Hollywood Utopia

Patrick Brereton

Description

Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research and is used extensively to examine the most influential global medium of all time. The book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from 1950s to the present, which has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, westerns, nature and road movies, as listed in the filmography are extensively analysed while particularly privileging ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. The five chapters all use detailed film readings to exemplify various aspects of this ‘feel good’ utopian phenomenon which begins with an exploration of the various meanings of ecology with detailed examples like Titanic helping to frame its implications for film study. Chapter two concentrates on nature film and its impact on ecology and utopianism using films like Emerald Forest and Jurassic Park, while the third chapter looks at road movies and also foreground nature and landscape as read through cult films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Grand Canyon. The final two science fiction chapters begin with 1950s B movie classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man and compare these with more recent conspiracy films like Soylent Green and Logan’s Run alongside the Star Trek phenomenon. The last chapter provides a postmodernist appreciation of ecology and its central importance within contemporary cultural studies as well as applying post-human, feminist and cyborg theory to more recent debates around ecology and ‘hope for the future’, using readings of among others the Terminator series, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and Alien Resurrection.

Sujets

• Sciences de la nature
• Sciences de l'environnement
• Science
• Film
• 454 Life Sciences
• General
• Ecology
• History of film
• Physics
• General officer
• Computational
• Applied ecology
• Biology
• Película fotográfica
• Sciences et techniques
• Life Sciences
• Mathematical
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509129
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The fruit of years of painstaking study, Pat Brereton's Hollywood Utopia is a landmark in the emerging field of ecological media criticism. The more urban human societies become, the more our media reflect upon the landscapes, the animals and the fragile unities of our planet. Of no media formation is this more true than of Hollywood, as Brereton argues in this meticulously researched and carefully organised work. Far from trashing the planet, Hollywood films have, Brereton claims, a tradition stretching back to the 1950s of care and concern for humanity estranged from its roots, and a world at risk of destruction. Through innovative analyses of Jurassic Park , Easy Rider , Thelma and Louise , Star Trek, Terminator 2 and Blade Runner among countless older and newer films, Brereton traces a utopianism often overlooked in traditional film criticism. Not only films with explicitly Green agendas like Emerald Forest and Medicine Man , but in films noted for far different qualities exhibit the saving grace of nature. Films like Dances With Wolves or the towering spectacle of the tornado's heart in Twister provide grist for an original and far-reaching account of the place of nature in contemporary popular cinema. Dissent and disorder emerge in science fiction films of the 1950s and blockbusters of the early 21st century. The book traces complex negotiations with the meanings of nature and humananity's place in it through costume dramas and high-tech special effects bonanzas, always with an eye to the telling contradiction and the emergence of a generalised and liberal but nonetheless impressive and perhaps heartfelt need to restore the bonds that have been sundered between humans and their environment. To these analyses Brereton adds a powerful and persuasive thesis concerning the spatial concerns of contemporary Hollywood, a thesis that leads him through a broad overview of the literature of green cultural studies and postmodernism. Throughout, Brereton manages an easy, graceful prose to immense purpose. Its clarity, its reach, its honesty and its originality should ensure this book a place on the shelves of any media scholar and many Green activists, The ultimate optimism of its case is a challenge to other critics to write for makers and audiences who want more from cinema, both the cinema we have and the cinema we may yet make in the new century.
(Sean Cubitt, University of Waikato, New Zealand)
Hollywood Utopia
Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema
Pat Brereton
First Published in the UK in 2005 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2005 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-912-4 / ISBN 1-84150117-4
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Copy Editor: Wendi Momen
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FILMOGRAPHY
1. HOLLYWOOD UTOPIA: ECOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA
2. NATURE FILM AND ECOLOGY
3. WESTERNS, LANDSCAPE AND ROAD MOVIES
4. CONSPIRACY THRILLERS AND SCIENCE FICTION: 1950s TO 1990s
5. POSTMODERNIST SCIENCE FICTION FILMS AND ECOLOGY
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank media staff at my previous university in Luton as well as in DCU for their assistance and encouragement. Other readers who helped in various ways include Nick Heffernan, Peter Brooker, Christine Geraghty and Steve Neale. Finally I wish to thank Angela and my family for their support over the many years it took to complete this project.
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Andromeda Strain (1970) Robert Wise
Alien Resurrection (1997) Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott
Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1991) Ridley Scott
Contact (1997) Robert Zemeckis
Dances with Wolves (1990) Kevin Costner
Dances with Wolves - Special Edition (1991) Kevin Costner
Dark City (1998) Alex Proyas
Easy Rider (1969) Denis Hopper
Emerald Forest (1985) John Boorman
Endangered Species (1982) Alan Rudolph
Fifth Element, The (1997) Luc Besson
Grand Canyon (1991) Lawrence Kasdan
Incredible Shrinking Man (The) (1957) Jack Arnold
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Don Siegel
Jaws (1975) Steven Spielberg
Jurassic Park (1993) Steven Spielberg
Last of the Mohicans (1992) Michael Mann
Logan's Run (1976) Michael Anderson
Lost World, The: Jurassic Park (1997) Steven Spielberg
Medicine Man, The (1992) John McTiernan
Men in Black (1997) Barry Sonnenfeld
Safe (1995) Todd Haynes
Searchers, The (1956) John Ford
Soylent Green (1973) Richard Fleischer
Star Trek: First Contact (1996) Jonathan Frakes
Straight Story, The (1999) David Lynch
Terminator (1984) James Cameron
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) James Cameron
Thelma and Louise (1991) Ridley Scott
Them(1954) Gordon Douglas
Titanic (1997) James Cameron
Twister (1996) Jan De Bont
Water world (1995) Kevin Reynolds
Yearling, The (1946) Clarence Brown
1 HOLLYWOOD UTOPIA: ECOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA
Prologue
Ecology has become a new, all-inclusive, yet often contradictory meta-narrative 1 , which this book will show to have been clearly present within Hollywood film since the 1950s. This study focuses particularly on feel-good films whose therapeutic character often leads to their being dismissed as ideologically regressive. By concentrating on narrative closure and especially the way space is used to foreground and dramatise the sublime pleasure of nature, Hollywood cinema can be seen to have within it a certain tendency 2 that dramatises core ecological values and ideas.
The study is committed to a strategy of building bridges and creating cross- connections between film and other disciplines. In particular, the investigation draws on Geography (space/place, tourism and so on), Philosophy (aesthetics, ethics and ontological debates), Anthropology, Feminism and Cultural Studies, while maintaining close contact with the traditional literary and historical disciplines.
In the light of this cross-disciplinary approach, the first section of this introductory chapter sets the scene for an ecological investigation, drawing on a wide range of ideas and historical contexts, while the second section has a narrower focus, clarifying a methodology for film analysis to be used throughout the study. Within many blockbuster films, the evocation of nature and sublime spectacle 3 helps to dramatise contemporary ecological issues and debates. Filmic time and space is dramatised, often above and beyond strict narrative requirements, and serves, whether accidentally or not, to reconnect audiences with their inclusive ecosystem.
As Bryan Norton puts it, environmentalism needs to educate the public to see problems from a synoptic, contextual perspective (Norton 1991: xi). In this respect, Hollywood films can be seen as exemplifying, and often actually promoting, this loosely educational and ethical agenda, particularly through the use of ecological/mythic expression, evidenced in a range of narrative closures.
Introduction
The primary justification for this study is the dearth of analysis of the utopian ecological themes which pervade mainstream Hollywood cinema. There continues to be a preoccupation with narratology in Film studies, which often avoids the formal exploration of space. Coupled with this is the predominately negative ideological critique of Hollywood film, with many cultural histories predicating their analysis on Fredric Jameson s view that mass culture harmonises social conflicts, contemporary fears and utopian hopes and (more contentiously) attempts to effect ideological containment and reassurance. Relatively little academic effort is given over to understanding and appreciating rather than dismissing the utopian spatial aesthetic that permeates Hollywood film. This phenomenon will be examined most particularly through a close reading of closure in a range of Hollywood films from the 1950s to the present day, which can privilege a progressive conception of nature and ecology generally.
In his dictionary of green terms, John Button defines ecology and the growth of eco-politics as
a set of beliefs and a concomitant lifestyle that stress the importance of respect for the earth and all its inhabitants, using only what resources are necessary and appropriate, acknowledging the rights of all forms of life and recognising that all that exists is part of one interconnected whole
(Button 1988: 190).
The very idea of being green only came into popular consciousness in the late 1970s, though since the 1950s green has been used as a qualifier for environmental projects like the green front , a tree planting campaign popularised in America. The minimum criteria includes a reverence for the earth and all its creatures but also, some radical greens would argue, a concomitant strategy encompassing a willingness to share the world's wealth among all its peoples. Prosperity can be achieved through sustainable alternatives together with an emphasis on self-reliance and decentralised communities, as opposed to the rat- race of economic growth (see Porritt 1984).
While the ideological analytical strategy, focusing on power inequalities across class, gender and race boundaries, continues to preoccupy critical analysis of Hollywood cinema, there is little if any critical engagement with the more all- encompassing phenomenon of ecology. Yet, if so-called ecological readings are to remain critical and avoid degenerating into endorsing naive polemics, they must explicitly foreground a variety of interpretations and perspectives, which question any universal utopian project.
To anch