Eco-Trauma Cinema

Anil Narine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138791398
• eBook ISBN: 9781317649410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ecology

Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film's complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related, and even symbiotic: the traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us.

Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize the environment or its species, and stories that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.

1 Evolution, Extinction and the Eco-Trauma Film

Darwin's Nightmare (2004) and A Zed & Two Naughts (1985)

Barbara Creed

The cinema of eco-trauma raises the crucial question of humanity’s humanity. What is human nature? Are we an altruistic species, which is capable of living in ecological parity with other species? Or are we either too aggressive or too fearful to share the planet and its resources? Another more disturbing possibility is that humankind is drawn not to life, but to the dark side of its evolutionary history—to warfare, decay, death and extinction. Peter Greenaway’s avant-garde fiction film A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), or ZOO, offers a witty but disturbing exploration of the dark and uncanny side of Darwinian theory.¹

A Zed & Two Noughts asks us to contemplate a series of questions central to the eco-trauma film. Why is humanity drawn to myths of life and death, creation and extinction? Which kind of thinking is more conducive to ecological survival—systematic, logical thinking or fluid or even chaotic modes of thought? Why is the human species obsessed with trying to separate itself out from the animal and natural worlds? Are we now living through what Bill McKibben has disturbingly called “the end of nature”—a concept explored by the science fiction film Silent Running (Trumbull 1972) in which all signs of nature (forests, birds, insects, animals, fish, fruit, water-ways) have disappeared from earth, but are kept alive in spaceships hovering near the rings of Saturn.

Throughout its history, the cinema has in the main, placed the human protagonist at the centre of the narrative and given him or her agency and the power to influence events whether for good or evil. As Gorgio Agamben argues, the human has always strategically produced itself as privileged, maintaining its position through the “anthropological machine” of Western science and philosophy (33–38). This is not necessarily the case in the ecotrauma film in which the fate of human protagonists renders them impotent and calls their future existence into question. In Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam 1995), for instance, a malignant virus is let loose on earth. Billions perish leaving nature to reclaim the earth. A handful of human survivors are forced underground to live in virus-free spaces, prisoners of their own making. Children of Men (Cuarón 2006) presents the last days of the human race on earth. It is the year 2027, women have become infertile and no babies have been born for eighteen years. The human species faces its own extinction, all systems of governance have collapsed and chaos rules everywhere.

This chapter will argue that the eco-trauma film sets out to examine two central problems: the possibility of the extinction of all life on the planet and humanity’s anthropocentric vision of itself. It will also propose that Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its focus on anti-anthropocentrism and the role of dissolution, death, extinction and renewal, offers a rich theoretical framework for understanding eco-trauma cinema and its preoccupation with the end of the world. Darwin’s writings on the evolution of emotions in man and animals, in which he argues that humans and animals experience the same emotions including pain, pleasure, joy and grief, are also of direct relevance to this discussion as they have clear implications for the way in which we treat animals.

Darwin's Nightmare (2004)

Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, is aptly named. It presents a traumatic vision of the way in which human interference with a natural ecosystem not only disturbs the workings of evolution but also creates a chain of destruction which impacts negatively on the natural life and death cycle of a variety of species, including the human animal. Sauper’s film examines a specific form of eco-trauma, that which is initiated by so-called human enterprise.

Charles Darwin’s landmark work of 1859, On the Origin of Species, is central to a contemporary understanding of eco-trauma films such as Darwin’s Nightmare. Put simply, Darwin’s theory of evolution held that all living organisms have evolved very gradually over vast expanses of time from a common ancestor shared by human beings and the ape.² Evolutionary change is slow, and in Darwin’s words “the struggle for existence” will favour some individuals with certain genetic variations over others. He said, “This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection” (601). Natural selection thus gives a species a functional advantage that assists in its survival. Useful variations are preserved.

The eco-trauma film explores the different ways in which humanity’s functional advantages over other species now threaten its own survival and that of the planet. In Darwin’s Nightmare human power to introduce foreign species to new geographical areas results in an ecological disaster. The apocalyptic film On the Beach (Kramer 1959) reveals how man’s scientific genius, once seen as a functional advantage, has resulted in nuclear war; the people of Australia, who are the last survivors, know they face extinction within months. Set in the twenty-third century, Logan’s Run (Anderson 1976) depicts the survivors of human progress, similarly once considered an advantage, living an idyllic life in a domed city. They are kept safe from the effects of pollution and overpopulation, which, as a result of unchecked progress, are devastating the earth—the only problem is that life in Paradise ends at thirty.

Darwin’s theory challenged the dominant Victorian belief that humanity came into being in a special act of divine creation, thus suggesting parity between species and creatures—an issue that is central to a number of ecotrauma films such as Gorillas in the Mist (Apted 1988), Greystoke (Hudson 1984) and Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest (Kroyer 1992). A major consequence of this challenge was that it presented an anti-anthropocentric critique of human values and behaviour. Gillian Beer writes that “Darwin was to rejoice in the overturning of the anthropocentric view of the universe” (32). In her book Beasts of the Modern Imagination, which explores representations of the animal in the Western imaginary, Margot Norris draws particular attention to the anti-anthropocentric nature of Darwin’s work. She argues that Darwin’s conclusions “subordinated him—the human being, the rational man—to the very Nature he studied.”³ The Darwinian revolution resulted in

a subversive interrogation of the anthropocentric premises of western philosophy and art, and the invention of artistic and philosophical strategies that would allow the animal, the unconscious, the instincts, the body, to speak again in their work.

(5)

Norris examines what she describes as the “biocentric tradition” in the work of a number of writers and artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche and Ernst. She argues that Darwinian theory abolished “the fiction of the subject as the origin of the text” (26), a position endorsed by eco-trauma films, such as Darwin’s Nightmare, that explore themes of dissolution and extinction. The cult classic The Planet of the Apes (Schaffner 1968) presents a postapocalyptic world in which human and ape have changed places, whereas the documentary Life after People (de Vries 2008) explores how the planet may appear if the human species disappeared. Both films abolish the human subject as the originating source of the narrative.

As Beer explains, Darwin emphasized the crucial importance of the interconnectedness of all life forms.

Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and their physical conditions of life.

(xxi)

Nevertheless Darwin was well aware of humanity’s potential to upset these “mutual relations,” which he saw as crucial to this theory of evolution and natural selection. In discussing artificial selection he wrote, “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (qtd. in Beer xxii). Gillian Beer was one of the first to point out the ecological relevance of Darwin’s theory for the contemporary world. She also noted that, as in his own day, Darwinism continues to inspire quite opposite interpretations and arguments:

Indeed, it is remarkable that the chapters on “Natural Selection” that among Darwin’s contemporaries was often read as an argument for competition “in the great and complex battle of life” now reads so strongly also as an ecological text.

(xxi)

Darwin’s Nightmare directly confronts the issue of eco-trauma in a Darwinian context. Directed by Hubert Sauper, Darwin’s Nightmare examines the social, economic and environmental impact of the fishing industry on the area of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Sauper explores the far-reaching consequences of the introduction of the Nile perch to Lake Victoria around forty to fifty years previously. The aim was to repopulate the lake, and to harvest the fish for Western markets, but the Nile perch, which is more than six feet in length, preyed so successfully on smaller fish that virtually all local species suffered extinction and the lake’s ecosystem was largely destroyed. This had a disastrous effect on the lives of the impoverished and malnourished local population, who could no longer fish in the lake and were forced to work in the Nile perch industry. Unable to buy the fish for themselves, the Tanzanians are forced to live off the putrefying remains of the Nile perch, as well as the treated remains that are re-packaged to sell to them. The far-reaching destructive effects of the industry do not stop here. Sauper documents how the Russian pilots who fly the fish out also ferry in weapons to fuel the bloody local conflicts in Africa, which claim many lives. Prostitutes move into the area. As farmers leave the land to work in the new industry, food shortages create more havoc. HIV/AIDS besets the fishing community. Homeless children melt the plastic packaging to sniff the glue and become high on the toxic fumes.

As Dennis Lim points out in an article aptly entitled “The Descent of Man,” “The ruthless supremacy of the Nile perch and its devastating effect on the lake’s ecosystem constitute a gruesomely resonant metaphor for the impact of global capitalism on local industry.” The Nile perch itself has been described by the World Conservation union as “one of the planet’s ‘worst invasive alien species’” (2). This cycle of events not only represents a metaphor for global capitalism, as Lim observes, but also an allegory for the narrative of human evolution in which the predatory Nile perch could be seen to stand in for the human species itself. Darwin’s Nightmare suggests that humankind is the most “invasive” species of all. In a contest between a dominant species and those less well adapted, the giant Nile perch is the victor, just as the human appears to have triumphed over all other species. In destroying other species the human species runs the risk of destroying biodiversity on the planet and facing its own extinction. In order to survive, the Nile perch feeds on its own offspring. Eco-trauma films such as Soylent Green (Fleischer 1973) and Delicatessen (Jeunet 1991) explore postapocalyptic themes of overpopulation, scarcity of food and cannibalism.

It is tempting to analyse Darwin’s Nightmare in Spenserian terms as a survival-of-the-fittest narrative (a form of social Darwinism) with a focus on struggle, hierarchy, success and closure.

Social Darwinism . . . is the spurious claim that Darwinian competition in nature constitutes a proper model for the “survival of the fittest” in human society—in which everyone competes to survive, but only the wealthy have proven themselves “fit.”

(Appleman 10)

This view would also endorse a “survival of the fittest” model in what has become a competition between the human species and the natural world. Those who support a free-market economy would argue that there should be no interference in this struggle. The so-called march of progress and the dominance of human needs over those of the natural and animal worlds is simply evidence that the fit will survive. Darwin, however, did not argue for the Spenserian concept of “survival of the fittest,” which could be used to justify the decision to introduce the Nile Perch to Lake Victoria and its subsequent decimation of other species. Darwin stated simply that survival is a struggle. As Gillian Beer has observed, Darwin’s evolutionary ideas focused on a set of concepts and values, which led to the formulation of a narrative that is very different from the Spenserian survival of the fittest storyline.

Beer sees evolutionary narrative as distinguished by a series of factors, which arise from the natural life and death cycle of all species, and which travel in opposite directions: cooperation and competition, stasis and transformation, degradation and regeneration, scarcity and abundance, continuation and extinction: “So although Darwin himself gave some considerable emphasis to the language of progress and improvement, generating an onward and upward motion in his storytelling, these tales were constantly under the pressure of other darker stories—of rapine, degradation, and loss” (Beer xix). Beer cites Darwin’s discussion of the cycle of life and death: “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life” (xix).

Darwin’s representation of nature, however, should not be viewed as setting up oppositional sets of relationships. Rather it emphasizes flux, loss and chance and the power of inter-connecting relationships. Darwin did not endorse the idea of “a chain of being or ladder, with its hierarchical ordering of rungs” but rather supported the concept of what he described as an “inextricable web of affinities”:

These affinities he perceives sometimes as kinship networks, sometimes as tree, sometimes as coral, but never as a single ascent with man making his way upward.

(Beer 19)

Critics have tended to focus on the metaphoric nature of Darwin’s use of the tree of life. Michael Mikulak persuasively argues that “the environmental crisis is more than a problem for scientists; it is a problem of narrative, ontology, and epistemology . . . we must first change the way we think about nature if we are to solve the problem” (n.p.). He discusses Darwin’s “rhizomatic tree of life” and the writings of other rhizomatic theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Mikulak is concerned about what he sees as the limitations of rhizomatic theory, specifically its propensity to be “shaped by other rather arborescent discourses, namely the bioscientific narratives of biotechnology and capitalism . . ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Eco-Trauma Cinema
• 1 Evolution, Extinction and the Eco-Trauma Film: Darwin's Nightmare (2004) and A Zed & Two Naughts
• 2 Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary
• 3 Great Southern Wounds: The Trauma of Australian Cinema
• 4 Into the Wilde? Art, Technologically Mediated Kinship, and the Lethal Indifference of Nature in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man
• 5 The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host (2006) and the Geopolitics of Outbreak
• 6 Biting Back: America, Nature, and Feminism in Teeth
• 7 The Spirits of Globalization: Masochistic Ecologies in Fabrice Du Welz's Vinyan
• 8 Love in the Times of Ecocide: Environmental Trauma and Comic Relief in Andrew Stanton's WALL-E
• 9 Eavesdropping in The Cove: Interspecies Ethics, Public and Private Space and Trauma under Water
• 10 Cooling the Geopolitical to Warm the Ecological: How Human-Induced Warming Phenomena Transformed Modern Horror
• 11 Toxic Media: On the Ecological Impact of Cinema
• Contributors
• Index