Fire and Snow

Climate Fiction from the Inklings to Game of Thrones

Marc DiPaolo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438470474
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction, " a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7137.

1

Star Wars, Hollywood Blockbusters, and the Cultural Appropriation of J. R. R. Tolkien

Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. (Too often the hate is irrational, a fear of anything large and alive, and not easily tamed or destroyed, though it may clothe itself in pseudo-rational terms). … In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.

—J. R. R. Tolkien

“Primroses and landscapes,” [the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning] pointed out, “have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.”

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth and the Cinematic Ecological War Narrative

Over the course of six Star Wars films, George Lucas told the story of Anakin Skywalker, the tragically flawed Jedi Knight who fell from grace, transformed into the evil Sith Lord known as Darth Vader, and was redeemed through his son Luke’s belief in his enduring potential for goodness. The story unfolded in two trilogies: the original trilogy that recounted the coming of Luke Skywalker, a new hope for the future of the Republic, and the redemption of Vader—comprising Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983)—and the prequel trilogy that recounts the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of the Empire—The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005). The main arc of this story is supplemented by several comic books, novels, television shows, and video games, as well as new live-action films produced by Disney Studios that take place during, between, before, and after these films. Some series aficionados are vocal in their loathing of Lucas’s prequel trilogy—and his many alterations to the original trilogy—but the Star Wars saga is beloved worldwide nevertheless. Its appealing science fantasy appropriation of Buddhism as an awareness of the “Force” that binds all the Cosmos, and its melodramatic depictions of the Force’s chief disciples known as the Jedi, have inspired millions. Indeed, a surprising number of fans identified themselves as Jedi in religious affiliation questions on global census surveys in 2001, causing Jediism to be recognized as a religion by some governments. Though the first film was released at the beginning of the Carter administration, the blossoming popularity of the series coincided with the rise of the Reagan Revolution in the late seventies and early eighties; consequently, its predominantly male cast, emphasis on action over characterization, and depiction of messianic heroism has caused some cultural commentators to deem the series politically reactionary. However, critic Doug Williams championed the Lucas films as representing progressive values and depicting environmentalist, anti-imperial ideals.1 Also, journalist Kate Aronoff praised 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Tale as a timely and subversive antifacist narrative.2 As many scholars and fans are aware, the series offers up a positive role model for the young through Luke’s popularization of narratologist Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero.3 In some respects, the series is a hybrid of these value systems—reactionary and patriarchal as well as Buddhist and ecological.

The story of Darth Vader—told by Lucas in collaboration with co-writers Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett and fellow directors Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand—concerns a misguided man who thought that he was taking positive, heroic action to combat institutionalized injustice and slavery, but instead transformed into everything that he himself hated. In the six Lucas Star Wars films, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is depicted as a man who surrendered himself to the system of a totalitarian military industrial complex and became “more machine than man”—the physical embodiment of mechanized warfare and fascistic impulses. Vader serves Emperor Palpatine, who lives on Coruscant, a planet that is, essentially, one vast city devoid of vegetation. Vader himself lives atop a skyscraper when on Coruscant and has a primary home in a black castle located on the volcanic, Mordor-like planet Mustafar. Vader’s goal is to lure his son onto the same path he treads in life so that they can overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy together. However, for Luke to join his father, he would have to embrace authoritarianism so completely that he, too, would become more machine than man. The more tempted he is to be like his father, the darker his clothes become and the more machine parts begin to be grafted onto his body. However, Luke has chosen to reject what his father stands for. Luke has chosen the side of nature. He grew up on a farm, embracing the natural order, and has been tutored by the Jedi master Yoda, who lives on Dagobah, a planet covered in wetlands. In Star Wars, the moral side is represented by pacifists, inept left-wing politicians, and the radical liberal terrorists of the Rebel Alliance who are associated with nature imagery and who base themselves on forest and desert planets. In contrast, the Imperial side is replete with humans who cover themselves in so much armor that they are indistinguishable from androids, and barely alive enough to be considered murdered when they are shot by rebels. When the heroes suffer their most grievous losses, it is on planets such as Coruscant, or on ice- or snowfall-covered planets, when the seasonal cycle is symbolically linked with death. Significantly, the final battle between the Rebels and the Empire on the forest planet Endor sees the imperial Stormtroopers routed by the moral authority of the diminutive indigenous peoples called the Ewoks. From a strategic perspective, the Ewoks should not have been able to defeat the Stormtroopers, but the power of Nature and the subtle guidance of the Force helped ensure the victory of life over death and nature over mechanization.

As Campbell has observed, Vader is an intellectually dishonest figure who lies to himself about his own value system. Like Thanos, the tragic Malthusian ecoterrorist who erotically enjoys the act of killing (Infinity Gauntlet/Infinity War), the mass-murdering Vader has convinced himself he is a champion of Life. He has extended his own life unnaturally with cybernetics. He is—like his successor Voldemort in the Harry Potter saga—a perpetrator of genocide who started down a dark path only because of an intense dread of death and anger over the impermanence of life. If Vader would embrace Yoda’s Buddhist-like philosophy of the Force, he would not be so angry and misguided—but Vader is no Buddhist. The tension between the good intentions of his heart and the false logic of his ideologically shaped intellect has driven him mad. As Campbell said, “If a person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off-center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body is interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have only listened to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.”4

Fig. 1.1. In the six George Lucas Star Wars films, Anakin Skywalker is depicted as a man who surrendered himself to the system of a totalitarian military industrial complex and became “more machine than man.” He is transformed into Darth Vader, the physical embodiment of mechanized warfare and fascistic impulses. The iconic villain returned to the screen in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (pictured here). Lucasfilm.

The Hero’s Journey model of storytelling is as famous as it is problematic. It is widely associated with geek culture and adolescent male power fantasies. In scholarly circles, Campbell, the mythologist who popularized the model, is considered too much of a public scholar, self-help guru, and promoter of cultural sameness to be taken seriously. In contemporary anthropology, his name is anathema, and Alan Dundes famously condemned Campbell’s work in a 2004 Presidential Plenary Address to the American Folklore Society. And yet, despite such strong opposition from respected anthropologists, Campbell is, essentially, the patron saint of screenwriting courses. In each case, Campbell’s writings are vastly under- and overestimated. Contrary to popular assumptions, Campbell is not promoting an establishment narrative in which St. George kills a dragon in a triumphal, fascistic manner that is pro-war, pro-patriarchy, antifeminine, and antiegalitarian. In fact, Campbell’s dragon is a metaphor for the internal temptation that heroes face. They are tempted to surrender their wills to the dictates of an oppressive society rather than to heed the urgings of their own hearts. The dragon represents the hero’s temptation to “sell out”—to justify acquiescing to the demands of establishment forces through sophistry, and to do just what parents, religious leaders, and community leaders say needs to be done for success to be achieved in contemporary society. Campbell explains that the dragon represents the dominant ideological system of the day, which can be gleaned from whatever building is tallest in the community—the Gothic church in medieval times, the government building in the Renaissance, and the skyscraper headquarters of conglomerates in modern times. Those who fail to slay the dragon within become the dragon themselves and sacrifice themselves to a corrupt system.5 For Campbell, meditating upon the hero’s journey teaches us all to follow our bliss, and Jhumpa Lahiri dramatized the transformative power of this philosophy for good and ill in her novel The Namesake (2003).

Significantly, Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) was one of the sources of inspiration for Lucas when he was writing Star Wars.

For Campbell, the power of the Hero’s Journey cycle is that it models resistance to indoctrination and encourages those who immerse themselves in such stories to resist adopting a programmatic life. In popular culture, the hero’s journey is most famously exemplified in Luke Skywalker’s refusal to become his father.

Ever since the release of Jaws (1975), the first summer blockbuster, and Star Wars, a film that shaped the aesthetic and ideological sensibilities of Generation X to an astounding and incalculable degree, special effects–saturated film narratives have accounted for a growing percentage of the motion pictures released each year by Hollywood. Far from becoming weary of action movies with apocalyptic plots, global audiences have continued to patronize them, filling the lists of the highest-grossing films of all time with such blockbusters. Indeed, as special effects technologies have grown steadily more sophisticated, and the spectacle associated with these escapist narratives has grown more dazzling, audience demand for apocalyptic special effects extravaganzas seems to have increased in kind. This voracious hunger for these epic stories has encouraged studio executives to regard such films—expensive as they are to produce—as so lucrative that they have continued to produce a multitude of film franchises based on the same basic, market-tested formula. It is apparent to any film scholar, critic, fan, or even casual filmgoer that most Hollywood blockbusters follow the exact same storytelling formula: they have a generic plot informed by Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model filtered through the corporate scriptwriter model of Christopher Vogler. If Vogler’s template isn’t proscriptive enough, the script is also expected to adhere to the minute-by-minute “beat sheet” movie formula developed by Blake Snyder for his screenwriting Bible Save the Cat, and to be vetted by marketing consultants such as statistician Vinny Bruzzese, of Worldwide Motion Picture Group, who analyze scripts to make sure they contain no scenes, plot twists, or character personality traits that have been statistically proven to alienate audiences.6 In the wake of the huge success of the Terminator, Matrix, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man films, studios and premium television stations now appear to be engaged, more than ever, in search of ready-made properties to adapt into their next multimedia franchises. In recent years, some of the most popular and profitable fantasy and science fiction franchises have included Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, and Doctor Who. These texts are all continuations of (or reboots of) serialized narratives of the past or adaptations of intellectual properties with a proven market value. For decades now, investors have banked on their tapping into the ascendant geek culture zeitgeist, and tap in they have. The multimedia adaptations based upon bestsellers gave the narratives still greater exposure than they had in print format, ensuring that the authors and the architects of the adaptations became household names (if they weren’t already). Whether these adaptations are all quality productions or are truly faithful to the source material is oft-debated. Indeed, the adaptations of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and The Hunger Games have all been embraced or rejected to varying degrees by readers of the novels. There have been many insightful discussions of the artistic merit of these adaptations. There have been reasonable calls for them to be judged based upon their own merits and not merely upon their level of fidelity to their sources. Nevertheless, it is important to note that these adaptations’ persistent failure to bring the climate fiction sensibilities of their source novels to the screen is deeply troubling.

Any process of adaptation that minimizes the social commentary embedded in apocalyptic, dystopian, or climate fiction narratives and maximizes the length and scope of the battle scenes for marketing reasons suppresses much of the progressive or subversive qualities of the source material. Instead, it excavates and amplifies the more retrograde, pro-war potential of that narrative. Any “action movie” version of a cli-fi book is potentially dumbed-down enough to privilege a “reading” of the source book that transforms it into a piece of pro-war escapist art with the potential to bolster the power of reactionary political movements. In this manner, a book that was written to challenge fascistic forces in the real world is often transformed into a movie that, in many significant ways, appears to promote the very fascist causes the story was written to oppose.

A successful environmentalist narrative needs to be identifiable as environmentalist, in both its original written form and in adapted form. Whether it is an older climate fiction narrative by one of the Inklings or a pressing contemporary parable by a living author, it needs to be compelling enough dramatically—and convincing enough morally—to move an audience to action on ecological issues. The Game of Thrones series brings enough of the environmental sensibilities of the novels to the television screen that viewers have noticed them despite the ratcheted-up sex and violence. The rising ocean waters and other climate change conditions that helped create the stark class divisions of Panem were excised from The Hunger Games film adaptations, but they were more part of the back story of the books than the action of the plot proper, so those omissions were understandable, if unfortunate. Omissions such as these might have been made from some sinister attempt to keep any discussion of climate change as anything but a hoax out of the mass media. However, it is also possible that these thematically important moments were dropped from various film adaptations of cli-fi novels because they didn’t “advance the plot” like a runaway train to its inevitable climax. Thematically important moments are often deemed boring and superfluous, and are excised by screenwriters or directors even if they are centrally important to the author and the experience of reading the novel.

On a related issue, thanks in part to Vogler, studio executives often look to Campbell’s hero’s journey model as a template for the plot structure of their movies. However, the Hollywood reworking of Campbell frequently omits the usage of what is one of the most important of the many stages of the hero’s journey—the “Return”—in which the hero comes home to a...