Framing the World

Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film

Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780813930664
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

The essays in this collection make a contribution to the greening of film studies and expand the scope of ecocriticism as a discipline traditionally rooted in literary studies. In addition to highlighting particular films as productive tools for raising awareness and educating us about environmental issues, Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film encourages its readers to become more ecologically minded viewers, sensitive to the ways in which films reflect, shape, reinforce, and challenge our perceptions of nature, of human/nature relations, and of environmental issues.

The contributors to this volume offer in-depth analyses of a broad range of films, including fictional and documentary, Hollywood and independent, domestic and foreign, experimental and indigenous. Drawing from disciplines including film theory, ecocriticism, philosophy, rhetoric, environmental justice, and American and Indigenous studies, Framing the World offers new and original approaches to the ecocritical study of cinema. The twelve essays are gathered in four parts, focusing on ecocinema as activist cinema; the representation of environmental justice issues in Hollywood, independent, and foreign films; the representation of animals, ecosystems, and natural and human-made landscapes in live action and animation; and ecological themes in the films of two eco-auteurs, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Peter Greenaway. Willoquet-Maricondi's introduction provides an overview of the field of ecocriticism and offers both philosophical and theoretical foundations for the ecocritical study of films.

Contributors

Beth Berila, St. Cloud State University * Lynne Dickson Bruckner, Chatham College * Elizabeth Henry, University of Denver * Joseph K. Heumann, Eastern Illinois University * Harri Kilpi, University of East Anglia * Jennifer Machiorlatti, Western Michigan University * Mark Minster, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology * Robin L. Murray, Eastern Illinois University * Tim Palmer, University of North Carolina, Wilmington * Cory Shaman, Arkansas Tech University * Rachel Stein, Siena College * Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Marist College

PART I

ECOCINEMA AS AND FOR ACTIVISM

THE RHETORIC OF ASCENT IN AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH AND EVERYTHING'S COOL

MARK MINSTER

Given that the explicit purpose of both An Inconvenient Truth and Everything's Cool is to convince viewers to help fight global warming, the title of my essay might equally well be “the rhetoric of assent.” Both documentaries call for an end to nearly two decades of dilatory, unproductive debates about whether the planet's climate really is changing, or whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have caused “some” or “most” of the troposphere's warming. The science is as clear as it can possibly be, both films insist, and the time for discussion is over. The time for action is now. Toward this end, eliciting assent and inciting action, both films marshal a host of rhetorical devices.

Throughout Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (produced by Laurie David and eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll and directed by Davis Guggenheim) we see audiences laughing and nodding in agreement with him, one of the film's many shrewd decisions for building consensus. “Rhetoric of assent” reflects the film's remarkable success in doing what so few works of environmentally oriented film and literature have ever been able to do: taking an issue generally perceived as an activist concern and making millions of Americans ready to act, at least with their votes.¹ Even as recently as late 2006, global warming was hardly a viable ballot issue for politicians in the United States. It has become so since the film's release, as suggested by the platforms of all of the major Democratic presidential candidates and at least one of the Republican candidates in the 2008 election.² Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on Gore and climate in 2007, and even Rupert Murdoch's Fox News—which has given more airtime over the last decade to the Competitive Enterprise Institute than to climatologists, broadcasting documentaries of doubt and dubious merit—even Fox News announced, in late spring of 2007, that the company now vows to reduce emissions and bring climate messaging into its programs.³ And even though, as global warming skeptics are fond of pointing out, “correlation is not causation,” my sense is that Gore's film has had more to do with this transformation in values than did the appearance, in February 2007, of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Even if the film has not single-handedly raised America's consciousness or changed the country's mind, it is a rhetorician's dream. An Inconvenient Truth is a model of the art of persuasion, from Gore's winning sense of humor (“I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States”) to his role as skeptical semiotician, decoding cigarette ads and newspaper clippings, defusing his opponents' counterclaims; from the film's anticipation and bridging of its multiple audiences (the unconvinced as well as the committed) to its blurring of genres and deployment of Aristotelian modes of reasoning.

In Everything's Cool, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, the same directors who made the ecodocumentary Blue Vinyl, take exemplary persuasion yet one step further. If An Inconvenient Truth wants to persuade viewers that global warming is real and dangerous, and that we have the capacity and moral responsibility to stop it, Everything's Cool weaves together profiles of a number of activists—“global warming messengers,” the film's Web site calls them—who are actively attempting to do just that. It moves from the lecture halls of An Inconvenient Truth into the sets and dressing rooms of the Weather Channel, the home offices of an investigative journalist and a governmental whistle-blower, and the garage of a Big Lebowski-like ski bum who experiments with biodiesel. The film literally takes to the streets, following a fifteen-foot truck (wryly called “The Do You Care? Mobile”) that was driven across the country in 2004, and walking along with Bill McKibben's activist march in Vermont in 2007.

Whatever their differences, both films realize that audiences are persuaded to action not primarily by facts or prophecies of doom—nor, as Michael Shellenberger says in Everything's Cool, by abstract calculations about a rise in the price of maple syrup, nor by pictures of polar bears drowning. Rather, we are persuaded by likeable characters we can trust and maybe even emulate. We are persuaded by humor and believable emotion, by shared values and deeply embedded cultural narratives. Even though the films are documentaries, not works of fiction—indeed, perhaps because they are not fictional—they are successful at making us care about large, global issues by making us care about the people involved, and by convincing us that if we are not ourselves activists and “messengers,” we might still strive to be like them.

It is worth spending some time with this question: how does successful ecocinema spur us to action? An Inconvenient Truth, in particular, has been accused of being yet another environmental jeremiad, prophesying apocalypse.⁴ Perhaps the filmmakers come closest to this fear-inducing mode when they present images of numerous airborne diseases, showing an animated graphic (which looks strikingly like an old Atari game) with several enormous mosquitoes rising up a comparatively small mountain as the temperature rises. Gore slightly oversimplifies the scientific evidence to imply that many, many ominous-looking diseases will result directly from global warming, whereas most epidemiologists say that the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases are affected by numerous other factors as well, including a widespread increase in global travel and the cost and availability of mosquito control strategies.⁵ Here—and in the film's emphasis on Hurricane Katrina, particularly in the image used as the film's cover in which a single smokestack emits a spiral cloud that looks decidedly like a hurricane—the film does seem to emphasize the worst-case scenarios of what current science knows for certain about global warming.⁶ This is about as close to Jeremiah as Gore comes, however, in a film that is far more positive than doomsaying, and one that is, I hope to show, rhetorically uplifting as well.

Both films, in fact, are surprisingly optimistic, arguing that it is imperative for their audiences to take personal and political action, without coming close to taking Jeremiah's dark pleasure in predicting the collapse of humankind. The films do depict global warming as an urgent problem, but not as the all-too-certain I-told-you-so end of the world. As Michael Shellenberger quips in Everything's Cool, “Martin Luther King didn't give the ‘I Have a Nightmare’ speech, he gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

Contrast the tones of An Inconvenient Truth and Everything's Cool with the very title of Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth, or with the best-known fictional film about global warming, The Day After Tomorrow, which glosses over and even revels in the deaths of many millions of humans (and presumably other species as well). It is a last-man-standing film in which the audience is invited not to sympathize with the dead and dying and endangered, but to identify with the few Crusoes and Ishmaels who alone survive to tell the tale. When Dr. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) abruptly draws a line across the United States, telling the president to sacrifice the northern half of the United States (eliding, of course, the existence of Canada) to the calamitous storms that encircle the globe, we are meant to see how dire the situation is, but more important, we are supposed to sympathize with Hall, who is finally being taken seriously. Hall later picks his way over the frozen bodies of those who were duly warned and should have believed.

In The Day After Tomorrow, those who remain unconvinced about global warming are cast as villains or deserving victims, whereas in An Inconvenient Truth and Everything's Cool they are merely the audience, while the true villains are those who deliberately obfuscate science for the sake of greed and the status quo.⁷ Everything's Cool, admittedly, does permit us to laugh at Americans at fairs and truck stops who do not believe that global warming is as real a threat as terrorism or atheism. According to one woman interviewed in New Orleans wearing Mardi Gras beads, “Before Noah, we had global warming.”

If the films fit the pattern of an early American literary genre, it is not so much the jeremiad—which implies invective, judgment, and blame⁸—as the conversion narrative, the account related by one who was lost but now is found and has had his or her life transformed, in a pattern that mirrors other believers' transformations, inducing assent.⁹ Each convert's life story fits the same narrative pattern as the one that other believers tell about themselves, which fits with the larger narrative of salvation history. We identify with the minister who is also a convert, convicted by his or her harrowing experiences of having descended into the miry clay, only to be raised up, ascending, in the waters to new life. This is “ascent” as it is spelled in my title. Gore is one such convert-turned-minister, pairing the story of his own awakening to the realities of climate change with accounts of how the Gore family learned to give up tobacco farming, and how Gore has dedicated himself to telling others about the problems and solutions associated with greenhouse gases.

Everything's Cool presents several more exemplars, mostly people who started as writers but have become traveling lecturers, more active activists. Ross Gelbspan was a journalist who had to be persuaded that global warming is real before devoting most of the 1990s to writing books and articles on the interests that conspire to make the climate crisis seem unreal, and then joining the lecture circuit—”I didn't get into this because I loved the trees,” he tells us. Rick Piltz was a government researcher who became a government watchdog when his work was undermined by presidential appointees funded by the oil lobby, so he took his writing from Capitol Hill to the New York Times. And Bill McKibben, whom the filmmakers present reverentially as the “Poet Laureate of global warming,” the man “who wrote the book on the subject,” The End of Nature, now lectures and leads demonstrations and campus action groups.

Both films end with a kind of altar call, presenting solutions not just as easy things anyone can do, but as difficult ways to change our lives. In Gore's film Melissa Etheridge enjoins us to “Wake Up,” as a short montage of suggested solutions flashes across the screen, interspersed with the closing credits. “If you can, buy a hybrid.” “When you can, walk or ride a bicycle.” “Where you can, use light rail + mass transit.” While the sentences change, the words “you can” remain on-screen, the new words in the next sentence rising into place from the bottom of the screen. In Everything's Cool, the credits roll while the Flaming Lips play “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)” to show that real action begins when films are over. Through the song, the film asks us how we would use our power to affect the world: “If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch / If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich/Would you do it?”

For Aristotle, the rhetorician's art consists of three main kinds of appeals, or modes of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos (Rhetoric 1.2.2).¹⁰ Logos indicates an attempt to persuade with evidence, reasoning, using what Aristotle called “proof, or apparent proof” (1.2.5). Ethos is the attempt to persuade by the character and authority of the speaker. “We believe good [people] more readily than others,” Aristotle writes, going on to say that “character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion” (1.2.3). Pathos is an appeal to emotion but also, and perhaps more important, it is an appeal to shared values, shared narratives. “Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile,” he writes (1.2.3). Therefore, skilled rhetoricians will make sure not to pain or unnerve their audiences unduly.

While both of these films might seem to be about presenting evidence, appeals to logos are the least of what they do. Everything's Cool takes the scientific evidence for global warming as a fait accompli. The very first shot of the film shows seven rows of packing boxes with labels such as “Sea Ice,” “Exxon,” “N₂O,” “Greenland,” as a voice-over says that “several thousand tons of scientific studies on climate change all led to the same conclusion.” The boxes pile up until they all topple over. Filmmakers Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand set out to show not that global warming is a serious problem facing the world today—this they present as a given—but that, despite the vast quantity and relative clarity of the evidence, there is a sharp divide between what “scientists tell us” and Americans' general inability, or unwillingness, to accept this evidence and act on it.

Repeatedly, the film uses the visual metaphor of a widening rift, or chasm, between the left and right halves of the screen. On one side stands what we know from science. On the other stand the corporate lobbyists with their campaign of disinformation. All scientific evidence in the film is presented off-screen, as backstory. NASA scientist James Hanson is shown only briefly, testifying before Congress. Ross Gelbspan mentions how he was persuaded only by collaboration with the scientist Paul Epstein, and by the discovery that global warming skeptics were funded by the coal industry. Rick Piltz was responsible for assimilating reams of data at the Climate Change Science Program, data represented on-screen as stacks of files and government documents. Instead of walking the audience through charts and graphs, the film portrays evidence as piles of papers on desks, which we trust the experts have read. Even Heidi Cullen, the climate expert for the Weather Channel, is not in the film to persuade us with logos, abstract reasoning, scientific experiments, or laboratory results. She tells us just enough to establish her credentials. She functions, rather, to represent how challenging it is to present evidence to a general American television audience without having that evidence distorted by either the medium of television or the organizational politics of the Weather Channel. If she provides evidence, it is evidence for the rift between how much we know about climate change and how little we have done about it.

In An Inconvenient Truth, by contrast, the systematic, authoritative presentation of evidence appears to be the film's reason for being, though its logical argument is leavened with stories of Gore's growth as a person, and with cartoons of polar bears looking forlorn and Matt Groening's animation of thuggish greenhouse gasses bossing around rays of sunlight. Graphs that function as axes of evidence frequently appear, and they multiply. And yet these graphs operate less for the sake of logos than for the sake of ethos—they tell us at least as much about Gore's credibility as they do about the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere. The content of these graphs, in other words, is scientific. But what the graphs mean in the context of the film, the film's ultimate argument, is that Gore himself has mastered much of the science that has already been done, long before we arrived, and can authoritatively mediate that science for us. His encounters with the evidence are more persuasive than the evidence itself.

When Gore discusses Dr. Charles Keeling, for example—whom he describes as “faithful and precise,” and “hard-nosed” about the data—he presents numerous images of the famous Keeling curve that has recorded atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide above Mauna Loa since 1958. Its saw-toothed pattern reflects seasonal changes, but its overall upward rise is unmistakable, from 320 parts per million fifty years ago to nearly 400 parts per million now. The image appears at least thirty times: behind Gore as part of his slideshow, on his laptop in windows small and large, in an old-looking textbook figure, as raw tabular data. During Gore's discussion of Keeling's research, one grainy black-and-white pan-and-scan shows pages of strikingly similar graphs tacked to a wall. The color and texture of the shot, and much of the sequence, lend the graph historical authority, while the replication of the Keeling curve functions as “proof” of its veracity—the visual pattern of the graphs is what we notice.

Back in the film's present tense, Gore's presentation software slowly recreates the graph, automatically drawing the jagged upward line of CO₂ concentrations and simultaneously running a counter of the last fifty years. Gore compares the graph's saw-toothed pattern, created by seasonal variations, to the breathing of the planet, as an image of the earth pulses with blue light. As the computer draws the Keeling curve, the planet pulses, and the counter ticks along the years, Gore narrates his own involvement in the fight against global warming during the very years that flash across the screen. “It just keeps going up,” he says of the Keeling curve, “it is relentless.” Interestingly, this “it” has no clear antecedent: “it” could almost as easily refer to Gore's own growth as an activist, the relentlessness of his efforts attempting to catch up with the increase in atmospheric...