Polar Spectacle: Overwhelming Nature at the Limits
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Polar Spectacle: Overwhelming Nature at the Limits A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Research Masters in Cultural Analysis Department of Arts and Culture University of Amsterdam 2018 Word Count: 21,696 Contents Acknowledgements Page 2 Illustrations Page 3 Introduction Page 5 Chapter One — The Thing & The Polar Imaginary: Page 11 Spectacle as Antarctic horror Chapter Two — Runaway Climate Fiction: Page 35 Allegory and Derailed Ideology in Snowpiercer Chapter Three — Save the Plastic Arctic: Page 56 Greenpeace, LEGO, and the Building Blocks of Petroculture Conclusion Page 78 Works Cited Page 81 Works Consulted But Not Cited Page 88 "1 Acknowledgments I’d like to thank my supervisor, Jeff Diamanti, for tolerating my confusion, self-deprecation and despair throughout the process of writing; for essential words of support and encouragement at some of my darkest moments; for going beyond his role as supervisor to develop interests and intellectual communities beyond the thesis; and for my occasionally overlong sentences. I also owe a great debt to Niall Martin, not only for the generosity and good will (=time and effort) that he showed towards everyone during (and beyond) the Research Seminar, but also more specifically for ‘thinking with’ my very unformed and messy ideas. Without his support, my thesis would still be a ‘mind-map’ of dissociated concepts that, now I think of it, looks an awful lot like the Thing. Coming through at the eleventh hour, my mum also deserves a trophy for kindly proofreading my final drafts. Despite my insistence otherwise, she spent the better part of three days dutifully rearranging commas, grappling with my obscure ideas and ironing out my repetitive turns of phrase — although, despite her wishes, my 258 uses of the words ‘spectacle’, ‘spectacular’, ‘spectacularity’ and ‘spectacularise’ remain un-paraphrased. I would also still be sobbing hysterically into my laptop if it weren’t for Laura Pannekoek, whose very thorough and encouraging comments on my chapter drafts gave me the energy and confidence to finish this abomination. Finally, though many of my friends gave me the emotional support and relief needed to keep my sanity throughout these months, it was Ana Mustafa who was the only classmate who I could comfortably talk these things through with. I owe her a huge debt for relaxing me many times during the otherwise deathly post-lunch hours at the library. "2 Illustrations Introduction Fig. x — Photograph from “Apocalypse Tourism?” (Orlinksy and Holland) Page 5 Chapter One The Thing (1982) Fig. 1 — Burning Bennings-Thing as fetish Page 11 Figs. 2a-c — Kennel-sequence (MacReady; Dog-Thing; Other POVs) Pages 18-19 Figs. 3-4 — Kennel-sequence (Dog-Thing: partial framing; tentacular incorporation) Page 20 Fig. 5 — Kennel-sequence (escapes through ceiling) Page 21 Figs. 6a-c — Kennel-sequence (Dog-Thing transfixes Childs) Page 22 Figs. 6d-e — Kennel-sequence (Thing’s perspective; Child burns Dog-Thing) Page 23 Fig. 7 — Bennings-Thing Page 27 Figs. 8a-b — Benning’s-Thing’s POV Page 29 Chapter Two Snowpiercer (2013) Figs. 9-10 — The shoe is on the other foot Page 39 Figs. 11a-c — Passenger sees oncoming avalanche; POV; derails train Pages 42-43 Figs. 12-13 — Derailment (from below; from above) Page 46 Figs. 14-15 — Derailment (extreme long shots) Page 47 Figs. 16a-c — Derailment (falling carriages) Pages 49-50 Fig. 17 — Derailment (engine’s final grind to a halt) Page 51 Chapter Three “Everything is NOT Awesome” Figs. 18-19 — Villainous Shell (drilling for Arctic oil; Lord Business turns oil baron) Page 59 Fig. 20 — Nuclear family drowning in oil Page 60 "3 Fig. 21 — Emmet and Wyldestyle from The Lego Movie (2014) drowning in oil Page 61 Fig. 22 — Oil floods towards Arctic shore, mirroring rising sea level Page 62 Fig. 23 — Polar bear escapes the oil flood Page 63 Agency Staff, The Mirror (source: WWF) Fig. 24 — Polar bear clings to melting iceberg Page 63 “Everything is NOT Awesome” Fig. 25 — Crude oil’s viscosity slowly erases LEGO’s brand identity Page 69 “State of the Arctic” (Greenpeace International) Fig. 26 — Animated visualisation of gradual Arctic melt Page 71 The Thing (1982) Fig. 27 — Computer simulation of the Thing’s viral spread Page 72 "4 Introduction Fig. x — “Sitting roughly 120 miles from the top of the world” In truth, we actually still know very little about Antarctica and what could lie beneath the ice. What is happening here is what I call the El Dorado complex – the idea that unknown lands will be a treasure trove of resources. (David MacDonald qtd. in “Oil and gas in Antarctica”) Sea ice in the far north is melting, but rather than see this as a warning sign, Shell sees it as an opportunity to drill for more of the oil that caused the melt in the first place. (Greenpeace 2) A 2016 headline in Bloomberg Businessweek runs as follows: “Apocalypse Tourism? Cruising the Melting Arctic Ocean”. The piece recounts that summer’s first ever cruise through the Northwest Passage, for centuries only a mythical route sought by numerous, morbidly unsuccessful explorations (Leane, Antarctica 61), and now only navigable because of the rapidly retreating sea ice caused by exponential global warming. “When the Crystal Serenity emerged free and clear”, the article recounts, “there were no accounts of scurvy or cannibalism, only tales of bingeing on "5 themed buffets and grumbles from shutterbugs about the Arctic’s monotonous landscape” (Orlinsky and Holland). The accompanying images portray white, ageing tourists basking in the Arctic rays, purchasing onboard jewellery, reading serenely in cabins overlooking dramatic seascapes (Fig. a), and being entertained by members of the indigenous communities whose previously isolated lands this burgeoning industry is now encroaching on. This new phenomenon, and those described by the epigraphs above, briefly highlight the material stakes involved in this thesis’ focus on the representation of the Arctic and Antarctic in popular culture – their co-construction between fantasy and reality. Together, these examples evidence the enduring appeal of polar exploration (whether as luxury tourism or for oil-prospecting) expressed, moreover, in terms familiar from fiction. Describing “a build up in public perception that there are vast oil resources hidden in [the Antarctic]” (“Oil and gas”), the ‘El Dorado complex’ demonstrates in particular this mythic, quest-like attraction to the poles irrespective of scientific knowledge — the geological implausibility and consequently immense unprofitability of Antarctic drilling well-documented by MacDonald (268-9). Such imagery also betrays ideological inheritances from imperial and mercantile projects to ‘unknown lands’, far-flung from the Western metropoles in which exotic fictions mystified and romanticised settings both tropical and polar — the predominant tropes of the latter described henceforth as a ‘polar imaginary’ (detailed in Chapter One, after Darryl Jones’ neologism). Just as fears of extreme polar conditions failed to dissuade the heroes of the Age of Exploration, these oil-prospectors and tourists seem instead drawn to the poles’ dangers, real and imagined. Moreover, like the opportunism of Shell’s crisis capitalism — drilling ‘for more of the oil that caused the melt’ permitting that drilling — the Northwest Passage tourists seem indifferent to the irony of their own journey: facilitated by runaway global CO2 emissions just like the ones belching from their 69,000-ton cruise ship. Ultimately, these material ‘feedback effects’ between ecological and human activity are therefore also subject to a different kind of feedback: the co-productive relationship between the physical poles and their representation in popular culture. However accurately representative, images of the poles greatly influence the fates of the real Arctic and Antarctic, and, by extension, the global environments on which their melt spells devastating effects. "6 For this reason, this thesis’ focus on ‘polar spectacle’ follows predominantly from its filmic objects’ unique intersections of polar aesthetics, popular culture and environment. Though predominantly literary in its origins, the polar imaginary is now most manifest in spectacular film, where strange creatures, uncanny evils and overwhelming forces of nature often threaten human protagonists and viewers. Understood as ‘spectacles’ in the broadest sense, such visual events imply both a certain exceptional status and also distance from a viewing subject — a normative and spatial separation from the banal and the here and now, mediated by a screen not unlike that distancing the Crystal Serenity’s passengers from the melting Arctic facing them. Considering such a dynamic as prevalent to a polar imaginary therefore raises questions of its suitability to negotiating similar overwhelming forces of nature: climatic feedback effects. In other words, given that the Arctic and Antarctic are both the most extreme immediate receptors of anthropogenic global warming and subsequent accelerators of further climate change — through the loss of the ice albedo affect, melt-induced release of greenhouse gases (Emmett and Stuhltrager 33), sea level rise (Williams 184), and destabilised ocean currents (O’Hare 5; Tanya Lewis 12) — the polar imaginary poses unique challenges to thinking through the relation of human viewers to polar melt. But it also indicates strange coincidences between the mysterious and violent threats conceived through centuries of mythology and fiction — regurgitated