply, is to try to reproduce those ‘A-ha!’ moments that I personally have had. I’ve searched, in over a thousand efforts to present this, for the best way to produce for others the realizations that I’ve had. I’ve always believed that if I can get these scientists to explain it to me in plain and simple language that I can understand… If I can understand it, I can communicate it to anybody.
PRIDE: Another keen, key phrase is the film is finding a way to not go from denial to despair. I’m interested in that, and also in how Guggenheim synthesized three momentous events in your life, the 2000 recount and two personal tragedies. And how it’s meant to demonstrate, this is how someone who’s alert has personal revelations, so that the result is not hagiography, this is not “about me.”
GORE: Mm, yeah. First of all, David Guggenheim, in my opinion, has done a spectacular job of making a really entertaining movie out of a slide show! [laughs] It was his idea to use the short biographical pieces, not mine. He convinced me that on film it’s important to provide a basis for the audience to connect personally to a character or characters…. And he said… “You’re it!” By then, he had gained my trust to an extent I knew anything he did would be done sensitively and well. In a live stage presentation, whoever it is, even if it’s me, you’re going to have a certain dramatic tension just because there’s a live human being talking to you. On film, that doesn’t automatically translate. You have to supply the narrative thread to enable the audience to make that connection. Now, on the point of avoiding this transition straight from denial to despair, there is a global scientific consensus now that’s as strong as it gets. It’s based on five points that are all interrelated. Number one, global warming is real. Number two; we are principally responsible for it. Number three, the results are catastrophic. And number four; we have to fix it now. And number five; it’s not too late.
PRIDE: The very important part—
GORE: Yeah. For some people, they’re still on point one. “It’s not real.” Now, President Bush has retreated from point one to point two. He now says it’s real but it’s not at all clear that human beings are largely responsible for it. The scientific community is not confused about that. It’s just him and ExxonMobil and Dick Cheney and a few others. But there are those who say, “The results won’t be bad.” There are those who say, “We shouldn’t try to fix it because it’ll mess up the economy.” But the most insidious of the trenches that people retreat to is when people say, “it’s too big, we can’t solve it, nahhhh. We might as well not even try. “ Well, that’s the moral equivalent of being a suicide bomber, really. Because if you really accept the first four points and then you don’t even try! Then what are you giving up on? Human civilization and the habitability of the planet! [Gore laughs]
Hello! That’s not a moral choice. But more significantly, the scientists tell us that that assertion is wrong. There is no cause for despair. We still do have time. Now, if we wait long enough, they’ll be right. There is probably a ten-year window ahead of us, during which we have to make a significant start, bending down the lines that measure the rate of increase in pollution. But the scientists who I most respect, who I am convinced have a sufficient mastery of this material that they do know what they’re talking about, say that we still have ten years within which to do this but we need to get started right away. And some of the changes will be unavoidable. Some of the temperature increases globally are already programmed into the climate system because there are these big timelines. But what’s already programmed in is nothing compared to what’s yet to happen and yet to be programmed in that we have to stop. We have to forestall it. We don’t have a choice. H. G. Wells once said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. In this case, we do face a planetary emergency. The most powerful and influential nation on earth, that should be leading the world to meet this crisis, is now the biggest part of the problem. In order to change, we have to change the minds of the American people by falling back on something I’ve long believed to be the case, that ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And even though our marketplace of ideas doesn’t work in the way that it did in the days of our founders, there is still a way to present a truth even if it’s an inconvenient truth, and get people to act on the basis of it.
PRIDE: There’s the example of the fluorocarbons in Freon. We addressed that.
GORE: That’s correct. That’s correct. We’re well on the way to solving that.
PRIDE: How much have you read about the Net Neutrality stuff?
GORE: Ohhhhhh. That is, it’s a huge, huge issue. I think the New York Times just had an editorial.
PRIDE: A couple days ago.
GORE: Yeah.
PRIDE: They came out and said, this is insane, we need to preserve the freedom of the internet [without interference from service providers].
GORE: I spend a lot of time worrying about both the climate crisis and the democracy crisis. In order to fix the climate crisis, we will probably have to fix the democracy crisis by rehabilitating and revivifying the conversation of democracy that’s been hollowed out and desiccated, partly because of the shift from a multi-way conversation empowered by the printing press that had low entry barriers for individuals, and a meritocracy of ideas. A shift from that to a space dominated by one-way television broadcasts, over-the-air, cable, satellite, that does not allow individuals to enter the conversation. Along comes the internet to save the day with low entry barriers for individuals, a dynamic, multi-way conversation, that once again rebuilds this meritocracy of ideas and it doesn’t have the ability, the internet does not have the ability to support mass distribution, in real time, of full-motion video. And so television, because we have a kind of television receptor in our brains, and that’s another whole story, it has a quasi-hypnotic hold. The average American watches television four hours and thirty-nine minutes a day.
PRIDE: Ouch.
GORE: We don’t watch that much, so there are others making up for us and who are watching even more than that! [He laughs.] That’s up four minutes from the year before, and the vast majority of people using the internet are watching TV while they’re using the internet. So here’s the race: we have the possibility of democracy to be reborn and once again thrive, with the freedom of internet conversation, and yet the conglomerate ownership of a very small number of content companies that push out over the television medium to sell products has this hold on the minds of people who sit there, transfixed. It is absolutely essential to preserve the freedom of the internet. Because eventually it will support full-motion video, produced by individuals. I have a TV network that’s aimed, that’s based on that idea, pioneering that model. But yeah… it’s a different topic, but Net Neutrality—
PRIDE: —It’s another ecosystem.
GORE: I talk all the time about information ecosystems.
PRIDE: I’m a journalist by training, and I know you were, but I remain agog and aghast when you see established journalists repeating canards, such as a recent Chicago Tribune editorial that was bookended with lame jokes drawn off the falsehood that you said you’d invented the internet. I don’t even remember what it was about, just that something untrue was being repeated. I don’t know what I’d say to journalists like that if I were in the same room with them. “This has been disproved, this is not true?”
GORE: [laughs] Well, thank you for feeling that way. I appreciate that more than you know!
PRIDE: It’s like the problem of established journalists at magazines and newspapers frothing about blogs, that one-way conversation is suddenly threatened.
GORE: Absolutely.
PRIDE: Then you see the bullying about the internet, “It’s not censorship, why shouldn’t we pay for premium pipelines and for premium access speed?” You want to say, “No”—
GORE: —No, no, no, this is our last chance for democracy to be reborn, you’re right. And on the other point, you know, the definition of news is a fact or a collection of facts that yields incremental value because it adds to an already known set of facts. I remember in Carthage, Tennessee, a small community where I spent my summers, there was a newspaper article not long ago that began, “Everybody knows that lespedeza is vulnerable to fungus and dada-dada-dah, so now this new seed…” And I thought, well, the person was writing about something but he was revivifying the known facts to farmers who, y’know, didn’t know those facts about lespedeza. That was the established fact and the incremental news was added onto it. Okay. In this television environment, in order for what they call news to work, they have to establish meta-narratives that are partly fact, partly entertainment, then constantly revivify them in order to make it possible to add something. It’s just like here in the Chicago markets, the amount of money that is devoted to what they call derivatives. You know what derivatives are? Completely overwhelms the actual buying and selling of pork bellies, y’know. The collection of futures and all these different abstract concepts that are piled on top of the basic transaction, that is now far larger. Well, we now have news derivatives. They have come to overwhelm the actual… And again, it’s not a free market. It’s not a meritocracy of ideas. So the derivatives are artificially manufactured… We’re getting way far afield. It’s an interesting conversation…
PRIDE: Well, the longer piece I want to write out of this is to draw these parallels, again, the ecosystems. If you’re polluting the groundwater, you have all these problems, if you pollute journalism and the public discourse… Television and other outlets seem so frightened of ideas. The summer I was 12 was when CBS re-broadcast all these shows, then Woodward and Bernstein reported what they reported. So I still have these youthful, even childish ideals…
GORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me, too. Yeah.
PRIDE: It’s the part of me that asks, why is the material in your presentation, in this movie, not a regular ten-minute segment on something like Dateline. You get the daily news cycle excuse, too, "Oh that information was released late on Friday night, so that’s not part of our Monday news cycle."
GORE: I know. I know. It’s crazy.
PRIDE: That’s the parallel that intrigues me.
GORE: It’s crazy. And why isn’t there an ongoing outrage about torture? Y’know, it’s like, “Oh, well, Russell Crowe threw a telephone at the concierge.” That’s the lead in the news cycle. I was at an investigative reporters’ seminar held by the American Press Institute at Columbia University in December of 1972 when I was working at the Nashville Tennessean. And you mentioned Woodward and Bernstein being your inspiration. The topic of conversation was, “Is Investigative Journalism Dead?” Because their Watergate stories were terrific but had not yet provoked any reaction. And they were Example A of the argument that these kinds of stories just don’t find readers. Ironically, two months later, it just exploded and the heyday of investigative journalism began. Just as the Edward R. Murrow shows were terrific, Good Night, and Good Luck. shows how that marked a high water point in the television news business, because even then he was fighting off the commercial dynamic, which has now taken over. Most TV reporters, you know, will repeat the cliché, “If it bleeds, it leads,” and add, “If it thinks, it stinks.”
[A publicist signals for us to wrap it up.]
GORE: Anyway, I appreciate the unusual, in-depth questions that go below the surface, it’s a treat for me.
PRIDE: Well, thank you. And I don’t mean to be obsequious, but I’ve always wanted to shake your hand and say, “It’s good to meet you, Mr. President.”
GORE: [laughs] Thank you very much. Here, let’s get a picture of the two of us. Here ya go.
[For a glimpse of a relaxed Gore, watch Spike Jonze’s untitled thirteen-minute documentary that was commissioned for the Democratic National Convention but never used. Film stills: Paramount Classics. Portraits © 2006 Leah Missbach Day.]
ray - that was much needed - thank you - wonderful piece -
Ray, how completely APEX of you.
Great interview Ray! (and Al too). Readers might want to check out his TV channel on-line at http://current.tv/
Bravo!
Ray - what an intelligent and thoughtful interview with Gore. i work in the doc dept at Participant, so i've read them all. thanks for your continued insight. your wrtitings are truly additive to the world of film, and its business, and film criticism.
What a marvelous dialogue!! My prescient son has long believed that Al Gore will be the Democratic presidential candidate - I sure hope so - I had almost forgotten what an inteligent, humorous, incisive and insightful politician looks like - I just hope he's not too late - George has done such a good job of dumbing down the electorate, I hope they haven't lost the ability to THINK -
Ray,
Fantastic, interview!
I think this is especially apt-"the temptation to create one’s own reality and exclude inconvenient truths that conflict with the desired artificial reality, is what got us into Iraq."One may apply this truth to so much, Roe vs Wade, Aids, etc..
As well as being a fan of Gore, I am also a huge fan & supporter of Participant Productions,& look forward to seeing An Inconvenient Truth this week with my sister..
http://www.participantproductions.com/
nice. really nice, mr. pride.
i read this right after the old brandl piece on neo-sophism and the current story about horror movies. fits right in. we have our neo-sophists who have their own ideas of climate change quite independent of any scientific study ([“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”). and we have the anonymity and distance that's characterictic of the new horror films in the vagueness we feel toward the devastation that so far has not reached us who can always find food, shelter, and water. right now we are among the wealthy of the human population but that club will be kicking people out as things get scarcer. one billion people without clean water now. will that number go up or down? our horror movies might get good again, but i don't look forward to it.