Aesthetic Wonder & Climate Change
I should note that Leon is not the only character who is relaxed about the fires. Felix appears similarly relaxed. He is a photographer, a romantic. He photographs the sea and captures portraits of folks looking at the sea. The logistics of this confuse Felix and Leon until Devid offers a solution: Felix will first photograph the sea, and then photograph the person from the front. This allows the consumer of his art to see both the natural environment and the person’s reaction to it. This tells us something about the detachment we see enacted with Leon. Felix’s photographs, of which we get to see very few, reveal a distinction between aesthetic distance and emotional negligence. Petzold frames Felix’s calm through curiosity: he masks Felix’s negligence with wanting to understand the relationship between people and the environment. His detachment gets to appear not apathetic, but reverential. He looks outward in a way we might morally appreciate more than Leon’s outward gaze. We can forgive Felix but not Leon. Yet, the former is not much better than the latter. Take, for instance, the moment when firefighters announce the imminence of the fires. For Felix, this is too far away to be an issue; his apathy becomes dangerously close to Leon’s. Regardless, we know why we loathe Leon so much more than Felix, but what does this tell us? Afire certainly complicates our moral judgments: it reveals that some level of aesthetic wonder is okay—Felix’s actions—but others are not okay—Leon’s actions. So perhaps this distinction between aesthetic distance and emotional negligence is a distinction without a difference. Detachment, however you put it, and particularly related to climate change, is unforgivable.
Nadja, on the other hand, appears bothered by the fires. Or so she says. She is a free spirit, not afraid to have loud sex, share her opinions on everything, and just enjoy the environment around her. She is not so bothered that she feels urgency or a need to evacuate: just bothered enough to appear more likeable than Leon. Perhaps she understands the gravity of the situation, but her behavior remains fun, flirty, and theatrical. There is something to be said about this being the female character of the film: smart, but not smart enough. Her literary smarts are revealed at the end, but they are not really relevant. Nadja is indeed bothered by Leon and rejects his writing, but she never rejects him. She continues to invite him to meals and the like, even after he has insulted her and her friends. Perhaps viewers interpret this as grace, kindness, or even pity.
To my mind, Petzold has developed a classic female character entrenched in misogynistic stereotypes: useful in that she is expected to manage the failures of men, but not useful with her intellect. This distracts from the film’s ability to critique human action toward climate change insofar as it portrays her as someone who can’t act: Leon is too busy becoming triumphant, and she is too busy being a woman who cooks and picks up after men. So, who is responsible for addressing climate change, according to the film?
Whose responsibility is it?
These varying levels of work ethic become a significant topic discussed by Leon and Felix: Leon thinks that ‘real work’ is working solely on one’s art, while Felix believes that working on the house, cooking, and chores are what constitute real work. Leon talks a great deal about work, indeed, but actually does very little of it. His idea of work is rigid, self-aggrandizing, and performative. For instance, Felix heads off to the beach while Leon claims to have too much writing to do. But instead of writing, he looks at Nadja’s diary. He, and therefore we viewers, invade her personal space. He then runs (indeed his only moment of urgency) back to his work when he realizes that Felix is returning: it is as if he can’t be seen not working. His idea of work is not about creating meaning but about maintaining the illusion of purpose. Felix, on the other hand, is far more relaxed. What concerns him is the state of the home. In fact, the roof leak and resulting mold would bring a “catastrophe,” he says. That keeps him up at night. But not Leon: he is kept up by the loud sex. This contrast between the two characters reveals something about responsibility, although not anything particularly relevant to the climate change surrounding them. As viewers, it feels ridiculous to call the leak in the roof a “catastrophe” when the forest around them is burning and the house might soon cease to exist regardless of the leak. Likewise, Leon’s idea of work seems ridiculous because he spends more time analyzing others’ lives than doing his own work. Perhaps this is the film’s way of saying that there is no legitimate reason not to address one’s burning environment; the only issue is that the characters never have to face the illegitimacy of their responsibilities until it’s too late.
The Viewer’s Experience
Let’s return to the start of this blog post: consider the sound of flies, the knowledge that the wildfires are encroaching, and the fact that the car is broken down and cannot be fixed. Leon might not be unsettled, but we are. I found myself unsettled and bothered for a great deal of the film: I wanted the fly to stop and for Leon to get his act together. The constant buzz of the fly, present mainly during close-up shots of Leon, felt like nature reminding Leon and us that the fires are nearby. We understand this, but he doesn’t. We hear the planes extinguishing the fire go by. It worries us; it doesn’t worry Leon. He looks up, but we don’t. The camera remains trained on Leon’s figure. It isn’t until minute forty-three that we finally get a clear shot of the planes and the fire. Not to mention that Leon’s behavior becomes increasingly annoying: he keeps smoking even when he shouldn’t. You just want to scream at him to get it together. The sound design keeps us aware as Leon remains unaware or unbothered: by fixing the camera on Leon watching the planes, Petzold forces us to experience his obliviousness while simultaneously drawing our attention to what he ignores. We become so bothered by how someone can be so self-consumed. We think we are better than he is for a moment: we believe that we probably wouldn’t be that self-obsessed. Indeed, we get away with thinking that. To my mind, there is not one moment when Petzold corrects that judgment. Nadja’s smile, which the film ends on, seemingly confirms this: maybe she is mocking Leon and us for thinking we are better than others, or maybe she is confirming that women will always be there to pick up after others. Either way, ending on her smile (followed by his hopeful facial expression) rather than a shot of a ruined house or other devastation, for instance, allows us and Leon to get away with feeling the way we do: urgency isn’t necessary, and we would probably act in a way that Nadja would be proud of. That’s why she’s smiling at us, isn’t it? She knows better than she acts, but we know better than she does.
Art within Art
What about the art within art (the film)? Why include it? What does it suggest about climate change and aging? We’ve got Leon’s writing, Felix’s photography, Nadja’s ability to quote German poems, her exchange with the publisher, and the revelation that she is working on a dissertation in literary studies, specifically on the works of Heinrich Heine. In fact, she and the publisher even recite Heine’s “The Asra,” a lyric about the encounter between a princess and a slave whose people “die when they love”: almost like Felix and Devid, who fall in love and indeed pass away in the fires. Other writers discussed included Uwe Johnson, Heinrich von Kleist, and Werner Hamacher. Art mediates and complicates our relationship to climate change and aging. Leon’s writing and its success reveal how art risks aestheticizing catastrophe, which distances us from the real consequences; Felix’s photography reveals the art that we feel okay with, even when it is no better. Nadia’s literary engagement highlights the significance of cultural memory in addressing climate change and humans’ relationship with it: Nadia’s literary studies contextualize and ground the distance that other forms of art establish and exploit.
Climate Change & Aging
So what does the film reveal about climate change and its resulting destruction? We have a character, Devid, whose only business seems to be sleeping with Nadja and Felix; Nadja, who seems strangely go with the flow yet also concerned by the fire, just not concerned enough to evacuate; Felix, a romantic photographer who wants to engage in youthful beach activities, and Leon who sees nothing but his writing and feels insulted even when he isn’t spoken about. We, as viewers, are bothered by the fire. The characters aren’t. We feel attached; the characters, however, remain detached. This dissonance suggests something about what a “meaningful response,” as it were, to climate change might be. It’s not about heroes or victims, nor guilt, shame, and/or responsibility. Rather, I suggest that the film hopes to reveal the following: it’s about recognizing the internal conflict that is at stake when, or in the way of, addressing the changing environment. A meaningful response is the ability to vulnerably turn inward and extinguish the fires—rather than setting them aside—igniting our immediate internal world so that the external, appearing therefore less immediate, conflict then becomes the urgent fire.
What about aging? It dawned on me at the close of the movie that this film addresses the intersection between aging and climate change a great deal. On the one hand, you’ve got the playful edge that the characters long to maintain. Petzold discusses how important it was to him that these characters appear young and enjoy carefree summers. On the other hand, you’ve also got their desire to prove themselves: to grow up into working adults. Take Leon as an example. He can think of nothing but proving himself. Felix also wants to prove himself, but retains childlike energy. Devid appears content with where he is. And Nadja seems to have control over her social aging: she both pursues her desires and foregrounds her role as a woman. For Leon, the ‘correct trajectory for an author’ takes precedence over the changing climate. Perhaps this underscores how aging—or at least positioning oneself as a mature person—is as much about performing certain societal expectations as it is about actually meeting them. Leon’s obsession with legacy and success keeps him tied to a narrow idea of maturity: individual achievement over collective responsibility. These varying attitudes towards “growing up” reveal that youthful freedom, the pressure to prove oneself, and responsible actions in the face of environmental destruction are at odds with one another: to grow up is to learn to be an individual. It appears, according to the film, that this would exclude collective responsibility. Aging amidst climate change thus pushes us to redefine maturity.
I would like to conclude with a note on the translation of the title: “Roter Himmel” became “Afire.” The German title evokes a vivid image of nature as threatening. The English title is more ambiguous: we might think about the state of being on fire in terms of the external world and personal ambition—the internal world. Climate change is as much about the world being on fire as it is about our lives being emotionally on fire: the only issue is that Leon’s personal fire gets (temporarily) extinguished by the real fires around him. “Roter Himmel” perhaps emphasizes the external destruction more, appropriately so: regardless of whether your internal world is on fire, the external world will remain aflame. Ultimately, Afire attempts to expose our biases—we are a little bit like all of the characters, aren’t we? To my mind, it ends up burying itself in its own biases a little too much.
