ABSTRACT
Anxiety-producing tracts, visual representations and on-screen stories of overpopulation actively invite the viewer to consider their own subjectivity in the context of space and relationality with others who take that place. From the 1970s, parallel to public debate on population growth, a significant number of popular films and television series depicted human global overpopulation as a backdrop or a narrative stumbling block to be resolved, although with a range of different narrative focal points. This chapter aims to discuss the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of cultural engagement with overpopulation in popular pseudo-science writing, specifically Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 text The Population Bomb. It looks at some fictional screen depictions of overpopulation that draw on tropes of crowdedness and the loss of civility that figurations of crowdedness are seen to produce. The promotion of public anxieties about global overpopulation is not, of course, new in the second half of the twentieth century.
