With Hopelessness, she projects her emotional anguish on to a global screen, experiencing drone warfare, economic exploitation and ecological cataclysm as personal wounds.
Apparently "inspiring people to prepare a personal fortress and pray for cataclysm so they can start blasting away at their neighbors" was deemed not to have quite the same ring to it.
He is concerned not only with death itself — on both the staggering scale represented by cataclysm and the more personal level of Jemma's grief — but also with its metaphysics.
It's just that the disasters have been the cataclysms of middle-class life — personal apocalypses such as illness, divorce, death, infidelity, a transgression against someone that can't be made right, and, perhaps most essentially, the terror of simply growing up.
He admitted to several other protest actions, saying, "I did these things because I believe that it is the obligation of every thinking person to find a way to stave off climate cataclysm, and there is no effective, legal alternative to personal direct action".
Pearson is like many of Ballard's protagonists, the ironic, semi-detached observers of cataclysms, who don't feel any personal investment in either the normal order of things or their obliteration by random apocalypses.
"Ararat" tries to alternate the film-set re-enactments of the cataclysm in Van with the smaller, more personal tragedies that befall its contemporary characters and that exemplify some of the larger issues.
Both films confront the burden of guilt as an existential cataclysm; "Manchester" adds to it a sense of irreparable personal loss that invests it with a stifled howl of melodramatic fury, a daily tragedy in which the stuff of daily working life is grotesquely, comically inadequate to the absolute emotions tearing it apart.
