Film and Everyday Eco-disasters

6. Give Me Shelter

CHAPTER SIX GIVE ME SHELTER The Ecology of Homes and Homelessness In Blue Vinyl: The World’s First Toxic Comedy (2002), codirector and writer Judith Helfand and codirector/cinematographer Daniel B. Gold become comic detectives in their attempt to find a viable solution to the home repair dilemma of Helfand’s parents: is it possible to replace rotting wood siding with “products that never hurt anyone at any point in their life cycle” but still provide the economy, endurance, and good looks of cheap but toxic blue vinyl? After convincing her parents to forego their new vinyl siding choice for a more environmentally friendly alternative (as long as it’s cheap and looks good), Helfand and Gold embark on an investigative journey that reveals both the dangers underlying vinyl use and the challenge to find a viable, affordable, and environmentally friendly alternative. More importantly, their journey also illustrates the complexity of environmental justice issues. Environmental injustice, lack of human rights, and environmental racism all intersect in the literal study of homes in Blue Vinyl. For Helfand and Gold, it’s not just how you live and how you build your home; it’s where you live and what’s around you that contribute to the everyday eco-disasters associated with constructing and sustaining shelter. Blue Vinyl provides a narrative of discovery in which Helfand and Gold reveal what the dangers pvc (polyvinyl chloride) mean not only for her parents and other suburbanites keen on siding their homes with vinyl, 116 PART THREE but also for pvc chemical plant workers and home dwellers nearby. In this eco-comic documentary, as in other documentaries and fictional films, multiple issues of home and homelessness are explored, revealing a plethora of environmental problems that, according to Blue Vinyl and films tackling similar issues, should be addressed no matter how difficult the task. The repercussions of doing nothing are too toxic for both humans and the natural world. Overlooking these eco-disasters may turn the everyday into the catastrophic, these films assert, reinforcing the power of an environmental justice movement grounded in an equitable and humane vision of home. Ecology and Home in Environmental History and Film Ecology, literally, “the study of homes,” connects explicitly with our notions of shelter as a constructed space where humans live either with or without nature. This distinction between what is completely controlled, Blue Vinyl: The Lake Charles, Louisiana, pvc factory at night Give Me Shelter 117 artificial, and “dead” and what is natural and alive springs from empirical philosophy of the eighteenth century’s “Great Awakening,” a view that, according to Gary Lease, “led inevitably to an opposition between reason and nature, a position which Kant in his idealism effectively exploited” (8). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this struggle between a culture controlled by “reason” and a nature seen as “irrational” became further complicated by a focus on scientific pursuit that seemed to eliminate Spinoza’s identification of nature with God. But, as Lease suggests, “after wrestling with the notion of nature for well over two thousand years, Western tradition had come up dry: neither an identification of the human species with nature nor a strict dichotomy between the two proved ultimately successful” (8, 9). These dichotomies, or their deconstruction, are reflected in a variety of American fictional films. Numerous films glamorize urban life and the culture it represents. Musicals such as Anchors Aweigh (1945), Easter Parade (1948), and On the Town (1949), and comedies including Sex and the City (2008), Sex and the City 2 (2010), Friends with Benefits (2011), and the remake of Arthur (2011) celebrate life in the city with little or no reference to the natural world. Numerous crime films and film noir titles reinforce the dark and corrupt underbelly of urban life as well. Other films emphasize the need to connect further with the natural world, even bringing nature indoors as in Housekeeping (1987). On the other hand, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a Depression-era melodrama, explores the predicament of an elderly couple facing home foreclosure after the husband loses his job and is no longer able to pay the mortgage. They must live separately with family members, who mistreat them and misunderstand them. Unwilling to compromise, their children go back on their word and separate them permanently, forcing their mother to live in a nursing home and their father to live...