Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis

Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema

Robert Geal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000405798
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Ecologia

This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic real-world changes in how people treat the environment.

Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema's inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the 'lifeboats' on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book's new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive 'symptom' that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy.

1 Environmental crisis and epistemological crisis

Ecologically-destructive Cartesian subjectivity

DOI: 10.4324/9780367373429-2

This book is part of a wide scholarly movement which attempts to understand how culture relates to ecological degradation. A longstanding tradition in Western academia, and Western thought more broadly, tends to separate objects of study from one another, with each object having its own delineated borders and its own specific methods of analysis. The impact that humans are having on the environment, however, is a subject so pressing that it demands inter-disciplinary investigations which go far beyond traditional separations such as science from the humanities. Having scientists either merely catalogue the woes of environmental degradation, or experiment with material and technological means to ameliorate or reverse this degradation, is not sufficient. Scholars who study culture need to also contribute their insight that the ways humans think about the world around them influences how they act in and on the world around them.

There are a number of overlapping approaches to conducting this cultural analysis of how humans relate to the environment called, variously, ecocriticism, ecosophy, deep ecology, ecofeminism, ecopsychology and ecolinguistics. There are some important differences between these approaches, and these will have particular influences on this book’s argument as it develops, but they all share the overriding principle that, as Cheryll Glotfelty puts it, “current environmental problems are largely of our own making, are, in other words, a by-product of culture” (1996: xxi), and that we must therefore recognise Greg Garrard’s claim that “environmental problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientific terms, because they are the outcome of an interaction between ecological knowledge of nature and its cultural inflection” (2004: 14).

This book does therefore not promise any material, empirical scientific solutions to the environmental crisis. Ecocritical engagements with the scientific aspect of the crisis tend to limit themselves to an opening paragraph or two outlining statistics and predictions collated by governments, NGOs and/or intergovernmental bodies like the UN on the frightening extent of the problem. As time passes, the apocalyptic tone of these reports increases. However, by the time of writing, the need for such a summary here seems superfluous. I will discuss the phenomenon of climate change denialism in the next chapter, but such denialism is an instance of outright rejection of information that a summarising paragraph here cannot hope to change. Climate change deniers aside, the impending reality of disastrous ecological degradation is now broadly accepted, and has in fact become, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, an increasingly instrumentalised aspect of contemporary capitalism (2011: 330–334). The existence of this broad acceptance, combined with a startling failure to meaningfully act on this acceptance, is an important area of study for ecocriticism, and is the principal issue addressed by this book. That is: why, given that we know how disastrously our actions impact on the environment, do we not radically change those actions to alleviate this damage? What is the role of culture in either preventing or helping to facilitate this necessary change? And, more specifically, given the book’s focus, what is the role of films, especially those films which address ecological degradation in various different ways, in either perpetuating or helping to address and revise our negative attitudes and actions towards the environment?

The impact of the ‘stories we live by’ on our attitudes to the environment

The burgeoning field of ecolinguistics offers some useful insights in addressing these questions. Arran Stibbe makes the case for the significance of linguistics in addressing environmental issues because

language influences how we think about the world. […] How we think has an influence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on. Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world.

(Stibbe 2015: 1)

This argument will contribute to my analysis of how film operates similarly to language, influencing how we think, and therefore how we act. I will address this formal aspect of film in more detail in the next chapter. But there is also another important aspect of ecolinguistics that demonstrates a limitation with the ecologically-progressive potential of information communicated by language or by film. That is, language and film both have ways of communicating information (formal and grammatical structures) and contents of communicated information (particular claims and stories). The distinction between these two different elements is central to the role that language and film plays in communicating ideas about environmental degradation. This book’s opening two chapters are dedicated to explaining and exploring this distinction, but a certain element of ecolinguistics begins to demonstrate an important aspect. Stibbe claims that one of the main tasks of ecolinguistics is to

investigate the stories we live by – mental models that influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing. There are certain key stories about economic growth, about technological progress, about nature as object to be used or conquered, about profit and success, that have profound implications for how we treat the systems that life depends on.

(Stibbe 2015: 1–2, original emphasis)

Films have been complicit in telling all of these ecologically damaging stories. Scholarship has addressed some of these examples, so that, for example, Sean Cubitt notes how in

films like The Fast and the Furious [Cohen 2001] [the] wanton annihilation of natural resources is celebrated, consumerism is triumphant, the green world only a backdrop to blacktop, and the highest virtues – solidarity, brotherhood, liberty – [are] enacted in rituals of guiltless destruction.

(Cubitt 2005: 99)

In addition, a dominant tradition in Hollywood films locates the resolution of various problems with charismatic protagonists. Again, scholarship (Ingram 2000: 2–3; Rust 2013: 202) has noted how this individualisation of conflict facilitates a blasé attitude towards problems – an average spectator need not especially worry about a real-world crisis if they are used to fictional models where an individual undertakes a hero’s journey culminating neatly in the problem’s resolution.

If these were the only stories told by film, then it might be quite simple to explain why films contribute to ecological degradation – audiences ‘live by’ the environmentally damaging stories they watch. These are not the only stories told by film, however. This book is principally concerned with those films that tell stories of technological hubris, and of the destructive consequences of our attitudes towards nature. Yes, the narrative trajectories of these stories often resolve the ecologically problematic questions posed, and often do so through recourse to the same kind of aforementioned heroic protagonist who rises to the challenges presented. The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich 2004), in which a devastating ice age is caused by runaway climate change, is often used as the apogee of how big budget Hollywood films can address ecological issues, and it conveniently demonstrates many of the premises set out throughout this opening chapter. In terms of how it resolves the ecological issues it poses, the film ends with a pristine image of the Earth seen from space, purified of the toxins still building in the real, non-fictional world, and with the observing astronaut asking ‘have you ever seen the air so clear?’ In terms of suggesting that gritty individualism can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, The Day After Tomorrow culminates with a shift from climatologist Jack (Dennis Quaid) attempting to warn the government about the impending shift in the Earth’s climate, to his (successful, of course) attempt to rescue his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) through an act of indomitable, selfless and self-assured heroism.

As such, it might be the case that the stories told by a film like The Day After Tomorrow point towards narratives that ostensibly challenge the ecologically damaging stories mentioned by Stibbe, but finally lack the courage of their convictions and temper their environmentally progressive narratives in various ways. These kinds of narrative oscillations will be an important part of my subsequent analysis of how films depicting environmental degradation typically resolve the crises they portray. However, there is something more fundamental about the failure of films like The Day After Tomorrow to decisively alter environmentally damaging behaviour. This is to do with a limitation in this particular aspect of the ecolinguistic argument that we should change the content of the ‘stories we live by’. It is true to say that ecolinguistics goes beyond a focus merely on narrative content, and is concerned with form and grammar – these elements will be an important part of how I will use ecolinguistics alongside film theory to analyse how the formal grammatical structure of film influences spectators to think about the environment. But at this stage, the ecolinguistic focus on the ‘stories we live by’ suggests that altering the content of those stories will help to change how we think about and act towards the environment. However, a number of problems, both empirical and philosophical, suggest that a change in the information contained within the ‘stories we live by’ is an insufficient driver of genuinely transformative thought and behaviour.

The chimera of awareness: False consciousness, ‘wokeness’ and doomsday fatigue

Empirical surveys of how audiences responded to The Day After Tomorrow demonstrate the limitations of filmic information about anthropogenic ecological degradation. Even though viewers felt global warming is a problem which should be addressed, they were equivocal about how they would go about addressing the problem themselves, and the attitudes of viewers did not seem to have an impact on wider society. Anthony A. Leiserowitz’s (2004) questionnaire survey of two groups of Americans, one of which had seen the film, and one of which hadn’t, found that those who had watched the film changed their attitudes to climate change: “Even after controlling for […] demographic and political factors, […] watchers were still more likely than nonwatchers to perceive global warming as a greater risk” (28). Asked whether they would partake in four (minor) activities to ameliorate climate change, “[m]oviegoers were found to be much more likely to engage in all four behaviors than nonwatchers” (29), or at least said they would. Leiserowitz concluded that “these results suggest that popular movies can have a considerable influence on the risk perceptions, conceptual models, behavioral intentions, policy preferences, and even the voting intentions of the movie-going public” (31). However, when Leiserowitz correlated his data against surveys of the broader American public conducted before and after the film’s release, he concluded that

Americans before and after The Day After Tomorrow were no more likely to be concerned or to worry about global warming – or to believe that climate change impacts were more likely to occur. They also were no more likely to prioritize global warming as an issue, take personal actions, or to vote differently.

(Leiserowitz 2004: 31)

For Leiserowitz, then, a certain bundle of information in a story could be something like a ‘story we live by’ in the sense that it changed the attitudes of some of the people who watched it – these viewers at least partly adopted a new ‘story’ to live by. He puts the fact that this change of attitudes was not shared by those questioned in the wider survey down to the fact that the film was seen by “only 10 percent of the U.S. adult population, not enough to change public opinion as a whole” (2004: 31). A similar survey, conducted on British audiences by Thomas Lowe et al., concluded that even though The Day After Tomorrow

can be said to have sensitized viewers and perhaps motivated them to act on climate change, the individuals who participated in this study do not feel they have access to information on what action they can take or the opportunity in their daily lives to individually or collectively implement change.

(Lowe et al. 2006: 453, my emphasis)

For both Leiserowitz and Lowe et al. the problem is therefore a lack of information – the film’s story can have ecologically beneficial effects, but only in alliance with more and/or other forms of information. So, either more people need the information contained in the film’s story, or the information in the film’s story needs to be accompanied by information in additional stories. This is an essentially rationalistic approach, which conceptualises human thought and behaviour as reasonable (based on receiving, processing and balancing information) and measurable (through empirical surveys, for example). This rationalistic approach to ecological awareness has both a long history, with Henry David Thoreau stating as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century that “we [must] front up to the facts and determine to live our lives deliberately, or not at all” (in Merchant 1998: 438), and a growing sense of urgency, with the quasi-hagiographised David Attenborough stating, in the introduction to the television documentary Climate Change: The Facts (Davies 2019), that “if we better understand the threat we face, the more likely it is that we can avoid such a catastrophic future”.

Although I would obviously not want to argue against extending understanding about this threat, and accept that it is possible for people to be more or less ecologically aware depending on what information they have access to, there is also a limitation to this approach. In part, this limitation is peculiar to the way that ecological degradation like globa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endrosements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Environmental crisis and epistemological crisis: Ecologically-destructive Cartesian subjectivity
• 2. Cinema spectatorship as an illusory Cartesian ‘symptom’
• 3. Realist film as cogito-centric film
• 4. Surviving environmental disasters in film ‘lifeboats’
• 5. Surviving environmental apocalypse in film ‘lifeboats’
• 6. Survivors in post-apocalyptic environmental dystopias
• 7. The possibilities of non-Cartesian film
• Conclusion
• Index