Greta and I: Confessions of a Fifteen Second Cameo
By Lowell Bliss
Originally Published on 12/2/20
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It’s impossible for me to write a review of the new Greta Thunberg documentary because, you see, I appear in it. At the 30:26 mark in the film, at a break in the action during the COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland, you suddenly hear my voice and my fifteen second cameo begins. I have more lines in the movie than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Pope Francis. The narcissist in me demands co-star status, as if the title of the film, I Am Greta, is misnamed, but the long-practiced documentary watcher in me knows that I am a co-star, as are all the other adults who appear in the movie, as are you and every other adult on this warming planet.
A major theme of I Am Greta is how adults first encounter Greta Thunberg and then respond to her, and then whether we seriously listen to her or not. At the 30:26 mark, as I have my encounter with Greta, I come across pretty good, I think, but by the 1:09:27 mark, when the young, increasingly-frustrated activist says, “We have not taken to the streets so that you can take selfies with us and to tell us that you really admire what we do,” I think that, had I been in a theatre at my first viewing, I would be scrunching down in my seat and searching for my sunglasses. I might be a co-star, but I am not the hero.
The COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland was something of a debutante ball for the 15-year-old Miss Thunberg. Her lone, and then small-scale, school strikes outside the parliament building in Stockholm, Sweden had garnered enough media attention to warrant an invitation from the UNFCCC, the UN climate secretariat. “We need a person who could speak for, [who could] deliver a message from today’s younger generation,” a Swedish-speaking official says over the phone. In other words, Greta was not yet famous. By the next climate summit, a year later in Madrid, it was impossible to get into the room with her, unless you arrived early. In Katowice however, I could go up to her while she was waiting around for her dad. She had just finished participating on a panel of youth activists in a half-full press room, and I could ask her: “May I get a selfie?” The rest of my lines, caught on film unbeknownst to me, are: “I have a 16-year-old daughter in America—actually in Canada now, we live in Canada. Anyway, she’s quite the activist too.” The selfie now complete, I turn and smile at Greta, “But anyway, we’re proud of you,” I say to her. End of cameo.
I heard about the clip in a text message from a friend who lives in Hawaii. Ayesha and her husband had been watching the film on Hulu when she did a double take and said, “Wait. I think that’s Lowell!” My wife, the aforementioned daughter (now 18) and I spent about an hour texting back and forth with Ayesha while figuring out that the film was not yet generally available in Canada. My brother-in-law however subscribes to Crave and could watch the film, but the price of his sending the 15 second recording on his phone was to kid me about not knowing where I lived. COP24 was in December 2018; we had moved to Ontario from Kansas that previous August.
My first thought about the cameo in I Am Greta was admittedly, “That’s so cool.” And it is, thank you very much. But because I love watching documentaries, my second thought was more analytical: why in the world would the director (Nathan Grossman) decide, from all the footage that he had collected, to include those 15 seconds of my encounter with Greta? And why would he insert that clip there where he did? What purpose did my encounter serve in advancing the storyline or the themes of I Am Greta? Answers to those questions would best serve my fellow co-stars in Greta’s story, meaning: you. I could offer up to my readers more than a self-indulgent blog post. Here’s my list of theories of what purpose my clip serves:
Immediately before my clip, Greta’s father Svante is talking with Swedish reporters. “I can tell she’s feeling good,” he says. “She’s laughing. Which is amazing. You can’t know that ahead of time. I didn’t know how she’d react.” He explains that, growing up, his daughter had selective mutism. She had gotten depressed, stayed home from school for a year, and didn’t speak to anyone but her immediate family for about three years. Then my voice pops in—“May I get a selfie?”—and the filmmaker can “show; don’t tell” that Greta is interacting just fine with strangers and the world.
Svante is a dad speaking of his 15-year-old daughter. I am immediately juxtaposed to him, not to Greta, as another dad proud of his own 16-year-old daughter.
Immediately after my clip, Greta and Svante are walking down the hallway. “It’s like a movie,” she says to her dad in Swedish, with a chuckle. “Suddenly, lots of paparazzi.” I am that paparazzi, the first of many in her life, because the pair then lapse into irony when Greta says, “It’ll be over soon; it’s a fleeting thing,” and Svante replies, “Right, soon it’ll be Monday, and no one recognizes you anymore. No one will know who you are.”
How far out into the context am I allowed to theorize? The next clip after the hallway scene is of Greta and Svante talking on FaceTime to her mom, little sister, and dogs back in Sweden. Greta’s homesickness will become acute by the end of the movie. Did I help set the scene by referring to my own loved one back home, somewhere in North America?
And then the next scene after the FaceTime scene—in other words, the third clip out beyond mine—is of other young climate activists “back home” and around the world, each of them inspired by Greta. Like my daughter Bronwynn, they all happen to be female.
My furthest reach into the context goes all the way back to the opening credits where against a black screen you hear a disembodied voice say, “A little bit of warming wouldn’t be a bad thing for myself being a Canadian, and the people in Russia wouldn’t mind a couple degrees warmer either.” And then you hear the recognizable voice of the American president: “What’s with all this global warming? A lot of it is a hoax. It’s a hoax.” I’m glad that 30 minutes later, Canada and the US could be better represented: “but anyway, we’re proud of you, [Greta].”
It’s possible that the director got a lot of narrative and thematic mileage out of my cameo. In the end though, just like a mere 15 second segment gets lost in a whole one-hour-forty-minute film, so my one little encounter gets lost in the larger themes of the movie, one of which is the superficiality of how adults respond to Greta Thunberg, her school strikes, and the youth climate movement that she has inspired. I fare better at the hands of the director than does the adult assistant in the UK House of Commons who, half-an-hour after my clip, appears with Greta: “May I take a selfie? Here we go. . . one, two, three.” What immediately follows is Greta staring out a train window and her voiced-over monologue: “Everyone says it is so lovely that you are here, and promise to improve, but never do. When I’m in these fancy environments, or these palaces, or castles, or whatever it is, I feel very uncomfortable. It feels like everyone is in this role-playing game, just pretending. It feels kind of fake. Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter how many of us go on strike. What matters is that the emissions have to be reduced, and it has to start now.”
I also fare better at the hands of the director than the adult who appears with her iPhone on the pier at Plymouth from where Greta and Svante will embark on a trans-Atlantic voyage by boat to the UN Climate Summit in New York, to the conclusion of the remarkable twelve months that is the time frame of this documentary. This adult positively gushes: “The whole world thinks you are wonderful. You’re a brave girl.” She didn’t say anything essentially different than my earlier encouraging words, but her misfortune is that her cameo is the first “photo op” that the director includes after Greta’s speech to the UK House of Commons, and Greta’s line about “we have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us”:
Is my microphone on? Is the microphone really on? Is my English OK? Because I’m beginning to wonder. You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to.
During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. Despite all the beautiful words and promises, the emissions are still rising.
We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.
I fare better but only because I appear earlier. Yet, I have tried to imagine Greta in the current day, over in Stockholm, watching the premiere of her biographical documentary. She reaches the 30:26 mark and hears someone from off the screen ask, “May I get a selfie?” She remembers Poland, but doesn’t remember this particular moment. She does not recall this man with his Clic reading glasses hanging off his neck, with his daughter off in America or Canada. In the moment of Greta watching her own movie in 2020, I don’t “appear earlier” to her at all. I appear “after the fact,” after thousands of such selfie requests, after the 2018-2019 season where she heard many more “beautiful words,” where she was told repeatedly that we adults admire what she and her young colleagues are doing. I appear after carbon emissions have continued to rise, after 2018, 2019, and 2020 have joined the list of the hottest years on record.
The first words out of Greta’s mouth after the opening credits are: “Adults always say one thing and then do something completely different. They say we only have one planet and we should take care of it, yet no one gives a damn about the climate crisis.” The first encounter that Greta has with an adult in the film, immediately after this statement, is a white-haired lady who wanders by where Greta sits by herself in front of the Swedish parliament building. “Why are you on strike? You have to go to school,” she tells Greta, towering over the child who sits on the pavement. Greta explains, and the adult walks away with a dismissive hand wave. “Meh,” she says. I bet she regrets her cameo, but not as much as I hope Jean-Claude Juncker regrets his. Juncker was the president of the European Commission when Greta and some of her newfound Belgian friends give a speech before the EU Parliament. Greta concludes her remarks, sits down in the front row and is handed a set of headphones in order to hear the translation of Juncker’s response. He acknowledges “Monsieur president, Ladies and gentlemen, participants” and “Dear Greta” and then says—I kid you not—“And now I am going to focus on what is happening here today. I changed things while trying to regulate smaller things. Now in terms of flushes, they said that we need to harmonize all flushes across all toilets in Europe. Well, it could be useful, because we save a very large amount of energy.” Greta removes her headphones. The camera switches to her young friend across the aisle. She too removes her headphones. Those two single gestures were enough to gut me. My throat caught. Tears came to my eyes.
Vladimir Putin makes an appearance in the film and dismisses Greta as naïve. Donald Trump mentions Greta’s name at a campaign rally, rolls his eyes, and elicits a chorus of boos. Jair Bolsonaro calls her “this brat.” Alan Jones of Sky News Australia says to all school strikers, “you're selfish, badly educated, virtue-signalling little turds.” Such footage isn’t hard to obtain, but this documentary is certainly not just another example of that genre which should be called “climate denial porn.” None of those people are going to bother to watch this film. But I would watch it, and so would you. We are the Greta admirers. We are the encouragers of young activists. We are ones who “get it,” who don’t say “Meh” and walk away. This movie is for us, which means that the challenge of I Am Greta is reserved for us as well. Are we doing enough?
Certainly, one story arc in the documentary is Greta’s growing disillusionment with whether adults are listening. At one point, there is a real threat that Greta will devolve back into depression, into selective mutism, into refusing to eat. Her parents worry about her. The other story arc, the obvious one, is the growing youth movement. In the opening scene, she sits alone. Within four minutes, the first young person joins her: “May I sit with you?” Then another. By the 6:21 mark, there are eight kids surrounding her at the parliament building. By the end of the film, with depictions of the global climate strike in September 2019, Greta is “surrounded” by seven million people. It is a thrilling and hopeful sight to see. Nonetheless, Greta said one more thing to the UK Parliament: “People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.”
Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s. I have not mentioned that previously, but you’ve known about it, haven’t you? It figures into the film. Anyway, Greta’s Asperger’s, we are told, allows her to laser-focus on what really matters. She can look past the crowd of paparazzi, she can ignore the palaces and the castles, she can joke about the awkward photo of her dad with the Pope, but she can also be ruthlessly honest about a crowd of seven million mobilized activists. “The only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve.” So, I’m sorry, ego-stroked Mr. Bliss, and I’m sorry, you, my fellow co-stars in Greta’s movie: are we doing enough? The curve is the only thing we should look at, and I’m sorry, but it’s still rising.
I Am Greta (2020, directed by Nathan Grossman) is streaming on Hulu, and available for rental on YouTube, and possibly other outlets by now.
The article that I originally wrote about my encounter with Greta in Poland, December 2018, is entitled “Greta Thunberg Has a Dad” and is available here.
I hope to generate one more blog post as a review of I Am Greta. I want to re-examine the activist’s seeming need to suffer for their activism, much like how photographer James Balog “sacrificed” his knees in the documentary Chasing Ice. (I told you I watch a lot of documentaries.) By way of preview, my treatment of Balog can be found in the article “‘By Balog’s knees. . . ‘ we will overcome climate change” and is available here.