Film and Everyday Eco-disasters

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Cinematic Eco-disasters and Our Basic Human Needs Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), an epic antiwar drama confronting the fight for survival of a Devon horse named Joey in the no-man zones of World War I France, addresses our relationship with the environment in a variety of ways. It effectively illustrates the connections between humans and the natural world with its focus on the relationship between Joey and his owner’s son, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). The scenes before, during, and after battles also demonstrate the horrific consequences of modern warfare for people, animals, and the natural world, a devastating human and ecological disaster leaving clear evidence that, as the film tells us, “The war has taken everything from everyone.” But the film moves beyond more traditional disaster themes by illuminating everyday eco-disasters associated with our basic needs. For example, Joey, a swift and strong Thoroughbred, must prove he can plow a field for turnips to ensure that the Narracott family maintains its shelter and the surrounding land that provides its food. When the turnip crop fails and war is declared, Albert’s father, Ted (Peter Mullan), sells the horse to the British army to pay the farm lease and, again, secure those basic needs. Joey’s horrific war journey, then, is caused by a family’s drive to simply survive. Film and Everyday Eco-disasters examines our basic needs in relation to the changing perspective toward everyday eco-disasters reflected by xii Introduction filmmakers from the silent era forward. Maurice Yacowar provides a base reading of such eco-disaster films in his seminal “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre,” which delineates eight basic types of disaster films, all of which have as their essence “a situation of normalcy [that] erupts into a persuasive image of death” (261). Yacowar’s categories of disaster films include a category most aligned with environmental disaster, “Natural Attack,” which pits a human community against a destructive form of nature, such as animal attacks, an attack by the elements , or an attack related to atomic mutations. The natural attack disaster film has evolved in contemporary film, however, and now includes everyday eco-disasters, such as those associated with industrial farming and energy generation. These films serve as examples of ecocinema, a term that critics, especially ecocritics , are just beginning to debate. Although some define ecocinema narrowly to include only those films that “actively seek to inform viewers about, as well as engage their participation in, addressing issues of ecoHow to Boil a Frog: The atmospheric cost of energy production Introduction xiii logical import” (10), as does Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, others take a broader approach. Although we too see the best ecocinema, especially eco-documentary, as inspiring viewer action, we agree with the more general view of ecocinema that Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt postulate in Ecocinema and Practice: “All films present productive ecocritical exploration and careful analysis can unearth engaging and intriguing perspectives on cinema’s various relationships with the world around us” (3). In other words, every film is potentially an example of ecocinema, one of the media included in definitions of eco-media, a term that encompasses nonprint media from still photographs and cinema to music and videogames. According to this definition these filmic representations of everyday eco-disasters are ecocinema ripe for ecocritical readings. To begin this study, our work will explore a sampling of eco-films in relation to three primary ecocritical approaches: human approaches to ecology like those of Ellen Swallow Richards, the rhetoric of the eco-documentary, and the repercussions of negative externalities, the term corporations producing everyday eco-disasters use to mask practices that potentially have a negative effect on both humans and the natural world. Human Approaches to Ecology This text centers exclusively on films associated with our basic needs (air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and energy) and the everyday eco-disasters associated with their exploitation. Such exploitation is typically associated with a “fair use” model of ecology, which grew out of economic approaches to the environment connected with social Darwinism. Human approaches to ecology, however, maintain the worth of our basic needs, either as separate from or part of the natural world. Whether defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow as physiological needs, by Reality therapist William Glasser as survival needs, or self-determination theory as competence in dealing...