Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene by Jennifer Fay (review)

Experts agree that we have entered an era of dangerous uncertainty, but they cannot agree when. Some say it started with the Agricultural Revolution, twelve thousand to fifteen thousand years ago. Others cite the Industrial Revolution or the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Still others dispute that the epoch we are living in deserves a new name at all. As I write, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has yet to adopt the term "Anthropocene." So, the subtitle of Jennifer Fay's elegant new book, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, raises a question: "When?" At the same time, it marks her study as belonging precisely to the present.

The past several years have been boom times for the Anthropocene as a paradigm. "Welcome to the Anthropocene," the cover of the Economist announced in the issue of May 28, 2011. In 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert used the same phrase as a chapter title in her Pulitzer Prize– winning The Sixth Extinction, and Dipesh Chakrabarty put the term on the map of humanities scholarship with his influential article "Climate and Capital."¹ From there, it migrated rapidly. 2015 saw the publication of Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Jedediah Purdy's After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, and McKenzie Wark's Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene.² That same year Jussi Parikka played on the term in The Anthrobscene, and Jason W. Moore argued, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, that "capitalocene" would be the more accurate term, as Andreas Malm reiterated in Fossil Capital (2016).³ Subsequent books aimed to correct the masculinist bent of this emerging subfield as well as its "willful … racial blindness"—among them, Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), the critical anthology Anthropocene Feminism (2017), Joanna Zylinska's The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (2018), and Kathryn Yusoff's A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019).⁴ The In Focus section on "Film and Media History in the Anthropocene" that appeared in a recent issue of this journal focused on the methodological challenge that the concept poses: how can scholars reckon with the incommensurable time scales on which geological and human history unfold? Fay's contribution to that issue, an essay on the Trinity 1945 nuclear test film, models one strategy: pry open the archive and examine previously neglected moments in which human and geological history intersect.⁵ But the claim of her book is more ambitious. Fay argues that the Anthropocene and cinema have a special kinship—and that cinema studies, therefore, has a special insight into the predicament of our imperiled planet.

Inhospitable World interweaves two, related projects.⁶ First, Fay uses contemporary concerns about the Anthropocene to reframe the history of film theory, drawing attention to the ways in which its canonical authors were always already concerned with nature and the nonhuman.⁷ Second, Fay argues that, because cinema is an art of "artificial worlding," it is particularly well suited to reflect on the Anthropocene, the era in which "humanity and its world-building activities are the new nature."⁸ She distinguishes her project from work in animal studies and ecocriticism, in that she is not particularly interested in nonhuman creatures or remote landscapes, or in calling for immediate action; rather, she wants to meditate on the ongoing unnaturalness of human existence. Other scholars in the wake of Friedrich Kittler have turned to nonhuman environments as an antihermeneutic gesture. Fay, by contrast, reads for wisdom. Her first book, Theaters of Occupation, was about didactic uses of cinema.⁹ Here, she herself instructs her readers: "We need to learn how to live and die in an unpredictable and increasingly inhospitable world."¹⁰

The first section of Inhospitable World examines three genres that evoke different origin stories for the Anthropocene. Chapter 1, "Buster Keaton's Climate Change," explores...