IMAGINING the ANTHROPOCENE Science Fiction Cinema in an Era of Climatic Change
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IMAGINING THE ANTHROPOCENE Science Fiction Cinema in an era of Climatic Change DR. TOBY NEILSON MA FILM STUDIES Distinction (University of Exeter, 2011-2012) BA FILM STUDIES, 1ST CLASS HONS (University of Exeter, 2008-2011) SCHOOL OF THEATRE, FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES COLLEGE OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW JANUARY 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract - 4 Chapter 1 - Introduction, Literature Review and Methodology Introduction - 6 Literature Review - 17 Methodology - 48 Chapter Overview - 56 Part One: From the Technological to the Ecological - 61 Chapter 2 - Changing Imaginations of Disaster: Different Death Stars and Devastated Earths Star Wars: From The Death Star-to-Star Killer Base and Back Again - 72 After Earth: An Imagination of Disaster for the Anthropocene - 85 Conclusion: Beyond After Earth - 107 Chapter 3 - Nonhuman Perspectives: Annihilation, Ecomonstrosity and the Posthuman The Terminator and The Thing: Technological and Ecological Posthuman Forms - 117 Ecomonstrous Encounters in Annihilation - 133 From Ecomonsters to Zoe-Centric Posthumanism - 146 Conclusion: What Next for Posthuman Science Fiction Cinema 156 Part 2: Temporal and Planetary Imaginaries - 162 Chapter 4 - Time Found and Felt in the Anthropocene: Folding Time in Interstellar and Arrival Cinema, Time, Modernity and The Anthropocene - 170 Time as Environment: Interstellar’s Folding Temporal Signatures - 176 Arrival, Interstellar and Transcending Temporal Flow - 192 Conclusion - 206 Chapter 5 - A Planetary Perspective: Melancholia, Another Earth and Gravity’s Ecofeminist Sublime An Ecofeminine Sublime in Another Earth and Melancholia - 222 Gravity’s World-With-Us - 233 Conclusion - 261 Bibliography - 270 Filmography - 279 ABSTRACT This thesis explores contemporary science fiction cinema through the concept of the Anthropocene. The literature review suggests that science fiction film studies doesn’t engage with ecological concerns as much as it could, that ecocinema studies tends to ignore the genre, and that the broader field of the environmental humanities similarly overlooks the genre’s uses. By bringing science fiction cinema into conversation with emergent Anthropocene debates, it makes useful contributions to science fiction film studies, ecocinematic understanding and the wider environmental humanities field. This thesis is split in two. Part one suggests a trend within a number of science fiction films of the 21st century, which are shown to respond to the 4 ecological concerns of this era marked by rapid environmental change. Chapters two and three in particular are concerned with showcasing how legacy forms of representation in the genre undergo Anthropocene-inflected alterations. These chapters showcase a movement from technological to ecological concern in a selection of contemporary science fiction films. Beyond demarcating this shift towards the ecological that’s being borne out in the genre, this thesis also suggests science fiction cinema as a uniquely placed framework for mediating and experiencing certain aspects of this era. In part two, comprising chapters four and five, this thesis argues for the importance of science fiction films in lending aesthetic and experiential consideration to the dwarfing nonhuman timescales and objects that pervade human experience in the Anthropocene. Through an analysis of the representation of time and planets across a range of films, this thesis argues for the uses and importance of the genre in wider ecocritical discourse and understanding. IMAGINING THE ANTHROPOCENE CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION, LITERATURE REVIEW & METHODOLOGY aa INTRODUCTION The genesis of this work came from an offhanded observation that science fiction films appear to be a bit “greener” of late. From this starting point I started to consider what exactly I meant by this, if it is true and why it might be so. By “green” I do not mean that these films are aesthetically more verdant, though in some instances this is most certainly true. Instead, this remark reflected on the appearance of considered engagement with ecological themes, issues and aesthetics across a range of 21st century science fiction films. This thesis suggests that te shift towards a more ecologically attentive approach in the genre is a trend that runs parallel with the global rise in concern over environmental issues. As heralded by the coinage of the term “The Anthropocene” at the turn of the millennium (Crutzen and 6 Stoermer: 2000) humanity is now burdened with the status of a geological force, having perpetrated and continuing to perpetrate, catastrophic environmental damage. As global temperatures rise, biodiversity declines and rainforests burn, the disastrous realities of this newfound geological agency begin to sink in. Indeed, as a result of these various eco-crises of the Anthropocene context, the state and fate of humanity’s relationship with Planet Earth has been changed irrevocably. By way of an ecocritical analysis this thesis charts how contemporary science fiction films1 are informed by, and inform, these changes. In doing so it discloses the knotted ties between the pressures of the Anthropocene and the representational mechanics of science fiction cinema. My work here unveils how contemporary science fiction films are informed by the Anthropocene context, 1. By this I mean films from the 21st century. Given that the Anthropocene was coined in the year 2000 and that environmental concern has accelerated alongside rising global temperatures and human population since then, this seems an appro- priate bracketing of ‘contemporary’ in this context. IMAGINING THE ANTHROPOCENE whilst arguing that they allow for unique and hitherto undisclosed ways of imagining and mediating this era of rapid environmental change. While the Anthropocene, as a historical period, stretches back many centuries into human history, as a concept it is very much one of the 21st century. It is an idea that is arrived upon through the heightened scale of, and urgency to act upon, anthropocentrically induced climate change. Thus, when I suggest that science fiction cinema has changed in the Anthropocene, I do not mean that it has changed through the entirety of the epoch, since this would very comfortably house all of cinema’s history. Instead I mean that science fiction cinema has more specifically undergone changes that are informed by the idea of the Anthropocene and the planetary scale environmental demands that underpin it. As this thesis will disclose, 21st century science fiction films are often woven 7 through with the historical and representational intricacies of living in an era marked by catastrophic human influence on the planet we call home. Each chapter herein explores a set of interdependent changes in the genre that speak to this heightening of environmental concerns, using a theoretically informed textual analysis that draws on ecocriticism to do so. This thesis journeys from Death Stars to temporally estranged Earths and back into outer space to accomplish its goals, which is to demonstrate how the ecocritically engaged propulsions of the genre are correspondingly linked to the imperatives, pressures and demands of co-existing with a dying planet. But what is the Anthropocene, exactly? As Timothy Clark would have it in Ecocriticism on the Edge: if criticism and politics to date have had such difficulty finding adequate strategies to engage with climate change, the most prominent feature of the Anthropocene, it is IMAGINING THE ANTHROPOCENE perhaps because there is no simple or unitary object directly to confront, or delimit, let alone to “fix” or to “tackle”. There is no “it”, only a kind of dissolution into innumerable issues. (2015, 10) While I agree with Clark, this is perhaps not too useful as concrete definitions go. While critically reflecting on the Anthropocene most certainly results in a devolvement into innumerable issues, it is clear that this term has some unitary definition. On a strictly scientific level the Anthropocene names a historic moment in the Earth’s geological history. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coined this term at the turn of the millennium in the appropriately titled newsletter, ‘The Anthropocene’. This term was created a means of stratifying a new geological epoch, one that proposes humankind has had such an impact on the ecology and geology of the globe that we can now consider ourselves a telluric force. A baseline level of radioactivity in the ground, evidence of plastic 8 embedded in the rock fossil record, rapidly melting sea-ice as well as an unprecedented quantity of chicken and cattle bones in the ground reflect a step change in humanity’s relationship with the atmospheric, ecological and geological conditions of the Earth. If aliens landed hundreds of thousands of years from now to find an Earth absent of humans, a quick look at the rocks would attest not only to our existence, but also to our self-destructively consumptive practices. We are beginning to see ourselves embedded in deep Earth history, akin perhaps to volcanoes or the Cambrian explosion in our Earth and life-shaping power. This thesis argues that it is through this rather scary historic moment that a good number of science fiction films are aesthetically, thematically and philosophically enmeshed with the 21st century. This stratification, and its proposed inception date, is still awaiting approval from the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences before it is officially and ubiquitously considered a new geological