Film and Everyday Eco-disasters

1. At the Boiling Point

CHAPTER ONE AT THE BOILING POINT The Aesthetics of Atmospheric Pollution and Climate Change in Documentary and Feature Films In Red Desert (1964) director Michaelangelo Antonioni’s constructed world dominates the film’s narrative. Combined with an outstanding and eerie electronic soundscape, the film’s female protagonist Giuliana (Monica Vitti) and the contemporary viewer become trapped in a world that is overwhelmed by industrial waste, noise, and fear. The natural world is pushed to the edges of the frame. This world is filled with ghostlike freighters that dock with quarantine flags run up their masts. Her two competing lovers, husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) and Corrado (Richard Harris), walk past polluted lakes, laughing about how people now complain that their food tastes of oil. In another scene Corrado and Giuliana walk past a lone fruit and vegetable vendor. His outdoor display is full of ghostlike produce that has turned ashen and gray. Giuliana’s son asks why birds avoid the smoke pouring out of factory smokestacks. “It’s poison,” Giuliana exclaims, and we see a bright yellow smoke streaming into the sky, a clear reference to the human costs of toxic air and a lament for the loss of our most important basic need. From ancient Rome to the contemporary world, clean air has been a requirement for human and nonhuman life. It is an essential basic need we, perhaps without our knowledge, purchase, and when it is unobtain- 4 PART ONE able, we suffer the consequences of a toxic atmosphere. Although recent political struggles in the United States over cap-and-trade legislation and changes to the Clean Air Act highlight this dilemma, filmic representations of these struggles that draw on human approaches to ecology may be the most dramatic and effective arguments for clean air. Fictional and documentary films with atmospheric pollution at the center underscore the costs of both clean air and its absence. The Lumière brothers’ views of factory emissions and oil well fires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and films from the 1960s and 1970s such as Red Desert (1964) critique industrial waste with their narratives and/ or aesthetics. Recent documentaries and animated films argue against air pollution and its negative climate change consequences in similar ways, as do the critically acclaimed documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006); an eco-drama, Safe (1995); and the animated features, wall-e (2008) and Happy Feet Two (2011). Although the messages of atmospheric pollution and climate change merge most powerfully in two of these films (a little-known science fiction film from 1970, No Blade of Grass, and a 2009 documentary, How to Boil a Frog), Total Recall, Red Desert, and Safe all demonstrate the continuing concern with air pollution and its consequences for humans and the natural world. These films of conRed Desert: Giuliana (Monica Vitti) alienated by threatening industrial landscape At the Boiling Point 5 trasting genres and periods provide a compelling look at the dire costs of human’s exploitation of the natural world that places blame for the Earth’s health squarely on humanity and maps out explicitly the consequences of humans’ disastrous choices. These films shed light on not only the economic costs to limit emissions and climate change but also the human costs when these limits fall short. Unlike films showing pollution without commenting on human consequences, such as How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Molly Maguires (1970), or documentaries concentrating primarily on environmental rather than human disasters resulting from global warming, as in An Inconvenient Truth, some filmic explorations of toxic air demonstrate the importance of clean air as a basic need that must be met to reduce harmful effects on humans and nonhumans alike. They also reveal the continuing truth of Ellen Richards’s 1908 assertion: “The essentials of public health are recognized as clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean and wholesome food. When people crowd into a limited space these must be secured by cooperation” (Cost of Cleanness 49–50). Total Recall (1990), for example, explores what might happen if oxygen, now a free and open Earth resource, became a commodity controlled by corporate interests. In the film Douglas Quaid, formerly a secret agent Total Recall: Reactivated oxygen atmosphere on Mars 6 PART ONE named Hauser (Arnold Schwarzenegger), battles a corporate mining company head on Mars, Vilos Cohaagen (Ron Cox), over air. Cohaagen and his henchman Richter (Michael Ironside) fight to continue mining...