In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

9 Time Out of Mind: The Animation of Obsolescence in The Brave Little Toaster Marisol Cortez Since the 1970s, garbage—the visible remains of individual acts of consumption —has been one of the most recognizable public faces of environmental destruction. The target of public service announcements and government programs, from the US Forest Service’s classic call to “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!” to the Texas Department of Transportation’s ongoing “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign, postconsumer waste exists within the dominant environmental imaginary as an object of contempt and loathing—something that from an early age, we learn to regard as morally and politically abhorrent. One of the well-documented downsides of this affective relation to waste is the way it tends to individualize environmental problems. The hypervisibility of the soda cans carelessly tossed on to the highway shoulder , for example, obscures the larger problem of industrialized food production and distribution systems, with their reliance on both packaging and long-distance transport. In some cases, propagation of this confusion between waste as hated object and the systemic nature of environmental problems has been intentional, as in the famous case of the 1970s’ “Crying Indian” ad. Produced by Keep America Beautiful, a front group for the bottling industry, this ad presented an ostensible American Indian (in actuality played by Italian American actor Iron Eyes Cody) who weeps at the site of a US landscape despoiled by garbage and smog. With its tagline “People start pollution. People can stop it,” the ad directed a burgeoning environmental consciousness away from corporate activity and toward the actions of individuals instead (Strand 2008). Dominant social relations to waste as garbage are thus marked by a central contradiction or problematic, in which waste either disappears from consciousness altogether , or where it appears, evokes such intense negativity that it also disappears from consideration the historical and social forces that have shaped how we relate to it, and hence the question of whether other, less ecologically destructive relations might exist. 228 Marisol Cortez In The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, cultural critic Gay Hawkins explores similar problematics, arguing that environmental moralizing about waste frequently reproduces the very relations to nature it tries to change. As she observes, cultural contempt for waste objects is motivated by broader assumptions about the disenchantment of nature within urban industrial society as well as our alienation as humans from this nature. But this assumption in fact reinforces this alienation along with the radical separation of nature and culture it presumes. Writing about the dancing plastic bag scene in the film American Beauty, Hawkins (2006, 31) is disturbed that “a major environmental problem [is] rendered sensuous and enchanted,” yet at the same time finds this aestheticization captivating, contrasting it with antilitter campaigns that present plastic bags as contaminating “the purity and otherness of the environment.” “How is it,” she asks, “that a scene from a hit movie has more emotional and political impact on me than the EPA’s waste education campaign? Why is it that the EPA commercial leaves me feeling guilty and patronized, irritated by its explicit pedagogical intent? Could it possibly be more ‘environmentally friendly’ to feel sympathy and ethical concern for rubbish rather than shame, disgust, and anxiety about it?” What happens, she wonders, when waste rather than nature or even people become “the motivation for new actions” (ibid., 133)? This chapter considers another key example from popular culture where the literal enchantment or bringing to life of waste suggests an alternate affective basis for environmental ethics and praxis than an individualizing waste hatred: the 1987 film The Brave Little Toaster. A lowbudget animation based on a novella by sci-fi writer Thomas M. Disch, Toaster is a sort of machine-age Incredible Journey, in which five anthropomorphized appliances—a toaster, radio, bedside lamp, electric blanket, and vacuum cleaner—travel great distances to reunite with the human “master” who has seemingly abandoned them. Yet overlaid onto this otherwise-sentimental narrative is something darker and stranger, something much more in keeping with the film’s scifi origins: a dystopian vision of consumerism illuminated not by its human or even ecological casualties but more unpredictably by its spent commodities. For in the course of their journey, the appliances discover that they have become obsolete—“out of time” in the sense of being at the end of their socially useful lives. As with the dancing plastic bag in American Beauty, this portrayal of waste is deeply sympathetic...

Share