Polar Spectacle: Overwhelming Nature at the Limits

Home , Alien invasion, Climate fiction

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 in recent decades of spectacular cinema

— and the unpredictable, protracted response to carbon emissions from these distant places.

Ultimately, if polar fictions gravitate to the spectacular, then how does polar spectacle negotiate viewers’ imagined relations to distant melt, its political context, and the host of effects that it darkly threatens? To answer such a question, the political-aesthetic significance of ‘spectacle’ in this thesis remains open-ended – referring to the concept’s use in film formalism, political theory and visual culture.

On the one hand, the concept serves most broadly as a catch-all for describing popular cultural entertainment, particularly manifested as exceptional and eye-catching visuals. In ﬁlm theory, both its description and implications are disputed, though generally imply excess: of expenditure

(Bordwell 107; Lavik 169), scale (Brown, “Spectacle/gender/history” 169), technical specialisation

(Tomasovic 312; Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson qtd. in Brown, “Spectacle and Value” 54), as ‘the

7 antithesis of narrative’ (Darley qtd. in Wood 371) or a meaningless visuality — “‘communication for communication’s sake’ […] gratuitous display” (Brown, “Spectacle/gender/history” 159). As the objects of this thesis prove, ﬁlm spectacle seems at once self-evident and yet heterogeneous in form, and, consequently, ambiguous in effect.

On the other hand, spectacle inevitably recalls Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, a polemical text epitomising both Franco-centric ‘anti-ocularcentrism’ most broadly — "a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” (Jay, Downcast Eyes 14) — and also a wider, post-Frankfurt School suspicion of popular culture as a malevolent ‘culture industry’ (Carducci 118). For Debord, ‘the spectacle’ “appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification” (par. 2). In this strict sense describing not images but “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” as false representations (par. 4), the term’s subsequently common use to describe visual form can imply little other than that form’s reproduction of the epistemic deficiencies and injustices of capitalism: “The spectacle is the acme of ideology” (par. 215). Subsequently, the concept’s diffusion to film studies and visual culture has arguably contributed to a generalised conflation of all ‘spectacular’ aesthetics with the logic of the commodity, and the reduction of their political effects to (revised accounts of) Marxist reification and alienation.

In the environmental humanities, in particular, the political-ecological signiﬁcance of visually

‘spectacular’ forms is relatively under-theorised. TJ Demos’ recent book, Against the

Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today features scattershot applications of

‘spectacle’, broadly condemning “media spectacles” (52, 57), conﬂating the ‘spectacular’ with the

“apocalyptic sublime” (32, 64), and muddling visual form with “happy Hollywood endings” (37). In the 2014 special issue of Public Culture on Visualising Environment, Robert Marzec is similarly quick to describe both an ‘age of the spectacle’ (238, 252), and also ‘spectacles’ as metonymical of a deceitful mass media (246, 247, 248). Even Rob Nixon, whose work elsewhere calls attention to

“the slow, incremental environmental violence that is spectacle deﬁcient” admits in that issue: “I don’t think we can renounce spectacle, even if we need to be alive to its limitations” (qtd. in Marzec and Carruth 291 294). Besides equating spectacular images with the image-relations of ‘the

8 spectacle’, these authors’ focus on the ostensible falsity of commodity-images — seeking “the lineaments of slow terror behind the façade of sudden spectacle” (Nixon 62) — constitutes a certain ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that itself regurgitates the idealism against which Marxian critique emerged (Mitchell 173-4). Instead, this thesis does the opposite, taking the self-evidence of spectacular forms as its starting point for theorising not the invisible but hyper-visible manifestations of polar environment as spectacle.

Neither refuting Debord’s account nor taking for granted its wholesale applicability to visual form

(nor environmental aesthetics), the following chapters depart from the insufficiency of spectacle either as a meta-language for commodity culture’s totality (and falseness), or as a blunt tool to condemn popular cultural forms. In fact, the vivid polar spectacles of my three objects are better understood not as false representations, but rather as performative of the settings they depict — particularly in their roles as imaginary limit-points for the agential and geographical complexities of climate change. Bringing the poles (and polar feedback effects) home, film’s negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in this way relates viewers to polar spectacle. Given that “the psychological distance of climate change” seems essential to influencing “concern” and “sustainable behaviour intentions” in science communication (Spence et al. 957), this broadest sense of connection to ecological calamity should not be understated. Therefore, spectacle’s effects on viewers can be understood as reorienting not only the exceptionality but also the relative proximity of polar catastrophe, spatialising in particular climate change’s relations between human and nonhuman, domestic and polar.

Chapter One begins by outlining the key tropes of the polar imaginary, within which The Thing

(1982) typiﬁes a canon of Arctic and Antarctic horror. Though climate change is absent from its narrative, its eponymous monster’s spectacular mutations provide its exceptional visuals. This transﬁxing ‘thing’ violently incorporates its human spectators, visualising a literal alienation between polar object and viewing subject that is also a dis-alienation, a fusion. The polar imaginary, visual ideology and spectacle combine in this object to alienate and successively dis- alienate viewers from polar environment. As with the wider narrative — that melting will release dangerous things — this consummate polar spectacle here articulates an ambivalent subject-

9 object relation in which the violence apparently threatening the viewer also questions that violence’s source: as with climate change, this is partly a monster of our own creation.

In Chapter Two, this analogical relation between viewing polar violence and climate change is made explicit by the political-ecological themes of ‘cli-fi’ film Snowpiercer (2012) — in which backfired geoengineering has made the entire planet effectively polar. The film’s titular train seems straightforwardly allegorical for the vulnerability of humanity to a hostile ‘nature’ exacerbated by its own intervention, and the social stratification of the train itself a fairly blunt microcosm of class division. During the climax, an explosion on the train triggers an avalanche leading to its derailment. Despite the narrative’s anti-spectacular critique, this overwhelming polar catastrophe shatters the spectator’s ideological separation from environment through a distinctly spectacular vernacular.

Finally, Greenpeace’s campaign video ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ in Chapter Three brings the politics of climate change at the poles most explicitly into view – pushing for LEGO to end their partnership with petro-giants Shell, in the face of proposed Arctic drilling. Its concise miniaturisation of the pole, and its ﬂooding by crude oil, viviﬁes certain correspondences between disparate political-ecological concerns — while also inadvertently rehearsing the visual economy of petroleum culture that idolises and de-emphasises the oiliness of plastic. Its popular cultural rhetoric is also ambiguously a détournement, ‘culture jam’ or ‘cultural acupuncture’. Conjointly, the oppositions between spectacular and anti-spectacular, centre-periphery and environmentalism- petroculture become here most unstable.

Together, these objects demonstrate the capacities and blind-spots of ‘spectacle’ for describing coherent visual forms and their corollary political-ecological effects. Together with their various genres, settings and aesthetics, the forms and spectatorships described in these chapters are spectacular in ways that intersect uniquely with Arctic and Antarctic concerns. As polar spectacles, they test the limits of representing the dramatic collisions of human and nonhuman activity at the edges of the Earth.

10 1 — The Thing & The Polar Imaginary: Spectacle as Antarctic horror

Fig 1. — Burning Bennings-Thing as fetish

Spectators are linked only by a oneway relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness (Debord par. 29)

maybe every part […] was a whole? Every little piece was an individual animal (MacReady, The Thing)

I don’t know the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is (Clark, The Thing)

The hypnotically grotesque sequences of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) provide the concrete

film ‘spectacles’ of this first chapter. Like the threatening, abstract horror of Guy Debord’s spectacle as figured above, the eponymous, bodysnatching Antarctic monster unites what is separate, but unites only in its separateness.1 Seemingly grouping together a host of horrors both self-evident and metaphorical, the Thing is consummately alienating and alienated. The vivid scenes in which it

1 For Mark Fisher, whose term ‘capitalist realism’ describes the high pessimism of the spectacle, the Thing is a metaphor for capitalism: “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact” (6). 11 erupts from the boundaries of the creatures it has assimilated provide the ‘spectacular’ thrills of this science fiction horror in genre terms, repelling and seducing viewers in gratuitous transfixion. As most typical of the ‘polar imaginary’ referred to throughout this thesis, these spectacles here describe the intersection of visual spectacle with polar environment. What then would it mean to understand this spectatorship as productive of viewers’ relations to distant polar melt?

To answer this, this chapter begins by outlining the key tropes of a ‘polar imaginary’, before analysing the graphic mutations in The Thing as uniquely polar spectacles. Situated within the tropes of polar ﬁction, the monster’s violent transgression of boundaries also embodies the

Antarctic as itself an imaginative space, where subjects’ separation from their hostile environs is perpetually threatened — as both symbolic of and contiguous to its polar setting, the Thing’s excavation from the ice generates a violence that overwhelms its victims. Yet, the mode through which onscreen protagonists are distanced from one another, as well as from a viewer’s perceived

‘home place’ far from the pole, is here an ambivalent one. The monster alienates protagonists, sowing distrust: who is who? But it also violently dis-alienates them, physically intermingling their organic matter. It is both surrounded by and permeates the Antarctic space which it symbolises; it is somehow at once alien, animal and human; it is manifestly, radically plural and yet repeatedly deﬁned (and destroyed) as one ‘Thing’; and its constituent parts act both as if autonomous and also vastly networked (as the main protagonist MacReady concisely suggests above). As polar spectacles, The Thing’s violent mutations are therefore doubly predisposed for spatial and intersubjective alienation, but are also in excess of that alienation. This is to say that spectacle serves here both to reproduce certain social and ecological logics — particularly apropos the

Antarctic — and also to dramatise the latent possibility of their overcoming.

1.1 Polar Psychotopography, the Antarctic Gothic, and the Polar Imaginary

To consider the significance of spectacle set at the poles, I will first outline at some length the key features of speculative fictions set both in Antarctica and the Arctic. Mapping the correspondences

12 between both the Arctic and Antarctic’s discursive histories and their climatological signiﬁcance reveals a particular set of compatibilities and incompatibilities for visualising the dynamics of climate change in its spatial, temporal and agential distribution. In this way, the historically deﬁned discourses contributing to a ‘polar imaginary’ also reveal the gendered, colonial politics of vision implicated in speculative polar representation.

Though together producing a relatively heterogeneous set of narratives and related concepts, the fictions discussed by the authors below are overwhelmingly speculative adventure, fantasy and science fiction stories from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a tendency for narrating mystery and horror. Moreover, they present a surprisingly consistent set of tropes, many of which are nevertheless broadly defined by a certain ambivalence. While far flung from their audiences’ implied perspectives, these fictional poles’ extreme otherness is held at a distance only unstably.

Though eclipsed by Elizabeth Leane’s far more rigorous and extensive research on Antarctic

fiction, it was Darryl Jones’ reading of Edgar Allan Poe that produced the term I will use for the broader aesthetics outlined below: the ‘polar imaginary’. Comparing the imaginative Antarctic setting of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Руm of Nantucket (1838) to the Northern ‘Ultima Thule’ in mythology and fiction, Jones justifies his “geographical inversion” by describing the similar rhetorical functions of both polar settings (51), whose predominant features echo those outlined by

Leane: twin portals to mythological underworlds (56), together “a limit-point of human speech and understanding beyond which is only silence and whiteness” (51). Yet, unlike Leane, Jones’ “Polar

Imaginary often conﬂates the two poles, and sometimes regards them as aspects of the same thing, or as indistinguishable” (52); as ﬁgures for narrative, each setting projects its protagonists’ fears of a “ne plus ultra, the end of the world” (53), each equally suited to apocalyptic narratives.2

On the one hand, this has led to a speciﬁc 20th century tradition of apocalyptic science ﬁction, like The Thing, where ancient aliens, unearthed at one of the poles, threaten to eradicate all

2 Appropriately, the ‘Thing’ itself was transposed from the original Antarctic setting of Campbell’s story to the Arctic in its first, 1951 film adaptation, shot — like its numerous successors— in North America. 13 human life.3 Despite the trend towards more “realistic”, exploration-themed fictions throughout the

19th century (Wijkmark 198), this glut of polar science ﬁction and horror ﬁlm and television most explicitly references the kind of planetary mystery canonised by H.P. Lovecraft and his Antarctic

1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness (Leane, “Locating”; Glasberg, “Viral” 209; Wijkmark

231) — itself symptomatic of a longstanding literary gravitation to the mythological, romanticising exploration accounts by recourse to the supernatural.4

On the other hand, this particular thread of polar alien invasion stories exemplifies not only the polar imaginary’s imaginary nature, but also its retention of exploration accounts’ colonialist rhetoric: a preoccupation with difference and distance. As extremes of a nature defined against the particular culture of ‘civilised’ Euro-American perspectives, both poles were long conceived and described by explorers through what Hannah Eglinger describes as “typical imperialistic impetus” and “patriarchal chauvinism”; their “virgin snow and untrodden land” figured strongly as spaces of colonisation: “unknown blank spaces […] waiting to be discovered and mapped” (5). The gendering of polar landscape also conforms broadly to what feminist geographer Gillian Rose outlines of settler colonialist discourses surrounding feminised wilderness, through which ‘landscape’ is constructed as a “visual ideology” (87), conjointly inert and threatening. Paraphrasing Annette

Kolodny, Rose explains such discourses’ ambivalent codings of landscape both as “objects of desire” and inciting “a fear of Mother Earth”: “Wild and threatening landscapes haunted Victorian

Europe, and colonialists’ deep horror as well as their fascination with foreign lands can be understood through this” (106).

Where such gendered, colonial discourses intersect with polar mythology and anthropocentric hubris, both poles come to signify an ecology at once desirable (and exploitable) and also steeped

3 As indicative of a “twentieth-century tradition of Antarctic aliens hidden in the depths of the continent” (Antarctica 66), Leane mentions both the feature-length The X Files 1998 movie’s Antarctic alien virus, and the 2004 Alien vs. Predator, in which both of its titular ancient aliens are excavated at the South Pole. But, further reinforcing the interchangeable ‘polar imaginary’ hypothesis, apocalyptic Arctic alien parasites are also unearthed in Peter Høeg’s 1992 novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and its 1997 ﬁlm adaptation, the 1993 episode of The X Files, ‘Ice’, 2009’s explicitly global warming-themed The Thaw and, most recently, 2015 television series Fortitude (Donald).

4 More recently, while the 2018 television series The Terror, and the 2007 novel on which it is based, recount Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition, their liberal use of horror mystify the pole’s natural threats as ambiguously supernatural (Kajganich). 14 in malign agency. Victoria Nelson, in her more theological account of the mythology driving polar

ﬁction, characterises “the polar quest” in terms of a self-reﬂective quality, which she names ‘polar psychotopography’: “the way in which ‘inner psychic processes’ are projected onto ‘an exterior landscape’” (Nelson qtd. in Leane, Antarctica 55). Nevertheless, such broadly psychoanalytical terms naturalise these tropes as independent of discourse and history — also simplifying their discursive features, however fantastically-derived. For the purposes of this thesis, I therefore understand such tropes not as a-historically cosmological but as precisely ideological — the projection not of mere ‘psychic’ content, but rather as historically derived and particular in their effects.

That The Thing should fall neatly into this dynamic is unsurprising: extraterrestrials as constitutively ‘other’, and the poles as supremely ‘over there’, go hand in hand in their extreme distance and difference. Timothy Morton writes of the increasing insufficiency of ‘Nature’ to define ecology that since modernity, humans “saw the reflected, inverted image of their own age...always

‘over yonder’, alien and alienated” (An Ecological Thought 5). However, the poles’ increasing association with climate change increasingly ﬁgures them as uncannily inextricable from ‘us’ ‘here’.

While this foreboding of dark sentience often seems to map contingent histories of colonisation elsewhere, the resultant polar imaginary also provides a neatly ambivalent schematic for climatic feedback effects: polar aliens and climate change both reflect (in)human horrors. Appropriately, situating The Thing as eco-trauma horror, Christopher Justice cites Dana Polan: "Polar alien invasion films offer visual representations of the trauma we’ve created. […] the horror is now 'part of us, caused by us'; we’re responsible for the monstrous” (214). Ironically or coincidentally, speculative polar fiction’s abandonment of verisimilitude produces narratives highly compatible with the poles’ actual ambivalent status as loci of warming — both anthropogenic and, at least, partly nonhuman. Like the poles themselves, we are both victims to and agents of the climate crisis.

If the above features typify narratives within a polar imaginary, Antarctic settings in particular amplify the self-reflexive, disturbing and uncanny aspects of polar fiction. Dedicating an entire monograph to tracing the aesthetics of precisely Antarctic fiction, Leane emphasises “a mythological and literary tradition” that “exploits the symbolic resonances of Antarctica’s position on

15 the underside of the world, casting the continent as a repository for both humanity’s deepest fears and its hidden, forbidden desires” (Leane, Antarctica 54-5). Nuancing Victoria Nelson’s trans-polar and broadly psychoanalytic reading of polar mythology, Leane traces the features of a speciﬁcally

‘Antarctic Gothic’. Most broadly, Leane writes, “Polar mythology, with its whirlpools and abysses, dovetails readily into the gothic concern with fearful, dark spaces”, but it is Antarctica’s later discovery and mythical saturation with monstrously feminine “vortexes” and “polar holes”, corresponding also to its actual geophysical instability, that instil its coding as both psychoanalytically attractive/repulsive and more speciﬁcally, ‘abject’ (58-9). “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (Kristeva 1), and "Antarctica’s extreme mutability” therefore provides fertile ground for “tales that explore the instability of the subject” (Leane, Antarctica 58). Gothic Antarctic images displace colonial optics onto unpopulated, superlatively imaginative landscapes unstably separated from their viewers — the visual excesses of distant South Polar spectacles threatening to spill over into the here and now.

1.2 The Thing as horriﬁc polar spectacle: separation, imbrication and visual excess

“For Campbell, as for Lovecraft, Leahy, Poe and Coleridge before him, the Antarctic represented more than a conveniently large blank space on the map, and more than just a generically hostile setting: it signiﬁed instead an instability at the margins of the subject and the margins of the world” (Leane, Antarctica 79)

As Leane makes clear, the historically specific emergence of the above tropes, through gendered and colonial logics, means that polar fictions thematise ambivalence and transgression, laying the ground for stories and images in which horror and desire are two sides of the same coin, and subjects, objects and their environments are held apart only tenuously. Long figured at the edge of human geography, consciousness and history, the cosmic horror and apocalyptic scale associated with polar settings provide fertile ground for spectacle's testing of limits. However coincidentally, polar spectacle is therefore also schematically predisposed to ‘revenge of nature’ narratives that 16 thematise the runaway feedback effects of polar melt — an anthropogenic thawing that triggers a devastating ecological response.

As much as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) ﬁts neatly into the ‘traditions’, ‘imaginaries’, histories and tropes outlined above, it also provides decidedly visual spectacles. Unlike Christian

Nyby’s 1951 ﬁlm adaptation of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? — which articulates decidedly cold war tensions, transposes the location to the Arctic and presents the ‘Thing’ as a man in a suit — Carpenter’s ﬁlm sticks fairly close to the text, and relishes making Campbell’s

Antarctic monster grotesquely vivid.

Consequently, this section’s analysis of The Thing focuses on its particularly visual, spectacular qualities — with particular attention to how such form intersects with the narrative features of a polar imaginary, and also with historically contingent modes of viewing and visualising environment: ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’ and landscape.

For this reason, I here provide a brief synopsis. The ﬁlm’s events take place almost exclusively at an American research station in Antarctica. The titular, shapeshifting alien ‘Thing’ arrives at this base in the guise of a sled dog, having already inﬁltrated and almost entirely decimated a

Norwegian research station elsewhere on the continent. The Norwegian team (the Americans later

find) had discovered an alien spacecraft buried in the snow, and unearthed the creature from the nearby ice. Initially unaware of this, the (all-male) American team inadvertently allow the Thing in dog form to, one by one, kill and ‘assimilate’ its members, realising too late that some unknown individuals are really aliens in human form. Overwhelmingly shot in fairly typical, Hollywood continuity style, the vast majority of the film is made up of relatively long takes of dialogue within the base’s interior as the crew try to discover who’s who. Consequently, tension builds there between the conversely grotesque spectacles during which various manifestations of the Thing are discovered and suddenly burst from the confines of their hosts, attempting to kill and assimilate the remaining human team members. Unlike the fairly balanced realism and intrigue of the rest of the

ﬁlm, these scenes revolve around rapid cuts between carefully framed shots of the mutating Thing

— an enduringly repulsive collection of practical effects designed by the now legendary Rob Bottin, in which rubber, animatronics and writhing masses of tentacles and goo disintegrate and

17 reintegrate into the malformed body parts of humans and dogs, insectoid legs and often featureless protrusions and recesses or teeth and eyes. Ultimately, the plot is both claustrophobic and apocalyptic in scale, as the team members realise that if the Thing were to reach civilisation, it would wipe out all life on earth.

Fig. 2a — MacReady [ﬁrst eyeline match to Dog-Thing]

Fig. 2b — Dog-Thing

In this way, while the plot has nothing to do with climate change (other than by inadvertently symbolising the apocalyptic potential of polar melt), the ﬁlm nevertheless visualises aspects of the polar imaginary, in which gothic and abject qualities intersect with the spectacular to make gratuitously visible certain relations between subjects, objects and their environments.

18 Fig. 2c — Other POVs

As effectively the ur-scene for the film’s later mutations, an early sequence taking place in the base’s kennel demonstrates the visual characteristics of the Thing-as-spectacle. In essence the introduction of the Thing, this scene is Bottin’s initial flourish of special effects, during which both audience and protagonists first witness its grotesque visual potential: a drama of aggregation and disaggregation in which the distinction between subjects, objects and environments becomes porous. Having left the intruding dog (the Thing) in the kennels, the crew are alerted by the dog handler, Clark, that something is up, after he catches a glimpse of unusual movement from within the dark cage. Approaching well armed, the men close in on the kennel and shine a light through the cage to reveal an unsightly agglomeration of half-formed dog’s heads, claws, writhing, wiry protrusions and blood-soaked fur (Figs. 2a-c). In this perverse theatre of violently graphic enmeshing, it is impossible to make out distinct beings, surfaces or origins. Lit dimly and intermittently by torchlight, the creature’s tentacular incorporation of the half-dead sled dogs surrounding it provides immediate justification for the men to begin firing at it (Figs. 3-4). Shot from various angles, the creature’s undefined mass is always only partially framed, escaping one unifying view (Figs. 2b, 3, 5). Moreover, its own makeup is always incomprehensible — having no one head, nor mouth, nor skin, its surfaces continuously shift and reveal new eyes, new openings and teeth (Figs. 6a-c). Intercut with the gawping faces of the team, the Thing’s intra-diegetic visual power is literally stunning; as one member, Childs, approaches with a flamethrower, he is briefly

19 paralysed by the creature’s implausibly evolving surfaces as numerous eyes open from folds of

flesh. Only when the creature’s skin suddenly tears apart and a toothed protrusion launches at the camera do we realise we are (temporarily) occupying Child’s point of view (Figs. 6c-d); embodying the Thing’s teeth, the camera suddenly flips 180 degrees and rapidly approaches Child’s paralysed face, before rapid cuts to his weapon end the sequence in flames, returning a safe distance between viewer and Thing (Fig. 6e). As with later scenes, spectacle here defines the visual pleasures of a horror at the threshold of subjects and objects.

Fig. 3 — Dog-Thing: partial framing & torchlight

Fig. 4 — Dog-Thing: tentacular incorporation of sled dogs

Fig. 5 — Perspective behind Dog-Thing: partially escapes through ceiling

As visual object, the Thing’s spectacularity broadly corresponds to film formalist accounts, in terms of exceptionality and difference. The film’s transformation scenes are self-evidently spectacles as “moments of ostentatious display that temporarily arrest the flow of narrative”

(Brown, “Spectacle and Value” 51). In particular, the scene constitutes what Simon Lewis distinguishes as ‘object spectacle’: “a theatrical revelation akin to the drawing aside of a curtain” (219). Such techniques of emphasis also often reveal protagonists in highly gendered ways, perspective exaggerating the stature of their (masculinised) heroes or — as Laura Mulvey famously notes of spectacle — eroticising female protagonists in their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (837).

The Thing’s spectacular form models Debord’s critique, that the spectacle skews reality “solely as an object of contemplation” (par. 2) — the Thing’s exceptional visuality put on show.

Such a gendered perspective correlates with Martin Jay’s designation of the scopic regime of

‘Cartesian perspectivalism’. This ‘scopic regime’, in which disembodied, masculine voyeurism’s historical contingency is naturalised, renders its object as inert nature: “a reifying male look that turned its targets into stone” (Jay, “Scopic Regimes” 8). Like Rose’s historicisation of landscape,

Jay describes how this regime “succeeded in becoming so because it best expressed the ‘natural’ experience of sight valorized by the scientiﬁc world view” (5). Conversely, the dog-Thing’s head roars directly at the camera, its teeth almost grasping the viewer (Figs. 2b, 6c). While the Thing is certainly to-be-looked-at, it also looks back (with many eyes) and its look is deadly.

Fig. 6a — Dog-Thing transﬁxes Childs

Fig. 6b — “

Fig. 6c — “

22 Its revelation also oscillates between gothic inscrutability and spectacular coherency. Fear in the gothic, as Judith Halberstam describes it, “emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning”;

“The monster” within the literary gothic “always becomes a primary focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number of meanings” (2). Similarly, Leane notes that

Lovecraftian polar monsters — including Campbell’s Thing — “are creatures that are defined by their inability to be defined […] all can only gesture towards it in hyperbolic language, in a chain of endless deferral” (Leane, Antarctica 71). But Carpenter’s Thing instead answers gothic fear with visual excess. Unlike much of the horror genre’s leaving things to viewers’ imagination, Bottin’s spectacular, grotesque set-pieces provide the real Thing — its horrific qualities self-evident.

Fig. 6d — Dog-Thing transﬁxes Childs: cut to Thing’s perspective

Fig. 6e — Dog-Thing transﬁxes Childs: Childs burns Dog-Thing

23 In this sense, The Thing’s spectacles seem at once to sublimate the unconscious or uncanny aspects of the gothic Antarctic — ﬁxing the deferral of meaning onto one Thing — and also to realise them as explosions of rapidly changing forms: visualising the unvisualisable. As Steffan

Hantke writes of these scenes’ spectacular quality: “It is important to note that this is not

Hitchcockian suspense, but rather moments of grand guignol, […] These scenes are all about spectacle, visibility, and the outer limits of what audiences are willing to watch” (116). Visual excess here functions materially as the exhibitory ﬂourish of practical effects and psychologically just at the threshold of pleasure. The “ornamental excess” of gothic aesthetics here become gratuitous

(Halberstam 2), the surplus of meaning modulated into spectacular abjection — Bottin’s evolving models emphasising ruptured surfaces, spilling liquids and limbs. Yet, if the gruesomeness of such grand guignol is somehow psycho-sexual, this is not to draw a line under it as an a-historical psychoanalytical phenomenon. Ann McClintock’s account of ‘abjection’ describes this “process whereby an object is rejected, yet that object nonetheless haunts the subject as its inner constitutive limit”, but emphasises its social genesis (qtd. in Henessey 50). As Rosemary Henessey puts it, the “unruly elements” of this "forbidden area in a culture's logic” are representative of an ideological separation of sex from history (50). Insofar as the Thing here (and in later, similar outbursts of graphic violence) constitutes the spectacular object, therefore, its object-ness deﬁnes an apparently natural transﬁxion (really ideological) through which mutability, abjection and transgression form the visual drama that both repels and attracts spectators.

For Elizabeth Leane, these qualities make the Thing as it appears in Campbell’s novella a decidedly Antarctic ﬁgure. First reading the continent as itself monstrously feminine in its abjectness — “an unruly body that does not know its boundaries, swelling and shrinking like a pregnant woman” (59) — Leane describes of the Thing:

Just as the abject substance, blood, stands in metonymical and metaphorical relationship

with the Thing (it is both part of the larger whole from which it is taken and a substitute for

the whole), so the Thing stands in metonymical and metaphorical relationship with the

continent. The Thing is contiguous with Antarctica (it was buried in the ice for 20 million

24 years) and also serves to symbolize Antarctica (it shares the same spatial characteristics).

The alien is shapeless and shifting; the Antarctic, too, has no ﬁxed shape or size, doubling

its area from summer to winter, exceeding its own boundaries, constantly expelling

material, fracturing, melting and reforming.

(Leane, Antarctica 78)

While Campbell’s monster merely resembles the paradoxes and gendered mutability of the pole, these abject qualities appear in the image form of Carpenter’s Thing. Visualising this Antarctic gothic not as a mystery figure or stage for rehearsing polar fiction, Bottin’s models instead burst forth as vivid visual objects, indexing the polar space that they also resemble: the setting becomes a hostile protagonist. As if indicating this, in the kennel scene, part of the Thing seems to disappear into the ceiling (Fig. 5), to later burst from the floor and walls at the film’s climax. Carpenter’s Thing brings forth the horrors of the polar imaginary as a gratuitous visual onslaught, through which the

Antarctic’s alienness becomes tangible.

Moreover, the fact that the Thing in Leane’s terms is both ‘contiguous with’ and symbolic of

Antarctica gestures to a mutability in terms not just of form but also of proximity — a polar nature unstably relegated to the fringes of ecological thought. To the extent that the Thing’s spatial mutability symbolises a mythologised and even geophysical Antarctic, its relation to protagonists and viewers articulates a polar imaginary in ecological terms: it ﬁgures the pole over there in relation to viewers here. Citing cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, Leane expresses the transgressive power of the Thing’s abjection in psychotopographic terms: “the horror of the story occurs when the continent refuses to obey the boundaries that the men have established; when the ‘alien space’ of

Antarctica, in the form of the ice-encased Thing, invades the sanctuary of the ‘homeplace’; when what should have remained outside is allowed inside” (Leane, Antarctica 78). In this sense, the abject is unsettling in spatial terms. Moreover, for Nelson, the Thing falls neatly into “the category of the Other who emerges from the Pole, the desert, under the sea, and all other regions of inner wilderness outside the realm of consciousness”; the horror of its repulsion is therefore a kind of death drive: "The pull we feel the Polar Spirit exerting on us to go to it is also our own desire for it

25 to come to us” (n.p.). The ‘realm’ to which this Antarctic monster is relegated is therefore both constitutively other to a conceived subject position and precisely threatens that category.

Such graphically ambivalent alienness can be read most generously as ecological interconnectedness portrayed through a spectacular idiom. Christopher Justice writes of polar horror that such ﬁlms’ “nascent ecological sensitivities suggest an environmental occurrence in one location will impact another continents away. That complex systems are interdependent is an emerging, yet subordinate theme” (215). Writing speciﬁcally of The Thing, Justice argues that it presents “challenges to ecological ideologies” in narrating the interdependency of organisms (the monster’s parasitic nature) and the mutability and interrelation of factors within vast ecosystems

(220-221). Carpenter’s visualisation of polar abjection therefore appears congruent with ecological thought, at least to the extent that it dramatises the dark ecological agency of feedback from human emissions. In any case, the spatial drama is the same: the human detritus dumped on the world’s peripheries returns, with a vengeance, to the centre.

In terms of relating subjects, objects and environments, these scenes are therefore spectacles not merely of alienation, but also of imbrication. Paraphrasing Leane’s reading of the particularly

Antarctic monster, Justice’s analysis also corresponds to Morton’s dark ecological appraisal of the monster’s ‘ecopoetic’ aesthetics and visualisation of what he calls the ‘mesh’. Writing against the word ‘Nature’, Morton’s neologism instead describes radical ecological interconnection as a kind of post-poststructuralist linguistics: “all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge” (An Ecological Thought 41). Morton’s call for an aesthetics of interrelations without subjects or objects nevertheless lacks historical justiﬁcation, and his object-oriented ontology leans on an idealistic — even “dogmatic” — conception of inaccessible ecological truths (Hansen 392). Rather than merely gesturing to such ecological-aesthetic ideals, the visual and grammatical (dis)pleasures of such imbrication are better understood as socially- produced ‘abjects’ in McClintock’s terms: ideologically ‘unruly’ precisely as products of ecological alienation.

Along these lines, the Thing’s repulsiveness to the ﬁlm’s protagonists makes some narrative sense in grammatical terms. “Torch it”, says MacReady to Childs — ‘it’, to the men, seems in some

26 sense to corral the multiplicity of the alien’s biological and ontological transgressions into a singular form. The internal and external shifting of the creature’s boundaries, its de-centred structure and confusion of distinctly identifiable beings, can no more be uttered than permitted to live. This process is not unlike what Karen Barad calls ‘thingification’ as a historical blindness to process and relationality: “The turning of relations into ‘things' ‘entities,' 'relata'—infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it” (Barad 812); you can’t torch relata, but you can burn things. In at least one sense, then, the Thing’s spectacularity is a commodification of ecology, insofar as the complex (inter)relations that precede its naming as one ‘Thing’ are somehow solidified into singular entities. In making imbrication tangible, Bottin’s Things are both visually excessive and also, like the word ‘Thing’, simplifications — the ideological stabilising of otherwise unstable ecology.

Fig. 7 — Bennings-Thing

More threateningly, the ‘Thing’ names an unstable separation from its hosts. It was common practice during production to describe various manifestations of the mutating, attacking Thing and also its completed human imitations using ‘-Thing’, for example: ‘Bennings-Thing’ or ‘Blair-Thing’ for those assimilated team members and the monsters bursting forth from their matter (Cohen).

The name of whatever or whoever the monster has already assimilated ceases to be a noun in its own right and becomes a modiﬁer for the dominant descriptor ‘Thing’ — already a “grammatically shapeless and protean noun”, like the shifting polar geography it represents (Glasberg, Antarctica

27 63). In this way, subjects lose grammatical cogency and instead themselves become mere relata

— functions of an object itself extremely mutable.

This loss of stable subjecthood ﬁnds an audiovisual analogy during a later scene, in which the

Thing is caught midway through assimilating a human protagonist, Bennings. This ‘Bennings-

Thing’ is encircled by the remaining team members outside the base. Almost complete in its bodysnatching, the replica is visible as such only once the camera slowly reveals its deformed, elongated hands — at which point the Thing lets out a disturbing howl (Fig. 7). Morton writes of the

ﬁlm’s sound design that the protagonists’ “screams are indistinguishable from the Thing's slow yelping, which is never entirely distinct from the sound of a decelerated voice saying ‘I’” (Ecology

Without Nature 182).5 Beyond emphasising the (non)human nature of the Thing, for Morton, this is therefore the melancholic cry of the subject (‘I’) in the internally impossible statement “I am immersed in nature” — an audible lament that traditional notions of the subject (as distinct from its environment, its constitutive others) are negated within the ‘mesh’ of interconnected ecology (182).

Surviving the movie, on the contrary, means violently disavowing the human in the Thing. “It isn’t

Bennings!” shouts MacReady, before setting the Bennings-Thing on ﬁre.

What’s at stake in these scenes, as in the statement ‘I am immersed in nature’, is precisely the distinction between subject and environment that deﬁnes this thesis’ visual focus. As is easy to forget in Morton’s account, the ‘I’ as considered disembodied and distinct from ‘nature’ as surroundings is a contingent discursive formation with particular ideological effects. If spectacle is understood to distance viewers from the objects of their vision, then a similar case could be made for its tendency to alienate subjects from environment. In this sense, it would also reproduce the disembodied, singular point of view rehearsed by Cartesian perspectivalism: alienation would therefore also describe an ecological and spatial separation. However, spectacle here doesn’t act alone. As outlined earlier, these distinctions between self-other and subject-environment are the

5 According to co-producer Stuart Cohen, the foley for this cry was a mixture of ‘nonhuman sounds’ and digitally synthesised versions of recorded human screams — elements of which were also used during other transformation scenes (Cohen). So, in this sense at least, Morton is not over- interpreting. 28 precise arena for the transgressions of gothic and body horror, ampliﬁed as they are by the discursive ambivalences of a polar imaginary.

Fig 8a. — Bennings-Thing’s POV: pans from right of encircling team-members…

Fig 8b. — Bennings-Thing’s POV: …to left

This violation of the subject-object distinction is visualised in such scenes, in which the Thing at once constitutes the spectacular object, and yet also refuses determination by and distinction from onlookers. The Thing’s repulsive attraction exceeds the gendered, colonial logic of disembodied looks. During the kennel scene, shots of the Thing at times seem to follow MacReady’s perspective. However, this apparent eyeline match is made unclear by frequent cuts to different team members’ transﬁxed looks (Figs. 2a-c), to shots behind the Thing and otherwise cutting 29 diagonally across various angles (Figs. 3-5). In contradiction to the narrative coherency and narrow focalisation of classical continuity editing, here no single look captures the Thing as it is shown to the viewer. Later, during the above-described encircling, this unveiling of the howling

Bennings-Thing — not quite human subject, not quite ‘thingified’ — cuts soon after to a reverse- shot from the Thing’s perspective, slowly panning around to capture each of the remaining team members, transfixed (Figs. 8a-b) — flipping the theatre of the spectacle by surveilling its surveyors.6 Only from this impossible perspective (from the spectacular object itself) are the looks of the protagonist-spectators visible in their alienation both from the Thing and from one another.

If the spectacular dog-Thing elides capture by the hero’s look, the Bennings-Thing reﬂects these looks back in symmetry at precisely the moment when they are most impotent. This inverted spectacle visualises a gaze made up of alienated looks: each protagonist asserts his own self- distinction from the Thing in front of him, even as he suddenly realises the equivalence of his look to those made by other subjects, some of whom are really Things.7 The Bennings-Thing — part human subject, part spectacular object, part polar landscape — is surrounded, but its surroundings are the subjects whose (disembodied) perspectives are now implausible. Their stability as subjects threatens to dissolve into interrelation.

To situate this inverted scene within a polar imaginary, the looks it corrals might be understood through polar psychotopography in visual-ideological terms. The ambivalent draw of the Things in these scenes corresponds on the one hand to what Gillian Rose describes as a gendered ‘way of seeing’ or ‘visual ideology’ that has historically produced nature as ‘landscapes’ distanced in relation to white, male viewers (Rose 86). But such visualisations also reﬂect a ‘fear of Mother

Earth’: a “fear [that] also motivates the voyeuristic gaze which sustains a gap between the subject looking and what they see” (106). As would-be voyeurs, the protagonists encircling the Bennings-

Thing are instead reﬂected in the object of their looks, reduced to mere placeholders for a desiring, fearing gaze whose visual-ideological production of landscape is caught in the act. In this sense,

6 Once on ﬁre, the encircled Bennings-Thing seems to take the place of the fetish — Marx’s ﬁgure for the commodity — in a ritual burning (Fig. 1).

7 In this way, the Thing’s alienation also alienates the crew from one another — the central narrative tension in Campbell’s story. As Leane notes: “everyone is ‘under constant eyeing’” (Antarctica 77) 30 the scene narrates not merely the impossibility of the ‘I’ within the sentence ‘I am immersed in

Nature’, but also the impossibility of the eye held apart from nature as inert landscape. Landscape is not out there waiting to be seen, but instead “a 'visual ideology’, because it uncritically shows only the relationship of the powerful to their environment” (Rose 87). In other words, the objectiﬁcation of nature facilitates its exploitation, its alienation from human viewers only visible through such an inversion.

The excavation of the Thing merely rehearses in spectacular exaggeration the anxieties inherently produced by the gendered separation of land from its colonisers: “this separation, together with the indifferent land’s refusal to be either Mother or Mistress, legitimated the degradation of the landscape then and continues to destroy it now” (Rose 105). Environment as inert visual object is a speciﬁc function of historical land claims and resource extraction, and the resultant voyeur as overseer merely displaces the violence of exploitation onto landscape as always potentially monstrous nature. In psychotopographical terms, the Antarctic monster reﬂects the desiring gaze that sought it out; the horror of the inversion lies in upsetting the presumed separation of nature as inert visual phenomenon.

This discursive background also situates these spectacles’ narrative function — a rehearsal of imbrication and separation that both reproduces polar nature’s alienation and spectacularises its violent resistance. Although Christopher Justice’s reading highlights the potential in The Thing of narrating the dispersed violence of ecological crisis, I call this interpretation ‘generous’ because it equates the diegetic horror in horror ﬁlm with affect offscreen. Inversely, Morton’s appraisal of the

ﬁlm as ‘ecopoetic’ presumes that its spectacles of imbrication model desirable realities (as if body horror were literally utopian). Both authors forget that, in The Thing, the monster — and the monstrous transgressions it poses — is both visually pleasurable and yet must, emphatically, be met with ﬁre.

Ultimately, the ambivalence of the Thing as polar spectacle is that, on the one hand, it reinforces the ideological rendering of the poles as distant and different. As literally alien, the Thing alienates the interrelation of the viewer, here, and the ecological object, over there. The ﬁlms’ repeated scenes of intra-diagetic, horriﬁed viewerships of monstrous polar things perform

31 exaggerated fantasies of separation between anthropocentric subject and ecological object, in which hostile natures threaten to invade the subject, but are satisfyingly contained — corralled into one place and then incinerated.

But, on the other hand, these stagings are only enjoyable — they only make sense as desirable forms of spectatorship — insofar as they threaten to rupture the separations that they repeatedly rehearse. The horror factor entertaining the ﬁlm spectator rests precisely on the narrative tension between the satisfaction of a hostile polar nature kept at bay, and the possibility, and frequent, vivid realisation, of its overrunning the team — its spilling over the ontological gap separating man from thing and subject from environment.

It is this this ‘rehearsal’, the transgression of and restoration to norms, that typiﬁes what Noel

Carroll calls ‘ideological’ accounts of horror fiction as “rituals of inversion for mass society” that merely pose the horrific and its ultimate destruction as reproductive of ideology — that they reinforce the norms that make monsters monstrous to begin with (201). The transgressions posed by horror in this sense mirror the widespread “fantasies of liberation” account of ideology critiqued by James C. Scott (185). Such a position condemns popular forms of immaterial resistance as typifying “bread and circuses” or ‘carnival’ “rites of reversal” as ultimately repressive: “safety-valves to carry off the explosive elements” they seem to dramatise within the confines of ritualised fantasy

(Scott 187, 185). To the extent that The Thing stages the successive alienation and imbrication between subjects and the (ecological) objects of their vision — as ‘rituals of inversion’ or transgression — it might be understood as ultimately hegemonic, its horror only a temporary threat against which to reinstate the normative: Nature held against the detached viewer-subject. This may be at least partly true. But as Carroll notes of such critiques of horror as ultimately repressive, they can only account for narrative factors (201). Though The Thing’s grotesque spectacles function respective of narrative, the effects of their visual excess (realising the abjection and abstraction of perspectives) are not reducible to that narrative: perhaps the ‘excess’ of the ﬁlm’s spectacular appeal is precisely that its monstrous visuals have an effect beyond narrative — and beyond ﬁction.

32 Such accounts also overlooks spectacle’s confusion of escapism and the banal. Debord’s concept describes the false appearance of exceptionalism produced by ‘commodity spectacles’ as not a break from the real, but rather the very (inverted) essence of it: “reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real” (Debord par. 8). As Mike Wayne writes of spectacle in horror

ﬁlm: “Media spectacles are thus not quite the ‘escapist’ rupture with the ordinary that they present themselves as, because the ordinary and everyday tissue of experience under capitalism is already an escapist fantasy” (Wayne 203). Taking spectacle seriously, therefore, also means taking fantasy and fantastical horror seriously as both reproductive of (visual) ideology and therefore also a lens to its critique.

For polar spectacle to mean more than the always-already repressive reflection of ideology, its visual excesses must be accounted for. If, as in McClintock and Henessey’s view, abjection is a function of ideology, then the enjoining of subject and (polar) environment in The Thing is repulsive as such in response to the normative separation of viewers from polar landscapes and wildernesses. Therefore, the thrills of corralling and being overtaken by Things reassert the ideologically acceptable limits to thinking subjecthood ecologically. But the entertaining, hyper- visual horror of The Thing also troubles the nature of this excess — it confuses pleasure with horror, and so what is at first experienced as transgressive seems more normative, and what is first experienced as restorative can be disappointing in the pleasure economy of its spectacular horror

— each moment of grand guignol correspondingly more gruesome than the next.

These inversions and transgressions — here-there, self-other, subject-object — are the dramatic wellsprings of the polar imaginary. To the extent that The Thing imagines (and images) hostile Antarctic space in terms not uncommon in polar ﬁction (both preceding and following it), it articulates a polar imaginary haunted by the hellish possibility that distant, alien ecologies threaten the here and now. Through that imaginary, psychotopography and the gothic express separation and imbrication not only through carnivalesque spectacles that return viewers to the norm, but also as reﬂections of historical ambivalences. The violence that distant polar nature threatens to return to the centre has antecedents in the gendered anxieties of colonial rhetoric, and descendants in the feedback effects that follow from polar melt. Spectacle in The Thing therefore rehearses both

33 visual ideology and its excesses — a polar agency both human and nonhuman, whose spectacular, devastating effects will ultimately be seen as more than spectacles.

34 2 — Runaway Climate Fiction: Allegory and Derailed Ideology in Snowpiercer

This train is a closed ecosystem […] From time to time we’ve had to stir the pot, so to speak: The Revolt of the Seven, the McGregor Riots, The Great Curtis Revolution — a blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot! […] we need to maintain the proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror in order to keep life going. (Wilford, Snowpiercer)

Snowpiercer encapsulates the status of practically every cultural artefact made today: produced and distributed through the processes made possible by capitalism as an economic system […] In this context, the utopian ending of the ﬁlm rings hollow and naïve, a placebo or a vent for the politically aware and a fun spectacle for everyone – a product (Protic 6)

While spectacle and horror in The Thing test the porous boundaries of ecological subjects, the limits in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) are symbolically global, explicitly political, and made to be broken. This latter ﬁlm’s computer-generated visualisations of ecological extremes at sub- zero temperatures, together with its action blockbuster presentation of catastrophic violence, move the consideration of polar spectacle to a different generic setting. Here, political dystopia, self- referential Hollywood tropes and ecological themes construct a narrative that explicitly thematises the ecological and ideological dimensions of spectacle outlined in the last chapter.

Carpenter’s vivid entry into the gothic strain of the polar imaginary provides an enduringly resonant ﬁgure for darkly ecological Antarctic horror — ambivalently alienating the pole and reversing the violence of its peripherality. But the icy setting of Snowpiercer is by turns a convenient backdrop and an overwhelming narrative force. The unintended product of meddling in

Earth systems, it at ﬁrst seems to provide a simpliﬁcation or ‘world-reduction’ facilitating an allegorical political struggle ostensibly void of environment. However, its dramatic return as avalanche later shatters this allegory, reasserting the dynamic ecological horizon to human politics as an unpredictable, all-consuming agency.

35 Even before this, Snowpiercer proceeds from a setting where the revenge of polar nature has already taken place. Its story takes place after an apocalyptic climate event, when a geoengineering solution to escalating global warming has backfired, causing rapid, lethal freezing worldwide. The hostile polar elements held apart from the viewer of The Thing are separated from the protagonists of Snowpiercer only by the windows of its eponymous train — spectacular vistas unevenly provided for the passengers, who are also the only remaining humans on an Earth made exhaustively polar. The ‘rattling ark’ of the Snowpiercer circumnavigates the globe, in parallel with the forward motion of its protagonists, as they fight their way through the violently divided social stratification of the train — the ‘freeloaders’ at the ‘tail-end’, the ‘first class’ at the front.

Unlike The Thing’s ambiguous symbolisms, Snowpiercer is in this way precisely allegorical. As the technocratic despot at its engine, Wilford, puts it: “The internal engine — it is eternity itself”;

“The train is the world, we the humanity”. Asserting the train’s own physical conﬁnes as the limits to political and ecological possibility for the train’s inhabitants, Wilford’s ideological maintenance of this symbolic threshold is — as implied by the epigraph above — part of a ‘blockbuster production’ comparable with Snowpiercer itself. In this respect (as in many others), the ﬁlm differs from both

The Thing and more recent ecologically-themed blockbusters as highly reﬂective on its commercial context and popular cultural aesthetics, as if through the suspicious lens of a (post-Frankfurt

School) critical theoretical perspective. As a key contemporary example of ﬁlmic ‘climate

ﬁction’ (Murray & Heumann, Monstrous Nature 206), Snowpiercer inherits its frozen planet setting from The Day after Tomorrow (2004), whose commercial success “elevated a low-probability scenario into an iconic image for climate change”, cementing a category of ‘Into/In Ice Age’ cli-ﬁ

ﬁlms now outnumbering those depicting rapid heating (Svoboda 59). But while TDAT typiﬁes what

Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’ by burying class politics in its spectacularly icy landscapes — in order, ideologically, “to conceal the corrosion of the U.S. model of capitalism beneath the biblical destruction of absolutely everything” (Beaumont 80) — the inversion of global warming that frames

Snowpiercer instead thematises limits and excess as the sites for revolutionary (and counter- revolutionary) politics. Against its villains’ capitalistic domination of environments and populations, the ﬁlm’s momentum seems at ﬁrst to accelerate the rebellious plot, later revealed by Wilford,

36 quoted above, to have been engineered: itself a repressive spectacle. On these grounds, the ﬁlm’s narrative brieﬂy develops a deep skepticism of spectacle itself, as tantamount to the nefarious ideological practices of its planetary managerialist dystopia.

Nevertheless, the ultimate derailment of the train by avalanche — triggered by the detonation of explosives set by its revolutionary protagonists — complicates this account. Serving as the spectacular object of this chapter’s second part, its action blockbuster aesthetics provoke a disjuncture with the ﬁlm’s prior narration of repressive spectacle, class warfare and political ecology on a polar planet. Ultimately, the crash literally derails the ﬁlm’s plot, the ostensible exteriority of its polar ecology brought violently to bear on the viewer. And its specialised Hollywood spectacle provides a vivid, disorienting cinematic experience that counterintuitively mirrors the shocks of polar feedback.

2.1 Snowpiercer as allegory: repressive spectacle and the ecological horizon of ideology

Before attending to Snowpiercer’s plot, its setting is worth comparing brieﬂy to Frederic Jameson’s reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s science ﬁction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Like

Snowpiercer, LHD takes place on a frozen planet, whose extreme cold Jameson reads “not so much as a rude environment, inhospitable to human life, as rather a symbolic afﬁrmation of the autonomy of the organism” (222). Unlike the utopian Gethen of Le Guin’s novel, the Snowpiercer’s own ‘autonomous’ shielding of its inhabitants from the lethal cold is explicitly dystopian. But both stories in their planetary freezing nevertheless constitute “an attempt to imagine an experimental landscape in which our being-in-the-world is simpliﬁed to the extreme”. Jameson names this

‘world-reduction’ — “an operation of radical abstraction and simpliﬁcation” with potential for both escaping ideology (e.g. as “an attempt to imagine something like a West which would never have known capitalism”) and also its reassertion: “a fatal return to just those historical contradictions from which it was supposed to provide relief” (222, 223, 228, 229). Mark Fisher calls this latter phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable

37 political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2). Snowpiercer’s speculative mode is similarly caught between the utopian potential of ‘world-reduction’ (breaking down class and ecological politics to manageable proportions) and its dystopian recuperation to capitalist realism. Narrating crisis capitalism’s residual grip on its post-apocalyptic setting, the ﬁlm’s global expansion of polar environment nevertheless also brings the vast horizon of climate politics — and the limits to seeing human culture’s imbrication with ecology — to the doorstep of its spectacular class struggle.

Unlike Gethen’s experimental utopia, Snowpiercer’s polar Earth is the explicit product of planetary meddling. Opening with an audio montage of news reportage from the dangerously warm conditions preceding its cataclysmic event, the film’s introduction reports that despite “protests from environmental groups and a number of developing countries”, an ambiguous international coalition pumped “artificial cooling substance CW7” into the atmosphere to “bring down the average global temperature to the finest levels”. Dictating the matter of proportion — temperature, emissions, dissent, consensus — is thus in Snowpiercer already explicitly the site of negotiation for a global political ecology, which, in a matter of minutes, becomes reduced to the allegorical world of the train. In this way, Snowpiercer’s dramatic reductions and expansions also recall Timothy

Clark’s injunction against eco-critical “scale framing”: tendencies to over-simplify the correspondences between the dramatically differentiated scales of complex ecological phenomena

(74). Correspondingly, the ﬁlm’s allegorical reduction of class warfare and political ecology to its eponymous train arguably constitute a kind of ‘miniaturisation’, reducing “the social, psychic and emotional complexities and nuances” of political ecology to ‘parables’ (77). As allegorical,

Snowpiercer’s fantastical setting and ostensibly simple narrative trajectory appear in this way reductive — but as ‘world-reductive’, its speculative and spectacular elements also provide a clear frame for envisioning the global stakes of capital’s relation to nature, otherwise too vast to be visible. Its high-concept setting, for one, hyperbolises the parasitic ideology of Anthropocene discourse as outlined by Jeremy Baskin: the “planetary managerialism” legitimised by partisan interests endures in isolation even beyond the climate apocalypse it has created (13).

Snowpiercer’s own scaling visibly demonstrates how the anthropocentric hubris of a particular

38 political group (presumably ‘developed’ and ‘anti-environmental’, given their opponents) is immediately abstracted to a broader ‘humanity’ – here, the micro-world of a failed human project, more generally.

Fig. 9 — The shoe is on the other foot

Fig. 10 — “

39 Verisimilitude aside, this elucidating effect also applies to the train’s visible conjoining of environment with class politics. By the time the ﬁlm proper begins (17 years after global freezing), gross injustice and gratuitous oppression have already stoked the ﬁres of Snowpiercer’s cartoonishly violent class warfare. As Joshua Clover argues, "Snowpiercer makes a mockery” of

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s assertion that "climate collapse signals the end of class politics” because

“[u]nlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged” — instead of ‘lifeboats’, the train allegory provides the “ready-made metaphors of travel” comprising a technocratic stratification of privilege (Clover). In its counter-position both to the polar hostility outside and the Dickensian-poor tail-enders, the excessive luxuriance of its first class carriages visualises what Baskin calls an ‘Anthropocene of the rich’: the contemporary crisis capitalism seeking profit from climate collapse (23). The train’s literally straightforward struggle — indicated by the film’s tag-line “Fight your way to the front” — is therefore the logical (and most generatively spectacular) reaction to its similarly simplified politics: its claustrophobic, oppressive ‘closed ecosystem’ a violent and visually appealing miniaturisation of the geopolitical structures that led to its dystopian conditions.

Nevertheless, both allegory and spectacle also serve perverse objectives within the narrative.

The Snowpiercer’s ruling elite legitimises these oppressive politics by continually reasserting the train’s constitution as a social body — an allegory that both miniaturises class struggle and naturalises its reproduction: (some of) its component parts replaceable, its overall composition unchanging. The clownish deputy, Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), repeatedly denigrates the train’s poorest on these grounds. After one tail-ender, Andrew, protests his son’s kidnapping by throwing a shoe at Mason, she delivers a typically patrician speech, while Andrew is slowly tortured with the shoe perched on his head: “We must, each of us, occupy our preordained, particular position.

Would you wear a shoe on your head? […] I am a hat, you are a shoe. […] So it is”.8 As the spectacular action driving the rebels’ progress pushes forward, Mason’s later capture is celebrated according to this allegorical body politic — by posing for a group portrait in which their roles are

8 An additional bodily management emphasising both the train’s deadly exterior and its metaphorical negotiation of appropriate position, Andrew’s torture has his arm forcibly exposed to the outside elements of the train until frozen, and subsequently shattered. 40 reversed: the shoe is on the other foot (Figs. 9-10). Once the rebel’s leader, Curtis, reaches the front of the train, he is offered the chance to replace Wilford as head of an unchanged system — revealed also to be using the tail-enders’ kidnapped children as literal replacement parts for the engine. It is later revealed that Wilford has conspired with the tail-section’s beloved leader, Gilliam, to orchestrate the rebellion from the start, at once in order to dissipate dissent and as population management: "We discover periodic insurrection is baked into the system, population control toward the great equilibrium of resource management conditioned by humanity’s crisis” (Clover).

The ‘proper balance’ of conformity, terror and human life in this sense become immune to resistance, and the forward motion of the rebels turn out not to be an exception to but, ultimately, a repetition of the Snowpiercer’s own predestination: a mirror for the circular movement of the train itself, a revolution with no telos — merely a revolving. As Wilford says of the children inserted into the train’s mechanism: “The engine lasts forever, but not so all of its parts”; the rearrangement of the train’s constituents changes nothing of its systematic inequality. In narrating rebellion, as Peter

Frase puts it, Snowpiercer is therefore "about the limitations of a revolution which merely takes over the existing social machinery rather than attempting to transcend it”. These several metaphorical inversions ultimately combine to produce a tragicomedy of repressive circularity — a snake eating its own tail — in which revolution merely resets the allocation of limits, and seizing power regurgitates its excesses.

As a ‘fantasy of liberation’ for both passengers and viewers, the action driving the rebellion is reduced to repressive spectacle. Wilford’s speech, quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, emphasises that the rebellion was not merely a population culling strategy but also a ‘blockbuster’ staging of resistance designed to satiate the masses — precisely a ‘ritual of inversion’ or, as Carl Freedman describes of the ﬁlm’s twist, “Marcusean ‘repressive tolerance’” (86): permissible noncompliance ultimately harmless to the status quo (similar to the ‘safety valves’ argument, whose challenge by

Scott was outlined last chapter). “The spectacle preserves unconsciousness as practical changes in the conditions of existence proceed” (Debord, par. 25), and spectacles’ false appearance of exception to the norm are in this sense applicable to the ultimately superﬁcial thrills of the train’s internal takeover. As Selmin Kara writes of the ﬁlm: “In this context, cyclicality points to a

41 parallelism between the mechanism of the train and the crisis logic behind neoliberal capitalism: crisis is not antithetical to the system; rather, it emerges as its modus operandi”. At this level,

Snowpiercer seems to give a rather pessimistic account of ideology’s absolute determination and delimitation of resistance in a micro-society of the spectacle.

Fig. 11a — passenger sees incoming avalanche

Fig. 11b — passenger’s POV of incoming avalanche

42 Fig. 11c — incoming avalanche derails the train

We might also call this, after Debord and the Situationist International, ‘recuperation’ or

‘spectacularisation’ — deﬁned by Situationist scholar Karen Kurczynski as “the process by which those who control the spectacular culture...coopt [sic] all revolutionary ideas by publicizing a neutralized version of them" (295-6). This extreme suspicion also produces a kind of meta- cinematic condemnation of ﬁlm spectacle, that the ‘blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot’ is really Snowpiercer. Bong’s critique of spectacle here becomes double-edged.

The futility or repressive determination of the plot (meaning both conspiracy and narrative) is twofold — staged within the story and also through the diegesis mise en scène (literally, put on the stage) for the viewer. Snowpiercer’s spectacular action scenes — seemingly driving its revolutionary narrative — were all merely for show.

This apparent correspondence between spectacular narration and the narration of spectacle lend the ﬁlm’s climactic train crash an allegorical weight with an additional ecological dimension.

This reflexive turn towards spectatorship seems to frame the train crash at the film’s finale, where the avalanche derailing the Snowpiercer is first seen from the perspective of an unknown passenger gazing stupidly through her window at the oncoming disaster (Figs. 11a-c). As with the

Northwest Passage tourists outlined in this thesis’ introduction, the postcard-perfect polar landscape in Snowpiercer is mere eye-fodder for its opulent ﬁrst class. The ensuing impact against 43 the train creates a sudden rupture of the screen that previously rendered that landscape inert — altogether a further jab at the passive spectator of the ﬁlm’s own blockbuster spectacle, only recently credulous of the revolutionary validity of the spectacular action driving its plot.

The window-screen in this sense embodies the ideological separation of viewer from environment. Emphasising the ﬁlm’s own ‘world-reduction’ to limits of extreme temperature, the train’s exterior ﬁrstly echoes Jameson’s interpretation of Le Guin’s utopian ice-planet: “the cold of

Gethen is what brings home to the characters (and the reader) their physical detachment”, “a fantasy realization of some virtually total disengagement of the body from its environment or ecosystem” (222). As a social body, the dystopian Snowpiercer’s absolute self-containment instead reproduces this ecological severance in the abstract. Reafﬁrming this, Mason repeats the mantra

(also constantly drilled into the train’s elite children): “Order is the barrier that holds back the cold and death”. Yet, this turns out to be an exaggeration produced by the Snowpiercer’s ideologists, after the later realisation that the polar Earth is, in fact, thawing and hospitable again. Frase notes of the train’s metaphor for capitalism: "The train symbolizes that system, which subordinates everyone to logics of domination through labor while convincing them that no other world is possible — that only death awaits them outside the machine”. The Snowpiercer’s dystopian conditions and closed ecology are justiﬁed in this way — its internal limits merely logical necessities of its external ones: “We are all prisoners in this hunk of metal”, Wilford insists, paraphrasing Chakrabarty’s ‘lifeboats’ metaphor, and thus excusing the excesses of injustice at the same time as he forecloses imagining an ecology beyond the train.

Extant environment is therefore a twofold ideological construct for the Snowpiercer’s inhabitants

— naturalising capitalism’s totality (‘the train is the world’) and legitimising its own injustices, while also asserting its false distinction from ‘Nature’. Emphasising the centrality of this latter “binary

Nature/Society” to capitalism’s reproduction, Jason W. Moore notes: “the view of Nature as external is a fundamental condition of capital accumulation”, its exploitations a product of rendering environments “external, controllable, reducible” (14). Similarly, the apparently radical disconnection of Nature from the Snowpiercer both naturalises the political-economic conditions permitting the train’s construction — the planetary managerialism that triggered the ﬁlm’s apocalypse to begin

44 with — and ensures their permanence. By seeming to equate the outside with death, the

Snowpiercer visualises Fisher’s capitalist realism, derived from the statement famously attributed to Jameson: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2). The unimaginable limit of capitalism in Snowpiercer is made literal as the train’s walls — its self- containment from the polar exterior as mythological as its own self-justiﬁcation against any alternative.

Spectacular viewership in Snowpiercer marks the limits of both a political and an ecological imagination: demarcating capital’s limits as the apparent exteriority of nature. And so the ﬁlm’s ultimate derailing of this allegorical world presents a counterintuitively spectacular critique of repressive spectacle — welcoming, as its undoing, the polar environment that maintained its own order.

2.2 Derailing ideology: violent polar feedback in a spectacular vernacular

[cinema is] geomorphic in its production of a spatially organized or territorialized material ‘object-world,’ an apparent geography distinguished by hereness, thereness, and distances and relations between the ‘pieces of world’ displayed (Adrian Ivakhiv 88)

Through such combined world-reduction and self-critical spectacle, the train crash’s allegorical meaning takes on political and ecological signiﬁcance as a total rejection of a rigged economy of tolerance and human life, symbolically dismantling capitalism’s spectacular separation from nature.

On a micro-scale, polar nature’s peripherality is here the explicit product of a planetary-managerial capitalism, whose enduring policing of limits it ultimately destroys.

However, the form in which this dismantling takes place — the derailment — is spectacular in a way entirely unlike the forward motion of the ﬁght sequences preceding it. Firstly, in narrative terms, the derailment dramatically upends, rather than reproduce, the cyclical politics that precede it. Secondly, in terms of form, its bloodless yet spectacularly dynamic visual excesses contrast with both the train’s internal sequences and the polar landscapes previously held in the background of

45 that anthropocentric action. Ultimately, the crash derails the cyclical reproductions of repressive spectacle and capitalist realism — through a spectacular Hollywood vernacular.9

Fig. 12 — derailment (from below)

Fig. 13 — derailment (from above, facing backwards)

9 I take the term ‘spectacular vernacular’ from activist-scholar Stephen Duncombe (9), anticipating its inﬂuence on Henry Jenkins’ theorisation of ‘cultural acupuncture’, discussed in Chapter Three. 46 Fig. 14 — derailment extreme long shot 1

Fig. 15 — derailment extreme long-shot 2

The derailment’s framing emphasises this turn from narrative momentum to a disorienting spectacle that at once reflects and dramatically refracts the human agency that triggers the catastrophe. The film’s ostensibly marginal characters, Namgoong and Yona (one of the film’s two survivors), turn out to have an alternative agenda: they don’t reclaim the engine, but instead 47 detonate a bomb in an attempt to escape. Contrary to — in excess of — their aims, the explosion triggers an avalanche as the Snowpiercer passes through a valley into a tunnel. While the tremors are gradually felt by members of the train’s elite, one shot rests on the unknown passenger, an eyeline match cutting neatly from her stare out of the window to her perspective of the oncoming danger (Figs. 11a-c). With the shattering of the ideological window-screen, outlined above, comes not only an expanded ecological horizon but also a mirrored ecological agency — the Snowpiercer and its inhabitants themselves pierced by snow. In inverse relation to the revelation of the rebellion’s spectacularly false exceptionalism, the polar landscape transitions instantaneously from inert visual landscape to malign agent.

This abrupt switch in trajectory is expressed, above all, in spatial terms – geomorphically, to quote Adrian Ivakhiv’s ‘ecophilosophy of the moving image’, cited above. From this point onwards, the lengthy sequence switches between wildly different, though almost exclusively exterior, perspectives of the train, as the falling snow pushes the vast majority of its carriages off a cliff — only some utterly wrecked carriages (within which, two survivors) make it through the tunnel, finally grinding to a halt (Fig. 17). The many, rapidly-cut perspectives of the sequence vary between extreme, aerial long-shots of the collapsing train (Figs. 14 & 15) and viewpoints positioned implausibly close to the carriages as they hurtle into one another and into the abyss — see, for example, the dynamic shot illustrated in Figs. 16a-c, in which a camera at first ostensibly mounted at the tunnel’s opening later swivels wildly downwards to capture various falling carriages, which fly by in unrealistic proximity. The narrative coherence afforded by more stable continuity editing is here abandoned for the cinematic disorientation of otherwise humanly impossible thrills.

Unlike the ultimately false exceptionalism of the spectacular rebellious plot, the derailment cuts across the linear-cyclical time of the train’s (preordained) progress. By shifting the spectacular emphasis from the rebellious plot to the external forces rendering it superﬂuous, the narrative momentum escapes the dimension of dualistic conﬂict and teleological struggle. Unlike the movement of the rebels through the Snowpiercer (constantly left-right across the screen), the crash pushes train and plot off the tracks, while also fragmenting the camera’s point of view respective to the train’s initial trajectory. The spectacular destruction visited on the train’s perpetual cyclicality in

48 this sense correlates to scholarly descriptions of cinematic spectacle as vertical movement perpendicular to the horizontality of narrative, demanding “wonder” over credulity (Brown,

“Spectacle/gender/history” 158). The train’s movement thus instantaneously switches from coherent linearity to literal exorbitance — ceasing its planetary orbit as its visual and kinetic force suddenly becomes gratuitous.

Fig. 16a — derailment: falling carriages 1

Fig. 16b — derailment: falling carriages 2 (ﬂying through POV) 49 Fig. 16c — derailment: falling carriages 3 (sudden pan downwards)

This spectacular mode — by way of its emphatic physicality and “dramatic punctuation” (Brown,

“Spectacle and Value” 59) — functions respective to a conventional cinematic language, and in excess of allegory. By so dramatically counterposing the train’s directionality to a polar environment deﬁned by spatial surrounding, the scene’s extra-diegetic signiﬁcance exceeds the parallelism of allegory. Instead, the vividly kinaesthetic everywhere-ness of a previously externalised environment suddenly imposes itself on the viewer as a dramatic stalling of continuity

— disrupting the suspension of disbelief in favour of emphasising the cinematic apparatus. Despite its manifestly pure CGI, the sequence’s close-up shots are invariably rendered in mock handheld style, their shaky cam perspectives even including several visible zoom effects as if shot live by amateur operators or as news footage. In this sense it has its cake and eats it too — its digitally achieved perspectival dynamism modulated by the “more ‘authentically’ terrifying viewing experience” afforded by handhelds’ ubiquity in contemporary disaster and horror (Murphy 96). The sequence is at once a sudden shock to the system — its rapid movement, bewildering explosion of perspectives and emphatic externality all stylistically disjunctive with previous scenes — and yet relatively banal: a spectacle familiar from countless other Hollywood crashes and explosions.

50 Fig. 17 — derailment: engine’s ﬁnal grind to a halt

These emphases on the cinematic apparatus at the moment of viewing the train crash are also disjunctive with the cognitive logics of both allegory and ideology. Through its anachronistic combination of climate ﬁction and locomotive steampunk, Snowpiercer folds ecological disaster into the modernist ‘cinema of attractions’ — Tom Gunning’s now canonical concept for the emphatic display of non-narrative ﬁlm spectatorship, its ur-scene demonstrated by the Lumières’

Arrival of a Train at the Station (1896). Gunning challenges apocryphal accounts that such spectatorships were (and continue to be) marked by naive credulity — early audiences famously jumping from their seats. Instead, he historicises the immediate and self-reﬂective visual pleasures of such ‘incredible’ ‘illusions’ in spectacular viewership, and re-emphases the utopian potential of their mass cultural salience as previously asserted by Eisenstein, Marinetti and others (Gunning

116-19, 121). Even for early ﬁlm viewers, the pleasures of non-narrative attractions – unlike the repressive spectacle of Snowpiercer’s ‘blockbuster’ plot – do not correspond to passive, dumb spectatorship.

Rather, such visual-physiological shock tactics return Snowpiercer to the embodied thrills ampliﬁed and banalised over a century of specialised cinematic development. Karin Littau gives

51 some phenomenological heft to Gunning’s broader position. Revisiting the Lumières’ train, she accounts for the supposedly physiological reactions of its early spectators by way of pre- or extra- rational experience: “the crash, as the very emblem of the thrill, shock and disaster, is not to be understood solely as an impact on our psyche […] but translates into a physical reﬂex, a bodily sensation” (35). For Littau, the kinaesthetic pleasures deﬁned by a ‘cinema of crashes’ function through “presentation rather than representation” and “exhibitionism rather than voyeurism” (47).

The prismatic perspectives, rapid cuts and advanced special effects of the Snowpiercer's derailment also demonstrate the aesthetic tools of a more contemporary cinema of attractions.

Wanda Strauven’s 2006 collection of essays The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded updates

Gunning’s concept to include New New Hollywood’s inheritances of early ﬁlm’s “direct, somewhat aggressive, address of the spectator”, typiﬁed by action blockbusters (Strauven 18). Elsewhere,

Nick Browne emphasises such action aesthetics in their archetype, the ‘spectacular explosion’:

"Explosive spectacularity is a distinctive mode of representation […] not simply to show an event but to recreate it experientially, namely in a mode that displays the force, that is the physics of the event, but not its meaning” (2). Such technically advanced eruptions of perspective and movement at once thrill with a visceral directness only dreamed of by their modernist forebears, while also typifying a standard of action cinema — “the type of violence typical of American cinema” (Browne

1) — long since dissociated from the ruptures of everyday life. Like Carpenter’s escalating grand guignol, Hollywood’s spectacle continues to shift its technical thresholds for kinaesthetic attraction.

Therefore, the spectacular aesthetics of Snowpiercer’s derailment are both decidedly non- representational in their physicality, and yet, so conventional as to render their shock tactics not altogether shocking.

In this way, the derailment’s ostensible shattering of ideology takes place through a paradoxically unexceptional mode of exceptional visuality. Through spectacle’s emphasis on the cinematic apparatus and its physiological effects on the viewer, Snowpiercer’s destruction becomes more than an evocative symbol for system collapse — it assaults the ﬁlm’s conﬁned allegorical world. The polar exterior of the train ceases to remain outside, symbolically but also phenomenologically. After two hours of only glimpsing polar vistas through the screens of luxury

52 passengers, the train crash’s bewildering multiplication of viewpoints, kinaesthetic ﬂourishes and digitally engineered landscapes combine to disorient the parallelisms, tensions and limits established beforehand. In this sense, the ﬁlm’s visual-spatial negotiation of proximity and peripherality makes its attack on the limits of ideology more than allegorical — but precisely through specialised Hollywood style.

In this regard, Snowpiercer’s disjunctive collision of allegory with dynamic spectacle affords an extra-representational testing of polar environmental externality, at the expense of conforming to cinematic commercialism. If its polar setting facilitates a ‘world-reduction’ or ‘miniaturisation’ — to return to Clark’s pejorative — the literal and vivid closing in of the train’s environment also expands

Snowpiercer’s ecological horizon. Unlike Clark, Ursula Heise praises cultural objects that represent the planetary scales of climate change, so long as they also emphasise the “ecological dynamisms, disequilibria, and disjunctions” between those scales (64). To this end, she calls for narratives that “combine allegory with modernist and postmodernist experimental modes that resist any direct summing up of parts into wholes” (64). Precisely through its specialised spectacularity, the derailment might be understood as such, mirroring precisely that which for Clark eludes miniaturisation — the vast and incomprehensible “displaced agency” of “the tipping point, where positive feedback loops related to forest dieback, permafrost methane release, and the ice-albedo effect generate — in some scenarios — ‘runaway’ climate change, independent of human action” (Menely and Ronda qtd. in Clark 79-80, emphasis Clark’s). Clark’s reassertion of this scalar and temporal incompatibility between non-human environment and human culture exaggerates the non-correspondence between them — omitting that while ‘independent of human action’, the feedback loops at stake in the most apocalyptic projections of climate crisis are also, however imperceptibly, anthropogenic. The agents derailing the runaway train are in the same way conjointly human and non-human, and the scale and dynamism of the sequence at once anti- anthropomorphic and highly conventional. In this way, the derailment and polar feedback are not just things that happen to human subjects, but also because of them.

Yet, Snowpiercer places little emphasis on these feedback loops’ production of its narrative conditions (the Gaia’s revenge of its global freezing). Frase even goes so far as to call the global

53 warming frame story “a red herring”. Nevertheless, this ‘runaway’ polar climate constitutes the literal (not allegorical) conditions for the train’s confines and the limits they symbolise — even though it ultimately destroys them. The violent intervention of hostile polar nature is a ‘red herring’ in the sense that its sudden appearance is unexpected in the film’s allegorical mode — the real red herring turns out to have been the rebellion’s own tunnel vision, failing to see that the real plot was going on outside the train all along. Thus, the dramatic return of this ‘first nature’ is both a narrative reflex to the film’s planetary managerialist politics, and also an emphatically spectacular reminder of the already spectacular aesthetics of a conventional polar imaginary: its engaging mystification of ice as always more than an inert backdrop to human activity — a dark agent, reflecting such interference in vivid excess.

This isn’t to say that Snowpiercer offers some perfect analogue (symbolic, spatial, or otherwise) for polar feedback. Rather, it merely points to the readiness of a spectacular mode to present political-ecological feedbacks through its own logic — not as resembling actual polar melt, but rather indicative of how such processes’ representations are themselves already unstable feedbacks between human and nonhuman agencies, micro- and macro-scales. To refer briefly back to the terms of Ivakhiv’s ‘ecophilosophy of the moving image’, both Gunning’s historicisation of and Littau’s vividly physical description of cinematic derailments suggest a direct correspondence between the spatial ‘object-world’ of cinema and the ‘subject-world’ of their viewers; this ‘geomorphic’ function of film gives spectacular attractions an experiential resonance beyond the limitations of ideology. In so doing, Snowpiercer’s spectacular presentation conforms to the tropes of a vernacular of Hollywood attractions. This could suggest a cynical, Debordian account of the society of the spectacle’s absolute colonisation of even the spatial aspects of experience — although as Fisher points out, such claims are themselves key drivers of capitalist realism’s high pessimism: “the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen” (9). Or, perhaps, it gestures to precisely those elements of experience, permissible in a spectacular mode, with the potential to exceed capitalistic logics — that climate crisis, and the distant threat of polar melt, are most resonant in cli-fi as popular cultural phenomena through a popular cultural phenomenology.

54 Coda: polar iconography and leaving the viewer cold

More than a ﬁnal call towards the suspension of disbelief, these ﬁnal moments represent both a rejection of the exploitation of late capitalism and an inability (or unwillingness) to imagine any alternative. (McCarthy 77)

It is as though — after the immense struggle to free yourself, even in imagination, from the infection of our very minds and values and habits by an omnipresent consumer capitalism — on emerging suddenly and against all expectation into a narrative space radically other […] the spirit could only lie there gasping in the fresh silence, too weak, too new, to do more than gaze wanly about it at a world remade (Jameson 229)

As indicated by McCarthy’s condemnation, Snowpiercer’s apparently necessary resort to the popular cultural — spectacularising both runaway climate change and post-ideological revolution

— is ambiguous. More specifically, he is referring not (only) to the derailment, but the film’s peculiarly fable-like closing sequence that follows it, in which Yona and Timmy (one of the ‘spare- parts’ children) emerge as, ostensibly, the only remaining human survivors on Earth. Stepping out onto the only real snow shot in the film, they see a polar bear in the distance. Shedding the ideological trappings of the Snowpiercer’s allegorical confines, Yona and Timmy’s view of surviving polar nature feels — both symbolically and aesthetically — like a breath of fresh air: a crisply stable image counterposed to the perpetual motion and CGI rendering of the exterior’s previous visibility only as fleeting, spectacular vistas. The film’s final image is of this most ubiquitous icon of polar nature and conservationism, staring directly into the camera. After hours of allegorical eco-political spectacle, the viewer is left, alongside the most ambiguous of endings, with visual fatigue and a hollow cliché: the most commodified image of the Arctic.

Like the implausible hope for (post-)humanity represented by Timmy and Yona’s dubious Adam and Eve, the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal moments offer only the bare seeds for re-envisioning nature and capital — its ‘world remade’, to cite Jameson above, inconceivable through anything other than the hollow materials against which it rebelled. Returning to the limp iconography of conservationist polar aesthetics seems at once deeply cynical, hopelessly naive, and yet pragmatic — the same move made by the next chapter’s turn to Greenpeace and LEGO.

55 3 — Save the Plastic Arctic: Greenpeace, LEGO, and the Building Blocks of Petroculture

The aesthetic and thematic concerns of the previous two chapters combine here in a YouTube video — a symbolically dense ﬁgure for various aspects of petro-capitalism.‘Everything is NOT

Awesome’ stages the pollution of an Arctic built entirely from LEGO, as part of a Greenpeace campaign (within their larger ‘Save the Arctic’ initiative) to end the toy giant’s promotional partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, who, at the time, were speculating for Arctic oil. In the video, a miniature Shell rig and excavation trigger an all-consuming flood of oil, which slowly drowns its plastic figurines — many of them popular cultural characters. The oil’s slow accumulation also parallels sea level rise — emphasising the role of fossil fuels in accelerating global warming. By explicitly counterposing LEGO’s image with that of Shell, Greenpeace also equate petro-capitalist industries’ ideological practices (branding) to material pollution: “Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations” (“Everything”). Consequently, the plastic pole literally miniaturises (scaling down and simplifying beyond even Timothy Clark’s intended definition) both Arctic resource extraction and its ideological supports — modelling a metaphorical eco-politics much like the allegorical micro-world of Snowpiercer outlined in Chapter Two, but here made material as LEGO figurines, frozen in the face of impending pollution.

In this sense, ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ is not strictly spectacular by the film formalist terms detailed in the previous chapters. But its aesthetics and rhetoric are cut from the same conventional cloth. Greenpeace’s video, produced by British agency Don’t Panic, only makes sense as campaign material by recourse to the popular cultural idioms of both speculative polar aesthetics (the polar imaginary) and repressive spectacle (already thematised in The LEGO Movie, which it references). This makes its pop-conservationism both vastly more gothic and also self- referentially spectacular than likely intended. As in The Thing, the oil flood spilling from this LEGO tableau reproduces the polar imaginary’s psychotopographic tendencies — the ecological monster, 56 unearthed by but uncannily indistinguishable from humans, with potentially apocalyptic consequences. The uncanny alienness of this sticky black ooze therefore disturbs the emphatically familiar rendering of its popular cultural Arctic, but through a reflectively anthropogenic monstrousness already typified in the polar imaginary. Moreover, this juxtaposition of crude oil with

LEGO figurines further troubles the violence represented by Greenpeace. Oil’s polysemy figures both the mystified organicity of deep geology and the reckless extraction and burn fuelling everyday modernity — but it also makes up the plastic of the LEGO miniatures that it drowns.

Consequently, the spectacular and abject aesthetics of gushing oil here combine with the taken for granted “everything of oil” that deﬁnes petroleum culture (LeMenager 11): the falsely exceptional abjectness and spectacularity of crude oil appear to disturb the everyday of petro-modernity, despite the less visible reality of their co-production. Thus, Greenpeace’s video builds their environmental justice critique from the manifest materials of petro-capital — both literally (from

LEGO bricks, plasticising and commoditising play) and also rhetorically: through a spectacular vernacular. These elements ultimately enact a contemporary critique of partly Debordian descent

— a détournement as culture jamming that wavers on the edge of a less radical critique: the fannish pragmatism of cultural acupuncture. Pouring oily materiality and (anti-)spectacular critique into the narrative mould of Arctic melt, ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ demonstrates both the power and pitfalls of polar spectacle in a time of climate crisis: ambiguously alienating, debatably effective for critique, but certainly enlightening as a model for the intertwined eco-politics of petroleum and global warming.

Beyond the pole: melt, branding and/as pollution in a popular cultural Arctic

The ice itself is under threat. It is no longer the enemy or the implacable outside force to be conquered. Nor is it an uncomplicated pure wilderness. It is no longer exactly a blank backdrop for imperial posturing. Rather, the ice is fragile, melting, ever shifting — in need of rescue (Elena Glasberg, “Living Ice” 222)

57 A ﬁrst step to stopping Shell from polluting one of the most pristine places on the planet is to stop Shell polluting our children’s minds. (Greenpeace 12)

The poles’ mythological and literary developments — together producing a relatively coherent polar imaginary, outlined in chapter one — are increasingly subject to more contemporary concerns.

Accumulating histories of exploration, degradation and climate change, the poles’ enduring

“position at the periphery of popular imagination” is now populated not only by explorers (Howkins

6), but also environmentalists, oil drillers and climatologists (11). As Elena Glasberg writes of this increasing polyvalence: ”Once the mythic zones of European heroism, the poles today are more associated with concerns over Native rights, oil company drilling and privatization, the destruction of habitats and species, and most of all climate change” (“Living Ice” 221). All this considered, a suitable narrative for a conservationist mode would be, rather than one of vengeful invasion, one of rescue.

Nevertheless, the polar imaginary persists. Still often deﬁned by the supernatural, and predisposed to the apocalyptic, the poles’ imminent fate — the ‘melting’ and ‘shifting’ of their ice mentioned above by Glasberg also threatening unpredictably dramatic climatic feedback — seems, in many ways, increasingly compatible with their enduring narrative magnetism towards revenge of nature dynamics: stories in which human colonisers are somehow consumed by their hostile environs, or where polar excavations trigger darkly ecological incursions from seemingly peripheral spaces closer to home.

Accordingly, even where ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ attempts to juxtapose the violence of oil spills with their fairytale LEGO Arctic, these darker tropes persist. As Greenpeace’s most viral campaign video to date, the popularity and success of the video appears to owe much to the abandonment of a more straightforwardly conservationist frame, as used in its other videos.10

Encoding the scene with an eeriness bordering on the uncanny, the rising oil — spilled by a team

10 Other, more sentimentalist videos within the ‘Save the Arctic’ campaign lean heavily on depicting the Arctic as a sublime wilderness. See, for example, ‘Ludovico Einaudi - “Elegy for the Arctic”’ — where pianist Einaudi plays atop an artiﬁcial iceberg, with glaciers calving dramatically in the background — or ‘The Arctic, Like you’ve never seen before’, whose 360° footage focuses on dramatically expansive landscapes and polar bears. 58 of Shell extractivists made cartoonishly villainous in the video (Figs. 18-19) — seems equally to manifest a historical “fear of Mother Earth” (Rose 106), ‘psychotopographic’ reﬂexivity of anthropocentric concerns (Nelson), or gothic ambivalence (Leane, Antarctica 54). In this way, despite Greenpeace’s concerns for sanctifying the Arctic, the video’s regurgitation of these aspects of the polar imaginary recall not so much the fragility of the ice as the dark potential underlying it.

Fig. 18 — A LEGO Shell drills for Arctic oil

Fig. 19 — A LEGO Shell drills for Arctic oil: Lord Business turns oil baron 59 Fig. 20 — Nuclear family drowning in oil

Primarily, this uncanny invasion is visualised by ﬁrst producing a fantastical Arctic deﬁned as a

Euro-American-centric ‘homeplace’ — the domesticity and everyday of Western popular culture here consecrating the imaginative pole polluted by Shell. Fundamentally, as this section’s epigraph demonstrates (taken from Greenpeace’s campaign materials), the video rests on the equation of the literal pollution threatened by Arctic drilling with that of Shell’s branding: how "the LEGO brand provided Shell with a social license to drill”, as Greenpeace Denmark’s campaign manager Birgitte

Lesanner phrases it (qtd. in Reestorff 39). To this end, the oil ﬂood on which the video’s violence is focused consumes a pole not merely constructed from LEGO, but also made up of icons both normatively domestic (a drowning nuclear family, a crying child holding a teddy bear, Santa Claus and an elf, a teenager listening to music) and explicitly popular cultural: the protagonist of the

HALO video game franchise, the snowy owl from Harry Potter, characters from Game of Thrones, as well as The LEGO Movie (more on which below) (Figs. 20-21).11 To refer back to Yi-Fu Tuan’s terms, through which Elizabeth Leane explains polar settings’ predispositions for troubling human

11 By constructing the pole as entirely fantastical in a Western mode, the video also entirely obscures the longstanding dependence on Arctic lands and resources by indigenous peoples. Howkins warns of this tendency as also a product of fantasy-based conﬂations of the unpopulated Antarctica with the Arctic’s inﬁnitely longer history of human inhabitation (11-12). 60 separation from environment, the ‘homeplace’ threatened by the ‘alien space’ of imaginative polar ecology is, in this case, constructed as a domestic threshold — “a protected enclosure that

‘nurtures biological life [and] commands the strongest attachment and loyalty’” (Tuan qtd. in Leane,

Antarctica 11). But this threshold is articulated in the video chieﬂy through the familiarity of popular cultural fantasy. In other words, the violence of far-away Arctic oil is rhetorically counterposed to the sanctity of domestic play, albeit built from franchise entertainment.

Fig. 21 — Emmet and Wyldestyle from The LEGO Movie (2014) drowning in oil

Consequently, by invoking such gothic tropes of polar hostility against a ‘pristine’ Arctic marked by the popular cultural everyday, the video presents Shell’s synergistic LEGO campaign as itself horrific — while nevertheless uncritical of the commodification of play more widely. Greenpeace’s assertion of the sanctity of both “children’s minds” (against branding) and “the most pristine places on the planet” (against ecological degradation) is only possible if the peripherality of the latter is folded into the centrality of the former. The apparent dissonance of such a collision is exemplified by critics of the video: “Whilst no doubt the Greens will and do use any avenue to use as propaganda”, rails one of many anti-Greenpeace commenters on YouTube, “there should be something that is sacrosanct. And that is kids and their emotional well being, this garbage has crossed the line” (Inconvenientruths). Equating the Arctic and LEGO means shifting the frontier of 61 environmental justice from the alien pole to the toy box — conjointly staging the purported violence of petro-capitalist branding along the same spatial lines as a polar revenge of nature horror story: an assault on the intimacy of the domestic.

Fig. 22 — Oil ﬂoods towards Arctic shore, mirroring rising sea level

Moreover, this popular cultural homeplace reorients the locus of violence depicted, to both here and there, paralleling the oil spill with polar melt. As Derek Gladwin summarises, the video conjointly shows “how drilling for oil in the Arctic will pollute water sources, melt polar ice, and irrevocably destroy habitats and food supplies for animals and organisms, in addition to releasing more carbon into the atmosphere and increasing global temperatures” (55). These numerous representational aspects correspond to the video’s context within Greenpeace’s ‘Save the Arctic’ campaign, which aims more broadly towards a legal safeguarding of the region against oil drilling and unsustainable fishing, but emphasises too the threat to Arctic ecology exacerbated by global warming (Christensen). In this sense, the spatial dynamic of an Arctic submerged in oil doubles as an inverted image of its melting, and the subsequent sea level rise’s global effects. This latter aspect is accentuated early on in the video, as the oil floods from the offshore rig onto a plastic coast (Fig. 22). Later, one of the last images solidifies this inversion as a highly efficient

62 Fig. 23 — Polar bear escapes the oil ﬂood

Fig. 24 — Polar bear clings to melting iceberg

63 combination of climate change framings: a polar bear shelters on the last mound of ice not yet covered in oil (Fig. 23), immediately recognisable in its resemblance to photographs showing bears left adrift on small bergs of melting sea ice (Fig. 24). To refer to the dominant audience- frame correspondences posited by climate change communications specialist Mike Shanahan,

‘Everything is NOT Awsome’ at once fuses this latter, conservationist ‘polar bear frame’ (targeting

‘animal lovers’) with the alarmist ‘catastrophe frame’ tending towards grander scales (qtd. in Hulme

229). The localised threat to habitats posed by oil spills is thereby generalised conjointly by the polar bear’s iconographic status (standing in for Arctic ecology in the abstract), the spectacular dimensions of rhetorical catastrophism, and the global proportions of sea level rise. The distant threat to this most salient of conservationist icons is thus transcoded instead into an all-engulﬁng, malevolent force — the bluntly apocalyptic frame amplifying the video’s incitement of empathy for non-human animals. Thus solidiﬁed into one image, extractivism’s otherwise temporally and spatially distributed effects on biodiversity and sea level are together as darkly and immediately visible as oil.

The overall effect is dual: it efﬁciently symbolises (literally, miniaturises) seemingly distinct ecological violences, while also prismatically multiplying and inverting distinctions between familiarity/exceptionality, here/there and natural/cultural agencies. By recourse to catastrophist framing and apocalyptic polar aesthetics, the Arctic oil inherits the mutable, abject characteristics of extracted Things — primordial, alien and yet uncannily human: the vengeful products of human tampering in Earth’s geology. Yet, the popular cultural Arctic and iconic polar ecology there included also ﬂip this dynamic: the external incursion of this threatening polar alien space becomes instead an internal bubbling up of dark potential, within a space at once peripheral and intimate.

64 Plastic, petroculture & the aesthetics of oil

[I]t is through plastics that we begin to fathom the complete permeation of oil into every facet of cultural life (Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis 2)

In this way, the popular cultural rendering of this miniaturised Arctic brings the poles violently home. But such plastic miniatures are also made from the same material of the everyday that enacts their abjection: oil.

In conjunction with the invasion dynamic outlined above, the video’s staging of violence also depends on the counterposition between the drowned ﬁgurines and oil as self-evidently hostile. In this way the oil takes the place of the alien Thing — emerging uncannily from human excavation, threatening the self-enclosure of human subjects. And the visual drama of the video therefore rests on contrasting its popular ﬁgurines’ comforting familiarity with the apparent rupture of this black

ﬂood. The equivalence posed by Greenpeace between the violent incursion of branding, the pollution threatened by Arctic drilling and the feedback effects of global warming depends in this way on contrasting here and there — homeplace and alien space — through a visual disjuncture between oil and plastic. The irony of this contrast is that this LEGO Arctic is precisely built from petroleum. By deﬁning the intimate and proximate against the ostensibly exceptional character of crude oil, the video inadvertently naturalises the distortions of petroleum culture — masking the fact that the homeplace is already invaded by oil.

Although ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ takes few cues from the film generic, spectacular conventions outlined in the previous chapters, its petrocultural aesthetics rehearse a similarly dubious emphasis on exceptional visibility defined against the banal — selectively visualising and itself coming to being as the product of oil extraction and refinement as fuel and plastic. Among other researchers into petroleum culture, Stephanie LeMenager’s book Living Oil traces the hyper- visibilities and blind spots of contemporary ‘petroculture’: “by which I mean petroleum media, by which I mean the objects derived from petroleum that mediate our relationship, as humans, to

65 other humans, to other life, and to things” (6).12 She emphasises the “petroleum aesthetics” inherent in (particularly American) cultural life, where oil and oil industries negotiate the meaningfulness of “display, spectacle, concealment, and stealth”, broadly deﬁning the visible and the visibly exceptional (6). Amanda Boetzkes’ emphasis on petrocultural visuality adds that the deeply ideological function of such aesthetics go beyond hiding or revealing, instead radically permeating “the way in which we see” (226). Manifesting “[a] ‘society of the spectacle’ that originates from oil”, "the universalization of oil […] establishes the conditions for capital’s spectacular plenum” (Boetzkes & Pendakis 4). In this context, petroleum-based materials and media constitute both the preconditions for and expressions of an oil-based ideology that also already deﬁnes the spectacular.

One response to exploring this total saturation is to return to the physical stuff of media and

‘media ecologies’ underwriting cultural expression, such as through the ‘media geology’ of Jussi

Parikka, who argues that “it is through and in media that we grasp earth as an object for cognitive, practical, and affective relations” (12). In this sense, here it is necessary to signal the relatively unacknowledged petroleum-based negotiations between viewers of ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ and the exploitable ecologies it represents. Spectatorship in this context is more tangibly

‘geomorphic’ in Adrian Ivakhiv’s sense of negotiating viewers’ ‘subject-worlds’ with the ‘object- worlds’ onscreen (88), insofar as those screens have their own petroleum-riddled geologies.

Nevertheless, the signiﬁcance of media materiality here is less geological, more visual: that

Greenpeace’s emphasis is not on special effects but, rather, on the visibly tangible LEGO tableaus and sticky crude oil displayed. However richly symbolic, this visual encounter between glossy plastic ﬁgurines and oozing oil is also emphatically physical insofar as it signiﬁes not only through existing visual codes but also via the differentially familiar textures of oil-based materials. Its visual aesthetics not only materially depend on oil, but also articulate certain cultural and affective codings of oil — both crude and plastic, anti-extractivist and inadvertently petrocultural.

12 For more comprehensive introductions to the ﬁeld, see the 2012 special issue of the Journal of American Studies on “Oil Culture”, or the 2017 collection Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by key authors Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman. 66 In this case, while Greenpeace condemn Shell’s ‘pollution’ of children’s imaginations with their branding exercise, they nevertheless leave unscathed the more material manifestations of a similar act: the colonisation of play by petroleum-derived plastics. Carola Hein notes of the Shell-Lego collaborations precisely targeted by Greenpeace (promotional Shell LEGO toys distributed at petrol stations): “Such objects promote a recognition of oil buildings, logos, and colors from an early age, preparing children for an oil world” (Hein 17). Such naturalisations of oil-industrial elements in this sense form “part of the representational layer of the petroleumscape” (17); the environment of the homeplace deﬁned by petroleum in this sense is not only material but also cultural. But, of course, explicit Shell branding is not necessary for such an ideological process — an ‘oil world’ of toys (in no small part thanks to LEGO) also already naturalises in material tangibility “the everything of oil” more generally (LeMenager 11), the natural playthings in a ‘Plasticene’ age, as Heather Davis terms it (qtd. in Demos 94). The plastic object-world of the LEGO Arctic in the video is therefore both representationally and materially continuous with the plasticity taken for granted in the subject-world — the polar ecology there built of the same stuff as the petroleumscape here.

Materially and geomorphically counterposing a familiarly plastic Arctic homeplace with invasive oil, the video therefore articulates the spectacularity of extractivism as the rupture of dramatic, hyper-visible pollution into a plastic everyday. But this rupture is only visible as such by way of the aesthetic economy of oil as reproduced through spectacular entertainment and petroculture more widely.

This contrast’s dependence on the spectacularity of oil partly derives from cinema’s petroleum- defined aesthetic history. Stephen Rust’s historicisation of climate change themes in Hollywood cinema traces the ‘cinema of attractions’ back to “the aesthetic pleasures of burning oil” typified by the “spectacle” of the Lumière Brothers’ 1896 film Oil Wells of Baku: Close View, which captures the burning oil and smoke billowing from an Azerbaijani well (193). Shorn of a contemporary ecological perspective, Murray & Heumann similarly argue, this “disaster seems more like spectacle” (“The First” 44) — the naturalisation of petroleum-induced fires and explosions’ spectacularity having since become integral to Hollywood action blockbuster aesthetics, as outlined last chapter via Nick Browne. “These ‘disasters’ of oil”, adds Graeme MacDonald, “are

67 copiously reproduced in numerous dystopically tinged images and narratives, their immediate, spectacular drama undeniable”, at the expense of rendering consequently less visible “the catastrophic in the everyday life of ‘banal’ oil” (55) — in other words, the material and symbolic permeation of oil into cultural and social relations more generally.

The oil in ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ neither burns nor gushes. Rather, it seeps slowly and insidiously through the limits of the banal, emphasising its abjectness: at once mystically natural and uncannily anthropogenic. The apparent self-evidence of oil’s exceptional vividness relates also to its spatial emergence from deep below (in this case counterposed also to plastic’s superﬁciality) and subsequent encoding as primordial. LeMenager notes of iconic images of oil bursting from tapped reserves: “the spectacle of its gushing from the earth suggests divine or Satanic origins, a givenness that confers upon it an inherent value disassociated from social relations” (92). Oil “is the energy made possible by eons of fossilized death” (Boetzkes & Pendakis 4), subsequently a

“determinate historical inﬂuence” as the driver of 20th century capital (Wilson, Szeman & Carlson

9), and therefore also of the ecological and political crisis of the Capitalocene.13 But its mystical and spectacular appeal foreclose addressing this imbrication of the ancient substance into the routines and technologies of everyday late capitalism — as Timothy Morton succinctly outlines of a desirably ecological thought, avowing the fact that “[w]e drive around using crushed dinosaur parts”

(The Ecological Thought 29). Exemplifying instead the “openness to mystiﬁcation of a living/ performing spectacle” (LeMenager 92), oil’s tangibly “abject impurity as me/not me, inside/outside, alive/dead” appears as if spontaneously (99) — exceptional not as the historical driver of oil capital and its petrocultural products, but rather as naturally unnatural.

Inversely, those petrocultural products’ archetypal form — plastics — literally ﬁx petroleum’s abject mutability, their own naturalised ubiquity and adaptability concealing their origins in cruder oil. Boetzkes demonstrates how a critical viewing of plastic "shows the procedure by which oil obscures itself from visibility, in the same way that plastic voids itself of an earthly basis, an inherent form, and a stable value” (Boetzkes 229). Emphasised by its gothic polar framing, the

13 A descriptor for “the geological epoch created by corporate globalization”, emphasising the key culprits for climate change, otherwise abstracted to ‘humanity’ by the term ‘Anthropocene’ (Demos 55-6). 68 shimmering viscosity of the oil shown in the video is thus demonstrably distinct from the still, smooth surfaces of the figurines that it drowns. Their formal heterogeneity, vibrant colours and anthropomorphic characterisation are visibly incongruent with the cruder flood. The latter’s uniform sludge slowly obscures the miniatures’ visual distinctiveness, spilling over their edges until all that remains is a textureless blackness — even smothering over the relief of its LEGO bricks’ textured branding (Fig. 25). The "material endurance, sensorial fullness, flexibility, and hollow affects” typically defining plastic aesthetics (228) — their organic origins transmuted into synthetic banality

— are here sacriﬁced at the altar of oil. Visibly severed from both of its deep geological origins and the social conditions of its processing, the plastic LEGO is subsumed into the general murkiness of oil, against which its own petrocultural permeations are rendered invisible.

Fig. 25 — Crude oil’s viscosity slowly erases LEGO’s brand identity

Ultimately, then, the video’s dramatisation of Shell’s violent actions paradoxically rests on an aesthetic economy of false exception and banality that is itself a product and function of the petrocultural ideology espoused by the company. Nevertheless, Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew

Pendakis’ quote above emphasises plastic’s potential as also a hermeneutic for understanding such material-ideological permeation of petroculture into everyday life. On the one hand, the paradoxes and pragmatism inherent in Greenpeace’s plastic practices seem compromising, insofar 69 as they depend on normalising aspects of petroculture in order to deliver their critique of a petro- giant. But on the other, such practice also provides a lens through which to see the radical imbrication of human culture with oil — and the fundamental components of petroleum even in anti-petroleum discourse.

(Anti-)spectacular rhetoric: environmental justice and the materials of petrocultural spectacle

Children construct their relationship with the world through play with products like LEGO (Greenpeace 12)

‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ is built not only from the physical materials of petroculture, but also the icons of spectacular franchise entertainment. As outlined above, the LEGO video symbolises and also materialises the ideological saturation of popular and visual culture by both oil economy and commodity exchange. Insofar as the aesthetics of plasticising oil mirror and manifest the logic of the society of the spectacle, the video’s environmental justice rhetoric reproduces, as well as making visible (and visibly reprehensible), the spectacularity of polar extractivism. This demonstrates a certain co-extensiveness between spectacle’s purported colonisation of aesthetic experience and oil’s permeation of culture — if spectacular forms follow from and reproduce the logic of the commodity, so too “the plastic object is the material trace of globalized oil capital” (Boetzkes 235). But, in the way vividly demonstrated by Greenpeace, even where many of those correspondences go unchallenged, the emphatic rehearsal of material and symbolic petro- and commodity culture also has critical potential. Thus, the use of LEGO in the video tangibly models debates on popular cultural forms of resistance, returning to the question of whether spectacular modes can disturb the hegemony of a society of the spectacle.

Despite its petrocultural normativity, the aesthetic contrast between oil and plastic also serves the environmental justice rhetoric in the video by equating oil pollution with global warming and petro-capitalist branding. But these symbolic imperatives, constructed as they are from the materials of petroculture, also reveal certain unacknowledged correspondences between the aesthetics of oil and the polar imaginary. 70 Fig. 26 — Animated visualisation of gradual Arctic melt

71 Fig. 27 — Computer simulation of the Thing’s viral spread

Firstly, pollution in the video must mirror polar melt — but the pole itself already has a plastic quality in terms of its mutability, and is therefore also ‘abject’ in the sense outlined by Leane in

Chapter One. Even more than the Antarctica there described, the inﬁnitely reforming topology of the sea ice making up the Arctic’s ephemeral non-continent is also “shapeless and shifting […] exceeding its own boundaries” (Leane, Antarctica 78). As in The Thing, polar mutability already preﬁgures the primordial, abject aesthetics here contrasted against it. Correspondingly, elsewhere in the campaign materials for ‘Save the Arctic', the sea ice's periodic expansions and reductions are visualised in amoeba-like form — oddly similar to The Thing’s computerised simulation of its eponymous monster’s cellular mutations (Figs. 26-27), which Glasberg argues already

72 foreshadowed digital climate modelling (Glasberg, “Viral Things” 5). The Lovecraftian, primeval amorphousness of virality and single-cellular organisms are suitable for the polar imaginary’s tendency towards ancient alien narratives (themselves echoing the deep timescales of paleoclimatology), and also resemblant of polar mutability. But these qualities are inherent to plasticity as well, both in terms of its material adaptability and the spatial and temporal scales of its

“immeasurable penetration, dissemination, and sedimentation of oil into the world market” (Boetzkes 228). In other words, the apocalypticism of polar horror is just as applicable to oil in crude form as to its material and ideological construction of petroleumscapes — the LEGO

Arctic’s plasticity is already polluted by warming, preceding its flooding with oil. But, for the petrocultural aesthetics defining the video’s contrast to work, the pole — deathly still compared to the encroaching flood — must instead appear materially distinct from the oil’s abject viscosity and impenetrable opacity: the melting Arctic must be representationally frozen.

Secondly, the oil ﬂood must also represent the incursion of Shell’s ideological self-justiﬁcations into ‘children’s imaginations’ — necessitating a parallel contrast of violent exception to the sanctity of everyday domesticity. But, here, the irony of the plastic/oil contrast reveals the fault-lines in

Greenpeace’s tactical rhetoric: they rest on the same materials (physical and ideological) used by

Shell’s branding, the object of their critique. Their tactical resort to LEGO and popular cultural

ﬁgurines arguably mirror the ideological practices they oppose (more on which below). But their necessary championing of the LEGO brand against its Shell partnership also means de- emphasising the oiliness of their ﬁgurines’ plasticity. Even where extolling LEGO’s sustainability credentials in their campaign materials (Greenpeace), Greenpeace neglect to mention the company’s initiative to ultimately replace the oil in their toys (Lesanner qtd. in Reestorff 38). Just as the leftist bent of their environmental justice rhetoric must be apparently compromised by positively

ﬁguring ‘imagination’ in literal commodity form, Greenpeace must also counterintuitively act pro- plastic in order to be anti-oil.

On this point, the video’s mobilisation of petrocultural aesthetics to critique petro-capitalist extractivism inadvertently reinforces the visibility of exceptional oil as distinct from its everyday manifestation as plastic. Moreover, despite Greenpeace’s ostensibly anti-corporate leanings,

73 ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ also necessarily advocates for the LEGO brand and its popular cultural icons against the similarly spectacular vernacular of Shell branding that make up its target.

As both symbolic and material manifestations of commodity culture, the video’s franchise- referencing LEGO ﬁgurines provide the tools for an ambiguously successful self-reﬂective critique

— a dynamic already staged in The LEGO Movie (2014), the video’s primary referent. The ﬁlm’s premise revolves around the conﬂict between its rebellious characters’ desire for freedom to build

(an obvious and at times explicitly self-referential ploy to market LEGO) and the ﬁlm’s super-villain

‘Lord Business’ — whose already hyper-corporate dystopia is further threatened by Business’s plans to superglue his figurine-citizens into permanent fixity. Joshua Clover compares this hugely successful blockbuster branding exercise to Snowpiercer. For Clover, both films raise the same question: “Can the stuff of class domination be repurposed for some emancipatory system?” Unlike

Snowpiercer’s pessimism, he argues, The LEGO Movie’s optimism answers afﬁrmatively, its miniatures vividly narrating the possibility of “[‘repurposing’] the building blocks of corporate dystopia into something else entirely, against their own inner logic, their desire to be locked into place”. In this way, “Legos provide an ideal metaphor” for the material force of ideology:

“Purportedly designed for the builder’s inﬁnite creativity, they instead force themselves into

-orthogonal forms, efﬁcient, orderly. Pretending at play, Legos have always been all business”.

‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ takes from The LEGO Movie its main characters (Fig. D), its theme song ‘Everything is Awesome’ (both referenced in the title and sung in a sentimentally melancholic tone in the video’s background) and, also, this optimistically ironic critique of consumer capitalism

— most obviously by reﬁguring ‘Lord Business’ as a Shell-employed oil baron (Fig. B) (Reestorff

25). But, in so doing, the video also calls into question the implications and success of its own

‘repurposing of the building blocks of corporate dystopia’. The rhetoric employed in the video appears ambiguously hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, spectacular or anti-spectacular.

In order to return to questions of the political implications of spectacular forms, I here refer brieﬂy to several related traditions of resistant practices that each take commercial entertainments as their materials. In her afore-cited interview with Birgitte Lesanner, campaign manager of

Greenpeace Denmark, Camilla Reestorff insists that the video employs the tactic of ‘culture

74 jamming’ (27). The term describes “an organized, social activist effort that aims to counter the bombardment of consumption-oriented messages in the mass media” (Handelman and Kozinets, qtd. in Carducci 116), typically adulterating billboards and branding iconography, as interventional forms of revelatory ‘subvertisement’.14 Inheriting this retroﬁtting tactic from Debord and the

Situationists’ détournement — “confronting the Spectacle with its own efﬂuvia and reversing their normal ideological function” (Jay, Downcast Eyes 424) — both strategies assert the power of turning the images of commodity culture against themselves.

Nevertheless, not only have the efﬁcacy and political implications of both of these practices been since widely questioned (see Carducci; Heath and Potter; Serazio), but a more recent entry into this hall of repurposing tactics demonstrates their defanging for a much less radical pragmatism, equally applicable to ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’: ‘cultural acupuncture’. The term emerged from media studies work on ‘participatory culture’, centring around Henry Jenkins, who describes it as “mapping ﬁctional content worlds onto real world concerns” — a pragmatic

‘hijacking’ of popular cultural content to intervene in or advocate against contemporary political injustices (Jenkins par. 1.9). Unlike détournement and culture-jamming’s condemnations of spectacle and commodity form, the approach of these ‘fan activists’ is marked by an “afﬁliation with popular culture [that] gives them a basis for empowerment, and [an] ability to possess popular culture [that] enables them to take action in the real world” (“Henry Jenkins”). In these terms,

Greenpeace’s uncritical position regarding LEGO’s brand, their explicitly pragmatic approach to using popular cultural references purely for media exposure or ‘spreadability’ (Reestorff 30) — another of Jenkins’ terms — begins to look a lot more like cultural acupuncture than culture- jamming.

Greenpeace’s appropriation of the material and symbolic ‘building blocks’ of both commodity and petro-culture inherits not anti-spectacular but rather, unapologetically spectacular tactics. This either corresponds to a compromise with the society of the spectacle, or, at best, a necessary

14 Lesanner responds that Greenpeace campaigning terms this not culture-jamming but ‘brand bashing’, though she is afﬁrmative in recognising the equivalence in approaches, and also their inheritance of strategies from The Yes Men — archetypal culture-jammers in Carducci’s comprehensive account (117). 75 pragmatism — as Mary Schulz’s communications-oriented account of the campaign argues, alongside Marianne Lundholt’s appraisal of Greenpeace’s effective ‘metadiscursivity’ with Shell and

LEGO branding (49). Aylin Kuryel and Begüm Özden Fırat condemn precisely such tactics on the grounds that they rest on “the assumption that popular commodity culture in fact fulﬁls people’s essential desires, a logic that runs the risk of mystifying the fabrication of these desires by that very culture itself” (40).15 Nevertheless, they do acknowledge “the semantic and political erosion of”

Situationist and post-Situationist discourse as the preconditions for such non-radical procedures’ emergence (39). In this sense, Greenpeace’s campaign might be lumped in with the wholesale spectacularisation of anti-spectacular practices themselves. Or perhaps, in an oil-saturated environment, it demonstrates that spectacular tools are not only the most bountiful, but also the sharpest-edged.

Rather than attempting to settle such complex and longstanding debates about the political implications and efﬁcacy of (anti-)spectacular critique, I situate this object rhetorically merely to point out the complexities of coupling polar spectacle with a particular account of cultural expression in a society of the spectacle. As this thesis has so far demonstrated, spectacle is formally heterogeneous and adaptable to various contexts, with differing affective functions. But its use doesn’t necessarily implicate visual form absolutely in service of alienation from environment, nor through the commodity fetishism of an integrated spectacle. If spectacle only describes the metonymical relationships of images to alienation and commodity fetishism, the concept will always fall short in this respect — its blind spots for describing petroleum culture and environment irreconcilable without recourse to other vocabularies.

Ultimately, ‘Everything is NOT Awesome’ negotiates both the polar aesthetics and the politics of environment outlined in the previous chapters. However, it also tangibly symbolises the materials of consumerist and petrocultural ideology, mobilised here towards an environmental justice critique. If the pole is only culturally deﬁned by imperialist, gendered visualities, and a spectacular vernacular expresses nothing but alienation and reiﬁcation, then the combined parts of ‘Everything

15 One of their main targets is activist-scholar and Stephen Duncombe — much cited by Jenkins — who justiﬁes popular cultural interventions’ contemporary “spectacular vernacular” on the grounds of spectacle’s absolute colonisation of, or at least superlative power within, cultural expression (9). 76 is NOT Awesome’ should doom its eco-political function as merely another case of spectacularisation or repressive tolerance — a sparkle of false rebellion in the glimmer of the spectacle’s absolute determination of cultural expression. Nevertheless, it has achieved substantial success regarding its aims. Its articulation of a polar imaginary has seemingly contributed to the pressure behind safeguarding the Arctic against further exploration: Shell and other companies have since cancelled their plans to drill there (Christensen), though the decision was self- reportedly unrelated to the campaign (Wilson and Stammler 2). And its recourse to popular cultural, franchise entertainment has at least removed LEGO’s branding might from its petro-capitalist setting — ending the partnership critiqued by Greenpeace (Gladwin 50). In this sense at least, there is some cause for celebrating the video’s combined use of alienating polar aesthetics (and clichéd Arctic iconography), the tropes of spectacular entertainments, and petrocultural materials and media. Moreover, it provides a vivid hermeneutic for assessing the similarities and co- dependencies between petroculture and the society of the spectacle. The video’s contrasting of plastic with oil inadvertently rehearses the ideological distinction between organic fossil fuels and their radical imbrication in cultural life. Yet, it also provides a striking model for envisioning the shared scales and mutability of that imbrication with other apparently unrelated phenomena — polar melt, the popular cultural saturation of polar geography, and a viral lens for imaging apocalypse both fantastical and climatic. At this plastic pole, spectacularising the petro-material, ideological and climatic dimensions of polar extractivism is not only a commodiﬁcation — it also makes vivid (some of) those processes against which it campaigns.

77 Conclusion

The fate of the poles continues to look precarious. Antarctic tourism is on the rise (Walton), and even the more sustainable operators note the enduring attraction to Northwest Passage routes — the “designer label of the Arctic cruise world” on account of its “fascinating and brutal” history

(“Arctic Cruises”). Despite Shell’s abandonment of their Arctic projects, and Obama’s attempt to legislate against Alaskan drilling, the Trump administration has since re-opened Arctic waters to offshore extraction, and Russian drilling is also well underway. Even the Antarctic Treaty System — banning military, nuclear, and industrial development in Antarctica since 1959 (Glasberg, Antarctica

6) — is under discussion, its “romantic environmental ideal of Antarctica as a pristine wilderness” inappropriate for safeguarding the dynamic and heterogeneous continent against globally-rooted threats (Stephens).

Across these competing forms of investment in the poles, they continue to figure either as exploitable or protectable by humans: passive to the actions of distant and disconnected actors — despite, for example, the millions of people living north of the Arctic circle. Elena Glasberg notes that the endurance of such terms, even in contemporary conservationist framings of the poles, ironically “refers back to a heroic agency of rescue from the very circumstances that have produced the need for a rescue from climate crisis in the first place” (“Living Ice” 242). Though in this way continually defined against men or their absence, polar ecologies’ radical interconnections with anthropogenic activities — near and far — are increasingly profound.

Similarly, the polar imaginary outlined in this thesis emerges out of a mythologising tradition both justifying and inverting histories of the human exploration, exploitation and extraction of land.

The depiction of the poles not simply as pristine wilderness, but rather as horrific, distant and hostile, also inevitably abstracts the material and political dimensions of polar melt, and obfuscates the actors responsible. Together with spectacular visual form, such stories reinforce the visual ideologies that relegated the poles to the cultural peripheries in the first place. In sum, the imaginative tools left to figure the poles inevitably reproduce certain tendencies towards their alienation.

78 However, the heterogeneities and ambivalences demonstrated across the three objects of this thesis imagine polar violence riddled with both human and nonhuman agencies, at once exceptional and familiar, spectacular and banal. What I have described as polar spectacle might, then, fall well short of accurately representing polar ecology, biodiversity loss, and their changing relationships with indigenous peoples. But it does conjure up certain aspects of resource extraction and its subsequent tipping points, or climatic feedback effects: the already unpredictable speciﬁcities of threatened responses to both broadly human and speciﬁcally petro-capitalist practices, as they relate to the poles. But for ‘spectacle’ to describe such phenomena, its conventional, trans-disciplinary uses have had to shift.

Consequently, this thesis has approached the limits of the concept of spectacle for visual analysis. Triangulating spectacle across cinema, environment and ideology has required combining it with other concepts and descriptors: the abject and grotesque; rituals of inversion or repressive tolerance; a cinema of attractions, of crashes, or explosions; specialised Hollywood form, or a spectacular vernacular; plastic and petroculture. Otherwise, as a broad descriptor for ﬁlm form, the term’s applications are too wide-ranging, variously describing emphasis, scale, visual excess and non-narrativity. So, to avoid foreclosing the analysis of such distinct forms, their correspondences to certain political (and political-ecological) effects have therefore begun as open questions.

Rather, as I have argued, the appeal of and visual pleasures made possible by the spectacular, as it combines with genre, setting and polar aesthetics, are not reducible to the concept’s political corollaries: alienation, reiﬁcation, commodiﬁcation. Even in its common intersections with features of a polar imaginary (itself already relatively heterogeneous), polar spectacle manifestly encompasses as broad a range of forms and effects as this thesis’ objects have detailed.

The Thing’s vivid mutations are enjoyable as such not only as products of the alienation of polar ecologies, but also as emphatic ﬂourishes of specialised cinematic effects that visualise the psychotopographic ambivalences of polar hostility: the (in)human in polar melt. The push-pull testing of the limits of visual pleasure there exceeds the straightforward separation of viewers and objects. This is ﬁrstly because that threshold is repeatedly, vividly crossed, and therefore secondly

79 because it also escapes pure ‘inversion’ as an ideological, restorative function, since this transgression is at once enjoyable and horriﬁc.

Though incomparable in form, the computer-generated thrills of Snowpiercer’s derailment also exceed the repressive function of spectacle as narrated in the plot — polar environment dramatically rejecting its reduction to commodity-image, and reasserting the ecological horizon of capital, but doing so through Hollywood’s language of commodity culture.

The materiality of such spectacles — produced as they are for viewers through the petroleum- based media of cinematic apparatuses and screens — is even more visible in Greenpeace’s video, where plastic LEGO ﬁgurines model (metaphorically and literally) the stuff of both capitalist ideology and petroleum culture. The video achieves its conservationist and anti-branding aims, and yet does so by rehearsing the cultural conditions legitimising its petro-capitalist target: the association of plastic commodities with play, and their disassociation from the crude oil from which they are built.

In all these objects, spectacle takes unique forms, but its intersections with polar aesthetics demonstrate the ambiguity of its alienating functions. On the one hand, polar spectacle distances viewers from their imagined poles — though often reﬂexively, highlighting or blurring that distance.

On the other, the dual capacity of ‘spectacle’ — to describe in order to critique what it describes — gives polar spectacle a specific kind of hermeneutical power: highlighting the human and ideological processes accelerating and resulting from polar melt. These feedbacks between culture and environment continue to elude representation, but their scalar and agential challenges to human comprehension are also dizzying in a way that is itself spectacular. In this sense at least, the feedback effects spectacularised in the three objects of this thesis are not only abstracted, over-simplified or misrepresented. There, polar spectacle also serves to reproduce these limits — both ideological and natural — to comprehending the poles’ significance in terms of climate change.

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