THEno Extrapolationsseries on Apple tv, Meryl Streep gives voice to the latest whale. Feel it, on the occasion of Earth Day 2023 scheduled for April 22, causes the right terror effect. Before her, in 2014, almost ten years ago, to scare like never before about the uselessness of us humans in the grand design of the universe, we consumers and exploiters without conscience destined to disappearthere was instead Julia Roberts. The warning was given playing Mother Nature in a video shot for the project Nature is speaking organized by Conservation Internationala structure that cares about protecting the environment.
With her, among the celebrities called upon to do good information where an anonymous voice would not have obtained the same resonance there were Edward Norton (voice of the soil), Harrison Ford (voice of the ocean), Penélope Cruz (voice of water) e Kevin Spacey (banned following sexual harassment allegations; did the rainforest). Over the years, Reese Witherspoon, Lupita Nyong’o, Lee Pace and Liam Neeson have joined.
Earth Day 2023: The always valid video by Julia Roberts
But it is alone Julia’s Mother Nature to have overcome the attrition of the web to become a kind of classic of the apocalypse. To listen horrified and aware of having no way out. Moreover with the scary overload than a 10-year-old warning when every day there are reckless warnings about no-return dates. But why is this video so effective? For the same reason that made Joga by Björk (1997) equally disturbing and fascinating: aerial images of mountains and rivers, of fog and natural meadows, beautiful but precarious.
Julia Roberts. (Getty Images)
A bit in a «state of emergency», as he sang Björk using the environment as a metaphor for her inner malaise; a bit of an outside of which we are a part and which we treat as if it were able to constantly repair itself. “I’ve been here for over 4.5 billion yearsI don’t need you all this», says Julia in a firm and sharp voice. “I have fed species greater than you and I have starved species greater than you. My oceans, my soil, my forests, they can destroy you, or leave you. I don’t need humans, but humans need me».
Perhaps this perversely vengeful Mother Nature contains all the elements interpreted by Roberts’ other colleagues. It will be that she is better than them at declaiming the power of an entity indifferent to our end. One reason or another, the fact is that Julia’s two-minute voice-over is like the umpteenth passage of pretty woman on Rai 1. Always a success.
Certainly YouTube works differently from the generalist networkand the involuntary promotion machine of the Covid emergency – which went viral Julia Roberts is Mother Nature as never since the debut – it is to be hoped that it will never happen again. Who knows, however, that for this Earth Day 2023 it won’t hurt again (it is, by all accounts, better than the series Extrapolationswho so diligently arranges and illustrates natural disasters without ever really striking).
Instead Julia, the famous “punch in the stomach” with which we comment on painful streaksand how he gives it.
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