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  • Silent RunningNotes for the Remake
  • Karen Pinkus (bio)

The 1972 film Silent Running was considered a classic of “ecological” science fiction.1 I’d classify it as a work of “pre-post-nature.” In fact, in this film, apparently set around the turn of the millennium, “Nature” is delimited as plant life (forest-scapes populated with bizarrely tame animals) nostalgized and separated out from the realm of the human, and sealed under a series of bronze-tinted geodesic domes attached to a freighter.2 Silent Running stars Bruce Dern as a botanist/ecologist with Sierra Club patches sewn onto his flight suit and the forest conservation pledge taped to the wall by his bunk. His acting style (“play a vaguely sociopathic treehugger”?) is as loose as the plot. What follows are a few notes for remaking Silent Running in the Anthropocene. We will attempt a faithful reproduction of the structures that characterize the original while shifting the content to fit with the radical temporality and the radical globalization of climate change (or better yet, our consciousness of it). [End Page 198]


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Bruce Dern in Silent Running.

The Science

In the original Silent Running, Earth—or at least, the U.S.A.—is doing quite well without flora, thank you. Humans eat processed foodstuffs. (What has become of animals? Is the ocean the only remaining carbon sink? Whence oxygen?) Democracy is flourishing; unemployment nonexistent. The essential “problem” with earth, at least according to Dern’s character, Freeman Lowell, is that children are growing up without Nature. Freeman is a trained botanist, yet he can’t seem to figure out why his forest is dying after the ship moves to the dark side of Saturn. Only at the 11th hour does it occur to him that plants need light. Today’s audiences demand solid science bolstered by consultants.3 In order to parallel the original, we might make vague reference to an earth that has “solved” climate change (for instance through carbon management or geoegineering; or by highly technological forms of adaptation coupled with the widespread use of non-fossil based fuels), but at what cost? No need to be too specific. In our remake, as in the original, the domes (we will dispense with the Habitrail™ design style4 in favor of something more Gehryesque—henceforth we will call them pods) must contain matters that are no longer necessary for (a certain kind of) life on earth, but whose loss we, the audience, would mourn, even if only for purely aesthetic reasons. The question of what to put in these pods is more difficult. We might choose to send up mini-ecosystems with atmospheres of, say, 350ppm of carbon. Of course, in a contemporary science fiction film unconstrained by a previous model, we might well send up spaceships in search of new, non-carbon based fuels to mine. Or the entire purpose of our mission might be to remove carbon to a safe distance and release it, or to unhinge the pods themselves and [End Page 199] allow them to float around, perhaps visible to space tourists with digital cameras implanted in their eyes: in this case, there’d be no need to go all the way to Saturn, as in the original.) These aren’t bad ideas, come to think of it. Sure, something must go horribly wrong—otherwise, there would be no need for a film. However, none of these options really coincides with Silent Running. If we want to adhere to the logics of the original, then the “matters” we send into space must be parasites on the primarily commercial purpose of the ship. Perversely, then, our best option might be to fill our pods with polluted local ecosystems—unsightly, but redeemable. That is, “ecology” as something to be saved through activism. An “ecology” that we can somehow master, and one that in any case fits with a model of temporality, growth and intergenerational planning or “reproductive futurity” coincident with current (and therefore reassuring) models. Our pods, in other words, might contain toxic ponds, ozone-depleted atmospheres, acid-rain-soaked fields, algae-infested lagoons, putrid landfills and...

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