Want to
know how the world really ends? Look to TV show Families Like Ours
John Harris
The Danish
drama is piercing in its ordinariness. In the real world, the climate crisis
worsens and authoritarians take charge as we calmly look away
Sun 11 May
2025 07.35 EDT
The climate
crisis has taken a new and frightening turn, and in the expectation of
disastrous flooding, the entire landmass of Denmark is about to be evacuated.
Effectively, the country will be shutting itself down and sending its 6 million
people abroad, where they will have to cope as best they can. Huge numbers of
northern Europeans are therefore being turned into refugees: a few might have
the wealth and connections to ease their passage from one life to another, but
most are about to face the kind of precarious, nightmarish future they always
thought of as other people’s burden.
Don’t panic:
this is not a news story – or not yet, anyway. It’s the premise of an addictive
new drama series titled Families Like Ours, acquired by the BBC and available
on iPlayer. I have seen two episodes so far, and been struck by the very
incisive way it satirises European attitudes to the politics of asylum. But
what has also hit me is its portrayal of something just as modern: how it shows
disaster unfolding in the midst of everyday life. At first, watching it brings
on a sense of impatience. Why are most of the characters so calm? Where are the
apocalyptic floods, wildfires and mass social breakdown? At times, it verges on
boring. But then you realise the very clever conceit that defines every moment:
it is really a story about how we all live, and what might happen tomorrow, or
the day after.
The writer
and journalist Dorian Lynskey’s brilliant book Everything Must Go is about the
various ways that human beings have imagined the end of the world. “Compared to
nuclear war,” he writes, “the climate emergency deprives popular storytellers
of their usual toolkit. Global warming may move too fast for the planet but it
is too slow for catastrophe fiction.” Even when the worst finally happens, most
of us may respond with the kind of quiet mental contortions that are probably
better suited to literature than the screen. Making that point, Lynskey quotes
a character in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year of the Flood: “Nobody admitted
to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because
what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.”
These days,
that kind of thinking reflects how people deal with just about every aspect of
our ever-more troubled world: if we can avert our eyes from ecological
breakdown, then everything else can be either underestimated or ignored. There
is a kind of moment, I would wager, that now happens to all of us. We glance at
our phones or switch on the radio and are assailed by the awful gravity of
everything, and then somehow manage to instantly find our way back to calm and
normality. This, of course, is how human beings have always managed to cope, as
a matter of basic mental wiring. But in its 21st-century form, it also has very
modern elements. Our news feeds reduce everything to white noise and trivia:
the result is that developments that ought to be vivid and alarming become so
dulled that they look unremarkable.
Where this
is leading politically is now as clear as day. In the New Yorker, Andrew
Marantz wrote, in the wake of Trump’s re-election, about how democracies slide
into authoritarianism. “In a Hollywood disaster movie,” he writes, “when the
big one arrives, the characters don’t have to waste time debating whether it’s
happening. There is an abrupt, cataclysmic tremor, a deafening roar … In the
real world, though, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors
can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away
the anomalies.” That is true of how we normalise the climate crisis; it also
applies to the way that Trump and his fellow authoritarians have successfully
normalised their politics.
Marantz goes
to Budapest, and meets a Hungarian academic, who marvels at the political feats
pulled off by the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “Before it starts,
you say to yourself: ‘I will leave this country immediately if they ever do
this or that horrible thing,’” he says. “And then they do that thing, and you
stay. Things that would have seemed impossible 10 years ago, five years ago,
you may not even notice.” The fact that populists are usually climate deniers
is perfect: just as searingly hot summers become mundane, so do the
increasingly ambitious plans of would-be dictators – particularly in the
absence of jackboots, goose-stepping and so many other old-fashioned
accoutrements. Put simply, Orbán/Trump politics is purposely designed to fit with
its time – and to most of its supporters (and plenty of onlookers), it looks a
lot less terrifying than it actually is.
Much the
same story is starting to happen in the UK. On the night of last week’s local
elections, I found myself in the thoroughly ordinary environs of Grimsby town
hall, watching the victory speech given by Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns, who had
just been elected as the first mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. For some reason,
she wore a spangly outfit that made her look as if she was on her way to a
1970s-themed fancy dress party, which raised a few mirthless laughs. She said
it was time for an end to “soft-touch Britain”, and suddenly called for asylum
seekers to be forced to live in tents. That is the kind of thing that only
fascists used to say, but it now lands in our political discourse with not much
more than a faint thump.
Meanwhile,
life has to go on. About 20 years ago, I went to an exhibition of works by the
French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson – one of which was of a family of
four adults picnicking by the Marne, with their food and wine scattered around
them, and a rowing-boat moored to the riverbank. When I first looked at it, I
wondered what its significance was. But then I saw the date on the adjacent
plaque: “1936-38.” We break bread, get drunk and tune out the noise until
carrying on like that ceases to be an option: as Families Like Ours suggests,
that point may arrive sooner than we think.
John Harris
is a Guardian columnist
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