Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret

The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies

Hunter Vaughan

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231544153
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ecology

In an era when many businesses have come under scrutiny for their environmental impact, the film industry has for the most part escaped criticism and regulation. Its practices are more diffuse; its final product, less tangible; and Hollywood has adopted public-relations strategies that portray it as environmentally conscious. In Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret, Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences.

Bringing together environmental humanities, science communication, and social ethics, Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret is a pathbreaking consideration of the film industry's environmental impact that examines how our cultural prioritization of spectacle has distracted us from its material consequences and natural-resource use. Vaughan examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how popular screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world. He recounts the production histories of major blockbusters—Gone with the Wind, Singin' in the Rain, Twister, and Avatar—situating them in the contexts of the development of the film industry, popular environmentalism, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan interweaves details of the hidden environmental consequences of specific filmmaking practices, from water use to server farms, within a larger critical portrait of social perceptions and valuations of the natural world.

CHAPTER ONE

Burning Down the House

Fire, Explosion, and the Eco-ethics of Destruction Spectacle

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

—Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”

FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

—Beavis, Beavis and Butthead

Although my more poetic inclinations want to embrace the lyricism of Robert Frost’s words as a beacon for this study, the truth is that Beavis far better represents the target audience and internal logic of mainstream American film culture. However, the pure fanaticism of Beavis’s excitement when seeing fire in heavy metal music videos can be reconciled to Frost’s reflection on desire, with both coming together in what French philosopher Jean Louis Schefer has referred to as “the ordinary man of cinema,” a theoretical foil Schefer uses to cast aside overly esoteric methods of film theory. He explores instead a more phenomenological notion of what exactly we are connecting to, looking for, experiencing, and enjoying when we watch films.1 According to Schefer, cinema is part of a long line of cultural practices whereby we willingly sacrifice the real on the altar of the symbolic, a cultural compulsion that pushes us to exist between the material actuality around us and an imaginary space connecting, in this case, our minds and our movies.

This desire drives us toward a symbolic fire, an incinerator of the popular-culture industry that takes the real, the wood and coal of the world, and destroys it for the entertainment of the masses; but we are also attracted like moths to the sensory brilliance of real fire, explosion, and flame as an affective and aesthetic practice. Beavis is the ultimate “ordinary man of cinema,” Promethean and unbound, embodying a purely visceral and emotional exclamation of the common joy for watching things burn and blow up. His raw excitement also puts a new spin on Frost’s poem, manifesting a desire that I explore here in ecomaterialist terms of the sociocultural contract whereby we collectively agree to convert material reality into destruction spectacle.

Screen culture acts as a weathervane of collective desires and values, which are laid bare for us at the height of every new movie season. On May 2, 2014, the New York Times Sunday edition included the publication’s annual “Summer Movie Preview,” mixing equal parts enthusiasm and criticism for the arrival of big-budget vacation releases. This particular year’s explosive fare included such Hollywood productions as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, Transformers 4, Fast and Furious 7, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Expendables 3, and the seasonally ironic Captain America: The Winter Soldier—all films that light up the screen with bursts of fire and flame.2 My aim here is not to illuminate the lack of creativity in contemporary Hollywood, demonstrated by the high percentage of sequels and reboots recently occupying screens; the market logic of such a formulaic concentration does belie, however, my argument that we participate in a sociocultural contract, central to American film culture, that revolves around the spectacle of fire, explosion, and destruction. Quite simply, we like watching things blow up. We get a kick out of watching things burn. Alas, Beavis: “Fire! Fire! Fire!!!” Here, I look at the ecological ethics of the cinematic spectacle—in particular the spectacle of destruction that comes in the form of fire and explosion—from the ecomaterialist ramifications of how such spectacle is produced and marketed to the philosophical problem of its consumption and reception.

I am certainly not the first person to acknowledge the central role of spectacle in the cinematic experience. Cinema, to paraphrase Tom Gunning, began as attraction. Gunning situates the fin de siècle audience within a civilization increasingly littered with images and argues that the audience’s legendary fear that August and Louis Lumière’s train at La Ciotat would continue through the screen and run them over was generated less by the conviction of visual verisimilitude than by the subconscious desire to disavow the distinction between real and imaginary in the quest for spectacular thrill. In other words, the myth of an audience genuinely panicked by the oncoming train is simply that, myth; the audiences of early cinema were mesmerized less by a belief in the representation’s realism than by a drive to be stimulated by the motion of images, a desire for spectacle and affect that made them willingly hand the keys over to a machinery of fantasy and a series of sensory shocks.3

This eager conversion of the material world into some other form is not new—only optimized by the cinematic machine. Well before film cameras rolled, Karl Marx noted ways in which the logic of capitalism turns centrally on the human transformation of nature into exchange value, describing the impact as a vaporization in which “all that is solid is melted into the air.”4 This sacrifice of the real on the altar of the symbolic has long provided a central kernel of cultural and social inquiry, and I resituate this dilemma according to an ecomaterialist framework that turns our attention to the concrete environmental ramifications of film practices.

Fire has always been central to both the material process and the symbolic magic of popular screen culture, from the hypnotizing effect of virtual dancing flames to the lore of incendiary catastrophe connected to exploding film canisters, engulfed projection booths, and grandiosely dangerous production shoots.5 Most recently, a film fire provides the central narrative premise for the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Holocaust revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds (2009), with the iconic scene being further secreted into legend by the subsequent anecdotes of how the fire stage on which the scene was shot burned out of control and nearly collapsed and killed the cast.6

Fire, destruction, and explosion have long been integral to the cinematic spectacle, just as they were to its cultural precursors of the late nineteenth century. In some ways, this relationship makes perfect existential sense given the newly wired electricity of a highly urbanized society: the relevance of fire-based destruction to daily life had heightened during the Industrial Revolution to the point of demanding a cathartic mode of entertainment, “a threatening yet fascinating reality” that could be reproduced, packaged, and sold.7 This demand fed the inferno of interactive amusements developed at the turn of the century, including the transformation of Coney Island from 1897 to 1904 into a “sophisticated mass-entertainment center” that relied heavily on disaster spectacles, among the most popular of which were two fire spectacles: “Fire and Flames” and “Fighting the Fire.”

These fire-spectacle reenactments involved massive sets and the employment of thousands of people (including professional firemen) and in some cases even placed spectators on set as part of the gawking crowd. Real human action and natural disaster merged to form a new kind of performance: “the fire spectacle.”8 As John Kasson writes in Amusing the Millions, such spectacles reflected a historically situated fascination with disaster, “a horrible delight in the apprehension that devastating tragedy had both historically and contemporaneously intruded suddenly into daily affairs.”9 This historical development of the daily presence and spectacularization of disaster coincided, of course, with the advent of cinema and became a popular motif of early screen spectacle.10 In 1896, Thomas Edison commissioned a series of three such films: Morning Alarm, Starting for the Fire, and Fighting the Fire.

Biograph’s film Fighting the Flames (1908) was in fact just a filming of one of the fire spectacles at Dreamland, a Coney Island amusement park (figure 1.1). As we will see, though, spinoffs of these amusements were not the only place for such cinematic spectacle—they were only part and parcel of a larger social familiarity with fire and destruction in the age of advanced industrialism and a cultural value process, kindled by cinema, whereby the real was transformed into screened image (figure 1.2). In ecomaterialist terms of the sociocultural contract, material resources became discounted kindling for the fire of the social desire to turn our own fears into entertainment.

Over the past century, fire has only become more central to our relationship with the environment. In The Unnatural World, a wide-lens survey of innovative contemporary responses to the newly emerging web of environmental problems, the science writer David Biello quotes Pauline Dube, a wildfire specialist at the University of Botswana: “The Anthropocene is truly an age of fire.… Thanks to humans, the whole world is now a wildfire risk.”11 Biello, Scientific American’s energy and environment editor, continues on to describe the existence of fire in places that did not burn before, such as Russia and Israel, due either to industrial development or to fossil-fuel exploration. He concludes: “Fire is everywhere in the world, some of it hidden inside machines small and large, some of it visible from space, vast smoke plumes fouling the atmosphere and raining ash over long distances, the red infrared glow of the blazes themselves.”12 In other words, this late-nineteenth-century condition was not a passing phenomenon, just an early spark. The same can be said for our movies.

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 The Fighting Flames Show at Coney Island and The Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) capture the domestic relevance of fire catastrophe that translated to early twentieth-century popular-culture spectacles, with manufactured pyrotechnics and smoke central to the entertainments’ affective power and narrative drama. Sources: Fighting Flames Show image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Frame capture from Life of an American Fireman by author.

Cut back to that list from 115 years later: The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, Transformers 4, Fast and Furious 7, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Expendables 3.… This batch of Hollywood releases in 2014 inspired the Times writer Kevin B. Lee to add to this summer movie review a study titled “Kaboom!,” in which he analyzes the explosions in nine top-grossing blockbuster films over the past four decades. Lee concludes that there are two types of explosion: “dramatic” (“which have a significant narrative or emotional impact”) and “decorative” (“in which explosions are deployed in a barrage, like fireball wallpaper”). Through his “Decorative Destruction Index (the number of decorative explosions divided by the total explosions per film),” Lee concludes that—relative to early films in the New Hollywood era of the blockbuster, such as Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1992)—contemporary action franchises such as pyromaniac director Michael Bay’s Transformers reach new levels of excess (Transformers: Dark of the Moon [2011], for example, contains 417 total explosions, 96 percent of them being decorative).13 In other words, in our day and age of environmental awareness and economic conservatism, blowing stuff up is more popular than ever: the fire spectacle rages on, alive and well, and no longer do we even bother with justifying it through narrative relevance.

SCREENING FIRE

As outlined in the previous section, the blaze of destruction spectacle has long been a central visual icon and driving sensory affect of the movies. This extends from the ear-popping explosions of fictional MIG airplanes in Tony Scott’s film Top Gun (1986) to the jaw-dropping representation of real oil fields across the world. The oil-and-fire infrastructure focused on in recent documentaries such as Crude (Joe Berlinger, 2009) and Gasland (Josh Fox, 2010, 2013) has a long genealogy dating back to the early pyroprolificacy of the Lumière brothers, who sent cinematographers around the world to capture new wonders for their films, including Kamill Serf, who traveled to Azerbaijan to film the burning oil wells at Baku. Because of its ambivalent set of aesthetic characteristics—driven by the conflicting spectacle of human ingenuity, sheer natural power, and the contrast between brilliant flames and sky-choking black smoke—Oil Wells of Baku: Close View (Lumière, 1896) provokes a problematic spectatorial position in which we are overwhelmed by the scale of what appears at once to be a miracle and a disaster.

In their close study of this film, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann capture the paradox of such entertainment whereby “disaster looks more like spectacle.”14 The image of flames and smoke conflates the boundary between natural disaster and manmade industry—a transgression that extends beyond the oil drilling to the cinematic spectators who are complicit in the spectacle: not only do the burning oil wells signify humanity’s explosive interruption and exploitation of natural resources, but the process of watching them burn also carries deep connotat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Big Picture
• 1. Burning Down the House: Fire, Explosion, and the Eco-ethics of Destruction Spectacle
• 2. “Five Hundred Thousand Kilowatts of Stardust”: Water and Resource Use in Movies and the Marketing of Nature
• 3. Wind of Change: New Screen Technologies, the Visualization of Invisible Environmental Threats, and the Materiality of the Virtual
• 4. Apocalypse Tomorrow: The Myth of Earth’s End in the Digital Era
• 5. The Fifth Element: Hollywood as Invasive Species and the Human Side of Environmental Media
• Conclusion: An Element of Hope
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index