Recently a four-minute video titled No Pressure, written by the writer of Notting Hill, bombed worse than Ishtar because it bombed innocents. No Pressure promotes the 10:10 movement’s goal to lower carbon emissions by ten percent. The video went viral in an ebola sort of way.
Because banners and billboards are so déclassé, the 10:10 UK organizers decided that they needed to raise awareness for the prevention of the imagined catastrophic consequences of global warming with a YouTube video. The video certainly raised awareness—or, at least, eyebrows. In it, schoolteachers and bosses “lightheartedly” explode—complete with bucketsful of fake blood—anyone who chose not to do their part to lower their carbon dioxide emissions by ten percent starting October 10 (hence,10:10).
About fifty actors volunteered to work in the British video. Said one smiling child actor, and nascent eco-crusader, drenched in fake blood, “I think it is vital that children should be exploded in a good cause.” (video here) Call me old fashioned but this chills me to the bone. I don’t think it’s okay to blow anyone up for merely holding a different opinion from your own.
Before the release of No Pressure, Britain’s Guardian newspaper (a sponsor of the video) called it “edgy.” Since its release, and its nearly instantaneous removal, the 10:10 UK folks have issued an apology. And, by way of explanation they wrote, “We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny…”
You should judge for yourself.
The video starts in a classroom. A teacher asks if their families will be lowering their carbon emissions. All students except two raise their hands. She says that it is fine if they do not wish to participate. “No pressure,” she says, and then announces the weekend’s homework and “one more thing.” She presses a large red button and the two non-compliant students explode. She smiles, wipes the blood from her glasses, and repeats the homework for everyone, “except Phillip and Tracy, of course.” Since they now resemble mashed tomatoes, they will not have to do, hee-hee, the assignment.
The next scene is in a business. The boss asks his twenty or so employees, after the preliminaries and “no pressure,” if they will be participating. All but four raise their hands and out comes the box with the large red button. Four more explosions. Four fewer dissenters.
The last scene is of Gillian Anderson doing the voice-over saying she thought that her doing the voice-over was contribution enough. The producer pushes the big red button. Blood thumps against the sound room’s glass and as a bloody mess dribbles down the window, a message comes on screen: “1010global.org. Cut your carbon by 10%. No pressure.”
Now I could call 10:10’s video a number of things. “Edgy” is not among them: sick, ghastly, horrid, appalling, disgusting, revolting, and other adjectives come to mind. “Extremely funny”? On what planet? You are scaring us by taking on the trappings of a crusade, a holy war for the earth where only the “just” deserve to live; infidels must die. Apocalyptic fear mongering quivers throughout much of the rhetoric of global warming crusaders. Like the amplifier for the ersatz band, Spinal Tap, the rhetoric has been pushed to eleven.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org (a group advocating lowering CO2 to 350 parts per billion in the atmosphere, and is organizing work parties for 10/10/10) wrote of the 10:10 video, “It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch…” Gee, Bill, given that the Guardian called it “edgy,” screeners of it found it “extremely funny,” a lad says it’s okay to explode other kids for the cause, a NASA scientist says oil and coal company “CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature,” and commenters to your posts call for the lynching of corporate executives, (I could go on), where could we have picked up that idea?
So, what are you doing this weekend? No pressure.
Nullius in Verba 
It’s unbelievable that Richard Curtis wrote this! What was he thinking? Blowing people up in that fairly realistic way, complete with the shocked reactions of their associates, is just not funny, and even if it was, repeating the same ‘joke’ four times isn’t clever. How the film manages to be quite so smug, boring and irritating in under four minutes I don’t know.
And what a creepy teacher. I can just see her reading The Guardian.
You’re quite right.
The use of authority figures as the one doing the killing struck me in the gut. My first reaction was that global warming skeptics (or sceptics if they were in the UK) had created the video. To make something that jaw-droppingly awful and be for lowering CO2 does not make any kind of sense.
A number of No Pressure’s supporters say that the violence in it is similar to Monty Python’s stuff. Did you ever see Monty Python’s Jabberwocky? The violence in it overwhelms the movie. What make The Holy Grail movie work for me is that the characters have the decency to fell bad when they hurt innocents. “You ran through the bride!” “Terribly sorry about that.”