HOLLYWOOD’S DIRTIEST SECRET The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies
HUNTER VAUGHAN
Introduction The Big Picture Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. — PAU L VA L É RY, “ T H E C O N Q U E S T O F U B I Q U I T Y ”
THE SECRET
Hollywood’s dirtiest secret is not lascivious, includes no insider power plays, and does not come with low-resolution snapshots from a motel room or rehab clinic. It does not involve a sex tape, a murder mystery, executive drama, or a drug scandal. Hollywood’s dirtiest secret is much dirtier and much more secret, and we all are in on it—though we may not know it yet. As with any good secret, there are rumors milling about—floating in the air, circulating in the water, sinking into the soil, rustling in the leaves. Small, seductive traces of it are revealed occasionally, provoking whispers . . . about how the production of James Cameron’s Titanic decimated a Mexican sea urchin population . . . about how Danny Boyle’s The Beach wrecked the natural dunes of Phi Phi Island . . . about the hundreds or thousands of E.T. Atari game cartridges buried in the Texas desert . . . about Colby’s casual theft of Great Barrier Reef coral on Survivor: The Australian Outback . . . about the dirty mining of precious metals that make up our smart mainframes and the amount of dirty energy necessary to fuel our Netflix binges. . . .
Like any good secret, we tune it out when we need to. Hush money is paid, and the Thai government forgives 20th Century Fox; Survivor’s producer makes a public apology and a vacuous commitment to the environment via Entertainment Weekly; carbon credits are purchased and trees are planted so that business can proceed as usual. And the guilty parties promise they will do better in the future: Paramount Pictures introduces its green-studio initiative, and Apple promises to no longer fund African civil wars and child labor by purchasing Congolese coltan. We keep buying and keep watching, but it’s okay: we won’t do that again. This secret is the hidden environmental impact of how we make, watch, and dispose of movies. It may not be sexy, but as far as scandals go, it is huge—and it is connected to everything. It is connected to our everyday viewing, built into the hardware of digital technology, and secreted into the ideological foundations of popular visual culture. Our smart devices operate on the raw materials dug out of international conflict and the constant hum of fossil fuels to which we turn a deaf ear— deep scars in a material reality that we are increasingly distracted from, environmental and social justice transgressions from which we are given respite by the virtual forums of social media and blockbuster fantasy. We power on, choosing to convert natural resources into screen culture (film, television, video, and other digital content). This secret is connected to the social structures whereby we have tacitly, perhaps unknowingly, come to accept this distraction as a given and in doing so have agreed to the sacrifice of the real on the altar of entertainment spectacle. In this book, I will utter this secret aloud, will violate the agreement by speaking its terms, and in doing so will take steps toward an ecological ethics—defined by Patrick Curry as “how human beings ought to behave in relation to non-human nature”1—that reframes the priorities of our screen culture. Using Hollywood history as an index for this tacit agreement—or “sociocultural contract,” as I call it—this book explores how the messages and methods of mainstream cinema as well as our participation in it as a willing and eager audience have cultivated our perceptions of the environment and treatment of natural resources and how films’ production and viewing practices have generated profound but unspoken modes of environmental impact. And, I argue, our entry into the digital age has only complicated this relationship, offering us new 2
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ways of understanding the natural world while also moving us farther away from it. But, like any contract, this one can be renegotiated. F R O M T H E I V O RY TO W E R TO T H E E A RT H
I should confess early on that I watch movies. I love watching movies. On my sofa, in a theater, in a classroom, on my phone, in black-and-white or color, alone or with people. Watching movies, streaming televisual series, ingesting online content—images and sounds beamed to me by satellite, snaked to me by undersea cable, flown to me in envelopes. Although I try to remain vigilant regarding the dangers of screen addiction, I do use smart technology. Hell, this book was written on a laptop. The entire reason I entered the profession of media scholarship and teaching is that I deeply appreciate—more so today than ever—the significant social power that screen culture wields. And, as a consequence, I believe it holds an ethical responsibility. This book is not an indictment of any single person or daily behavior; it is, rather, the expression of my own realization of the profound environmental ramifications of our visual culture and the complex materiality of the screen industries and infrastructures that provide for them. It is a plea for individuals to be more aware of the cultural practices we take for granted as well as a challenge to expect better from the industry and from professionals who cater to these practices. Our images do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences. Speaking both hope and anxiety, the German philosopher and cultural theorist Herbert Marcuse wrote, “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciences and drives of men and women who change the world.”2 With full respect to Marcuse’s humble intentions, I disagree: the way we make and use art actually does change the world, physically and compositionally, using its resources, draining its fluids, mining its innards, and rerouting its flows. This book is a documentation of that change. Over the past two decades, as popular awareness of climate change and other environmental threats has risen and our daily lives have Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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become further enveloped in the ubiquity of digital screens, a slow sea change has been brewing in the relationship between media studies, social sciences, and the humanities. We are nearing a confluence of critical and scholarly interest, coming from a variety of directions, around the intersection between media and the environment. This new field has grown from a seismic shift in ways of looking both at screen culture and at the purpose of theory and criticism, and its growing pains have in many ways been accentuated by the disciplinary and institutional tensions that exist between social sciences, humanities, and media studies. I intend here a blatant violation of that tension in the belief that environmental communication would benefit from more acknowledgment of the qualitative workings of visual culture and that environmental humanities would benefit from more grounded engagement with empirical perspectives such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology. In place of divided fields opposing each other in a war over regimented funding territories, methodological principles, and intellectual merit, I propose a bridge between these fields, one that engages with screen culture as a dynamic social force working at once through aesthetics and rhetoric, emotional appeal and cognitive-messaging strategies, and producing significant environmental impact. Today’s environmental debate is divisive, it is ideological (imprinted on beliefs so ingrained we no longer see them or question them), it is political, and it is emotional. In other words, it is the perfect canvas for the Hollywood brush. Yet as our lives become more and more bound to screen technologies, and as political divisiveness reaches new heights of volatility and aggression, film and media scholars seem to be shying away from hard stances, accepting the postpolitical turn and reframing their charge as one of industry experts and data analysts. I reject this trend and insist that film culture is socially relevant, deeply relevant, and that we can and should demand an ethical approach to criticism that is informed by the quantitative thoroughness of the social sciences. Though I am not trained as a social scientist and will not claim to practice those sciences here, the process of this book has drawn me farther outside the boundaries of film and media studies, arming a screen scholar with new horizons for how this field can intersect with studies of human psychology, collective cultural norms, and social behavior. What I will do here is attempt an accessible environmentalist study of popular films across 4
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Hollywood history that folds conventional methods such as archival research and close textual readings into a larger portrait of how films have both shaped and reflected—and continue to shape and reflect—our relationship with the nonhuman natural world. The environmental debate is largely cultural, and mainstream screen media is a huge factor in that—it has been for more than a century, even when not overtly discussing environmental issues. Recently, though, screen texts are discussing these issues, which is both good and bad, for they often do so in ways that are problematically tucked into allegories and woven into myths, piquing our concern with the comfort of vague outlines while shielding us from hard truths and demands for large-scale change. Perhaps without knowing it, our participation in popular screen culture belies a soft liberal embrace of environmentalist values, caressing our green disposition while implicitly allowing the industrial status quo to go unfettered. To tease out an example that is perhaps the crux of this book: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) is at once a cautionary tale about the dangers of unbridled natural-resource use and the militant destruction of nature, but it is on a deeper material level a lesson in neoliberal greenwashing, luring us into believing that its environmental message is not presaged on a production process that was excessively impactful on the environment and a marketing strategy that is a textbook case of global capitalism. We believe that celebrating a film such as Avatar puts us on the right side, but it is actually implicating us in the dirty secret, allowing us to exist in the virtual while the material real becomes fuel for its fire. In many ways, this issue is one of ignorance and of voluntary psychosis. It is a problem of the visible and, even more importantly, the invisible—we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real. To recognize this choice has taken me many years. More than a decade ago, caught in the final throes of my Ph.D., I was returning home from the pubs along Oxford’s cobblestones when I was struck by a throbbing glow that illuminated the night sky. I realized that this electric heartbeat came from inside one of the colleges. Winding my way inside, I discovered a full-scale film production—The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007)—and asked one of the crew members what they were doing. He responded that they were doing a run-through for the following day’s shoot. Electrical cable writhed like a snake den; massive clusters of lamps Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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and spotlights burned a surreal yellow blue into the night, a swirl of steam and smoke and chemical emission where air met the glass and metal apparatus; behemoth scaffoldings of iron and plastic, meant to last only a day or two, stood monstrous like industrial skeletons; and beating through it all like a heartbeat was the gentle hum of power generators. Though I had seen film shoots before and even worked on a major studio lot, I was nonetheless struck with the awe that hits most in the presence of a blockbuster production and momentarily thought, “What incredible spectacle”—a response that was immediately replaced by a cringe of anxiety as I did a double take, digesting the enormous use of resources and the production of waste and pollution at the service of artificially producing some magical version of the real: “And this is only for a run-through?!” I shuffled this experience away and got back—afloat in the ivory tower—to writing on philosophy and the image, but that glow in the night sky continued to burn, the hum of generators faintly resonating. That work eventually became my first book, Where Film Meets Philosophy,3 which argues that film can and does offer us forms of organizing information and knowledge with which to understand and express the world and that, because of this, it should be understood to hold an immense power for the construction and challenging of value systems. Although I stand by this rather romantic valuation of film’s potential purpose, by the end of that project I was ready to exit the ivory tower, to get down to the earth, and to turn my attention and effort to problems of a more concrete and material nature. This was not easy, though, because there is such a strong disconnect forged between our enjoyment of screen culture and our conscientiousness of its environmental impact. Though Hollywood is an easy scapegoat for the issues explored here, it is not necessarily even the root of the problem—it merely thrives on the problem. The problem is social and more largely cultural than one industry, one town, or one medium. It resides in our eager detachment from the material and ethical impacts of virtual experience, in the problematic balance of values according to which we have come collectively to orient cultural spectacle and the natural environment. Let us now confront the basic problem that is our existence, as cultural beings that are part of the natural world. It may help to convert a rather abstract cost–benefit question such as “What is the natural cost we are willing to pay to have art?” into a closer ethical 6
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confrontation of the material ramifications of specific manifestations of culture and what desires and pleasures this culture of spectacle appeals to and satisfies. Would you accept the extinction of a species of fish in exchange for your favorite movie? How about a species of rabbit? How many trees would you cut down in order to have Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011) be part of our collective image-scape? How many highways worth of carbon output is it worth to make sure we have Wedding Crashers (David Dobkin, 2005)? Does that change if the question is about Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly, 1952), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), or Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)? What if the victims are human? What if they could be your grandchildren? T H E R O OT S O F T H E P R O B L E M
The quotation from Paul Valéry’s essay “The Conquest of Ubiquity” at the beginning of this introduction is one often referenced by both artists and scholars of the digital age and has grown ever more popular with the environmental turn currently happening across academic disciplines as well as across society at large.4 It so aptly—and so presciently—captures the way images and image culture have become as ubiquitously present and are consumed as readily as the utilities that in 1928 had already started to be taken for granted in the average Western household. Moreover, the invisible origin and instantaneity of our daily images’ appearance and disappearance perfectly captures our contemporary notion of screen culture in the age of streaming: because of the ease and the hidden infrastructure of screen culture’s conveyance, we mistake it as immaterial, just as we do the water in our pipes, the energy in our wires, the gas in our tanks. But we are realizing that these utilities are not immaterial or infinite. And as we come to appreciate more and more the materiality and impact of our natural-resource use, so should we that of our image use. In doing so, we must begin to fully assess the complex relationships among our screens, our natural resources, and the ecosystems, ecologies, and economies they are a part of. The environmental turn can be seen in connection to a larger resurgence, in light of the increasing visibility of climate change threats, of an ecocentric and holistic worldview that was very much dispatched by Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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the rise of capitalism, the Scientific Revolution, and the age of industry. In her brilliant book The Death of Nature (1980), Carolyn Merchant captures an epic historical shift from medieval agriculture to modern industrial capitalism as being definitively connected to our complex and anxious relationship with the natural world today: The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been treated by most historians as a period of intellectual enlightenment in which a new science of mechanism and mechanical world view laid the foundation for modern scientific, technological, and social programs. But, in the face of the current crisis over the depletion of natural resources Western society is once more beginning to appreciate the environmental values of the premechanical “world we have lost.” Today, the ecological consequences of exploitative attitudes toward the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire—the ancient sources of life and energy, are beginning to be fully recognized.5
Much of what crystallized through the Scientific Revolution and the installment of market capitalism was, of course, already well set in place by the design of previous empires, the institutionalization of Christianity, and the rise of oligarchical political structures and commodityexchange culture. Yet Merchant sharply identifies the fifteenth-century transition between organic and mechanistic models as an umbrella for complex changes in technology, social organization, and ideology that laid the foundation for our contemporary relationship with the environment. I argue here that our current shift from analog to digital models is equally as sweeping, complex, and problematic for the environment. Though written nearly forty years ago, Merchant’s book sagely heralded the imminent twenty-first-century return of ecology as reviving a holistic tradition founded on the belief—revitalized by the Romantics in the shadow of early industry, by preservationists such as John Muir in the face of American expansionism, and by a growing voice today at the threshold of the digital era—that human beings are not apart from nature or at the top of an environmental pyramid but are inextricably bound within a symbiotic fabric of the natural world. The renaissance of such ecological thinking has been expedited by a recent rise in the general 8
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awareness of environmental instability and a growing anxiety over the human impact on the rest of the natural world. Unlike the world of the fifteenth century, though, and unlike the world of 1980, our natural world today just happens to include artificial intelligence and virtual-reality avatars, drone warfare, accelerated species extinction, and dangerously rising sea levels. And in the midst of it all, movies. In a deeper historical perspective, Merchant is apt to connect the advent of capitalism, industrial technology, and scientific rationalism as the underlying girders of our modern perceptions of the environment and of the consequent colonization and exploitation of natural resources. This argument is often adjoined to one of nature being both a cultural construct and a historical construct, a conceptual paradigm that has been crafted by human worldviews. Political and artistic discourses of the post-Renaissance centuries have merited criticism for erecting an apparatus that is as imperially raced as it is patriarchal, and we must integrate the natural environment into these overarching approaches to ideological structuring. Central to the environmental justice movement, systematic connections between social injustice and the environment have recently been framed specifically in relation to the advent of capitalism, class, race, and gender. McKenzie Wark’s argument regarding labor and nature can be applied to a wider overlap between facets of social hierarchy and notions of the natural: “They are historically co-produced concepts.” 6 Historically coproduced and historically bound to social structures of power. As such lenses indicate, current approaches to media and the environment are deeply enmeshed in other cultural studies approaches to social identity, capital, and inequality. These perspectives belie a wider turn in the humanities and the emergence of environmentally focused studies of art, literature, and— finally—screen culture. What is generally referred to as “ecocriticism,” or the study of how popular culture both represents the natural and positions us in relation to it, grew primarily out of literary studies and critical theory in the 1990s. Works by Lawrence Buell, Verena Andermatt Conley, and others focused on nodal points of American cultural history (e.g., transcendentalist philosophy and postwar social movements) as signposts for how literature and philosophy have shaped and been shaped by our relationship to the environment. The turn of the millennium witnessed a strong turn toward literary and film ecocriticism, echoing a rise Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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in the visibility of environmental issues in popular and journalistic discourse and being met by a parallel turn in communications studies to the environment as a field of significant query.7 And although many foundational works of screen ecocriticism focus on issues of representation in popular moving-image culture, scholars such as Adrian Ivakhiv have heralded an environmental bridge from ecocriticism to a more material focus, with writers such as Sean Cubitt, Nadia Bozak, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, and Nicole Starosielski moving away from issues of film representation and toward the geopolitics, industrial infrastructure, and material impact of media industries and practices.8 GREEN SCREENS
The first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by two important cultural surges: the rapid growth of our collective awareness and discussion of major environmental issues such as climate change and the proliferation of smart-technology devices and their central role in our daily lives. Although I critique overly optimistic claims of the symbiosis between the green revolution and the digital revolution, we cannot deny that the two are historically, technologically, and socially connected. They are emerging simultaneously, often empower one another through mechanical complexity and moral principle, and in many cases engage similar population sets and political stances. There is no question that we live in a volatile time, where the challenges of social division and global inequality are only exacerbated by the increasing effects and risk perception of accelerated climate change. This is not an issue that can—or will—wait, and it touches our entire screen universe, from the phones in our pockets to the rovers catapulting images back to us from Mars. It is not disproportionately alarmist to state that the way social and cultural systems interact with—and position us in relation to—the environment is part of a tacit agreement we abide by every day and is part of a process of environmental destruction that is nearing a point of no return. Nor is it overly ideal to believe that although larger political decisions must be made in order to force large-scale industrial change, this change will come only at the behest of radical shifts in popular thought and collective worldview, for which screen culture could be our strongest weapon. 10
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Many advocates, politicians, and activists appear to hold the same view, as can be seen by the recent turn to film culture as a hotbed of environmental action. The success of Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), based on Gore’s multimedia lecture on climate change, not only signified that popular audiences were ready to talk about the environment but also illustrated an abundance of new uses for smart technology and screen media in our understanding and expression of the environment. Best-selling writer and activist Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Environment (2014) has exploded into a traveling film event and spawned a grassroots social movement;9 similarly, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s critique of the systematic public-relations push against climate change science and emissions regulations, The Merchants of Doubt (2010),10 was adapted to the screen in 2014. Documentary and feature-fiction filmmakers continue to seek new ways to express environmental concern and to evoke ecological pathos through screen media, and the proliferation of distribution and exhibition methods made possible by cable television and the Internet has hotwired a brave new world not only of watching things but of looping screen texts to social groups and political networks.11 Though this book certainly offers an environmental criticism of the methods and madness of our screen culture, and though for the most part it is still business as usual in tinsel town, I also encourage a sense of optimism regarding the current green turn in American cinema. The environmental reform of Hollywood does not stop at the wallpapering of the Internet with images of Leo DiCaprio filling up his Prius at the gas pump or with the rising number of sci-fi films about environmental catastrophe. Although Mark Ruffalo’s widely covered antifracking activism; Shailene Woodley’s highly visible arrest at Standing Rock; Matt Damon’s founding of and continued work with Water.Org; and the voicing of nature by Julia Roberts, Morgan Freeman, and others for Conservation International’s Nature Is Speaking film series depend to varying degrees on the hierarchical institution of the star system, they are valiant attempts at the use of celebrity to solicit popular understanding and activism for environmental and social justice causes. That this is a new arena for star self-definition reinforces a growing sense of popularity in the awareness of, concern over, and desire to act on issues of climate change and environmental justice. Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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These voices, however, are only a part of screen culture’s role in our perception of and engagement with the environment: this book is a reminder of the degree to which our ideological positioning of nonhuman nature is bound to our social norms, collective values, and interactions with screen technology. We must also remember that the increasingly frequent occurrence of extreme environmental events does not mean the same to everyone. An unsung moment in this celebrity movement took place in an improvised interruption to NBC’s celebrity-heavy Hurricane Katrina relief programming in 2005, when—stepping off script and baffling Michael Myers, with whom he shared the stage—Kanye West called out the sitting U.S. president for environmental racism, staring at the camera deadpan and saying with steadfast and earnest calm, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Kanye’s brief comments were radical in their concise and accurate condemnation of the federal government’s handling of the response to that natural disaster and its aftermath, in which the victims were predominately black and lower class. The more we understand about the environmental toll of human actions, the more we also come to understand how the politics and culturing of the natural world is deeply tied—both symbolically and concretely—to the fabric of racial inequality, class stratification, colonial exploitation, and gendered objectification. What Rob Nixon terms the “slow violence” of environmental harm is meted out unequally, with its slowness being both a temporal slowness of degradation and a slowness of response due to the fact that this violence most frequently targets nonwhite and poorer communities and nations.12 Far from superseding the human struggles of identity and inequity, the imminent need for environmental responsibility accentuates the need for accommodating the variant demands of social diversity. To borrow an insight from Sean Cubitt: “Ecocriticism has to get beyond the stage of special pleading for a single cause, and to consider what, uniquely, it can offer as the holistic mode of critical thought in the twenty-first century.”13 E C O M AT E R I A L I S M A N D I T S E XT E N T S
One way to meet Cubitt’s challenge is to integrate problems of representation into a more focused concern with screen culture’s material costs because the materiality of this planet and its resources is something we 12
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all are bound to. In these pages, I stage an ecomaterialist intervention in film analysis and production-culture studies, offering an alternative history of Hollywood and, by extension and with full implication, of the audience for which it exists. By “ecomaterialist,” I mean an approach that does not limit its environmental scope to the question of representation (i.e., how nature is shown or how environmental issues and social groups are portrayed on screen) but explores the material environmental impact of film practices, from the extraction of minerals to the chemical waste of its process, the centrality of natural symbolism in its marketing and crossover merchandising, and the restructuring of urban communities based on production culture ebbs and flows. In doing so, I challenge the multitiered notion that our image culture is immaterial. As the French philosopher Paul Virilio has argued, “The cinema became the major site for a trade in dematerialization, a new industrial market which no longer produced matter but light.”14 This notion is at the center of the screen myth—a sleight of hand, a dazzle of fireworks that pleads magical illumination but is actually the product of immense amounts of resources, energy, pollution, and waste. This book turns on the house lights so as to drown out the projector, allowing us a moment to look around the theater and at one another as co-conspirators bound by a tacit social agreement to a cultural behavior of huge environmental proportions. In this ecomaterialist framework, I reframe the life cycle of the screen text through a lens that goes beyond the parameters of the typical production/distribution/exhibition assessment, considering the film’s mineral prebirth, zombie remains, wide-scale alchemy of social design, and shelf life as a tangible and symbolic object.15 I look at the cradle-to-cradle life cycle of film culture’s environmental impact: from the raw materials of screen hardware (including the environmental justice issues of mining precious metals for the manufacture of smart devices) to the on-site practices of filmmaking (including the decimation of location ecosystems caused by Hollywood shoots) to the global imperialism of e-waste disposal. A central component of my notion of ecomaterialism is the term materialism, a conceptual minefield that has inspired many recent works both in the field and peripheral to it, including voices from political ecology and object-oriented ontology—in addition to its meanings in Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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colloquial, archaeological, and environmental science vocabularies. For environmental studies, materialism refers to resource use, whereas for archaeologists it entails the cultural artifacts through which we can understand collective values, rituals, and social structures. In the colloquial, though, materialistic is a pejorative adjective used for people overly obsessed with consumer objects. Interweaving these various meanings through an environmental take on the Frankfurt School’s Marxist principle of dialectical materialism and therefore insisting that the natural world be included in an understanding of historical and political events arising from contradictory social forces, the term ecomaterialism evokes here the social inequalities, resource exploitation, and tangibility at the heart of mainstream screen culture. I connect these understandings of screen culture—as resource use, as network of artifacts, as dialectic tension between social and ecosystemic forces, as problematic crux of our consumer habits and collective desire for spectacle— through a systematic study of mainstream film culture’s practices and products. Most recent approaches to “materialism” center around a deconstruction of the subject–object hierarchy still dominating Western worldviews and defining the value difference between human life and inanimate things, and I bring this deconstruction to bear on the relational values we have with our environment—in terms of how we use it and the bearing it has on our quality of life.16 In Vibrant Matter (2010), Jane Bennett draws attention to the “vitality of matter,” critiquing the ethics that resist such a turn: “my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” The very term materiality applies a sense of a flattened playing field and “draws human attention sideways, away from the ontologically ranked Great Chain of Being and toward a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans.”17 Bennett’s influence can be seen in recent studies such as Digital Rubbish (2013) by Jennifer Gabrys and A Geology of Media (2015) by Jussi Parikka, which integrate this challenge of materialism and materiality into studies of the waste and remains of media technology. Making strange bedfellows of the archaeological, environmental, and colloquial understandings of the term material, the recent interest in e-waste and 14
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fossilization offers a rich perspective for the arching significance of our screen culture. In what Gabrys refers to as a “natural history” of electronics, she documents the record of dead electronics and the fossil forms in which they persist as evidence of the “materiality of electronics . . . often lost between the apparent ‘virtuality’ of information, the increasingly miniature scale of electronics, and the remoteness of electronic manufacture and disposal.”18 How we dispose of our screen technologies and how their carcasses continue to live with us provide varying pendants of the ideological ties between media and the environment. Parikka engages similar notions of fossil and zombie media with questions of deep time to unearth “the specificity and agency of mediatic matter,”19 insisting that technology be viewed as an active agent—and not merely as a tool—in our social and political configurations. I incorporate this approach into a Marxist materialism that is grounded in the praxis of capital and exploitation, including the planet itself as the participant in industrial productivity ultimately alienated from both product and profit. I embrace recent Marxist arguments waged by heralds of the “Capitalocene,” challenging the popular “Anthropocene” as positing an ahistorical and abstract homogenous humanity, set teleologically across a smooth linear story of progress and awaiting a technocratic solution.20 The problems we face in this era of accelerated climate change and environmental disruption are not simply problems of the human but are specifically problems of capitalist industry—philosophical impacts of the logic of capital and material impacts of the practice of industry, which in turn buttress the social inequalities of neoliberalism. We cannot extricate an understanding of Western media practices and ecosystem relations from the thorny tentacles of capital and should instead understand how capital shapes our various ways of relating to each other and to the environment. As such, I offer an ecomaterialism of screen culture that merges problems of technology development, media infrastructure, and resource use with problems of political economy, cultural values, and social justice. Although insisting on a material-oriented perspective, we must not lose sight of the important social and political configurations through which natural resources are used. Accordingly, the goal of this book is to maintain a social purpose and environmental justice ethics, moving dialectically between the material impact of screen culture and Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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reflections upon the sociocultural contract that makes this culture possible and that our screen texts intrinsically reaffirm at most turns. Adapted from the term Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined in his treatise on the compromise individuals make to preserve order in collective society,21 the term sociocultural contract refers to the unspoken agreement made within a society as to how it will produce and value cultural attitudes, behaviors, customs, and materiality. In this case, the agreement in question is the one regarding popular screen entertainment: what we use it for, how we generate it, how it affects us, and how this use and generation and effect reflect our fundamental valuation of the nonhuman natural world. An examination of this agreement is particularly urgent because that valuation has—according to unanimous scientific consensus—led us to an environmental precipice.22 How has Hollywood helped us to lay a foundation for organizing our relationship to spectacle and the environment in ways that are detrimental to ecological stability, and how are these foundations being used to build new cultural customs in the digital age? Much of this symbiosis involves our cultural production of mythology, a concept I return to repeatedly. The term mythology here refers to the collective need and cultural structuring of a symbolic register in which we can narratively and aesthetically address difficult collective anxieties and through which we both reflect and construct social norms and communal value systems. Film culture has a special place in this dynamic composition of mythology: the “dream factory” is really a mythology factory. Its assembly line extends across the planet; its delivery service is wired into our coat pockets and living rooms, penetrating our most private spaces and saturating our public ones; and its material impact is unrivaled by that of other popular arts. Moreover, its vertiginous potential as a time machine to catapult us between past and future and its bewitching blend of reality and fantasy make it an incredibly rich—and therefore dangerous—mythology factory. In this book, I tease out this concept of mythology as one that is both fundamental and fundamentally problematic to our relationship with the environment because it allows us to mediate the natural while also rendering it in some ways unreal, be it fictionalized or virtualized—and, if unreal, consequently detached from the human experience and not worth the empathy, connection, and care that we owe it. This is the great 16
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danger of a cultural balance where spectacle becomes an end in itself. Spectacle is a binding fuse of sensation, desire, and ecology, lending itself to mating rituals and predatory tactics across a number of species; and it is perhaps in exploring the sensory expressions, collective desires, and industrial ecologies that drive spectacle that we might come closer to understanding the sociocultural contract of popular cinema. The prominence of screen spectacle in our cultural value system is problematic specifically because it manifests a collective desire to sacrifice the stability of the natural world for our entertainment, pleasure, and comfort. This problem has only grown with the proliferation of screen devices in daily use and the advent of virtual and augmented realities. The already tenuous umbilical cord that connects us to the real stretches still thinner as our ability to simulate it expands, no matter how empowering and liberating new technologies may seem—the sociocultural contract is entering a new phase, one of even dirtier industrial potential and more cleverly hidden secrets. T H E B LU E P R I N T
The structure of screen mythology is pervasive and powerful and can best be revealed and most accessibly discussed in relation to popular cultural texts; for better or worse, this means examining the Hollywood blockbuster. Though not always the most artistically crafted or philosophically profound, mainstream feature films hold a special place at the center of our cultural rituals, ideological values, and existential anxieties. Films such as Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Avatar are definitive of their eras in terms of both industry practice and social zeitgeist. Hollywood’s capacity as a purveyor of mythology and a shaper of worldviews as well as the vast material impact of its methods make it the necessary object of this interrogation. In an attempt to gather the massive scope of this study into a coherent structure, I have embraced the familiarity of the natural elements as a reference point—familiar in that most global philosophies, religions, and cultures make use of some form of an elemental framework.23 In this case, the elements provide a blueprint for historiographic and conceptual expansion, with each elementally oriented Hollywood case study ushering in a new layering of ecomaterialist study, each chapter building Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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upon the previous one, just as the elements do not exist independently but as an interwoven whole. Beginning with an analysis of the central role that fire and explosion play in the blockbuster tradition, chapter 1 uses the epic burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone with the Wind as a paradigm for connecting issues of film authorship, mythology fabrication and marketing, and philosophical questions regarding screen spectacle and the natural world. I provide a historical survey of the emergent fascination with fire in fin de siècle popular entertainment, before it became part and parcel of the film spectacle. Drawing from primary archival sources as well as from philosophical and industrial perspectives on the unique connection between fire, the moving image, and celluloid material, this chapter explores how the early structuring of creative power and extratextual discourse was integral to the formative logic of Hollywood spectacle. Furthermore, I argue that this early formative logic of Hollywood spectacle anchored popular film discourse in an aesthetic and narrative purveyance of excess and destruction, through which the material real is sacrificed on the altar of screen culture. The pyrotechnic extravaganza of chapter 1 gets doused with artificial rain as chapter 2 turns to Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s film Singin’ in the Rain as a gateway for addressing natural-resource use in film production, highlighting resource materiality in screen practices from film-stock production to advertising tie-ins. An ironic behind-thescenes mockery of Hollywood excess, Singin’ in the Rain even reveals the resource use that drives the production of screen artifice; however, it ultimately reinforces the very values it critiques, in particular through its concrete use of natural resources and its symbolic play with water. The film’s making and marketing, I argue, illuminate how film culture both intuitively and expressly quantifies and qualifies the use of natural resources. Investigating diverse sources such as the assistant director’s reports and radio advertisement pitches, while also surveying the politics of water in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, chapter 2 captures classical Hollywood at its final peak before the decline of the studio system. This snapshot of American film culture’s traditional ecomaterialist logic, we will find, reveals the fundamental girders of the sociocultural contract that endure the transition to the digital era. 18
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The way in which screen culture is emblematic of our treatment of the environment is changing as part of a global technological shift. Building upon genre as a site of mythology formation, I turn in chapters 3 and 4 to the emergence of a new genre of environmentally themed blockbuster amid the wide-scale move toward digital practice, pinpointing Jan de Bont’s film Twister (1996) as a crucial point in that transition. Its digital dramatization of tornado-based destruction provides a crucible for digital screen culture’s visualization of the invisible aspects of the environment, a signpost for how this problem of visualization ties historical, philosophical, and environmental theories of film to the coming digital age. Focusing on the connection between emergent screen technologies and the climate change debate, I explore how new screen mythologies reflect an increase in climate change awareness that has been boosted by digital technology, social media, and popular cinema—a connection that is a double-edged sword. Building upon the myths of digital immateriality and the ScientistHero abundant in the making, marketing, and messages of Twister, chapter 4 uses Avatar as a case study for the ecodisaster genre’s intersection between popular environmental anxiety, digital production, and the evacuation of the real. Verified self-brander and box-office record breaker with Titanic and again with Avatar, director James Cameron is also an avid pioneer of special-effects technology; moreover, as a supporter of underwater exploration, he became in June 2013 the first movie celebrity in 125 years to grace the cover of National Geographic, arguably the journal most responsible for shaping American popular views on the natural world. Avatar marks the pinnacle in Hollywood’s recent movement in two parallel directions: toward digital production and across the spectrum of popular environmentalism. Despite being marketed as a fully digital production with a strong environmental message, Avatar indulged in grotesque production excess in order to produce a film that, although seemingly progressive on the surface, merely reinforces a number of conservative ideological values. Like many recent films in the screen genre referred to in literary studies as “climate fiction” (or “cli fi”) and that I dub the ecodisaster film, Avatar answers the anxieties of the Anthropocene by providing a fantastical escape from the very earth that we have destroyed through irresponsible industrial practices. Building upon the Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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proliferation of digital screen mediations of the natural world, Avatar extols the power of digital practices to visualize ecological problems while ignoring the new imperialism established in the manufacturing, use, and disposal of new screen technologies. The sociocultural contract forged by classical Hollywood has not been restructured for the virtual era—we simply signed a multifold extension with the advent of digital technology, clicking to agree without bothering to read the fine print. In order to acknowledge the importance both of our species’ impact on the natural environment and of the environment’s impact on our cultural practices, I have added a fifth element to the traditional four: the human. From institutional religious claims to early scientific cosmology to capitalist arguments for deep-sea drilling, humanity has rationalized the exploitation of nonhuman nature to the great detriment of both. Conversely, ecocritical studies of media tend to chart the human invasion of natural spaces but do not acknowledge how human culture—and, over the past century or so, screen-culture industries—have been shaped by their environmental surroundings. Arguing for the need to build bridges between media studies, environmental studies, and social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, production ethnography, and environmental communication, chapter 5 addresses how human social and cultural formations are inextricably tied to the natural environment. By assessing two specific production cultures—South Florida’s underwater cinematography community and the establishment of film incentives aimed at revitalizing major urban centers such as Detroit—I explore various ways in which specific ecosystems have shaped media cultures and communities and how localized media production cultures have altered both natural and human topographies. M E T H O D S TO T H E M A D N E S S
One of the great challenges—and delights—of any interdisciplinary endeavor is the need to balance various intellectual angles and analytic tools. This book is a tapestry of film and media studies, environmental lenses, and social science perspectives. It is driven by the fact that once you pull one thread on the relationship between screen culture and the environment, you feel the connectedness of countless other threads, inevitably realizing the prominence of these two grand paradigms in 20
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twenty-first-century existence. The Western world lives half in reality and half in screen-mediated virtuality, and the environment will be the defining social and geopolitical Rubik’s cube for coming generations. Ultimately, this book offers an environmental approach to film history and an interdisciplinary approach to the social organization and ecological ethics of screen culture. This environmental intervention in the Hollywood narrative must be supported as much by the existing wealth of philosophy and critical theory as by archive research, close textual reading, and analysis of secondary material. In film studies terms, this book is a historical study, involving various approaches to film-industry practice (such as authorship and genre theory); a historiography of film studies, marketing, and criticism’s role in the sociocultural contract of spectacle and the environment; and a complementary practice in what Ellen Elizabeth Moore calls the “symptomatic reading” of how mainstream cinema’s “environmental messages are entrenched within a capitalist framework, reinforcing a mainstream, consumerist mindset.”24 This book is also, though, a study of the society engaged in this contract and a production-culture study interested in “how media producers make culture, and, in the process, how they make themselves into particular kinds of workers in modern, mediated societies.”25 To some extent at the mercy of methods, this study is hindered by the lack of environmental debate in American society before the 1960s, a half-century into Hollywood’s reign—and by the fact that this topic is mostly absent from film texts and media studies until the 1990s. Moreover, the transparency and documentation of resource use and waste production have never been prioritized by Hollywood, nor has Hollywood ever been asked to do so. Considering that I am looking at classical Hollywood as well as at contemporary film culture, this study requires an acrobatic dexterity that, I hope, does not border on the impertinently creative in its reading between certain lines. The ability to quantify resource use and carbon dioxide emission is extremely difficult with regard to an industry so spread out and with so many diverse phases and practices, in which location scouting, studio and location shooting, digital postproduction, and various forms of distribution, marketing, and preservation are all part of the same product’s lifespan. In their influential report Sustainability in the Motion Picture Industry for the Institute of the Environment at the University of California at Los Angeles, Charles J. Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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Corbett and Richard P. Turco provide excellent rubrics for assessing the environmental impact of the film and television industry. However, this report, too, concludes with an open horizon on the difficulties of calculating the impact of an industry with so many moving parts and intangible by-products.26 Last, although strides are being made toward green film and media production, Hollywood is still an image-obsessed and spin-heavy industry with layers of lawyers and public-relations teams employed to limit access, and so my ability to learn firsthand about real change was bated and ultimately stymied by confidentiality clauses and legal-team blockades. Beyond these issues, there are the added complexities raised by the methodological problem of assessing any causality or degree of impact that screen culture may actually have on people’s ethical views and daily choices. As part of a recent rise in the field of environmental communication, Anthony Leiserowitz and others have applied social science methods to gauge the influence of blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) on public risk perception and behavior, relying mostly on survey-based methods to gauge films’ impact on perceptions of environmental issues. Although respondents noted an increase in their awareness of climate change issues and claim that this increase would shift their future purchasing and voting decisions, such studies cannot conclusively argue for how this self-reflection may translate to actual action.27 In his own study of The Day After Tomorrow, Matthew Nisbet also acknowledges the difficulty in quantifying the impact of films on daily behavior, noting further that even films with bad science details might add up to a bigger social result (in this case the conclusion that human activity is responsibility for accelerated climate change).28 In this book, I juggle these many discursive and methodological balls in emphasizing the argument that whether film culture dictates our every move or not, it buttresses and articulates our fundamental values and our negotiations with the world around us. Moreover, the way film culture positions and makes use of nonhuman nature is a barometer of our collective environmental ideology at a moment when this ideology must be illuminated, reflected upon, and reinvented. Entangled in this urgency, evident in this book, as in all studies of environmental media, is the problem of time, with timescales and temporalities being of particular 22
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interest and a grave challenge to environmental representation and communication. How are we to navigate the complex relationship between deep evolutionary time (roughly four and a half billion years) over which our Earth morphed into the planet we know, the relatively short time (150,000 or so years) modern humans have walked this planet, the relative-to-that short era of domesticated agriculture (approximately 12,000 years, or the majority of the Holocene period) and heavy industrial practice (about 250 years), the relative-to-all-that miniscule amount of time (60 years) since environmental science has begun to understand the impact of that industry and since the environmental social movement began in earnest, and—last—the shockingly brief period (perhaps 30 years) of heightened anxiety over, enhanced media coverage of, and central public debate of climate-related issues, which in turn have opened a cacophony of future timescales regarding just how permanent the damage we have done may be and how soon it begins to wreak serious havoc? It is not surprising, then, that a study of popular genres and texts that deal with environmental issues would confront challenges and nuances of temporality. This book opens with a case study from classical Hollywood that casts a self-glorifying light on the spectacle of destruction in the context of a romanticized representation of the past. It concludes its textual case study arc with the present-day ecodisaster genre, which similarly revels in spectacular visuality but is almost uniformly set in the future—a possibly not-so-distant future of environmental dystopia. In other words, just as digital technology has come to offer us a heightened sense of information immediacy and data permanence, digital screen culture is being employed to herald the possibility of our ecosystems’ and species’ impermanence, projecting our rising popular anxiety over climate change onto a temporal paradigm shift from a culture of nostalgia to a culture of anticipation. Feeling helpless in the face of environmental change, we are increasingly afflicted by what E. Ann Kaplan refers to as “pre-traumatic stress disorder.”29 Although this anticipation has met the nostalgic reactionary backlash of a fiery conservatism acting in the name of American capitalism, climate change denial, and entrenched social morality (encapsulated by the slogan “Make America Great Again”), there is no question that we are witnessing a sea change in how we perceive timescales that is slowly grinding the millstone forward. Intro duction : T he Big P icture
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An important tenet of this sea change is the return to materiality, for materiality is the heart of where our social rituals and conceptual worldviews actually affect the natural world—ourselves included. As Hollywood celebrities join the global fight of environmental activism and the studios increasingly turn to discourses of sustainability and the environment (to save money, to rebrand themselves in a progressive light, and to sell tickets), we must demand more than the greenwashing on offer in typical industry practices. Only a serious reflection on the environmental role and effects of screen culture will prompt us to understand to what degree an overhaul is needed not only in our consumerism but in our valuation of what function art and entertainment should hold in society. In a private conversation with activist filmmaker Louis Psihoyos, who was touring on the Oscar-winning success of The Cove (2009) and in the early stages of developing his impassioned film Racing Extinction (2015), I challenged him on the hypocrisy of practicing business as usual while being exculpated by the loophole of an environmental donation that garnered the film’s certification as a “carbon-neutral film.” Though pointing out that his and other productions did take strides for sustainable and environmental practice, he abashedly described the “carbonneutral” accomplishment as akin to “buying indulgences,” the Catholic tradition in which a sinner provided particular deeds or modes of penance in exchange for a lessened punishment in the afterlife. In Racing Extinction, Psihoyos acknowledges on camera that the worst thing a filmmaker can do for the environment is to make a film about the environment, evoking a catch-22 that cannot be avoided here. We will not stop making films, nor will we stop using screens, nor am I arguing for either of these outcomes. But we must—emphatically must—begin to adjust our focus from the surface sheen of entertainment spectacle to the hidden resource costs that produce that spectacle and the ramifications of its messages. Let those of us who watch and produce realize that both are environmental acts and demand a shift in how the natural is transformed into the cultural. Meanwhile, those of us who write must take into account the material, social, and overarching political ramifications of how our screen culture is made, consumed, preserved, and disposed. This book is intended as a step in that direction.
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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. Examining the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, he situates the production histories of major blockbusters—Gone with the Wind, Singin’ in the Rain, Twister, and Avatar—in the contexts of the development of the film industry, popular environmentalism, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan exposes 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. “Vaughan’s forensic accounting uncovers Hollywood’s secretly unpaid debts to the environment, demonstrating ecocriticism’s power to connect political economy to movies’ themes and styles, for analysis and for future makers. More than compelling: entertaining and inspiring.” SEAN CUBITT, author of Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
“Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is an important book that exposes the hidden environmental costs of how we make, watch, and dispose of movies. Well-researched and written in an accessible style, it is a thought-provoking alternative history of Hollywood, delving into the disconnect between our enjoyment of screen culture and concern for its environmental impact. It will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of fields, including cultural studies, communication, social science, and environmental studies.” ALISON ANDERSON, author of Media, Environment, and the Network Society
“In Vaughan’s deft readings of multiple films and their production apparatuses, film theory and analysis also become updated into a cutting-edge discipline. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is an essential book in ecocinema and ecomedia studies and an important contribution to ecomaterialism within cultural studies more broadly.” ADRIAN IVAKHIV, author of Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature
HUNTER VAUGHAN is associate professor of English and cinema studies at Oakland University and a 2017 Rachel Carson Center Fellow. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Environmental Media, the author of Where Film Meets Philosophy (Columbia, 2013), and the coeditor of The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (2018). FILM AND CULTURE SERIES
ISBN: 978-0-231-18240-9
Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A. Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Photofest and blickwinkel/Alamy Photo Back image: blickwinkel/Alamy Photo