Genre and the Politics of Performance in the Modern American Environmental Movement

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Appealing to Better Natures: Genre and the Politics of Performance in the Modern American Environmental Movement

by Shannon Davies Mancus

B.A. in Theatre and Speech, May 2004, Wagner College M.A. In American Studies, May 2011, The George Washington University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 15, 2016

Dissertation directed by

Melani McAlister Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs

Elisabeth Anker Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science The Columbian College of the Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Shannon Davies Mancus has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of March 28, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Appealing to Better Natures: Genre and the Politics of Performance in the Modern American Environmental Movement

Shannon Davies Mancus

Dissertation Research Committee

Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, Dissertation Co-Director

Elisabeth Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science, Dissertation Co-Director

Jennifer Nash, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies, Committee Member

Gayle Wald, Professor of English and American Studies, Committee Member

James A. Miller, Professor of English and American Studies & Director of the Center for the Study of Public History and Culture, Committee Member (Deceased)

iii Dedication

For my co-protagonist, Tony, and in memory of James A. Miller

iv Acknowledgements

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Melani McAlister, Elisabeth Anker, and

Jennifer Nash, for being not only incredible, generous, brilliant mentors to my work, but also amazing models for what it means to be an engaged, justice-seeking individual in the world. Thank you for increasing my hunger to understand what makes our culture and politics tick, and for radically altering the way I see myself in relation to our society. I also want to thank the universe for the fact that James A. Miller existed, and that I got to know him. Thank you, Jim, for pushing me to think about revolution and telling me to travel, listen to jazz, and drink beer, and for helping me to understand that my desire to be social and see the world was integral to my scholarship, rather than detrimental to it – I miss you keenly. Thank you also to Chad Heap, Gayle Wald, and Finis Dunaway – I am honored to have scholars I admire so much reading and commenting on my work.

I feel lucky to have amazing colleagues. Ramzi Fawaz: thank you always for being a model for enthusiasm and scholarly generosity, for increasing my love for film tenfold, and for giving me confidence when I sorely needed it. I feel grateful for everyone in the American Studies department at The George Washington University, but Michael

Horka, Patrick Nugent, Lindsey Davis, and Megan Black have been particularly generous interlocutors. Thank you, too, to Mona Azadi, for everything. This project would have been very different and not as fun without support from my amazing writing group in all its formations, but especially as it existed in the form of the part-time-butcher-ferris- wheel with Katie Shank and Meghan Drury. Thank you to Rebecca Evans, Kimberly

Pendleton, and Scott Larson for working alongside me and keeping me sane. Kathryn

Kein -- I literally could not have done this without you (at least not nearly as pleasantly).

v You helped make the last few months of the project a warm memory I will cherish forever.

My praxis as an artist informed this work greatly, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my current friends and former conspirators from dog & pony dc: Wyckam

Avery, Melanie Harker, Tyrone Giordano, Jon Reynolds, Kerry Mcgee, Ellys Abrams,

Joan Cummins, Lorraine Roessenger-Sloane, Elaine Qualter, Aaron Mosby, Danielle

Mohlman, Joey Caverly, Jorge Silva, Lisa Austin, Nasreen Villtur, and so many others.

Felicia Ruff planted the seeds in college of my desire to pursue a doctorate by being so engaged, compassionate, and brilliant. Early on in my career, Heather Raffo and Tracey

Beardsley inspired me to think about the ways in which art creates a public sphere, and my Wagner family and colleagues from the Republic Theatre Company helped me to further those ideas; thank you all.

My friends and family have been saints and cheerleaders throughout this process, especially Tommy Iafrate, Ilana Kein, Stacy Carroll, Carrie Mugridge, Kellin and Sean

Nelson, Dave Payne, all of the poets, Alison Marchese, Beatrice Bass, and Katie Bechtel.

My family has been endlessly patient as I worked on my laptop on vacations and once brought books to the table at Thanksgiving dinner; they not only tolerated it but cheered me on. Thank you Karen Mancus, John Mancus, Mary Ellen Sweeney, Steve and Sigrira

Pettit-Gentil Savitski, Alan and Melissa Thomas, P.J. and Jessica Walls-Lavelle, Stephen and Christina Davies, and Scott Davies – I love you all. Thank you especially, Mark and

Mary Davies, for letting me become a vegetarian and environmentalist at the age of three, for being rocks of love and support through non-circuitous career paths, and for instilling in me a love of learning and writing.

vi Because matter and ideas are vibrant, I would also like to thank the individuals who invented the Pomodoro technique, Noteability, Bento, Scrivener, and iCloud, which saved me from a nervous breakdown when my hard drive experienced a catastrophic failure the day the first draft of this dissertation was due. A non-speciest thank you also to

Nepenthe, Crockett, and Pyewacket, who seemed to know exactly when I needed to stay seated and when I needed to get up.

The person who deserves the biggest thank you is my partner, Tony Mancus, whose unending kindness, creativity, playfulness, and brilliance provided something to hold on to when this project threatened to consume me emotionally. Tony did all of the things that incredible spouses do, including reminding me to take deep breaths, being endlessly patient as I worked long hours, and bringing me warm clothes and food to the library when I was cold, tired, and hungry. But he did more than that: as I spent years studying all of the poor choices humans have made on this planet and worrying about the grimness of the future, his presence served as a constant reminder that there can be real goodness in people, and that there are many facets of humanity that are worth passionately advocating for.

This project was enhanced greatly by the helpful and lovely archivists at the Ad

Council Archives, the Edward Abbey Papers, and the Library of Congress. Support from

The Performance Studies symposium and Northwestern and C. Riley Snorton, as well as

Albert Beveridge and the Albert Beveridge III History Award helped this project grow.

Portions of chapter 3 – Melodrama and Global Warming – were previously published in the journal Performing Ethos.

vii Abstract of Dissertation

Appealing to Better Natures: Genre and the Politics of Performance in the Modern American Environmental Movement

Appealing to Better Natures is an analysis of the narrative strategies developed and deployed by different factions of the environmental movement — from consumer activists to eco-terrorists — as a tactic to combat political fatigue in the 21st century, wherein individuals are constantly bombarded by mediated dire warnings of various types. Environmentalists can and do use genre as part of a contest about the correct politics of relating to the environment in order to generate narrative fealty and police boundaries related to proper political practice, including performances of gender, politics, and economic identities. In this conflict, genre also functions as a tool to overcome apathy in and generate narrative fealty in an environmental marketplace of ideas, since generic conventions quickly convey what the viewer should perceive as right and wrong and also provide a blueprint for ethical citizenship. This research brings together important aspects of film and media studies in new ways. By noting genres’ effects on micropolitical action, this dissertation pushes past “viewing positions” to examine

“performance positions,” which take into account how generic structuring influences subsequent actions, discourse, and affects of those audience members that feel themselves “hailed” by certain types of genre appeals.

This dissertation argues that that these discursive deployments of genres seek to sculpt specific kinds of environmental citizens by organizing types of performances and sets of affects into mythic constellations that can be emulated by receptive audiences, and

viii indicates that for activists, being conscious of the structuring forms of the narratives they are deploying is as important as crafting the content of those narratives.

ix Table of Contents

Dedication iv

Acknowledgements v

Abstract of Dissertation viii

List of Figures xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Fantasy and Mainstream 33

Chapter 2: Action Adventure and Radical Environmentalism 81

Chapter 3: Melodrama and Climate Change Activism 130

Chapter 4: The Makeover and “Green” Consumerism 176

Conclusion 226

Bibliography 234

x List of Figures

Images 1 & 2 79

Images 3 & 4 80

Image 5 128

Images 6 & 7 129

Image 8 175

Images 9 223

Images 10 & 11 224

Image 12 225

xi Introduction

In September of 1970, as the modern American environmental movement was on the cusp of emerging as a transformative public force, a group of forty-eight men sat in a

Manhattan office building discussing how they could stay on top of the shifting concerns about human beings’ relationship with the so-called “natural world.” The Advertising

Council of America, a non-profit entity that produces public service announcements, had previously been responsible for many visible campaigns that urged stewardship of the environment. The ad council had focused on specific environmental threats including their forest fire prevention series which invented the figure of Smokey Bear, and their

Keep America Beautiful campaign which, until this point, had been centered on an anti- littering message.

However, in the years leading up to the 1970 meeting, environmentalism had experienced a paradigm shift caused by several mediated events that had shocked the conscience of the American public. Over the two previous decades, events such as the revelation that alarming levels of radiological material had accreted in American children and the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring led to new notions about the permeability of human bodies and their vulnerability to radiation, pesticides, and other forms of pollution. Adding to increasing feelings of ecological precarity were reality shifting images such as the first photograph of the earth from the surface of the moon taken and circulated in 1968, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb which warned that overpopulation was threatening to overcome the human carrying capacity of the environment; both of these events caused an ontological shift in human perception of scale and sparked conversation on planetary fragility. All of these factors contributed to

1 the explosion of environmental coverage that occurred amidst the visually dramatic environmental disasters of 1969 which included the Cuyahoga River fire and Santa

Barbara oil spill, which forced a national public dialogue on what it might mean to be a responsible citizen in light of a host of new forms of environmental awareness. These events heralded the beginning of what is considered the modern American environmental movement, and represented a high point in what would become an intermittent succession of peaks and valleys in national environmental consciousness and media coverage.

In order to remain nimble and relevant, the Keep America Beautiful team was debating the best way forward to account for a shifting cultural awareness that necessitated the campaign focus not only on surface and aesthetic pollution—trash accreting in waterways, along roadsides, and in parks—but also a notion of permeable pollution that seeped insidiously into different facets of the environment. The protests and teach-ins of the first Earth Day, which had occurred the previous April, had transformed the national conversation about environmentalism from a focus on the aesthetics and enjoyment of “nature” and the conservation of natural resources to a larger, more urgent debate on the problems of air and water quality, chemical pollution, and concerns about whether or not the earth would continue to be viable for human life long- term. The Ad Council, whose stated mission is to address the most pressing of natural problems, had decided at a previous meeting that these concerns needed to be addressed, and had hired representatives from advertising firm Marstellar, Inc. to develop a new campaign to help the Ad Council’s messaging remain germane to current concerns. 1

1 Significantly, the precursor to Marstellar, Inc.—Burston-Marstellar—is considered the first to successfully bring together the cognate fields of public relations

2 Over the course of their discussion, three key problems of environmentalist messaging were examined. 2 These three questions have remained relevant to all subsequent attempts to craft activist stories about the environment, including those narrative attempts made by prominent figures at the beginning of the 21st century, the corpus of which comprises the main subject of this dissertation.

The first point at issue was the encumbrance of convincing individuals that they were implicated in the environmental changes they were witnessing. The difficulty of this hurdle was driven home at the September 1970 meeting by Louis Magnani, corporate director of Marstellar, Inc., who explained in the course of a presentation to the board that his firm “…faced a number of problems in revamping the advertising,” because, “When people think of litter they think simply of someone tossing paper into the street. The average man thinks that he personally is blameless, and is really not interested. He thinks others are to blame.” To combat this perception of inculpability, Magnani proposed a rough version of a campaign, the “key theme” of which was “People start pollution.

People can stop it.” The advertisements, he further explained, would also direct people to write in for a free booklet called “100 Things You Can Do to Stop Pollution.”3

and advertising. See “Marsteller Inc.” Accessed February 23, 2016. http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/marsteller/98763/.

2 Ad Council: Meeting Minutes, 1942-98, 17 September 1970, series 13-2-201, Box 9, Advertising Council Archives, University of Illinois Archives, 19 Library, Urbana, Illinois. On Earth Day and Keep America Beautiful, see also Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013); Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2015; Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York; London: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).

3 Ad Council: Meeting Minutes, 1942-98, 17 September 1970.

3 Several scholars have noted that many of the people having these discussions likely had ulterior motives for displacing the responsibility for environmental recovery onto individual citizens, thus turning the focus away from industry and state regulation.4 The subcommittee that had been assembled at the Industry Advisory Committee on April 20th of that year, charged with overseeing the advertising efforts, included John T. Conner,

Chairman of Allied Chemical Corporation, Steward S. Cort, President of Bethlehem Steel

Corporation, and William F. May, Chairman of the American Can Company. Aside from how self-serving the atomizing of blame may have been, however, the board members were nonetheless wrestling with a fundamental question that still plagues environmental activists today—how to integrate the largest possible number of people into the movement, by getting them to see themselves as integral to both the problem and the solution. To foster this aim, the Ad Council searched for a narrative that would coax observers of their advertisements to feel a certain affective responsibility—since he or she was a part of the addressed “people” who started pollution—and also a responsibility for taking concrete actions, which the Ad Council intended to script in the form of an instructional booklet containing 100 different actions the person could perform in order to be a better environmental citizen.

A second problem the Ad Council was faced with was how to tell a positive story that would motivate people to participate. At a previous meeting discussing the environmental and public health problem of overpopulation, the Council acknowledged that many of the public service announcements it produced were risk-focused, and

4 See, for example, Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism” American Quarterly (60, no. 1, 2008): 88-89.

4 posited that it might be beneficial to shape the new campaign in a way that promised the creation of a better future as a reward for participating, rather than gesturing to the negative consequences that might result from undesirable behavior. This conclusion was summed up in the meeting notes: “With the Council devoting so much of its efforts to

‘crisis’ issues —e.g., Drug Abuse, Inflation, Rehabilitation, Traffic Deaths, Reducing

Crime, Forest Fires, etc. — It would be valuable for the Council to be associated with a program that goes beyond abuses and threats to building a better life for all Americans.”5

A third dilemma was how to make the message visible and legible in a “social problems” marketplace. The board knew the Ad Council itself ran the risk of overwhelming the Keep America Beautiful campaign in a deluge of public service announcements, and fretted about over saturating the media with messages. At the time of the meeting when the new Keep America Beautiful ad campaign was pitched, the Ad

Council was running fifteen major campaigns as well as competing with other public service announcements, leading to a central question of the meeting: “How many messages urging people to confront problems can they stand?”6 The amount of urgent ecological warnings individual citizens are exposed to has continued to increase as the environmental movement itself has fractured and ecological dilemmas have proliferated.

This hurdle to public involvement was addressed transparently by a later campaign called

Earthshare, for which a publicity kit sent out to newspapers succinctly laid out the hurdle to involvement being addressed: “The problem: With so many important environmental issues needing to be addressed, people become overwhelmed and want direction about

5 Ad Council: Meeting Minutes, 1942-98, 20 November 1969.

6 Ad Council: Meeting Minutes, 1942-98, 17 September 1970.

5 easy ways to get involved.” Again, the solution prescribed concrete actions that could be formed to consider oneself an ideal environmental citizen. “[B]ecause public opinion studies have shown that telling people precisely what to do is the key to getting them to do anything at all, the ads detail what actions make a difference: Switching to energy saving light bulbs, using a cloth shopping bag, composting lawn clippings, even putting a brick in your toilet tank.”7

The issues that the Ad Council was wrestling with in 1970, on the cusp of the modern American environmental movement, are some of the same hurdles that environmental activists still face today: How can stories be crafted that encourage people to imagine themselves as personally involved in the movement? How can environmentalist messaging promote stories that result in affects that are productive, rather than depressing, so that individuals do not feel that the problem is insurmountable?

In a crowded media landscape, how can one craft a short message that makes an impact quickly and clearly? What specific behaviors should environmentalists ask people to change? These questions, when taken together, add up to a more significant query: How can individuals be conscripted into performing a type of environmental citizenship?

In the first decade of the 21st century, several environmental tragedies analogous to those that occurred before 1970 prompted an upwelling of media attention to environmental problems. In 2001, the National Science Foundation and the US National

Research Council released reports that climate change was continuing at a dangerous pace and would inevitably have devastating effects on both human health and property in the United States. The same year, NASA published a series of photos captured by their

7 Ad Council: Historical File, 1941-1997, Earth Share Newspaper Kit, Series 13/2/207, Box 105.

6 satellites that showed the rapid and dramatic disappearance of glacial ice over the previous decades. Despite these reports, George W. Bush and a Republican controlled

Congress set about rolling back environmental legislation across the board. This aggressive agenda included passing the disingenuously-named “Clear Skies” legislation which weakened the regulations mandated by the Clean Air Act. It also allowed for increased levels of mountaintop removal for the purpose of speeding up the process of obtaining coal, which, in the process, weakened the enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

Additionally, the Bush administration promoted oil drilling in the Alaska National

Wildlife Refuge, proposed overturning laws that banned the import of captured animals that are endangered species, and refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement meant to set regulatory targets that would keep climate change within a “safe” range. It was against this political and legislative backdrop that two environmental tragedies occurred that produced devastating images that were broadcast around the world for months. On December 26th of 2004, massive tsunamis hit nations ringing the Indian

Ocean, resulting in the deaths of over 230,000 people. Less than a year later, on August

29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, killing nearly 1,500 people.

These massive death tolls due to drowning coupled with reports of the continued and increasing dangers of climate change and the aggressive attacks of the administration on environmental regulations created a disturbing confluence of factors that produced an uptick in concern and coverage about environmental issues. Though the tsunami was not tied to climate change, and even in the case of Hurricane Katrina it is scientifically difficult to tie individual weather events to overall changes in climate, the extreme loss of life caused by encroaching ocean water created what Greenpeace called “mind bombs”

7 and Kevin DeLuca has called “image events.” DeLuca quotes a Greenpeace member to encapsulate the value of such visuals: “Success comes in reducing a complex set of issues to symbols that break people's comfortable equilibrium and get them asking whether there are better ways to do things.”8 Images of the dead and suffering, particularly in the case of Katrina, thereafter became symbols of the risk posed by worsening environmental catastrophes.

Image events are important to environmentalists because stories about environmental issues rarely get the coverage in mainstream media that activists feel they deserve. Journalist Libby Lester explains that the media hesitates to cover climate change stories because they lack narrative digestibility and visual impact, and notes that climate change “rarely meets the demands of the 24-hour news cycle in that it has no immediate resolution (water is only rarely lapping at the doors of readers) and it contains a great deal of ambiguity.” 9 Though the facts about global warming were known to the mainstream media prior to 2005, they were seldom covered. Hurricane Katrina changed this, Lester argues, as it was “a large unambiguous event, to which news audiences around the world could relate. The severity of the weather event served to piggyback climate change into the news.”10 Katrina propelled conversation about global warming not only into the news, but into other forms of media as well. The earliest and most visible example of was Al

Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The direct appeal to public outrage about Hurricane Katrina can be seen on the posters for the film, which features an image

8 Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 3.

9 Libby Lester, Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 72.

10 ibid

8 of a factory emitting a particularly noxious form of pollution; a hurricane rises from its smokestack.

Public attention to environmental issues waxes and wanes. The period between roughly 2005 and 2010 represents an obvious peak in the production of environmental films and coverage of environmental stories. Many of the texts examined herein were not only widely viewed, but also critically acclaimed. Many were nominated for or won

Academy Awards, including March of the Penguins (Best Documentary, 2006), An

Inconvenient Truth (Best Documentary, 2007), Happy Feet (Best Animated Feature Film,

2007), and The Cove (Best Documentary, 2010). This most recent wave of environmental attention draws on many of the same tropes and employs some of the same techniques as earlier boom periods of environmental narrative production. In this dissertation, I reach back to earlier peak times in environmental storytelling to give context to more modern iterations of tropes and forms.

For example, it is important to understand that in continuously using Hurricane

Katrina as a touchstone for the dangerous effects of climate change, 21st century environmentalists have repeated the transgressions of earlier activists who have been roundly criticized for focusing on white middle-class concerns to the detriment of broader environmental justice issues. William Cronon has shown the ways in which the concept of “wilderness” was mobilized at the turn of the century primarily by and for the benefit of the white and financially privileged. Creating “natural” spaces such as the National

Parks System for recreation involved revoking the subsistence-level hunting and foraging activities of the poor and the erasure of indigenous habitation. Finis Dunaway has noted the American environmental movement of the 1970s tended to present environmental risk

9 as a homogenous force, which flattened and obscured the disproportionate risks that people faced living in poor areas of the country, especially in subaltern urban spaces.

A number of the discourses I examine herein echo these earlier narratives by noting the disparate effects of environmental tragedies on the poor and people of color while failing to acknowledge causes of environmental disasters as linked to other forms of racial and class violence. Earlier conceptions of environmentalism, then, are crucial to understanding why some feel convinced by narratives that appeal to outrage over Katrina while others feel excluded. By taking the most recent boom period as my subject of study but reaching back to connect narrative threads over time, I hope to provide a methodology that provides a lens that looks forward to the narratives that will be produced in the last few years before devastating levels of climate change are “locked in.” and looks back at previous moments of ecological awareness to gain a fuller perspective on the narrative trends of the environmental movement as a whole.

Despite the flaws of the environmental narratives examined herein, storytelling remains critical to the future of life on this planet. As human beings have had the knowledge and technology to halt environmental crises for some time but lack the political will to implement difficult and substantive change, attention to contemporary activist narratives is critical.

*******

“Appealing to Better Natures” takes seriously the idea that the relative success or failure of environmentalist storytelling is central to whether or not the earth will continue to be viable for the majority of life on this planet. In democratic societies, to make the type of decisions necessary to halt or impede environmental crises requires the

10 marshalling of tremendous political will. This dissertation examines the way that some environmental activists have approached this problem.

I argue that different factions of the environmental movement—from consumer activists to eco-terrorists—have mobilized distinct genres to articulate their often conflicting senses of how people should engage the environment. These generic discourses span multiple forms of media, including documentary films, journalistic interviews, new media content, and novels. All sections of the movement that I examine,

I argue, utilize genres to provide blueprints for differential conceptions of ethics.

Environmentalists can and do use genre as part of a contest among themselves about the correct politics of relating to the environment, because generic conventions quickly convey what the viewer should perceive as right and wrong. Environmental actors mobilize different genres, ranging from the makeover to action adventure to melodrama, to articulate their sense of not only why but also how people should respond to environmental crises.

These generic framings seek to hail potential movement allies and spur them into action by asking them to recognize themselves as the heroic protagonists in unfolding environmental narratives. Radical environmentalists, for example, often posit themselves as protagonists in an action adventure story to legitimate extrajudicial actions and moral outlawry, while climate change activists frequently invoke melodrama to convey a sense of urgency commensurate with the speed and scale of the crisis. In this context, genre functions as a tool to overcome apathy and generate narrative fealty in an environmental marketplace of ideas.

11 “Appealing to Better Natures” argues that for those successfully “hailed” by particular genres, certain affectual, moral, and political performances become legible while others are rendered illegible. Ultimately, I argue that the generic forms of specific narratives normalize not only particular notions of right and wrong, but also particular performances of class, race, gender, and individual agency. For example, western narratives assume the existence of a racialized antagonist that serves as a foil for the able- bodied white male hero; in radical environmentalist narratives, Japanese fishers and whalers are problematically cast as “savages” in need of civilizing. Protagonists of the makeover narrative are expected to become increasingly upwardly-mobile appearing and gender normative.

This dissertation examines the ways in which performative publics are created, sustained, and regulated—or as I argue, scripted—through generic narratives. My methodology constitutes a new way of looking at environmental narratives by focusing on performative solicitations of particular genres. This allows me to examine the precise ways the would-be hero of a given text is asked to improvise within the circumscribed bounds of ‘correct’ environmental citizenship practices as prescribed by the structure of the story.

I argue that activists use genres in an attempt to sculpt certain types of environmental citizens by organizing types of performances and sets of affects into mythic constellations that can be emulated by receptive audiences. This scripted citizenship—a form of political participation in which the boundaries of civic action are limned by narrative parameters—allows for an improvisatory politics in which activists

12 can demonstrate agency by choosing specific individuated roles while still acting in concert with a narratively unified performative public.

Since humans have the capability to thwart environmental apocalypse but lack political will, my dissertation takes seriously how generic narrative appeals work as potential scripts for environmentalist performances as it probes the strengths and weaknesses of competing forms of communication. My research indicates that for activists, being conscious of the structuring forms of the stories they are deploying is as important as crafting the content of those narratives.

There are three main lines of inquiry that are opened up by focusing on how narrative forms structure improvisatory politics. The first is the examination of notions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability that is sedimented by each of the individual forms. The second pertains to whom the narrative form encourages to act, and who is encouraged to be the type of protagonist the story requires. The third concerns the performative politics of the genre: would the actions that are scripted by the narrative, if actually performed, substantively ameliorate the problem the narrative identifies?

Generically scripted citizenship encodes not only sets of ethics, but also specific performances that are either thinkable or unthinkable.

*******

These strands of inquiry assume that citizens share a common working knowledge of the outline that provides the structure for the scripted citizenship of their performative public. In order to engage in improvisatory politics, activists need to hold in common a semantics of form. As such, scholarship from the fields of social movement theory, genre theory, performance studies, and ecocriticism inform my project.

13 Recent scholarship about storytelling in social movements has analyzed it as a relational act that occurs around shared cultural frameworks. Francesca Polletta, author of

It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, has been particularly influential for my project as she theorizes narrative interpretation as the basis for imagined communities. Francesca Polletta's work proposes that the ambiguity of storytelling in social movements attracts adherents proportionately better than statistics because the inherent ambiguity of stories necessitates a reliance on shared cultural frameworks, imbricating listeners in the narrative through the act of interpretation and shared understanding. Polletta argues that narratives produced by storytelling are inherently ambiguous; this ambiguity necessitates that the listener relies on a shared cultural framework in order to decode the story, stating that “More than other discursive forms, narrative demands an effort of interpretation. Following a story means more than listening: it means filling in the blanks, both between unfolding events and between events and the larger point they add up to.”11 This dialogic act imbricates the listener in the story and both calls for and presupposes the listener’s involvement, emotionally and responsively, to the issue being relayed.

These texts observe that although stories as a medium are not the clearest or most direct form of communication, activists and scholars nonetheless maintain that the form of a coherent narrative is consistently more efficacious than the conveyance of statistical information. Polletta further points out that stock plots are essential to the perceived veracity of the telling, noting “…most theorists agree that there is a cultural stock of plots…We believe a story because it is familiar. Indeed, we find a story coherent because

11 Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), viii.

14 it resonates with stories we have heard before. A character’s actions seem to reflect his character; the reversal in the story makes sense; the story’s end seems, in retrospect, to have a certain inevitability.”12 Linda Zingaro, and others note the importance of repetition of form in activist storytelling, observing that an individual’s comfort level with a story being told tends to correlate positively with his or her familiarity with the structure of that story. 13

I engage with the field of genre scholarship to think how familiar forms allow listeners to fill in the gaps in stories. What recent scholarship on narratives in social movements has ignored or failed to address is the exact nature of this “shared cultural framework” that allows the listener to easily interpret the ambiguity of the story and understand how he or she is expected to react. Polletta and Zingaro are not alone—an entire body of scholarship about storytelling in social movements continually refers to shared cultural frameworks for storytelling without actually defining what those frameworks are.14 I am arguing that genre is one common structuring mechanism for stories told both within and outside of movies and literature. Genre acts as a mechanism through which we come to understand what the “larger points” of the story line are and what the “blanks” between unfolding events should contain. Stories told within the frameworks of different genres leave enough ambiguity to allow for participation through

12 ibid, 10.

13 See Linda Zingaro, Speaking Out: Storytelling for Social Change. (California: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2009),

14 See, for example, Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Joseph E. Davis, ed., Stories of Change: Narratives and Social Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

15 interpretation while still ensuring that the politics of the story are unambiguously communicated. These assumptions point to a sort of assumed lateral understanding between receivers, implying an imagined community based on the story’s framework.

Rick Altman writes about publics formed around narrative frameworks, and elaborates on the myriad ways in which filmic genres create what he calls “constellated communities.” He notes that

…genres do not exist until they become necessary to a lateral communication process, that is until they serve a constellated community. Only when knowledge that others are viewing similar films similarly becomes a fundamental part of the film-viewing experience does lateral communication exist; only then does viewing films generically become a method of commun(icat)ing with other genre film spectators.15

Though Altman focuses his study primarily on genres that organize discrete cultural products, specifically films, the implications of his observation extend readily to politics.

Indeed, at the end of his book, Altman himself gestures somewhat broadly to the idea that genre may play a role in nationalism.16

The strong attractions and the sense of belonging that adherents experience in these generic communities come from sensing oneself as part of a public sphere in which certain sets of affects, including fears and hopes, are shared and may lead to a kind of generic fealty. Barry Keith Grant observes that:

15 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Pub., 1999).

16 Altman’s conception of genre is part of a larger trend in the scholarship of genre studies with breaks with an older taxonomic method of thinking about genre; that is to say, classifying texts in different genres by naming a trans-historically stable set of traits that are characteristic of a certain genre. Jason Mittell has been particularly insistent about the fluctuating nature of these stock stories. See Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

16 All genre movies deal in one way or another with reconciling individual and group values. This is a conflict that we constantly negotiate, psychologically and socially, as part of life, but for which there is no ultimate answer. For this reason, genre movies appeal to us as cultural ritual, replaying the same narratives with slight variations time and again, and offering us comfortable narrative resolutions for irresolvable questions.17

Grant's assertion of genre as a ritual that helps solidify group values draws heavily on the theories of Frederic Jameson, as does my conception of scriptive politics.

Jameson's theorizing of the role of reiterated narratives in working through cultural anxieties or problems notes “a kind of homeopathic strategy whereby the scandalous and intolerable external irritant is drawn into the aesthetic process itself and thereby systematically worked over, 'acted out' and symbolically neutralized.”18 Most often, these anxieties are managed through the deployment of a utopian bribe, which Jameson describes as “…the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony."19

By examining the specific genres preferred by certain subdivisions of the environmental movement, we can also draw conclusions about the specific anxieties and hopes for the future that are largely shared by those with whom the genre resonates strongly. This is to say, intended receivers of the generic message are not necessarily going to feel or behave in the way the producers of the message want them to, but they may be drawn to certain generic products in an economy of environmental ideas. The

17 Barry Keith Grant, The Hollywood Film Musical (Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 41.

18 Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (Social Text, No.1: Winter, 1979), 130-148: 136.

19 Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,”141.

17 differential powers of attraction of genres may be based on individual affinities to the anxieties and utopian promises that each genre acts as a vehicle for; different genres may hold disparate powers of attraction for those who come to the cultural products with different backgrounds, previously held ideologies and visions for what the world should be like. My work assumes a synergy between the existing ideology of different factions of the movement and their framing of narratives.

This claim takes seriously Jameson’s idea of form “apprehended as content”—that literary genres in particular are “sedimented content in their own right,” and “[carry] ideological messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works…”20 Such a conception of genre is not ahistorical, but posits a rough framework of linked tropes that are absorptive of historically specific political fears. These individual frames also naturalize some actions over others.21

The field of performance studies informs my work as it provides a lens to think about how individual actions are influenced by narrative. Erving Goffman, a forbearer of performance studies scholarship, defined performance in such a way as to make it clear as to why the field of performance studies provides a logical lens for the study of social movement actors: “A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other

20 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 84.

21 As David S. Meyer asserts, “Like individuals, groups are also constrained by organizational identities...that make some tactics possible and eliminate others.”21David S Meyer, The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87.

18 participants.”22 Recent scholarship in performance studies can also help us understand how people structure their behavior to fit ideological scripts. Looking at genre as scriptive reveals the ways in which genre does not just structure storytelling, but also structures performances. As such, it often influences the actions and tactics that actors within a social movement select. These intentionally performed actions intended to demonstrate solidarity with the structuring of the movement’s message will change in order to stay in accordance with the tropes of the genre that provides the frame for the faction of the movement.

Richard Schechner delineates four levels of activity that relate to performance. The most basic, “being,” involves simply existing in the world. The second, “doing,” involves undertaking some form of activity. The third, “showing doing,” involves self-conscious actions that underline, point to, or comment upon the act of “doing;” this is what is thought of as performance. I will be “explaining showing doing”—which Schechner identifies as performance studies—throughout my project; that is to say, I will seek to understand why and how individuals behave in ways that seek to highlight their acceptance or rejection of different types of generic environmental messaging.23 I will argue that those who strongly align themselves with certain factions of the movement perform in certain ways in order to signal commitment by following expected or appropriate affective and behavioral patterns, or by actively striving to craft or uphold generic messages through their actions.

22 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 15. Emphasis mine.

23 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).

19 In engaging with the field of performance studies, I follow the tradition of scholars such as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, E. Patrick Johnson, and Harvey Young who examine the process through which actions enact and re-instantiate ideology in culture. These scholars examine performances of identity within culture that are ideologically driven and are undertaken either consciously or unconsciously to varying degrees. Their theories, as well as mine, revolve around the concept of an “internalized audience” which is witness to performances of identity even when no other sentient being is physically present—representing a sort of panopticized performance. Performances, then, are not always for the benefit of distinct others but are repetitions that consistently reinscribe identity for the individual performing them. Additionally, all of these authors note that deviations in repetition (what Young refers to as “repetition with a difference”) are fertile sites of study for examining rifts, changes, and contests over ideology. I will be examining these variations closely. These performances, while often playful, have high stakes and are more ideological than theatrical; as Schechner notes, “[p]erformances can be either “make-belief” or “make-believe.”24

Diana Taylor's concept of scenarios theorizes one way in which ideological stories influence performances. Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire explores the role the repression of embodied memory played in the colonizing of the Americas, and articulates her theory of scenarios as “an act of transfer, as a paradigm that is formulaic, portable, repeatable, and often banal because it leaves out complexity, reduces conflict to

24 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 42.

20 its stock elements, and encourages fantasies of participation.”25 Scenarios not only script interactions, but encode hierarchical roles and assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. She argues that “[s]cenarios, like narrative, grab the body and insert it into the frame. The body, in the scenario, however, has space to maneuver because it is not scripted.”26 Taylor asserts that the improvisatory power of the body is allowed for in the liminal space created by the lack of a firm script but the regulating parameters of the scenario. However, that is not exactly what scripts do; the nature of performance, even scripted performance, allows for a wide variety of variation and unexpected developments. In articulating scriptive politics, I find Robin Bernstein’s notions of scripts and scriptiveness much more useful. Bernstein notes, “The term script denotes not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation.”27 Bernstein looks to material objects to theorize the ways consequential pieces of materiality, which she calls “scriptive things,” shape behavior. She describes the influence of a scriptive thing to be “like a play script, broadly structures a performance while simultaneously allowing for resistance and unleashing original, live variations that may not be individually predictable.”28

I argue that genres script what I call performance positions: like viewing positions, performance positions comprise a multiplicity of responses to a narrative, but performance positions limn subsequent actions taken in reaction to that narrative.

25 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 84. 26 Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 55.

27 Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 101 (December 21, 2009): 68.

28 Bernstein, “Dances with Things,” 69.

21 Because social movement messages are inherently a plea for action, the generic structuring often makes some responsive performances seem logical and others illogical in the context of actions taken on behalf of the environment. For example, by invoking a traditional action adventure or western format, radical environmentalists ally themselves with a narrative political structure that allows for certain types of violence—if that violence is righteous and perpetrated by an individual who is acting on behalf of the greater good. In the context of a makeover genre, however, calls to violence would be illegible, whereas consumption of products leading to teleological improvement makes perfect sense. As Judith Butler has observed, “There are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts not only become possible but become conceivable as acts at all.”29 Genre gives people the option to radically imagine themselves as participating in a mythic storyline, and to live out their politics in a creative way. Audiences who are fluent in American culture will also understand how they should feel about certain events and what they should do in order for the story to conclude with a happy ending. Genre organizes not only tropes but also types of performances and sets of affects into mythic constellations that can be emulated by members of society.

Social movement actors want their stories and scripts to flow intact through mass media and so choose what I call durable frames. Genre contributes to durable framing that transfers more easily through production and reception, because the media often seeks easy ways to tell somewhat messy stories. Social movements can get additional coverage if there is what journalists call a “news peg” (for example, the passage of a bill

29 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 160.

22 in congress) on which they can “hang a story.” 30 David Ingram, author of Green Screen:

Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema notes that social solutions are necessarily complex but need to be simplified to fit into a story in order to be relayed in the time allotted for each segment of the news—therefore, the side with the solution that more readily fits a story format can win a media framing war.31

I will argue that genre assists in this process because stories with recognizable formats that have proven entertainment value will be easily interpreted by an audience and are more likely to be transferred intact through media outlets. Ideological positions can be conveyed more quickly because assumed shared knowledge of the framework allows for narratives to be condensed.

The fourth field of scholarship I engage with extensively is ecocriticism. In recent years, the field of ecocriticism—the scholarly examination of the portrayal of the relationship between humans and “nature” in culture—has burgeoned rapidly. When it was a nascent field, much ecocriticism was accused of existing in order to glorify a stock canon of nature writing or to simply explore the ways in which “nature” is portrayed in film or literature. However, in the past fifteen years the methodology has become so extensively wielded as to warrant numerous critical studies of the field as a whole.32

30 Meyer, The Politics of Protest, 95.

31 David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

32 See, for example, Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London; New York: Routledge, 2004); Laurence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (1 edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); Michael Branch, SueEllen Campbell, Neil Evernden, Annette Kolodny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Glen Love, David Mazel, et al, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

23 Scholarship has moved from recounting observations about the presence or absence of the environment in selected texts to a more sophisticated analysis of environmental discourse in culture. The field has also become more expressly activist and political. Noel

Sturgeon, author of Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural troubles the ways in which environmental narratives uphold post-war U.S. hegemony and naturalize dichotomies as she advocates for the field to continue to move away from observational analyses and to instead explicitly “make connections between scholarship and activism on social justice issues, and scholarship and activism on environmental issues.”33 In addition to the influence of the increasingly activist politics of the field to my work, work in the clusters of ecocritical texts that center on environmentalism and identity, the visual politics of environmentalism, and ecomedia have been particularly influential to this project.

Ecocritical explorations of interplay between race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and the environment have been a part of the field from its inception, with Annette

Kolodny’s 1984 text The Land before Her offering a trenchant analysis in the ways that domination of the American West was informed by a gendered imaginary that codes the land as feminine and also an accounting of the oppositional conceptions of the land held by the women who also went west.34 More recently, scholars such as Greta Gaard and

Catriona Sandilands have been at the vanguard of analyzing the ways in which feminist

33 Noël Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 10-11.

34 Annette Kolodny, The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill; London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

24 and queer politics intersect with and inform different practices of environmentalism and perceptions of the “natural” world.35 Similarly, Jennifer C. James has brought the politically productive concept of Afro-pessimism to the examination of the intersection of race and the environment in her essay “Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War, and Black

Ecological Imaginings,” and Sarah Jaquette Ray has hybridized lenses from disability studies with eco critical methodologies to produce the reasons in her book The Ecological

Other.36

Other recent texts have focused more on how narratives travel through the media, or have thought about how different types of visual depictions of “the wild” constitute a discourse.37 Kevin DeLuca, for example, in his book Image Events, examines the deployment by environmental activists of “image events” meant to shock the public and recruit adherents to environmental causes.38 Stephanie Rutherfold examines a more top down portrayal of the environment by examining different forms of green governmentality through the visual politics of sites ranging from the American Museum

35 See, for example, Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), and Catriona Mortimer- Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010).

36 Jennifer C. James, “Ecomelancholia: Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings,” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner, eds, (Reprint edition. New York: Routledge, 2012); Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (2 edition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

37 Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

38 DeLuca, Image Politics.

25 of Natural History to Yellowstone Park, to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in order to assess how each forwards narratives of power over ecological processes. Finis Dunaway has written two books that trace the history of the visual politics of the environmental movement: the first, Natural Visions, explores environmentalist visual culture at the turn of the century.39 The second, Seeing Green, explores how visual tropes such as gas masks and recycling symbols shaped the terms of the modern American environmental movement.40

These works dovetail with the field of ecomedia, a subset of ecocriticism that distinguishes itself from the more traditional focus on literature to concentrate most often on film, and which continues to increase in size and scope.41 Sean Cubitt draws attention to how broad the study of the environment on film can be, noting that, “almost all big- budget films are ecologically themed in the sense that they deploy landscapes as location and animals as props, or alternatively because they meticulously exclude them.”42 Much new work avoids such a pitfall, however, in favor of more sophisticated lenses of an

39 Dunaway, Natural Visions.

40 Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2015).

41 Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, Ecomedia: Key Issues (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015); Sean Cubbitt, EcoMedia (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005); Ecocinema Theory and Practice, Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (1 edition. New York: Routledge, 2012); Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); Alexa Weik von Mossner, ed, Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); Tommy Gustafsson,and Pietari Kääpä, eds, Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (Bristol: Intellect Ltd, 2013).

42 Sean Cubitt, Eco Media (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005), 99.

26 analysis, with, for example, Cubitt himself focusing on the temporal politics of environment and Pat Brereton fixing upon on the spatial politics of ecofilms.43

There has been little attention to form in ecomedia criticism. Exceptions to this observation are the works of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. Murray and

Heumann have jointly produced two works that appear to take seriously the interplay between genre, media, and environmentalism. However, That’s All Folks: Ecocritical

Readings of American Animated Features (2011) and Gunfight at the Eco-Corral:

Western Cinema and the Environment (2012) harken back to the original style of ecocritcism; they read extant fictional products in ways that foreground the environmental factors inherent in the texts. The pair does not theorize the implications of the deployment of genre in terms of environmental message; they instead use genre as a grouping mechanism and explore the messages broadcast through each grouping.

Although they recognize some of the political messages of each genre, they do not tie these politics to specific environmental ideas or extend their readings to discourse or culture at large. Similarly, Leo Braudy’s “Genres of Nature: Ceremonies of Innocence,” identifies a meta-genre that he calls the “genre of nature” which encompasses some of the tropes detailed herein (including the appearance of the Ecological Indian, the semantic linking of women and children to nature…), but his framework is elastic as to encompass radically different texts that would be considered part of the same genre in the Altmanian sense. That is to say, Braudy’s genre of nature is useful as a framework for ecocritics, but is disconnected from the concept of genre as a category held in common by members of a

43 Brereton, Pat. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005).

27 culture.44 It is not the type of genre that could circulate as a performative framework.

David Ingram, on the other hand, acknowledges that melodrama is inherent to many fictional ecofilmic discourses, but does not connect those tropes to larger political narratives.45

There have been a few texts written about performance and the environment, but these texts focus more on how theatre engages with environmentalism or reads protest as performance events.46 Very little work has been done in performance studies regarding the performance of environmental citizenship. Lauren Berlant has defined citizenship as

“a relation among strangers who learn to feel it as a common identity based on shared historical, legal, or familial connection to a geopolitical space.”47 Citizenship, therefore, is a useful frame through which to think through environmentalist performance, as it attends to structures of shared identity and political action.

“Appealing to Better Natures” argues that the invocation of different genres is part of a contest about how to perform environmental citizenship, and a bid for friendly distinction, or an attempt to bring the viewer in line with each faction’s specific conception of what the ideal ethical environmental citizen looks without undermining the

44 Leo Braudy, “Genres of Nature,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

45 Ingram, Green Screen.

46 See, for example, Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds, Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 2012); Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events, (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

47 Lauren Berlant, “Citizenship,” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Handler (2nd ed., 41–44. Keyword Series. New York and London: NYU Press, 2014), 41.

28 movement as a whole. Charismatic figures within each faction utilize genre as a tactic to quickly communicate a set of politics; that is to say, they seek to make certain sets of moral and ideological positions, affects, and performances increasingly hegemonic, powerful, and influential in the public sphere. However, even as different factions might criticize each other, they recruit different types of people to different sections of the movement, which works as a sort of ideological market segmentation. Even though radical environmentalists might appear to be antagonistic to mainstream environmentalists, for example, their ideologies actually work in concert. David Brower, who began his career with the Sierra Club before going on to found more radical groups, explains this symbiotic antagonism, explaining “I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.” 48

Each of the chapters that follow each examines the attachment between a faction of contemporary American environmentalism and the genre it successfully mobilizes most often. The first chapter concentrates on how mainstream environmentalists have deployed the fantasy genre to suggest an intrinsically enchanted world and prescribe large-scale changes in affect as a means to achieve a symbiosis between humans and

“nature.” The overlapping rhetoric of “green” blockbuster films and mainstream environmental lobbying groups implies that feeling empathy for the environment inevitably leads to improvement, as it promotes faith in the system and posits individuals,

48 One can argue that the organization Earth Liberation Front now occupies a space that makes Earth First! look reasonable. David Brower, qtd in Don Liddick, Eco- Terrorism: Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 63.

29 legislatures, and companies who “care” as inherently good. This promotion of affect-as- politics creates the idea that citizens are part of a larger empathic community while leaving individuals effectively politically atomized.

The second chapter explores how radical environmentalists use action adventure narratives to justify and valorize their extra-judicial tactics in public discourse. The chapter examines a generic genealogy from the western fiction of Edward Abbey through the recent docu-drama Whale Wars and argues that charismatic intellectual leaders within the movement have policed the parameters of the narrative, tapping those with the most successful performances as their successors. These cowboy environmentalists urge adherents to imagine themselves as moral outlaws who must protect the innocent in the face of a state that is failing to protect its citizens and argue that ideal citizenship is about protecting the greater moral good imagined as upholding nature’s laws above that of the state.

The third chapter centers on the melodramatic narratives of a cluster of documentaries and public service announcements produced between 2005 and 2010 by climate activists. I argue that these melodramas promote dialectics of pathos and action as a means to halt the impending crisis of global warming. These texts forward a narrative that first prompts the viewer to accrue moral capital through suffering for the virtuous earth. Subsequently, each media plea provides a set of written instructions meant to coax the imagined ideal environmental citizen into the position of the hero who must perform an in-the-nick-of-time rescue to save the earth from near-certain doom.

The fourth chapter focuses on how the teleological logic of the makeover justifies

“green” consumerism and examines pushback from the mainstream media on endeavors

30 such as the No Impact Man project, which attempt to mobilize the same narrative for anti-consumption. The chapter argues that those promoting green products are not only hawking self-improvement through consumption, but also seeking to recuperate the politically tarnished image of the deep green anti-capitalist by conflating the categories of good environmentalists, good consumers, and good Americans.

The process of writing this dissertation has been inextricable from my personal anxieties as an environmentalist who has daily been bombarded with depressing statistics and vivid reminders of the consequences of a global failure to act to slow the myriad forms of ecological destruction that currently proceed at breakneck pace on a planetary level. At the same time, the act of writing this dissertation functions as an acknowledgment of the difficultly of crafting activist narratives, and the special challenges that telling stories about ecological dangers presents. As Rob Nixon, author of

Slow Violence has observed, when dealing with environmental destruction:

[T]he representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally requires that we find both the iconic symbols to embody amorphous calamities and the narrative forms to infuse them with dramatic urgency…to render slow violence visible entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast “glacial”—once a dead metaphor for slow—as a rousing, iconic image of unexpectedly fast loss.49

The critiques I offer of the varying narratives examined herein are an attempt to deconstruct reiterated tropes in an effort to attempt to imagine better stories we can tell about collective action that do not reiterate entrenched hierarchies or other types of violences. My research implies that the power of stories partially lies in the fact that for

49 Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2–14.1 (July 2006), 15.

31 those open to being narratively integrated, stories become scripts, and that or those successfully “hailed” by particular genres, certain affectual, moral, and political performances become legible while others are rendered illegible. Ultimately my work argues that for actors seeking to affect social change, paying attention to the form of a story is perhaps as important as crafting the content of that story.

Chapter 1: Fantasy and Mainstream Environmentalism

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is ever going to get better. It's not." – The Lorax

A clarinet trills merrily as cartoon mushrooms, mice, and fairies are roused from slumber. Headlights appear subtly in the background of the animation and cheery female voices begin to sing as the focus shifts and we see an animated FedEx truck drive into frame, bouncing genially to the refrain: “You and me and the big oak tree, side by side, one two three!” The FedEx truck drives onto a lushly leaved branch and is gently lifted by the kindly faced oak tree. Animals wearing twee clothing appear and begin to add a playful “la la la” to the chipper tune. A deep toned male voice that oozes a grandfatherly warmth acknowledges that “The inspiring story of a shipping giant who can befriend a forest may seem like the stuff of fairy tales.” He pauses while a whimsically inflated

FedEx plane surrounded by fairies dips into the frame, and the tree gently sets the truck down, and then continues, “But if you take away the faces on the trees,” (the kindly face suddenly readjusts to patterned wood grain) “take away the pixie dust,” (the sparkly trails that the fey leave behind morph into falling acorns) “take away the singing animals and the charming outfits,” (alarmed expressions as some of the animals disappear and others shy from the camera in a pantomime of abruptly unclothed modesty) “take away the sprites and the storybook narrator…” The voiceover ends suddenly and we see the CGI van and the plane transform into their real-world counterparts. A younger, franker male voice continues, “You’re still left with more electric trucks, more recycled shipping materials, and a growing number of lower-emission planes—which still makes for a pretty enchanted tale.” The viewer is transported to the inside of the truck, where we see that it is the driver who has taken over the narration. The shot pans back and a computer

animated frog on the passenger seat happily “la la la”s along with the subtler background music. The driver addresses us as he exclaims, “Oops! Forgot one!” The frog disappears and the truck begins to drive out of the forest as a third male voice confidently states,

“Sustainable solutions. FedEx: solutions that matter.”1

While this commercial references fairy tale motifs in order to acknowledge the perceived incongruity of environmental responsibility and corporate shipping, it simultaneously invokes many tropes that are stereotypically associated with environmentalist films made for children. Films like Fern Gully (1992), Pocahontas

(1995), and The Lorax (2012) signify harmony with nature in many of the same ways— a friendly human being welcomed to the forest by animals singing in chorus (The Lorax), anthropomorphized trees presented as wizened and wise helpers (Pocahontas), forest sprites as a personification of the perceived mystery and enchantment of the wilderness

(Fern Gully).

Even when the commercial drops the pretense of magic, the preliminary message remains; a corporate shipping giant having a friendly relationship with the forest is incongruous with what we know about the antagonism between big business and our so- called natural world. However, rather than this amicable relationship being impossible— the stuff of fairy tales—FedEx asserts, it is merely improbable that such a relationship could occur. Its unlikelihood makes it even more special, and FedEx that much more virtuous—which comprises the basis of the enchantment that the narrative lays claim to, even though the evidence it offers for such a friendship is framed in the vaguest possible

1 GreenCollegeOnline, FEDEX Enchanted Forest Ad, Accessed February 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIuL6seeQ-4.

terms (more electric trucks, more recycled shipping materials, more lower-emission planes). When we think through this antagonism between the environment and corporations more broadly, we might perceive that it is not just that it is symbiosis between shipping and environmentalism that is often relegated to "the stuff of fairy tales," but the very notion of sustainability itself. This is the fundamental anxiety that this particular advertisement, and indeed many environmentalist fantasies, seeks to sooth.

This chapter endeavors to show how mainstream environmentalism traverses and muddies the line between enchantment and fantasy in order to make the impossible seem merely improbable, while simultaneously prescribing affectual connection to "nature" as a bulwark against ecological catastrophe. These narratives seek to bolster the idea that despite overpopulation, despite global warming, and despite decades of evidence of a lack of political will, humans can still live in “harmony” with the environment. A cursory examination of the bulk of environmental communication by both corporations and mainstream environmental lobbying groups paints a picture of nature that exists in a liminal space between real and unreal, while environmental marketing aimed at children seems to promote an outright permeability between impossible fantasy worlds and adjacent attainable enchanted nature, a distinction that falls apart upon closer examination. Environmental fantasies promise us that nature is a site that brings magic and enchantment as close together as is possible. According to these narratives, nature is one of the only—perhaps even the sole—source of enchantment left in a disenchanted world. This notion relies on a construct of nature that is predicated on otherness; a trans- temporal fantasy of timelessness, of constancy. These narratives promise us that, as

FedEx avers, "nature" might not quite be the stuff of fairy tales, but it is certainly

enchanting.

In examining these narratives, Tzveton Todorov’s explanation of what he calls

“the fantastic” is useful. “The fantastic” occurs when the protagonist encounters a thing or event that counters his or her notion of what is possible in the reality in which he or she lives. The character then must discover if the event does not actually bend the limits of known reality—for example, if the protagonist has been the victim of a misperception, dream, or delusion—or if the event is actually the result of supernatural forces. “The fantastic,” Todorov explains, “occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is the hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”2

In this chapter, I will formulate a category I call the ecofantastic: an environmentalist narrative that hesitates in its understanding of “nature” between the uncanny and the marvelous, enchanted and magical. There are four main motifs of ecofantastic scripts for green citizenship. The first is that “pure” nature is enchanting/magical, and human abuse and/or negligence has disrupted and/or threatens to eradicate the divinity of the wild. These narratives posit that once we learn to live in

“harmony,” everything will function in a perfect, self-sustaining system. This type of thinking also has roots in two important strains of environmental thought: transcendentalism and the Gaia hypothesis, both of which rely on the fantasy of divine nature uncorrupted by man.

The second is that ecofantastic narratives actively blur the line between

2 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25.

enchanted and magical. To illustrate this, I will read the winner of the 2006 Academy

Award for documentary, March of the Penguins, ostensibly a documentary, in tandem with the obviously fictional, singing and dancing CGI extravaganza Happy Feet. As I will show, the two films match up not only emotional beat to emotional beat, but sometimes frame by frame.

The third is that caring connects the individual to an affectual imagined community, and that caring is presented as equivalent to progress. Environmental fantasies often charge the viewer to undergo a change in affect in order to achieve a more utopic symbiosis between humans and the environment. These mainstream environmental solutions call for a radical shift in imagined collective affect even as they leave individuals effectively politically atomized.

The fourth is a belief that corporations, people, and the state are inherently good when they profess that they care. This allows mainstream environmentalism to continue to locate its hope in avoiding environmental apocalypse through a faith in, and reliance upon, our existing system of cooperation between a tripartite government and free-market capitalist entities. Ultimately, I argue mainstream environmental fantasies ask people to locate salvation in what is ultimately and definitively impossible. A promise that, as the

FedEx commercial avers, a company or individual can “befriend” the forest without substantively altering the behaviors that imperil it.

*******

Often when fantasy is referenced in popular culture, what is conjured are the tropes of a subdivision of the genre often referred to as "high fantasy." Tolkien-esque

narratives in this subdivision often contain what we might think of as the stereotypes of fantasy: wizards, dragons, elves. These ersatz medieval landscapes are certainly an important subdivision of fantasy, but many scholars have pointed out that to limn the category of fantasy by these tropes does a disservice to the breadth of the genre. Instead, recent scholarship has lobbied for an expanded definition of fantasy. Many scholars choose to define fantasy at its most basic level as a narrative that contains elements that could not occur in a mimetic world. In her book The Fantasy Film, Katherine Fowkes articulates these non-realistic elements as causing an "ontological rupture" that offers or forces for readers a "break with our sense of reality.”3 The types of fracture that occur in fantasy narratives are key, as the cognate genres of horror and science fiction also are defined by elements that counter the reality of the audience.4

The breaks in perception in fantasy are generally pleasant, which is what distinguishes fantasy from horror. The protagonist might discover that she can fly, for example, or that animals can speak her language. Though danger may exist, it can almost always be defeated using a combination of magic, teamwork, and pluck. In horror, the impossible may also exist, but is deeply unpleasant or repulsive—corpses reanimate and menace the living; demons possess people or houses or objects; nightmares become real.

On balance, in horror, these non-realistic elements pose a real threat and death and defeat of the protagonists is often wrought by the non-real; in fantasy, obstacles can be

3 Katherine A Fowkes, The Fantasy Film (Chichester, U.K.; Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 2.

4 This distinction is not universally accepted; some scholars organize science fiction and horror under the heading of fantasy. See, for example, James Donald, ed, Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI Pub., 1989). Donald deploys fantasy in a psychoanalytic way that encompasses horror and science fiction.

overcome and monsters defeated.

In science fiction, elements may also exist that challenge our perception of what reality is or can be, but the genre dictates that we imagine that all the novel elements of the plot are possible with advances in technology and human knowledge. In fantasy, no attempt is made to explain these divergences from reality by rational means. Both share an investment in commenting on current political or social problems by setting them in a world that is not entirely mimetic to our notion of reality. The distance created by this gap, which is often referred to as cognitive estrangement, lowers the political danger of identification with more radical positions. Darko Suvin, the original theorizer of cognitive estrangement, noted the liberatory possibilities of deeper political critique by fostering a profound reimagining of what the world could be.5 The cartoon environmentalist blockbusters examined within, for example, often criticize capitalism in a way that would be perceived as far more pointedly political if it weren’t set in a world substantively different than our own. Wade Jennings, summarizing the genre of fantasy for a collection entitled The Handbook of American Film Genres, notes that the point of the philosophical fantasy is to examine basic values, the very meaning of life, from the distance offered by the fantasy. Such films may take us "far, far away" from ordinary reality, but it is nonetheless that reality that they comment upon."6 In this way, fantasy film’s transcriptive power allows for a deep mining of the core of the reality of our existence presented in the guise of escapism; it allows for an ontological examination

5 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

6 Wade Jennings, “Fantasy,” in Handbook of American Film Genres (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 257.

situated more starkly in the reality of our politics while presenting itself as a transportive escapist retreat from our jejune existences.

There is disagreement about how strong this break from reality needs to be in order to classify as fantasy. Richard Mathews, in trying to find consensus about the genre by examining scholarship on the topic of fantasy in literature points out that “most critics agree it is a type of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery, or magic – a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary, material, rationally predictable world in which we live."7 However, as David Butler, in summarizing other arguments about the filmic genre points out, fantasy is basically at the basis of all fiction because fiction is also defined in its opposition the reality.8 Katherine Fowkes concurs and puts a fine point on it: “Viewers may not be consciously aware that they have escaped into an ‘alternate universe’ when watching an action movie (for example), but that’s exactly what they are doing. Fantasy just exaggerates aspects of this pleasure and makes it explicit in its content.”9

This is perhaps the other end of the spectrum from the Tolkien-esque view of fantasy; a perception of the genre that becomes so elastic that it verges on useless. Some scholars have tried to correct this by trying to pin down new terminology to set precisely what they are referring to. For example, Butler defines what he calls the fantasy impulse, while Attebery limns the parameters of what he calls the fantastic (which is a different set

7 Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.

8 David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen (London; New York:Wallflower, 2009), 4.

9 Fowkes, The Fantasy Film, 7.

of parameters than how Todorov initially defined the concept of the fantastic). 10 Rather than wade into these debates about the genre more broadly, I endeavor to focus on a specific subset of narratives I call the ecofantastic. Ecofantastic narratives transport the viewer to a non-mimetic world that presents an alternative schema for what human’s relationship with the ecosystem might be. In formulating the ecofantastic, I find a line of inquiry put forth by Butler particularly helpful. He notes, “the basic principle of fantasy, imagining the world different to the one we know, is at work in the act of speculation and every time we ask the question ‘what if?’, Whether that is followed by the statement

‘dragons roamed the air’, ‘we could land on the moon’, ‘poverty was eliminated’ or ‘A cure for cancer was found…’”11 I believe that ecofantastic narratives answer specific

“what if?” questions, “What if humans cared more about the environment?” and “what if we lived in “harmony with nature?” The answers to these questions are hyperbolized and often symbolized by literal harmony—birds and people singing together, or, as we shall see in my analysis of Happy Feet, nature and humanity recognizing each other and beginning to dance to a single beat.

This idea gestures to the ways that notions of the sublime and mystical qualities of nature as identified by mainstream environmentalism. As articulated by Richard

Mathews, fantasy "stories at their hearts are about the relationship between the individual

10 Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

11 Butler, Fantasy Cinema, 4. Jennings also observes that the central question fantasy is “what if?” See Jennings, “Fantasy,” 258.

and the infinite."12 Generally, ecofantastic stories have a lot in common with two particular subsets of the fantasy genre: myths and fairy tales. The division between myths and fairy tales is very similar to the perceived rift between enchantment and fantasy, in that fairy tales are acknowledged to be wholesale fabrications, whereas myths have a much more complicated relationship with the concept of “the truth.”

As Jacqueline Furby and Claire Hines observe, from the outside, myths are considered to be thought real in the culture where they originate.13 Additionally, myths are transparently meant to guide our affects and actions, which is the point of most, if not all, mainstream environmental narratives. Donald Haase defines the distinct function of this subgenre: “Myths set out codes of behavior, systems of belief and morality, justify actions and ways of doing things, and ‘support the stability and functioning of whole societies.’”14 Participating in mythic storylines, therefore, either affectually or by emulating actions that are legible within the parameters of the storyline, makes those feelings clear and meaningful within society. Myth guides behavior even though they are not based on logic or evidence. American myths, for example, include the notion that manifest destiny was and is our divine right, or the idea that consumer capitalism is at the heart of our American identity, or that America is a fertile land of abundant resources.

These stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves feel true and guide our behavior but can easily be challenged or dispelled by phenomenological evidence.

Fairy tales are not meant to guide our actions, even though as scholars observe,

12 Mathews, Fantasy, 1.

13 Jacqueline Furby and Claire Hines, Fantasy (London; New York: Routledge, 2012). 7.

14 Haase, qtd in Furby and Hines, Fantasy, 6.

many premises of fairy tales derive from myths. Dragons, for example, were originally believed to be mythological creatures that were thought to have existed, and later became stock characters in fairy tales. As we have seen from the cheeky meta-commentary of the

FedEx commercial, mainstream environmental narratives often border on fairy tale territory. This makes sense as a narrative vehicle for tales of environmentalist conversion;

Jack Zipes finds transformation to be a key element of the traditional fairy tale.15

Environmental fantasies either follow the transformation of a protagonist who is meant to be our avatar and that we are meant to identify with, or are direct or indirect appeals to ask us to remake our relationship with nature. These narratives, especially those aimed primarily at children, are marked by transformations that end in “happily ever afters.” As

Duncan Petrie has observed, the “function of holding out hope” might be a more reliable marker of fantasy than the idea of “…long ago and far away.”16

These environmental fantasies, as I shall demonstrate in my side-by-side reading of March of the Penguins and Happy Feet, seem to fall to either side of that mythic line: where beliefs in fantastic truths sometimes override phenomenological logic. I argue that the two films exist along a spectrum of fantasy, which, specifically, I will define as a mode that operates in a sphere of at least partial unreality that promises a communitarian utopian reality through a change brought on by an inner or outer quest or journey. This idea of teleological transformation is typical of the genre as a whole, as whatever quest the hero in any fantasy undertakes nearly inevitably ends on a hopeful, joyful note.

15 Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Wildman Press, 1983.

16 Marina Warner, Duncan J Petrie, and British Film Institute, Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment: Lectures, Seminars, and Essays (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 27–28.

Fowkes observes that, “As a rule, fantasy tends to favor happy endings, and eschews not only tragedy, but cynicism, providing solace and redemption in a world of evil and violence."17

The promise of a better future endemic to fantasy, I argue, is only one of the tropes of the genre that makes it a handy frame for environmental rhetoric.

Ecofantastic Tenet 1: Nature is enchanted.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 paradigm-shifting book, Silent Spring is often credited with being one of the catalysts for the coalescing of the modern American environmental movement. Though the work as a whole is lauded for being a non-fiction exploration of the ecological impact of the use of chemical pesticides, it begins with an ecofantastic narrative, which transparently seeks to induce readers into a state of cognitive estrangement that will allow them to examine the projected consequences of the societal structures they partake in. The very first words in the book comprise the heading of the transportative first section: “A Fable for Tomorrow.” This fable begins in much the way you would expect a fable to: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”18 Soon, however, the pastoral ideal of the bucolic hamlet was disturbed and “…a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died.

Everywhere was the shadow of death.” This malady is what causes the titular soundless

17 Fowkes, The Fantasy Film, 6. See also Jennings, “Fantasy,” 251.

18 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1962) 1994), 1.

season, as it causes “…a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone?…It was a spring without voices.”19

Near the end of the short fictional story, Carson begins to disrupt the more fantastical elements of the fable, such as the idea that it might have been an “evil spell” that has wreaked such havoc. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves,” she tells us, before clarifying the line between reality and fiction in the final paragraph of the section:

This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.20

Carson begins Silent Spring with an ostensibly fictional story, therefore, to ease into a reality that she assumed readers of the time might have found impossible. Simultaneous with introducing the idea that human actions could result in the death of birds and other animals on a previously unimaginable scale, Carson reifies the idea of sustainability through harmony, and paints a tale of harmony with nature as enchante(d/ing), as this harmony is a precondition of the disruption of that harmony, be it from a magic spell

(fantasy), or from the overuse of dangerous pesticides (disenchantment of the natural world caused by human damage).

This narrative of humans past symbiosis with an enchanted nature that preceded a fall from transcendental grace is reiterated over and over again in many types of

19 ibid, 2

20 ibid, 3

environmentalist mediums. Perhaps the most mythically succinct summation of this idea comprises the opening lines of the 1997 Hayao Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke: “In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods. Back then, man and beast lived in harmony, but as time went by, most of the great forests were destroyed.”21 Fern Gully begins in almost the same way, with an elder forest sprite’s explanation comprising the first spoken words, “Our world was much larger then. The forest went on forever. We tree spirits nurtured the harmony of all living things, but our closest friends were humans. Then, as sometimes happens, the balance of nature shifted.”22 Environmental fantasy narrative generally proceeds from this very premise, or assumes that we are situated somewhere in this unfolding.

Part of restoring the balance of life in the ecofantastic involves humans recognizing and valuing the enchanting qualities of the modern world. This is predicated on humans embracing awe and thus revaluing “nature” as infused with sacred properties. This idea that enchantment is a key to being a more mindful species is not just embraced by environmentalists. More recently, theorist Jane Bennett has explored the idea of enchantment as an antidote to indifference in modern society. In The Enchantment of

Modern Life, Bennett identifies myriad narratives of disenchantment in the modern cultural imagination in order to make a bid for enchantment based on the wonders of the present rather than a nostalgia for an imagined enchanted past. The yearning for an

21 Hayao Miyazaki et al., Princess Mononoke (Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment : Distributed by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2000).

22 Tim Curry et al., FernGully: The Last Rainforest (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005).

enchanted nature infused with a sense of the divine is a key part of this narrative of disenchantment, as Bennett recognizes:

The death of God spelled the end of nature as the earthly residence of the Divine. The animated creation gave way to a field of lifeless matter. Although such corpses can serve as objects of scientific interest, the laboratory reports, no matter how extensive or detailed, can offer nothing in the way of ethical guidance. Nature was once enchanted by the word of God and inscribed with hints of his divine purpose, but it is now disenchanted, stripped of spirit and vitality and no longer wholesome.23

Bennett's observation about the assumption that science has superseded a more

[sacred] set of ethics in a disenchanted world is critical to the understanding of the assumptions of the modern environmental fantasy. Bennett, citing Weber, further explains that, "…the disenchantment story describes the material world as consisting of lifeless stuff. We see evidence of this view in Weber’s claim that, because science materializes

(turns into pure matter) the world, it renders nature meaningless.”24 The ecofantastic, then, can be read as a bid for an ethics of enchantment, which renders environmental spaces as—if not divine in and of themselves—then at least divinity-adjacent. The notion of sacrality has often been forwarded as reasons to privilege nature as a space apart from humans, and provides justification for the protection of wild spaces.

The notion of a nature imbued with transcendent or mystical qualities served as an organizing principle for two key sectors of the environmental movement in the 20th century: transcendentalists, who advocated through self-improvement and communion with divinity through contact with nature in the early part of the 19th century, and Gaia

23 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 78.

24 Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 64.

hypothesis devotees who, beginning in the 1960s, began to advocate for a view of the planet earth as a self-regulating being whose perfect stability was being interrupted by human interference.

Transcendentalism was partially a reaction to Puritanism and grew out of

Unitarianism as adherents sought a more democratic relationship with God. In pushing back on the notion of clergy as necessary, transcendentalists left a void in the conduit of communication between God and humanity that was partially filled by nature. As Joel

Myerson has observed, “[The transcendentalists] set the stage for advocating the doctrine of self-reliance (or to enhance the divinity within one’s self) and stressing the importance of observing nature (if nature is divine, then studying nature is a way to examine the expressions and workings of the divine mind). And if all—God, humankind, nature — emanate from the same source, then the natural world and its inhabitants are microcosms of the macrocosmic divinity…”25

Many of the famous writings of the transcendentalists consist in advocating for communion with natural spaces, and continue to have an enduring influence on how we think about humanity’s place in the natural world. Thoreau’s Walden and other works like it have inspired a genre of nature writing—particularly writing about white men having philosophically altering encounters with what they perceive to be “the wilderness”—that persists to this day. This confluence of “man” and “the wild” is meant to confer an enhanced understanding of the meaning of life; depending on who the author/philosopher is, this increased knowledge borders on omnipresence.

25 Joel Myerson, Transcendentalism: A Reader (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxix.

Emerson, for example, sums up this transformative encounter rather dramatically in his essay, “Nature,” while speaking of walking in the woods:

Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith….Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye- ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.26

These encounters with the divine are meant to be both inspiring and terrifying. As

Emerson implies, one is not only expanded but almost obliterated by the force of what is formulated as bare nature. Edmund Burke, in a treatise in 1757 dubbed this particular type of awe the sublime. Natural spaces that fostered this feeling were especially precious to transcendentalists. Adrian Ivakhiv notes that for the Romantics (who adhered to a school of thought deeply intertwined with transcendentalism), the twinned feelings of awe and terror categorized an encounter with the sublime. The desire to stimulate feelings of the sublime through contact with “monumental nature” has mostly to do with pushing the limits of human understanding. The sublime, as Ivakhiv notes, “forever and accessible to the categories of reason…marked the inherent threshold of our knowledge and signified the cleavage between the conceived and the presentable.”27

26 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Mankind Is Inextricably Linked to Nature,” in Greg Barton (ed), American Environmentalism. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2002.

27 Adrian Ivakhiv, “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Towards a Jamesonian Ecocriticism,” New Formations, no. 64 (2008): 105. For both Kant and Bourke, the sublime represented the “incommensurability between nature and the human.”

The sublime then, when read through a lens of genre analysis, is always already fantastic. That which exceeds the bounds of our knowledge borders on, if not tips over into, the magical. A conception of the natural world which exceeds the bounds of human knowledge or reason runs through all of the narratives discussed herein.

This notion of interconnectedness is conducive to the sense that there exists a mystical energy inherent in nature would eventually be picked up and transformed by the counterculture to a near deification of the environment itself. Key to this transition was

James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which was first formulated by Lovelock in 1965 and developed over the course of almost a decade in a series of conversations with Lynn

Margulis.28 The Gaia hypothesis, as summarized in Lovelock’s 1979 text Gaia: A New

Look at Life on Earth, theorizes that “…the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life.”29

Though Lovelock did not initially intend it to, the Gaia hypothesis took on a religious inflection, as strands of environmentalism, including ecofeminism, saw a spiritual alternative to traditions of patriarchal sects, and promoted the benefits of a set of ethics that promoted symbiosis and egalitarianism over more Judeo-Christian notions that scripturally justified man’s dominion over nature. Lovelock, in a forward for a

28 Ruse, Michael, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

29 Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, vii. The hypothesis was first printed in a series of science journals by both Lovelock and Margulis before Lovelock translated it into his 1979 text. For more information on the development and early publications of the theory, see Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press, 2013.; Tyrrell, Toby. On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth, Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 2013.

theological text on the Gaia hypothesis, expressed his surprise over this mode of engagement with his theory, noting, “When my first Gaia book was published in 1979 I was astonished to receive twice as many letters from those interested in its religious aspects as from those interested in science.”30 The enthusiasm with which he pens the theological introduction, however, indicates that his surprise was not commensurate with displeasure. Furthermore, this linkage between religion and the Gaia hypothesis was in a way forged originally by Lovelock in the naming of his theory. Gaia is a Greek deity, considered the mother and progenitor not only of the earth, but the entire universe. The concept of the earth as Gaia, then, is useful for those wishing to generate conversation about the ethical nature of humanity’s abuse of the planet and also for feminists and other progressives seeking a new narrative that provides an alternative to patriarchal religions which most often justify and promote human domination over the environment.31

The Gaia hypothesis had a profound effect on the environmental movement.

According to the Gaia hypothesis, the collective natural world is nearly perfect, and nearly sentient—a kind of deity unto itself. Following this line of thinking, to interrupt with its holistic balance—the mystical way it functions “perfectly”—is perhaps not only morally repugnant but actually a form of blasphemy. There are two main dangers in pursuing a set of ecological ethics based on the Gaia hypothesis. The first is the notion that the earth takes care of itself, and that all humans have to do is get out of the way so the earth can “heal” from the incursions of civilization. This actively denies the profound

30 Lovelock’s Introduction to Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science (London: Routledge, 2001). ix.

31 See Pat Brereton, Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 19.

changes that human beings have already had on the earth. Geologists are currently contemplating declaring a new geological era, called the Anthropocene, based on the indelibility of these changes on the geological record: evidence of the vast amounts of earth moved, the altered chemical compositions of the atmosphere which will be preserved in stone, and non-compostable materials embedded in the earth’s surface will testify to a human presence on earth even long after our species is gone. This relabeling of the current geologic age testifies to humankind’s inability to integrate ourselves into what they perceive to be the baseline character of the planet, which is self-regulating sustainability.

Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, authors of a 2013 scholarly collection entitled

Gaia in Turmoil, polemicize against the notion of the Anthropocene in the introduction to their volume:

We still live in the Holocene and should resist the sirens of realism that call for branding our human-dominated era by a new name. We do not need the form of realism that surrenders to the seemingly unstoppable expansionism of human civilization in the biosphere, that resigns itself to more ecological losses, and that calls for coping in piecemeal fashion with consequences that come our way. Instead, we need an enlightened form of realism in order to undertake the tasks that can make the decisive difference…32

By being transparent in labeling what they are rejecting as “the sirens of realism,” Crist and Rinker seem to acknowledge that what they are actually resisting is the provable fact that human beings have irreversibly altered the planet. The acknowledgement of this evidence, Crist and Rinker imply, is tantamount to the acceptance that the encroachment of human beings into ever increasingly more spaces on the planet is inevitable. This mingling of the human with the “wild” will inevitably lead to environmental degradation.

32 Crist and Rinker, Gaia in Turmoil, 15.

This seems consonant with Lovelock’s assertion that “[t] here is only one pollution…people”33

This points to a second problem with the philosophical logic of the Gaia hypothesis—the false premise that there are privileged spaces on Earth that have existed without human alteration since the species first appeared on Earth. William Cronon, in what is perhaps one of the most respected and taught articles of eco-philosophy, “The

Trouble with Wilderness,” has strongly refuted the notion of wilderness as a privileged

“natural” space apart from humanity, and instead has detailed the myriad ways in which the concept of “wilderness” is constructed.34 Especially germane to the consequences of the Gaia hypothesis is the fallacy of nature as a domain free from human presence. In the

United States, the spaces we consider wild and “pristine” have been occupied by human beings for thousands of years, and thus the notion of wilderness is one that is predicated on the erasure of indigenous persons in the distant past, and the subsistence poor in recent history. This violence can get extrapolated to a global scale when one considers the types of spaces such a form of environmentalism values. This fascination with a symbiotically functioning globe is not only the preserve of self-conscious Gaian environmentalists, however, but has filtered into and influenced recent blockbuster cultural products that fetishize the specifics of the mechanics of the interconnections between non-human animals and the inanimate world. DisneyNature’s 2007 documentary Earth, for example,

33 James Lovelock, Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 122.

34 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, William Cronon, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995).

was released as a family-friendly feature-length version of the documentary television series Planet Earth, which was produced by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in

2006. While deeply diving into the interconnected ways various parts of the planet function in complementary ways, both pieces of media void humans from their narratives and cinematic frames. It is stunning to watch Earth, which clocks in at a time of just under two hours, and realize that Disney’s conception of “Earth” does not include any of the nearly seven billion human beings who lived on the planet at the time of the film’s release, nor any concrete evidence of their existence. This elision is not even commented upon; it is instead meant to be understood that Earth = nature = lack of humans.

Of course, there is an anti-speciest reading of the film that more generously includes an acknowledgment that there is enormous value in fostering a sense of the planet as home to many non-human animals that are intrinsically complicated and valuable independently of human existence or needs. And certainly the concept of the web-of-life that dovetails the notion of Gaia as a self-regulating system can call on us to be more mindful of how we as a species live. But by remaking the world to fit the concept of the sublime rather than by presenting a more complete view, we create a fantasy in the pejorative sense, in that the resultant narrative is not consonant with lived reality.

These Gaian narratives fetishize and reiterate notions of the sublime, in that they present nature as fierce and/or beautiful in order to spur a strong effectual response in the viewer. This transformation is assumed to be a prelude to a more environmentally progressive set of politics. Crist and Rinker, for example, end their introduction with a plea for emotional transformation:

We hope that this volume will provide readers a compelling understanding of Gaia as a way of knowing: Earth, home to countless and evolving species, diverse ecosystems, and complex biogeochemical processes, all interconnected and awaiting not only discovery but, even more crucially, the awakening of gratitude and awe.35

This sentiment is not aimed at children, but fellow scholars, and was written in

2010 and published by MIT press. There is a strong strand of environmentalism that promotes feelings of awe as a conduit toward increased levels of empathy toward the environment. Like Crist and Rinker, these narratives assert that human contact with nature leads to an ecological awakening, one that transforms one into a better environmental citizen. Thus, a profession of empathy is essential to those who wish to present themselves as model ecofantastic citizens.

Ecofantastic Tenet 2: Ecofantastic narratives actively blur the line between enchanted and magical.

In Ecofantastic narratives such as Pocahontas, Fern Gully, and the enchanted forest FedEx commercial, empathy is often presented as the ability to “listen” to the earth and her inhabitants. Two blockbuster films that were released in close proximity to each other, in 2005 and 2006, provided audiences with an opportunity to listen to the stories of penguins in two ostensibly different ways. March of the Penguins (2005) is purportedly a documentary about a year in the life cycle of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Happy

Feet (2006) is the animated story of a misfit penguin who uses his misunderstood dance skills to save his entire colony. While Happy Feet may on its surface seem more

35 Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 17.

transparently fantastical than March of the Penguins, many of the key breaks with reality that the two films present are startlingly similar. Both narratives juxtapose the lives of the penguins against the presumed experiences of the viewer in similar ways and to similar ends; Happy Feet makes explicit what is implied in March of the Penguins with less hyperbole than one might think.

Happy Feet not only takes the already anthropomorphized penguins from the documentary and makes them sentient enough to advocate, in English, for the projected human values such as love and family unity present in the documentary, but also makes the communitarian and utopian politics of the fantastical elements of March of the

Penguins more apparent and articulated. In the alternate universe we are presented in both of these films, penguins are basically human beings with human feelings and human motivations. We are also presented with a setting that is surreal in and of itself, but made even more fantastical in description—for example, the narration in the March of the

Penguins continuously refers to Antarctica as “the bottom of the world” and reiterates that it is “the most hostile place on earth.” It is beautiful, and it is dangerous: it is not a habitat we can naturally occupy. It is, in short, a space presented as the radical opposite to the world we know; it is ecologically othered. The alienness and the harshness of the climate is one of the selling points of the documentary, as we marvel at the ways the anthropomorphized penguins persist in maintaining successful nuclear families under the harshest of conditions.

March of the Penguins was directed by French biologist turned filmmaker Luc

Jacquet. The film emphasizes the harsh conditions that Emperor Penguins in Antarctica must endure in order to successfully reproduce, including multiple 70-mile treks to the

ocean's edge, and in the case of adult male penguins, three months without food. The penguins, we are told, do this not out of a biologically driven need to propagate their genetic line, but because of "love." The movie emphasizes the monogamy of the penguins

(or rather, as many critics have pointed out, it exaggerates the monogamy) in order to make the journey's end product an affectually cohesive family, the bonds of which make the survival in the impossible conditions "worth it." As Morgan Freeman puts in one of his voiceovers at the beginning of the film, “in some ways, this is a tale of survival… of triumph of life over death. But it’s more than that, really. This is a story about love.”

Happy Feet picks up and extends the themes inherent in March of the Penguins in a way that almost seems to assume that the viewer has familiarity with the latter before she or he sees the former. Whereas March of the Penguins delves deeply into the ways in which penguins survive and reproduce, Happy Feet zooms through much biological exposition. The processes of conception and incubation are quickly shown and briefly explained in a way that feels like a recap of known events rather than new exposition.

Furthering this impression of the intertextuality of the two films is the near perfect doubling of images from March of the Penguins in Happy Feet. As Happy Feet was illustrated from the same footage that comprised the documentary, many of the shots are visually repetitive for those viewers who have seen both films. For example, side by side images of a leopard seal attack are virtually indistinguishable, despite the fact that one is actual footage and the other is a CGI recreation. In other instances, Happy Feet recreates iconic shots but alters them slightly to make explicit the subtext of the way the shots are used in March of the Penguins, as in the shots of penguins touching beaks when they choose their mates. In March of the Penguins, the pseudo-heart shape their bodies form is

implied; in Happy Feet it is exaggerated and literalized. 36

Happy Feet diverges significantly from the topics covered in March of the

Penguins when a baby penguin named Mumble is born. Mumble is unusual in that, while all the other penguins can sing their own "heart song" (a transparently fantastical version of the particular unique call that each penguin has that they use to identify and find each other), Mumble cannot sing, but instead wants to dance. He feels ostracized from the community, but finds allies and purpose when he leaves the colony. He eventually finds out that it is human beings (called "aliens" in the film) overfishing that is causing a food shortage for the penguins. Through a series of misadventures, Mumble winds up in a zoo where no one can understand his speech—but they can understand his dancing. Mumble leads a group of scientists to his penguin colony, where penguins and people dance in harmony, which leads to a montage of media and political discussions with the UN banning fishing in Antarctic waters. This resolution occurs while the iconic lyrics, “And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take” plays in the background.

Of course, Happy Feet exaggerates the shared elements of the common stories much more clearly in some situations. The idea that penguins sing and dance, for example, is obviously taken much more literally in Happy Feet, but it is important to note that March of the Penguins refers to the penguin’s calls as “songs” and actions such as the transfer of the egg from mother to father as “ancient dances.” The protagonist penguin in Happy Feet performs these actions not only in the inescapable penguin coat and tails,

36 See images 1 & 2. The fact that documentary footage is shared by Happy Feet and March of the Penguins is noted in Michael Mallory, “The March of the (Singin’ and Dancin’) Penguins,” Animation 20, no. 12 (December 2006): 10–12.

but also in a bow tie.37 Similarly, whereas March of the Penguins notes the fantastical nature of the way in which the penguins find each other in large groups by crying out for each other with special sounds, Happy Feet gives the penguins the full power of language, allowing the individuated penguins to call to each other by name.

Perhaps most importantly, Happy Feet can be thought of as extending the politics of

March of the Penguins to an imagined happy ending.38 His fantastical narrative already requests that the viewer understand an impulse toward environmental harmony. In both the credits and on the DVD case, rather than saying “narration by Morgan Freeman,” the film tells us that this is a story “told by” Morgan Freeman. The opening credits also tell us that the documentary is “Based Upon the Story by” Luc Jacquet. True documentaries should, obviously, not be based on a story. In fact, Jacquet’s instructions to the original composer of the film was to give him “the sound of a fairy tale.” He adds, when speaking about the music, that “from the beginning, it was not my goal to make something tough, but to make a fairytale.”39 Jacquet has made explicit the specific environmental politics of the film in interviews and has expressed his belief (in accordance with the logic of fantasy) that a recognition of enchantment and a change in affect will lead to progress on environmental issues. When asked if he intentionally wanted to talk about the greenhouse

37 See images 3 & 4.

38 A happy ending for the penguins was in doubt at this point, as Emperor Penguins, the subject of the film, were in real danger and close to being placed on the endangered species list. See David Biello, “March of the Penguins—Onto the Endangered Species List” in Scientific American Blog Network. Accessed February 28, 2016. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/march-of-the-penguins-onto-the- end-2008-12-19/.

39 It is interesting to note, that in France, this anthropomorphization actually went even further, with the penguins talking for themselves.

effect in Antarctica, despite the fact that it is never mentioned explicitly in his film, he replied

It was intentional not to put a direct political message in the film. Everyone on the planet nowadays knows about global warming so to tell it directly again, was not the objective of my film. Maybe for me it’s more important to give something to love before I give the lesson. Ten or twenty years ago it wouldn’t have been the same situation. Back then, the goal was to put into people’s consciousness the basic ecological problems of the planet.40

In this way, enchantment and blatant fantasy, the uncanny and the marvelous, both run into each other in the service of the politics of the eco-fantastic.

Jacquet’s belief in the inherent goodness of the nature of all creatures on Earth is summed up nicely by Mumble, who, when trying to get humans to understand that they need to stop overfishing, is asked what his tactic to accomplish this will be, responds “If I could just talk to them, appeal to their better nature”—he never gets to finish this sentence, but we are to understand that Mumble believes that if our “better nature” is activated through an emotional recognition of the penguins as fellow species, there is no question that we would take the steps necessary to protect them.

Ecofantastic Tenet 3: Caring is a precondition of, and a teleological precursor to, progress.

One of the most iconic advertisements of the environmental movement is what is often referred to as the "Crying Indian" campaign. Produced in 1971 by the Ad Council, the thirty-second television spot features actor Iron Eyes Cody (who presented himself as

40 From an interview documented in Genevieve Jolliffe and Andrew Zinnes, The Documentary Film Makers Handbook (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 497.

Native American, but was later discovered to be of Sicilian decent), who paddles a canoe down a stream surrounded by forest to the sound of booming timpani drums. Dressed in fringed and embroidered buckskin, and wearing a feather in one of his braids, Cody travels further downstream and encounters floating trash and a factory spewing smoke on the side of the river as the music grows increasingly frantic. After pulling his canoe onto a litter-strewn beach, Cody continues the journey on foot. A low-voiced male narrator begins speaking, telling us that "Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country." Cody's face appears in close-up, looking determined but disturbed. The narrator contrasts this commitment by stating, "…and some people don't" as the camera shows us a woman throwing a bag of trash out of the car. The bag splashes open at Cody's feet. We see him in profile slowly raising his eyes from the trash to the camera as he turns toward us, revealing a single tear sliding down his right cheek.

The camera zooms in increasingly tighter on Cody's eye and the symbolic tear as the gravelly-voiced narrator chides, "People start pollution. People can stop it."

This public service announcement is so famous that it often stands in as the paradigmatic example of environmentalist deployment of the figure of the Ecological

Indian (a trope that presents Native Americans as prelapsarian avatars of environmentalist virtue) and has continued to be a frequent target of satire in popular culture, including in

The Simpsons (1998), Wayne's World 2 (1993), and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015).

Though many are familiar with the original advertisement, the follow-up print campaign is less well known and well studied, even though it makes transparent the ethics of the original television spot. In a paradigmatic full-page newspaper advertisement created in

1975, the page is horizontally bisected by large, bold-faced, message in all capital letters

that declares, "THERE THE LAND IS GOOD AGAIN BECAUSE ENOUGH PEOPLE

CARED." Above the inescapable take-home message of the missive, Iron Eyes Cody rides a horse toward the viewer through lush vegetation, including waving grasses that appear to be nearly as tall as he is. What appears to be rocky outcroppings appear in the background of the frame as the emblem of the campaign rides his steed down a sharply sloping hill. In the bottom left-hand corner of the page is an extreme close-up of Cody's face which freeze-frames the moment of the iconic tear from the first advertisement, while the slogan of that campaign is reiterated to its right, also in bold font: "People start pollution. People can stop it."

A cursory glance at the advertisement implies that a return to pristine nature has been wrought exclusively by a mass change in affect. There is a clear cause and effect to the main message of the piece—cause: enough people cared; effect: the land is good again. Paired with and superseding the original image and slogan in both size and visual importance, the ad gives the impression that because people were emotionally moved by the single tear shed by the human avatar for the earth, nature has experienced a resurgence in health and vitality.41

The smaller text on the page which is light in hue and dense, however, alters the meaning of both the image and the "headline." If we choose to engage with that text, we find that the land that Cody is riding through is actually a garbage dump that has had a botanic garden cultivated on top of it. The text posits, "A dump transformed into a paradise. Impossible?," which again reiterates the perceived incommensurability of the

41 Ad Council: Historical File, 1941-97, Series 13/2/207, Box 55 1975 Advertising Council Archives, University of Illinois Archives, 19 Library, Urbana, Illinois.

processes of disposable consumer culture and the notion of a healthy planet. The Ad

Council reassures us that such a transformation is not impossible "when enough people in a community get together and work." The text then encourages people to volunteer for their local Keep America Beautiful group and provides information about how to get involved. A careful reading of the full ad, therefore, does script a performance which includes collective action to enact change; however, two key features of the campaign undermine the efficacy of this idea in terms of larger environmentalist goals: the fact that the small text requires an engagement and level of attention that is a high barrier for an advertisement in a newspaper, and the fact that the specific campaigns that the Keep

America Beautiful campaign advocated for were largely cosmetic (i.e., layering an aesthetically pleasing garden on top of a dump). This shallow style of advocating is not surprising, considering the makeup of the board of directors that oversaw the campaign, which included representatives from the American Can Company and Bethlehem Steel, which had a vested interest in the perpetuation of disposable containers and goods; the relationship between these companies and their environmental investments will be examined in greater detail below.

The idea of caring leading to transformation is even less opaque in fictional environmental cinema. In "green" blockbuster films, especially those aimed at children, the idea of care leading to harmony is often hyperbolized and made literal. The notion of a friendship with the forest is possible and indeed necessary for the protagonist of the film to succeed in overcoming evil and destruction. This friendship is helped by being able to understand nature and its needs, and as such the earth and her non-human inhabitants can frequently speak, or, if linguistic communication is an impossibility, an

emphasis is put on various types of transcendent communication.

For example, in Disney’s Pocahontas, a very fictionalized John Smith travels with the Virginia Company and the Corrupt Governor Radcliffe to “the new world” to find resources to make Radcliffe wealthy. Despite the fact that Smith has been brought along to fight and kill any hostile indigenous people the English group might encounter, he proves himself trustworthy to the viewer and Pocahontas herself by being kind to the titular character’s raccoon friend in his first encounter with indigenous life. In Avatar,

Jake Sully’s conversion from exploitative human invader to problematic white savior of the fictional planet full of indigenous blue inhabitants is filtered through the vector of his love for a native woman and sensual education about the divinity of the planet, which functions like a single organism; Pandora is a cognitively estranged Gaia, and the path to protection is through love and recognition of its holistic magical properties. Both the book and film versions of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax proscribe caring as the only prerequisite for environmental improvement; the fictional figure of the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, leaves both the protagonist of the narrative and the reader with a maxim which has endured from the 1970s, when the book was published, to the present in which one can still see reruns of the recent film on television: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is ever going to get better. It's not.” Whereas suffering is a marker of virtue in melodrama, caring and empathy are markers of virtue in fantasy.

Ecofantatic Tenet 4: Corporations, people, and the state are inherently good when they profess that they care.

The precondition of caring is such a marker of good environmental citizenship that corporations have often foregrounded their affectual positioning vis-a-vis the

environment in order to claim an identity as ecologically virtuous corporate citizens. In her essay "Touch the Magic," Susan G. Davis explores the presentation of environmental corporate ethics through facilitation of a magical encounter with nature that is untroubled by the imperative for large-scale corporate change. Describing a spot that aired from

1993-4 with the same title as her article, Davis notes

…Sea World, and many similar mass media products it's fancy vision of nature's future that is consonant with the interest of corporate America. The green public relations version of nature not only of obscures a long history of relationships between human nature; it makes democratic pressures for environmental preservation, safety, and health invisible. Other parks like Sea World and adds like "touch the magic" appeal to call popular environmental concern, neither the problems of pollution and resource exhaustion or solutions from outside to the corporate sphere have a place in the sea world scenario. Rather theme parks show corporations like Anheuser-Busch rising to the conservation occasion with spontaneous Goodwill.42

It is somewhat ironic that Sea World is the subject of one of the more famous articles on corporate environmentalism, as at the time of the writing of this dissertation, Sea World as a corporation is under increased scrutiny and endangered by boycotts, bad publicity, drastically reduced revenue, and plummeting attendance numbers due to the documentary exposé Blackfish which alleged cruel treatment of orca whales that led to human deaths.

One defensive response Sea World had was to create a website to answer the allegations leveled against them by the documentary. It is telling that the URL of this digital repository is Seaworldcares.com; the one word that appends the moniker of the company that defends its virtue as a good corporate citizen is "cares."

42 Susan G. Davis, “Touch the Magic,” in Uncommon Ground (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 215.

*******

When corporations and people care together, such marketing argues, an affectual imagined community is created. As the entirety of this dissertation argues, the work of all genres is to create an imagined community based off the idea of a shared script, and in this way, I echo Rick Altman in his assertion that “It is the ‘fantasized’ community, this

‘invisible bond’ between viewers, that becomes important for fans of any genre."43

Katherine Fowkes mobilizes this quote from Altman in order to tug on a particular narrative thread that she claims constitutes one of the most important myths that circulates in the constellated community created by fantasy around "the theme of home."

Fowkes claims that one of the most robust motifs in fantasy is that no place in the universe is preferable to one's home.44

Much mainstream environmental rhetoric frames the earth as our home—for example, Barack Obama, announcing his clean energy plan in August of 2015 noted in his remarks to the press that, "We only get one home. We only get one planet. There is no plan B."45 This statement echoes an ethics of care akin to familial investment in the domestic sphere, and can be perceived as conscripting all living beings into an imagined family unit; this is the grandest application of the fantastic imagined affective community.

One way that the ecofantastic signals its own untenability is through a deployment

43 Altman, Film/Genre, 165.

44 Fowkes, The Fantasy Film, 11.

45 “Remarks by the President in Announcing the Clean Power Plan,” Whitehouse.gov, August 3, 2015. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2015/08/03/remarks-president-announcing-clean-power-plan.

of a green type of infantile citizenship. Lauren Berlant defines the infantile citizen as a figure that glosses the reality of national hierarchies and inequities and yet inspires with the notion that we might remake a world that could sustain his or her impossible beliefs.

Berlant explains that

[T]he infantile citizen’s ingenuousness frequently seems a bad thing, a political subjectivity based on the suppression of critical knowledge and a resulting contraction of citizenship to something smaller than agency: patriotic inclination, default social membership, or the simple possession of a normal national character. But the infantile citizen’s faith in the nation, which is based on a belief in the state’s commitment to representing the best interests of ordinary people, is also said to be what vitalizes a person’s patriotic and practical attachment to the nation and to other citizens.46

The idea that the ability of children to believe in the impossible, and the ways in which that leap of faith transforms the polity that the child protagonist is a part of, is a key theme in fantasy. Whereas Berlant is invested in the political downsides of the nation’s investment in the infantile citizenship, writers of and about fantasy narratives generally hold in common a faith in the transformative power of children. Many fantasy stories not only appeal to children, or have child protagonists, but locate hope for a better future in these child readers and heroes. J.R.R. Tolkien himself suggested that children have superior powers to encounter the fundamental truths of the world even as he argued that fantasy should be considered a genre for all ages. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,”

Tolkien argues that one of the primary purposes of the genre is to assist the reader in seeing the world more lucidly as the genre assists the “ability to clean our windows; so

46 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27-28.

that the thing seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or similarity…”47

In arguing that fantasy helps adults encounter the world as if again seeing it for the first time, Tolkien stresses the importance of a childlike mindset to fantasy and elevates youth’s lack of preconceptions. Familiar things, asserts Tolkien, become “like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”48

This conception of childhood implies that even if children are more associated with the imaginative and irrational, they are also allowed greater leave to break from the rules and conventions of society.49 This leads them to a kind of superior wisdom, and allows for, as Petrie observes, “adults in the audience to see their own absurdity and harshness through the eyes of the child.”50

This faith in the transformative power of the clear-eyed vision of children may be one reason we see so many blockbuster environmental family-friendly fare. Another, slightly more cynical reason, has to do with ticket sales. Aiming the ecofantastic primarily at children and fantasies means that the message has a higher chance of being seen because family fantasy cinema is often high-grossing at the box office. As it is often not only targeted at multiple generations (especially children and their parents), but

47 J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories,” in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 146.

48 ibid

49 See also Warner and Petrie, Cinema and the Art of Enchantment, 39.

50 ibid, 44.

suffused with spectacle which often provides a box-office draw, and revolves around plots whose morals are clear and plots easily translatable across cultures, fantasy films are often global financial successes.51 We’re currently in a perhaps unprecedented time for fantasy films. Butler observes that 2001 was "a pivotal year" for fantasy, noting the release of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the

Sorcerer’s Stone, and even goes as far as to argue that "fantasy film would indeed appear to be experiencing something of a golden age.”52

Less cynically, these filmic products that are good bets for producers provide ready frames for progressive themes. Because it is popular and often associated with children, scholars note, fantasy has not always been taken seriously by scholars or censorious states, and therefore can be especially good vehicles for radically subversive statements.53 In fact, the label of "fantasy" has often been seen as a type of denigration, implying that the cultural product is childish or trivial or meant to "seduce us with unrealistic wish-fulfillment."54 Because fantasy is perceived as less politically loaded, it has often been a vehicle for projecting ideas into a different world to avoid seeming like

51 Jennings, “Fantasy,” 258. One might also look to the birth of cinema, and the silent films of Georges Méliès, to think about the attraction and transferability of fantasy for wide varieties of audience.

52 Butler, Fantasy Cinema, 5.

53 See, for example, Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger) 2010; Butler, Fantasy Cinema; Fowkes, The Fantasy Film.

54 Fowkes, The Fantasy Film, 1. Butler also argues that there was a perception in early fantasy cinema that it "cannot or should not be subjected to meaningful critical analysis." He intimates that this is because it was primarily based on spectacle. Butler, Fantasy Cinema, 2.

criticizing current society. Through cognitive estrangement, fantasy provides an opportunity to project dangerous or tricky concepts onto a more innocuous template, since texts are able to discuss societal flashpoints while still being able to disavow political intent. “The frame of the fairytale made possible a certain outspokenness, the hope held out by the genre made possible rank confrontation of pain and torment” observes Petrie, continuing to note that people who can’t say what they want to say often project things into fables and made up stories, because “special effects and magic” can

“disguise depths of our rage and anger.” 55

Furthermore, the questions fantasy raise are of great import. If a protagonist has to choose between two worlds (as Jennings argues is true of much fantasy) "How can the characters make the choices which confront them at the ends of the films except by examining their values and deciding under what circumstances they can live freely and happily given those values?"56 These questions, he notes, can include such heavy inquiries as"... which is stronger, good or evil? What is the nature of power? How can love conquer hate?” These questions, he asserts, are “simple but not simpleminded."57

The ability of fantasy to raise complex questions is just one of the reasons contemporary scholars have begun to defend the genre as an opportunity for creative progressive thought. If we extrapolate Tolkien’s distinction between the risk of confusing

"the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter," we might interpret this environmentalist desire for flight as indicative of a desire for something different than

55 Petrie, Cinema and the Art of Enchantment, 25–26.

56 Jennings, “Fantasy,” 251.

57 Jennings, “Fantasy,” 257.

reality can currently provide; it indicates an intense dissatisfaction with current systems.58

At their best, fantasy narratives do not only let us escape an imperfect world, however; they allow us to imagine a better one. This decentering is handy for environmentalists who seek to get large swaths of the population to recognize the inherent value of nature.

********

To become the hero of the ecofantastic narrative is to transform into someone who cares about the environment, who sees nature as enchanted and “listens” to what it has to say. The ecofantastic hero proclaims her or his affectual connection to a Gaian world in order to try to convert others as well.59 Though ecofantastic narratives ask us to—in the words of the fairy elder from Fern Gully—“resist the forces of destruction,” the allegorical nature of these stories means that the audience is not meant to take the imperative as physical instruction; these narratives are not asking us to stand between a bulldozer and a tree, but to talk to other people and to try to get them to honor the earth more. This may be another byproduct of cognitive estrangement: trees get hyperbolized into magical trees, feelings into action. When we watch Avatar, for example, the film is not trying to convince us that there is a magical tree somewhere that can bring people back to life, but nor is it asking us to go against the army and risk our lives to stop mineral extraction.

Becoming the hero in the ecofantastic journey is cathartic, because one has already succeeded when one cares, and one enters into an imagined constellated affective community by changing his or her affect. The ecofantastic reiterates the construct of nature that William Cronon criticizes—the false notion of a wilderness untouched by

58 See Butler, Fantasy Cinema, 101.

human hand.60 The problem with this, as Sean Cubitt puts it, is that psychic divide does not just cause a disconnect, but, “[I]n fact, that model of pristine nature is as politically responsible for the division of humans from nature as humanity’s assaults on the green world.”61

Jennifer Price pushes the political implications of this idea, using an examination of the plastic pink flamingo to draw out the ways in which the separation of nature and culture mask the ways that people use natural resources. The alienation of commodities from source materials caused by the contrasting of the real and the artificial is examined by tracing the “natural history” of the plastic lawn bird. Though pink flamingos are thought of as the height of artifice, she notes, every component of the campy suburban decoration is made of natural resources: the birds stand on steel legs; their petroleum- based plastic bodies are covered with vibrant petroleum-based paint, and they begin their existences by being forged in steel molds before they are packaged in cardboard and transported by fossil fuel powered trucks. Price puts a fine point on the imperative to recognize that the plastic pink flamingo does, in fact, have a natural history. She stresses

The definition of nature as anti-artifice has always erased the human presence in our bastions of Nature and the definition of artifice as anti- nature has erased the nature used to manufacture it. My generation and class have wielded a vision of naturalness that sidesteps our own complicity in the aggressive and unsustainable uses of natural resources. And we’ve made it ever more entrenched as our economic power has

60 Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”

61 Sean Cubitt, Eco Media (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005), 2.

grown. Would you believe that the history of the pink flamingo has a moral? The symbol of artifice is actually nature incarnate.62

The disavowal of “artificial” commodities as antithetical to nature is a major theme in many ecofantastic narratives. The Lorax, in particular, epitomizes this false binary with opening words, delivered by the title character: “We open in Thneedville, a city, they say, that was plastic and fake and they liked it that way. A Town Without Nature. Not one living tree. So what happened to them? Cue the music! Let’s see…” Because the town is made of plastic, the Lorax tells us, it is “A Town Without Nature.” In doing so, he places the blame for environmental degradation more on the exile of trees than on the act of resource consumption. The problem is that there are no trees, which sets up the film to have a resolution in which all of the problems of the town can be solved by planting a single seed in town square; this in fact, is the solution the plot proposes.

Ted, a boy who wants a Truffula Tree seed to impress a girl named Audrey who wants to see a real tree, seeks out to find the Once-ler, a recluse who lives outside of town that we learn is the individual responsible for the extinction of the Truffula Trees. In flashbacks, we see the Once-ler strike out on his own as a young man and settle down in a forest with singing, anthropomorphic, adorable animals. Ted cuts down a Truffula Tree in order to use the soft fronds to knit an invention called a thneed (an amorphous commodity). This act of tree cutting summons the Lorax, who is a sort of protector spirit for the forest, who attempts to save the Truffula Trees from the Once-ler by various means. The Once-ler proceeds to produce thneeds in what he feels is a sustainable manner, and manages to make the fuzzy knit product popular. This leads him to cut down

62 Jennifer Price. “The Plastic Pink Flamingo,” The American Scholar 68.2 (1999): 73. Web. 25 Feb. 2016, 88.

an increasing number of trees to keep up with the demand. As he grows in wealth, his scofflaw, no good family shows up to feed off of his success. They arrive in a trailer that expands to a monstrous home, dismaying the Lorax and terrorizing the animals of the forest as it quickly adds stories. The last horrifying touch, however—the piece de resistance of class shame, irresponsible consumption and bad taste—is a plastic pink flamingo emphatically speared into the lawn by a robotic hand.

Though The Lorax borders on leveling a fairly scathing critique of capitalism, particularly with a song called “How Bad Could I Possibly Be?,” sung by the Once-ler as he grows in wealth and becomes monstrous, the larger politics of the film undercut the scathingness of such lyrics as “Complain all you want, it's never ever, ever, ever gonna stop…I'm just building an economy/Just look at me pettin' this puppy/A portion of proceeds goes to charity/How bad can I possibly be? Let's see./All the customers are buying/And the money's multiplying/And the PR people are lying/And the lawyers are denying/Who cares if a few trees are dying?/This is all so gratifying.” In order to understand how weak the overall criticism of neoliberal society is, we could look at its integration into neoliberal marketing practices. The Lorax was used to market an astounding array of things, from plastic merchandise to Mazda SUVs. 63

However, though there was much deserved critique about the “greenwashing”

63 This complicity in greenwashing was blatant enough the raise the heckles of the mainstream media. See Andrew Lapin, “The Lorax Speaks For The SUVs,” NPR.org. Accessed April 27, 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/03/02/ 147806335/ the-lorax-speaks-for-the-suvs; Ed Gillespie, “Greenwash and Hamming It up – Mazda Makes a Mess of CX-5 Advert.” The Guardian, February 27, 2012, sec. Environment. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/feb/27/mazda-advert- dr-seuss-lorax; Bryan Walsh, “Why The Lorax Shouldn’t Be Selling SUVs,” Time, March 6, 2012. http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2108368,00.html.

engaged in by the film (marketing itself as environmentally friendly while engaging in and promoting unsustainable practices), I believe that a problem with the film that is as serious but did not get as much attention are the baffling scriptive politics. Both the residents of Thneedville and the audience are being asked to care about things that constitute “nature” without fundamentally examining the things that are destroying it.

Despite the somewhat cutting critique of capitalism in the song “How Bad Can I Be?,” the film’s political solution does not actually lie in consuming less but in appreciating and fostering “nature” more, without drawing a clean line between the two as it did in the beginning. We understand that the Once-ler became evil as he became greedier and cut down more trees, but the consumers of thneeds are presented more as innocent dupes than as active participants in the destruction of natural resources. Indeed, the final song,

“Let it Grow,” is partially sung on the artificial ski slopes adjoining an artificial beach that have been presented cheekily as evidence of the good living caused by environmental manipulation and are uncritically presented again in their candy-colored glory at the end of the film. The lyrics “Maybe it’s just one tiny seed/but it’s all we really need/it’s time to change the life we lead/time to let it grow,” doubly refer to the last

Truffula Tree seed that Ted has been given by the Once-ler and also to the germination of care for the “natural” world blossoming inside each individual. However, one seed and a large scale affectual change will not actually make any substantive difference for a town with toxic air and toxic water. What is actually called for are radical changes in consumption habits and lots of personal sacrifice of goods and services, an issue elided by the end of the film.

Though, as Bennett has asserted, there is political power in enchantment, and

though many scholars have noted the potential of fantasy to imagine alternate futures, the reiteration of a false nature/culture binary means that ecofantasies are not asking us to reimagine society very deeply. While a Gaian notion of a deified earth may seem to address Lynn White Jr.’s assessment that “More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one,” the ecofantastic’s largely positive view of the goodness of those who profess to care means that the form makes it difficult to question the actual mechanisms of government and neoliberal trade that are, in reality, largely responsible for the problems these narratives seek to ameliorate.64

Heteronormativity is a given in these films, even when the protagonists are nonhuman. In the animated tale The Lorax, the protagonist Ted’s quest to find a tree is motivated solely by the desire to win the affection of a girl he has a crush on. The penguins in March of the Penguins are apocryphally presented as uniformly monogamous and heterosexual, when it is well known during the release of the film that penguins engage in monogamous homosexual relationships as well; the children’s book And Tango

Makes Three about Roy and Silo, the then-monogamous high profile penguins at the

Central Park Zoo, was released the same year as the award winning documentary.65

White men are the avatar for audience members in most of these films— occasionally literally. In many of the more enduring ecofantastic narratives (Fern Gully,

Pocahontas, Avatar), the conversion of these white male figures from part of the problem

64 Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science (155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–7), 183.

65 Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell, and Henry Cole, And Tango Makes Three (New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005).

to prophet of the forest occurs through contact with racially and sexually primitivist figures. Through his contact with the indigenous, the hero solidifies his rugged masculinity, learns the wisdom of the forest, and, in the case of Jake Sully from Avatar, who begins the film in his human body in a wheelchair, has his perceived disability corrected by fully “going native” and inhabiting his indigenous avatar permanently. This change in affect that results in greater intimacy with the “natural” world is usually consummated by sensual or sexual contact with a sexually exoticized indigenous female.

Environmental fantasies ask us to reconsider what we think we know, or what we think is possible, in our world, even while they present pain and chaos as mistakes marring a world that would be naturally happy and utopic if everything were in balance; this suggests a reality that is contrary to phenomenological evidence. On the one hand, it makes sense that fantasy serves as a ready frame for environmentalism, as it is popular, historically a vehicle for morally progressive thought, and generates an affect of wonder which, at the very least, has the possibility to decenter people and ask them to transform.

On the other, fantasy often encodes violent assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality; reinforces the nature/culture divide; assumes a teleological connection between affect and action; and often fails in its potential to imagine a future radically other than our own, especially when it comes to neoliberal capitalism, which is sometimes exemplified in the marketing of disposable goods around an ostensibly "green" text.

This incommensurability is present not only in filmic discourses, but also in the discourse and practices of most mainstream environmental non-profit organizations.

Naomi Klein’s recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate points out, many environmental organizations continue to actively work with fossil fuel

companies, even as they acknowledge that we are rapidly passing the threshold to limit the world to two degrees Celsius of climate change (a temperature that, even if we hold at it, will have devastating effects on life on Earth). Klein exposes that some of these organizations not only cooperate with the industries, but take money from them, have petroleum experts sitting on their boards, invest their endowments in fossil fuel companies, or, in the case of the Nature Conservancy, even drill for oil on their own lands. The chapter detailing these behaviors that have impacts that are completely incommensurate with the stated ideology of the organizations falls in the second section of the book. The title of that section? “Magical thinking.”66

66 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York; London: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

Images 1 & 2

Images 3 & 4

Chapter 2: The Western and Radical Environmentalism

In the wilds of the frontier, a single man and his ragtag crew of brave followers are tasked with protecting the innocent from a barbaric racialized other that time has left behind. In a space in which the laws are either ambiguous, not enforced, or both, this group must take the law into their own hands, even though they understand that their actions will cause them to be ostracized from society. Some call them heroes, others call them outlaws, but charged with a clear moral imperative, this group and their fearless leader fight both bureaucracy and barbarians and risk their lives in order to live by their morals.

Although this story structure could typify the plot of a western film, it applies equally to the series Whale Wars on Animal Planet, which has been airing since 2008 and follows the exploits of infamous radical environmentalist Captain Paul Watson and the

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), his international crew of volunteers. Each season of the show follows a particular “campaign” in which the radical environmentalists sail a fleet of ships down to the Southern Ocean in Antarctica and navigate the elements in order to attempt to disrupt and ultimately end the practice of whaling there by Japanese fishermen.

Like all radical environmentalists, Watson and the rest of the SSCS have rejected mainstream legal action as a viable tactic to change environmental policy. Instead, they employ extreme methods to accomplish their aims. Their tactics include everything from throwing rotten-smelling chemicals on the decks of Japanese processing ships, to boarding harpoon ships and refusing to leave, to attempting to disable the fleet by deploying steel cords called prop-fowlers designed to immobilize propulsion systems.

Tactical maneuvers have resulted in multiple collisions at sea, for which both the Sea

Shepherds and Japanese whaling fleets claim the other party is at fault. These controversial methods are specifically designed to attract media attention, and although they are often dangerous or of suspect veracity, many succeed in that aim.

Whale Wars is the vanguard of mainstream radical environmentalist discourse circulating in popular culture, and the narrative that structures the activists’ exploits has been carefully crafted to convey certain information about the radical environmental movement in a way that is meant to be easily recognizable and politically familiar to mainstream audiences.1 This chapter argues that the protagonists of Whale Wars deploy, consciously shape, and promote a western framing in order to communicate moral imperatives to the audience by positioning themselves as ‘the only sheriff in town,’ battling a racialized other in a (judicially uncertain) remote frontier. In addition to resonating because of the overlap of given circumstance, I argue that the western is a ready frame for radical environmentalists in terms of ideology, genealogy, and solidarity.

The western emphasizes the imperative of radical individuals to care for citizens the state has failed to protect and legitimates the use of moral violence to accomplish that aim.

Fealty to the western also facilitates solidarity because the invocation of different genres

1 Whale Wars has proven a hit for Animal Planet over the six years it has aired on that channel, and has arguably spawned a new sub-genre of reality television, with Animal Planet adding Battleground: Rhino Wars to what Marjorie Kaplan, president and general manager of the station, describes as their “muscular conservation strand” which focuses on “heroes” who are “risking their lives” battling forces that operate solely for “greed and profit,” and Pivot introducing their own “eco-adventure” series starring “eco- warrior” Pete Bethune, a former Sea Shepherd ally who played a large role in season 3 of Whale Wars. See Discovery Communications, Battleground: Rhino Wars Press Release, http://press.discovery.com/ekits/rhino-wars/press-release.html. Last accessed 09/03/14, and Sara Bibel, "Pivot's Eco-Adventure Series 'The Operatives' to Premiere Sunday, August 17," Last modified August 7th, 2014, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/08/07/pivots-eco-adventure-series-the-operatives- to-premiere-sunday-august-17/291367/

is part of a contest about the correct politics of relating to the environment: genre functions not only to limn the parameters of what is right and what is wrong, but also to proscribe a set of actions that are internally consistent. This is not to say that radical environmentalists have not altered or amended the frame; below, I will show how individual activists have turned to other cognate genres that, like the western, fall under the umbrella genre of action adventure. The politics of the umbrella genre of actions adventure also promote radical individualism and moral outlawism.

Genealogically, the western has been used as a frame by radical environmentalists as far back as the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a 1979 pulp western novel that fictionalized the illegal environmentalist antics of its author, Edward Abbey, and came to serve as a “bible” for the founders of Earth First! The western has been a historically consistent narrative guide as those that push the politics of radical environmentalism seek to make certain sets of moral positions, affects, and performances increasingly hegemonic, powerful, and influential in the public sphere.

The western emphasizes the imperative of radical individuals to care for citizens when the state fails to do so and legitimates the use of moral violence to accomplish that aim. Though the costuming and setting of Whale Wars may deviate from traditional westerns, the protagonists of the show are adept at tailoring their performances and statements so that viewers quickly understand that the tenets of the western are meant to guide how they should feel about certain events and what they should do in order for the story to conclude with a happy ending. This rhetorical posturing is often quite blunt. The show is peppered with bits of dialogue such as “We’re really in the Wild West. We do what we have to do,” and “It’s hard being the only sheriff down here. There’s no law

down here but us.”2 These types of statements immediately invoke the western and signal the Sea Shepherds as the moral center of the story; we are meant to understand that they are charged with upholding the rules that others are either too weak or too unwilling to enforce. It also positions the Japanese as outlaw criminals that need to be brought to justice through extrajudicial means.

Because social movement messages are inherently a plea for action, the generic structuring often makes some responsive performances seem logical and others illogical in the context of actions taken on behalf of the environment. Watson’s commitment to this vision of himself and his compatriots as “the only sheriffs in town” extends beyond narrative sound bites. Watson and the Sea Shepherds often use the western as a performative framework—a guide for the differential valuation of tactics. The Sea

Shepherds have been known to use the stratagem of posting wanted posters to great effect, plastering them around harbors where whaling ships dock and offering $25,000 rewards to anyone who sinks the ships they are targeting. By invoking and performing certain scenarios involving a few concomitant tropes of the western, the Sea Shepherds can mobilize a constellation of political ideas in an attempt to legitimize their actions.

The genre offers several performance positions from which observers can participate in the storyline. The events of the narrative will resonate with different audiences in different ways, and the cast of Whale Wars is counting on different types of reception that may lead to various types of support. The Sea Shepherds do not expect sympathetic viewers to embrace their tactics and way of life or abandon other positive conceptions of environmentalism. Just because a viewer may accept the frame of the

2 See Whale Wars Season 2, Episode 8: “The Crazy Ivan.” Paul Sherwin, dir., Whale Wars: Season 2 (Discovery - Gaiam, 2009).

radical environmental movement doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she rejects all other frames, or that he or she has to respond to that acceptance by becoming a radical environmentalist. Participants in the frame have the ability to act like the townsperson in a western, which is to say that they can choose to accept that extrajudicial violence is occurring by largely looking the other way. That role is built into the frame; individuals can chide the darkness that brings about change while still allowing it to happen or tacitly accepting that it needs to happen by largely ignoring it. Others will respond by simply accepting the frame and advancing the expected story: they can be said to perceive their role of that of audience member or townsperson. Audience members can acknowledge that they are uncomfortable with the tactics while still feeling as though someone has to do something can see the extrajudicial violence as a stopgap before traditional law and order catches up. They can dearly wish for the problem to be taken care of by legal means even as they understand that the law has no teeth yet in the frontier in which the battle between good and evil is being fought. On the other hand, a tiny fraction of viewers will respond by wanting to become the cowboys (but of course, inherent in the frame is the idea that but a few noble souls will do this and that it is a sacrifice to do so).

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the political implications of framing a story as a western. Sara L. Spurgeon points out, “...[stories] from and about the West allow us to continually reimagine how multiple cultures should coexist, how humans should interact with nature, what we should think and how we should feel about our history and our future.”3 In the transnational sphere of the Southern Ocean, the Sea

3 Sara L. Spurgeon, Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), For other relevant discussions on the western and the politics of “nature” see also Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment

Shepherds investigate these same questions—how multiple states can negotiate claims to parts of the biosphere, what constitutes appropriate interactions with the natural world, and how we can learn from past corruptions to rethink what it means to be civilized. In doing so, they reopen the ideological territory that was supposedly closed with the frontier. By moving the line between settlement and wilderness to the Southern Ocean, the figures explored in this chapter are presenting themselves as ideal subjects to found a new kind of community: rugged individualists who have earned dominion over contested

“natural” spaces, who are tasked with bringing a new kind of “civilization” to a global community.4 Radical environmentalists use western plot lines to advocate for the reconsideration of the current anthropocentric conceptions of community in favor of a biocentric expansion of rights.

The frontier allows for the reimagining of civilization partially because it is a space of legal ambiguity, and so it is not a surprise that the Sea Shepherds have found success in international waters. Radical tactics are much more easily carried out in large, sparsely populated spaces of semi-lawlessness, where sabotage can be undertaken more secretly and where the outlaw hero can hide. This capacity for allowing moral fugitives to evade the long arm of the law was recently demonstrated by Watson who was declared an internationally wanted fugitive by Interpol in August 2012 and who, after jumping bail in

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012); Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, et al and Thomas J. Harvey, eds, Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2003); Deborah A. Carmichael, The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2006).

4 For the founders of the movement (whom I address in the full chapter) that space was the original space of the frontier as the “wild” spaces of the American West was encroached upon by development.

Germany, stayed on his ship in international waters for fifteen months to evade capture and prosecution for an altercation with a Costa Rican shark finning vessel in 2002.

According to the frontier thesis, certain types of moral violence are not only permitted in the frontier but are instead endemic to the formation of a new civilization. In his book From Guns to Gavels: How Justice Grew Up in the Outlaw West, Bill Neal notes that in each iteration of the expansion of the frontier,

a similar evolution in the establishment of the law occurred: no law in the beginning, then self-help redressal of wrongs (usually called ‘Winchester law’), then law enforcement by private groups (e.g., vigilante committees, stockmen’s protective organizations such as the ‘anti-horse thief association’ plus lynch mobs spontaneously formed to mete out punishment for specific crimes deemed to have been particularly egregious by the local community), and finally the beginnings of a crude court-administrated justice system that struggled to gain ascendancy over the earlier self-help forms of reining in outlawry.5

In much this way, radical environmentalists have deemed it necessary to take the law into their own hands because of the failure of state mechanisms to protect the

“innocent” and mete out “justice” in a lawless territory; they further argue that environmental loss occurs at a rate that bureaucracy and legislation cannot hope to keep up with. Some practice a sort of “Winchester law” of individually and extra-legally protecting those they see as innocent (the wild) from the corrupt and greedy (individuals

5 Bill Neal, From Guns to Gavels: How Justice Grew Up in the Outlaw West (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press), xvi. For other relevant sources about the relationship between violence and civilization in the western, see also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. New edition. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Have: Yale University Press, 2010); Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001).

and corporate interests seeking to “damage” the wild).6 Radical environmentalists also form vigilante groups that mete out extralegal justice more conspicuously (such as

Watson and the Sea Shepherds). Scholars have noted that showdowns occur on Main

Street between the hero(s) and villain(s) because such showdowns are public affairs, and because they are ultimately about who will be ruler and how the collective will be ruled.

Radical environmentalists are trying to win in the court of public opinion, not in

Congress or the court of law — they are instead asking the public to question the very legitimacy of the (moral) authority of the law.

Whale Wars continually emphasizes the legal ambiguity at play in the Southern

Ocean, along with the difficulty/unwillingness of nations to actually enforce the laws that do apply, albeit with some haziness of jurisdiction. This problem is clearly stated and emphasized in the introductory voiceover to each episode, which reminds the viewer that,

“The Sea Shepherds say that the whalers are violating an international ban on commercial whaling. The whalers say that they are legally killing whales for scientific research.” The contested claims to legitimacy focus mostly around the guidelines of the International

Whaling Commission [IWC]. Though the Southern Ocean technically became a whale sanctuary in 1994, which means that commercial whaling there was banned entirely, the provision also allowed for whales to be killed for the purposes of “scientific research.”

Complicating the matter further, the IWC allows each member nation to stipulate their own annual numbers for scientific whaling and has further mandated that those whales that are killed for scientific research not only can be used for meat, but that the whale carcasses, in fact, must be used and not discarded. The Japanese have set their annual

6 This occurs, for example when individuals spike trees in an effort to keep logging companies from cutting them down (this was a common Earth First! tactic).

number at 1,000 whales to be killed for scientific research and use a gigantic factory ship called the Nishan Maru that allows them to butcher the whales on deck, packaging and refrigerating the resultant meat below deck. The Sea Shepherds acknowledge this legal loophole, but point to the lack of studies that have actually resulted from the “scientific research” the Japanese claim to be conducting and the massive profits they reap from the whale kills. They counter the IWC loophole by invoking the 1982 UN World Charter for

Nature, which includes the language,

States and, to the extent that they are able, other public authorities, international organizations, individuals, groups, and corporations shall...Implement the applicable international legal provisions for the conservation of nature and the protection of the environment...[and] Safeguard and conserve nature in areas beyond national jurisdiction.7

Because both the UN and the IWC are international organizations without actual authority to police and enforce their rulings, and because both the whaling and the dubiously legal actions of the Sea Shepherds occurs in international waters, both the Sea

Shepherds and the Japanese whalers can claim their actions are legal and sanctioned by an international body.

In the western, a moral code often fills the void left by the absence of codified law, and violence is recognized as legitimate when wielded by the legibly righteous. The idea that moral authority is recognizable and able to protect its bearer against enemy attacks is hyperbolized in a particularly dramatic incident that concludes the last episode of the first season of Whale Wars. Captain Watson stands stalwart on the deck of the ship as the

Japanese throw flash grenades at the boat. Around the same time we hear one explode, we see Watson grimace and stumble back to the bridge. He opens his jacket to reveal a

7 "A/RES/37/7. World Charter for Nature," UN News Center, UN, 18 Oct. 1982. Last accessed 6 Oct. 2014. .

Kevlar vest with a bullet hole in it, and then undoes the vest to reveal his bullet damaged anti-poaching badge, which has ostensibly stopped the bullet from further harming his person.

The veracity of this incident is heavily contested by skeptics who argue that he would have been knocked backward by the shot and received an eggplant-sized bruise from the impact. However, the incident still made international news, prompting the

Japanese to issue a statement mocking Watson by noting, “As in Western movies, the claim is that he was miraculously saved by a badge.”8 Close examination of the badge points to the larger hybridizing of action adventure narratives that the show engages in, as the badge number is clearly imprinted as “007.”9

The theatricality of this incident serves to highlight Watson’s commitment to the western frame—ultimately, he was more concerned with the framing of his actions than with potentially looking foolish or mendacious. Whether or not people believed him, he was creating a bold performance that invoked recognizable tropes that not only fit the frame of the movement by clearly implicating the Japanese as violent and dangerous and proving his goodness through an attack on the physical manifestation of virtue, the badge, which ultimately protected him from unwarranted assaults from those less moral than he.

This incident also serves to dramatize what the Sea Shepherds see as the disparity between the two types of violence deployed by themselves and the Japanese whalers.

Whereas the Japanese whalers’ violence is directed toward animals (and, if you believe

Watson, people), the Sea Shepherds’ violence is directed toward the ships and machines that enable the whaling. The badge incident seems crafted to highlight the idea that only

8 Whale Wars, Season 1, Episode 7: “Boiling Point.”

9 See image 5

those who seek to protect the innocent are moral enough to wield violence in the service of political force.

Watson also frequently repeats an origin story for himself that fits this mythic framing. He has claimed repeatedly in memoirs and interviews that he became radically political when he joined the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in 1973.

Additionally, he claims that while there he participated in a sweat lodge ceremony in which he had a “vision” in which he freed a buffalo with a rope around its neck. He claims that this dream was interpreted for him to mean that he was meant to save the buffalo of the sea, the whales. Watson only tells this story in some circumstances and some details seem to have altered over time, but he consistently uses his futile desire to save the buffalo as a primary event in his founding myth. He states in a memoir, for example,

I remember thinking of the buffalo on the Great Plains. I had always wished there had been champions for the buffalo back then. The Plains Indians had indeed tried, but what had been needed were buffalo defenders with the technology to have made a difference. I had often fantasized about riding over the hills with a Sherman tank, an armoured shepherd blowing buffalo hunters to hell and taking on the U.S. Army if they tried to intervene. Now I had the opportunity to do for future generation what I wished some of our forefathers had done for us.10

By imagining himself as the protector of natural resources in a western myth, Watson is not only attempting to naturalize himself as the hero of the story, but also attempting to fix the Japanese as villainous squanderers of resources. Genre becomes utilitarian shorthand because it communicates strong moral dichotomies that are readily picked up by the media. Watson and the Sea Shepherds not only select language that will present

10 Paul Watson, Ocean Warrior: My Battle to End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas (Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1994), 16.

themselves as moral radical individualists, but also characterize the Japanese in ways that reiterate antiquated cowboy rhetoric about “bad” Indians who are wasteful, kill unnecessarily, and cling to outdated, obsolete, barbaric, uncivilized rituals. This framing of the Japanese is consistently reinforced through crewmember statements like, “It’s

2011. What the hell are they still doing down here killing whales? It’s an outdated, bullshit thing to do. They need to be shown that what they’re doing is wrong, and here we are. We’ll do the job.”11 Similarly, Watson, at the end of season five (when the Sea

Shepherds were cautiously optimistic that they had put a stop to whaling for good), states,

“I think that this is the century that we’re going to find that whaling will be tossed into the dustbin of history and left for what it is—antiquated, unnecessary, barbaric, uncivilized, and no place in the modern world.”12 This language not only racializes the

Japanese in troubling ways, but also reiterates some of the more xenophobic and imperialistic aspects of the western.

Despite the more troubling aspects of the ideological implications of the conflict, the western has proven a successful frame for the Sea Shepherds partially because it makes for good television. Animal Planet continues to produce seasons of the show and shorter mini-series about the Sea Shepherds because such content continues to attract viewers. The frontier aspect of the show offers the potential for excitement not only as hospitable sites for outlaw hideouts and cat-and-mouse style chases, but they also always contain the consistent potential for man versus nature style conflict. The danger inherent in the landscape can often increase interest in the plot, emphasizing the heroism and self- sufficiency of the protagonists, and in the case of radical environmentalist narratives,

11 Whale Wars, Season 4, Episode 2: “No Escape.”

12 Whale Wars, Season 4, Episode 10: “Delivering the Final Blow.”

keeping people away from sites that they wish to remain free of development. To heighten televisual excitement, the frontier element of the Southern Ocean setting of

Whale Wars is foregrounded by the production company that makes the show and the media that covers it. The focus on the remoteness of Antarctica, which is often referred to as “the bottom of the world” in the show, not only allows viewers to take pleasure in seeing a part of the world that they can’t/shouldn’t visit themselves, but also serves as a method to further valorize the bravery and self-reliance of the members of the Sea

Shepherd crew. In the vast frigid Southern Ocean, Paul Watson and his crew are not only battling the Japanese whalers, but are also in confrontation with the elements. Entire episodes are devoted to scenarios that emphasize man’s battle with the elements in a remote frontier such as the rescue of hypothermic crew members, or trying to navigate through storms with no land or hope of rescue in site.

Additionally, in most westerns, the natural beauty of the frontier is often emphasized; paralleling this within the show the cinematography often fetishizes icebergs, casting the Antarctic over and over again as a kind of monument valley that the crew traverses through.13 This doubling recasts Antarctica as the new frontier, and recasts the ship as a stagecoach or wagon train, and the crew as frontiersmen.

Speaking of a lost ship, Watson once stated “... I can honestly say that I loved that ship. I loved the lady that went before her, too, and hated having to scuttle her in Leixoes harbour, but sometimes in a range war, you have to shoot your horse. John Wayne knew of these things—I learned them from him at Saturday afternoon matinees. Call me a cultural apostle of the Duke. His politics were antediluvian. But his style! His style was

13 See images 6 and 7.

okay.”14 Though the politics of the framing of the Sea Shepherd’s narrative can be troubling, the generic style of the delivery of their narrative has served to dramatically increase their visibility and quickly communicate their vision of what it means to be an effective environmental advocate. It has also helped to position them in a longer lineage of radical environmentalism, as it reiterates the framing that dates back to the beginning of the movement.

*******

The genealogical roots of the frame can be traced back to Edward Abbey, who often gets credited with the birth of the radical environmental movement. Abbey certainly wasn’t the first radical environmentalist, but he is thought of as the predominant ideological progenitor of the movement, I argue, because he gave the movement a narrative to cohere around. This framing was so durable and appealing that it would eventually be picked up on and carried through on by individuals Dave Foreman, Howie

Wolke, and Mike Roselle, who together founded Earth First!, the first nationally visible radical environmental coalition. Documents about the founding have referred to Abbey’s

1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang as the “bible” for the organization, in that it contains parables that explain the genesis of the movement and provides a set of codes and ethics for radical environmentalists to operate by. This “bible” was a western novel.

Abbey is known primarily for two genres of writing: nature memoirs, such as Desert

Solitaire, and for a series of western fiction including The Brave Cowboy, Fire on the

Mountain, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and its sequel Hayduke Lives!. Both genres lament the encroachment of development into the previously “wild” spaces of the American

14 Paul Watson, Ocean Warrior, 72.

southwest, and the westerns introduce heroes who fight back against this encroachment.

The earlier novels provide us with more straightforward individualist resistance, in which the male cowboy protagonists use their skill at living in the desert to hide, or protect their homestead with guns. In the latter novels, the fight becomes coalitional and features a collective of protagonists working together and demonstrating a set of tactics known as monkey wrenching that can be easily emulated. Monkey wrenching at its most basic involves the non-violent sabotage of machinery or environmentally harmful processes that is harmful to machines and profits but not to people. Though Abbey did not invent monkey wrenching, he gave that set of tactics an increased level of visibility.15 He also placed them into a western framing that legitimized them in a way that made them seem noble, mythic, and linked to a long history of righteous American extralegal moral protectionism.

Many of the tactics described in The Monkey Wrench Gang were partially based on the actions of some individuals affiliated with the Black Mesa Defense Fund, which attempted to stave off strip mining in Black Mesa, Arizona, in the early 1970s. Though the Fund itself operated above board as a traditional grassroots lobbying group, several individuals within the organization were rumored to have taken matters into their own hands, including Abbey and his friend Jack Loeffler, who founded the organization. This fictionalization of real life events is emblematic of the way Edward Abbey played with the bounds of reality and unreality in all aspects of his life in order to make reality seem more closely hewn to the mythology he was trying to create.

15 The practice dates back to the Luddites of the eighteenth century. For more about the Luddites, see Rik Scarce and David Brower, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement (Walnut Creek, Calif: Left Coast Press, 2007), 12-13.

Abbey was a master of what biographer James M. Cahalan has dubbed “creative nonfiction.”16 Throughout his life, he blurred the line between fiction and reality in service of presenting himself in a mythic way. He also used the blurring of fact and falsehoods to aggressively maintain the boundaries of the western framing he had set for the radical environmental movement, particularly in his last novel, Hayduke Lives!, which satirized an Earth First! meeting in order to ridicule those trying to change the tactics of the group while simultaneously lauding those he saw as his ideological progeny.

In this way, those real people who were transparently his disciples—such as Dave

Foreman and Paul Watson—literally became absorbed into his western themed narratives by being written into Abbey’s fictional novel.

Perhaps nothing is so indicative of the success of his construction of a mythic truth over a messier reality than the widespread circulation of Abbey’s carefully crafted biography, key parts of which are completely fabricated. Edward Abbey was not born in

Home, Pennsylvania, and he did not die in Oracle, Arizona, despite what multiple self- penned essays, dust jackets, scholarly works that took Abbey at his word, and even his

New York Times obituary would have you believe. Abbey chose these locations because he liked the mythological resonances of the names of the towns. Abbey was fully aware that he was born in Indiana, PA, and when he was filling out paperwork in which inaccuracies could cause legal trouble, Abbey correctly listed his birthplace. At the time of his death, Abby actually resided just outside of Tucson but rented a post office box in

Oracle so he could have his fan mail sent to a location that reinforced the notion of him as a prophet of radical environmentalism.

16 James M. Cahalan, Edward Abbey: A Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

Whenever Abbey was relaying the details of his own life, he tried to emphasize his working class and farm roots; this self-mythologizing was not solely for the benefit of others. Even alone, he tactically misremembered details of his early life, including referring to "the lamp lit farmhouse where I was born" in a journal—in reality, Abbey was born in a hospital to parents who did not own a farm. However, his claims to this type of upbringing were not entirely disingenuous. He did come from a working class upbringing in a small Pennsylvania town, and although his parents moved him and his to brothers to a farm when he was fifteen, he spent most of his young life in a state of transience.17

As Abbey approached adulthood, he set off to explore the physical geography that had served as the canvas for his self-mythologizing. The summer before his senior year of high school, he hitchhiked and rode box cars around the West in an act of anti- authoritarianism, individualism, and romantic adventurousness. Douglas Brinkley, in his introduction to The Monkey Wrench Gang, quotes Abbey as saying about seeing the west on his trip, “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same.”18

Abbey served in the Army between 1945 and 1947, and kept extensive journals where he narrated ribald tales of sexual and anti-authoritarian exploits that occurred during his service, which was spent mostly in Italy. These stories echo and reinforce

Abbey’s perception of himself as an anarchic redneck, and portray him as hyper-

17 Cahalan counts eight different places that he lived before he was fifteen, not including the temporary campsites that the Abbey family sometimes called home during that period. See Cahalan, 10.

18 Douglas Brinkley, “Introduction,” in Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (Philadelphia: Harper Perennial, 2006), xviii

masculine, anti-elitist, and anti-authority. However, upon returning to the United States,

Abbey became highly educated, obtaining both his bachelor’s degree and masters at the

University of New Mexico, and traveling to Ireland on a Fulbright. Later in his career, he was even awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and was employed as a professor at multiple respected universities, including multiple years at the University of Arizona.

Despite his increasing education, Abbey continued to write in a way that glorified the iconic figure of the redneck loner. His first western novel, The Brave Cowboy (1956) follows protagonist Jack Burns, a classic individualist horseman whose anachronism is commented upon by climax of the book: he and his horse are eventually struck by a tractor trailer truck carrying hundreds of toilets while trying to cross a highway. Fire on the Mountain, his second western published in 1964, follows the exploits of protagonist

John Vogelin as he defends his mountain ranch against inevitable eviction by the US military, which is commandeering his land to expand its nearby missile range. Both novels were extended lamentations on the passing of individualist frontier hero, and both were defeatist in their endings, as they seemed to take the disappearance of the cowboy and the complete annihilation of the frontier as inevitable and failed to imagine specific solutions to the societal problems that Abbey so passionately drew attention to. The

Monkey Wrench Gang represented a radical change in Abbey’s previously established pattern, because it featured characters who worked together, fought back against corporate degradation of the landscape, and won.

The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975, follows the escapades of a small band of saboteurs dedicated to destroying the mechanized agents of the development of the West. The Monkey Wrench Gang was Abbey’s third western novel to feature

anachronistic heroes engaged in attempting to stave off the complete disappearance of the frontier. As previously alluded to, The Monkey Wrench Gang, though “fictional,” was partially based on real life exploits of Abbey and his similarly ecologically mischievous friends, many who were involved in the ostensibly legally respectable actions of the

Black Mesa Defense Fund. Ken Sleight became represented in the books as Seldom Seen

Smith, Ingrid Eisenstadter served as the model for Bonnie Abbzug, Doug Peacock was fictionalized as George Hayduke, and Abbey himself (along with a dash of friend John

De Puy) became the model for Doc Sarvis. Though the living doppelgangers have downplayed the idea that the exploits in the book in defense of the wide-open spaces of the West—which include disabling vehicles, cutting down billboards, and even blowing up bridges—were real, many of them have admitted to lesser infractions in interviews and have intimated that the dialogue in the book was sometimes lifted straight out of actual conversations the friends had with each other. Abbey was less coy about his involvement in activities that, in their fictional form, served as detailed models for technological sabotage and inspired the formation of the radical group Earth First!. He was quoted in People magazine as stating, "I did quite a bit of field research for that book…I spent whole nights on construction sites in Utah, putting sand in transmissions, shooting holes in truck tires and radiators.”19

The Monkey Wrench Gang developed a cult following of ecologically minded individuals who were disillusioned with what they perceived to be as the failure of mainstream environmentalism. The “fiction” that Abbey wrote served as a model for the

19 qtd in Peter Carlson, “Edward Abbey: The Sage of the Southwest Defends His Beloved Desert with Words – and occasionally Some Well-Chosen Sabotage,” Time, 25 June 1984.

real actions of those who decided to emulate the actions of the characters in the book.

Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First! (along with Howie Wolke, Mike

Roselle, and others), is largely credited with translating the story back into reality most effectively.

Media descriptions of Foreman often stress his frontier bonafides. The New York

Review of Books explained to their readers, for example, that

Earth First! Was formed in 1981 by five environmental activists on their return from a journey into the Pinacate Desert in Sonora, Mexico. Dave Foreman was their informal leader, a one-time enthusiast of Barry Goldwater and member of the Young Americans for Freedom who has said that he 'couldn't take orders very well.20

A profile about Foreman by Charles Bowdin, a renowned southwestern author and journalist, described Foreman thusly: "He's a registered Republican, a descendant of companions of Daniel Boone, and all the women in his family belong to the Daughters of the American Revolution" and further notes that he is part of a pack of "environmental

Lone Rangers." 21 The origins of Foreman's reputation as one of the foremost cowboy environmentalists can be traced back to the days before the founding of Earth First! when he was a lobbyist with the Wilderness Society, where he was part of a group of employees in the Denver branch that were known colloquially as the “Buckaroos.” A fellow buckaroo, Tim Mahoney, explains the significance of their redneck performances to their identity as activists, describing the activities that defined the group, he

20 New York Review of Books (39:6 March 26 1992), 34. Found in box 1, folder 3, Edward Abbey Papers, 1947-1990 Abbey Archives, University of Arizona, Special Collection.

21 Buzzword, The Environmental Journal (Volume II, Number 2, Mar/Apr 1990), 47- 48 Found in box 1, folder 3, Edward Abbey Papers, 1947-1990 Abbey Archives, University of Arizona, Special Collection.

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remembers, “We drank beer and listened to country music and hit the bars and wore cowboy boots and things like that.” These activities were in emphatic contrast to the

“wine and Brie stereotype…that was being used by wilderness opponents, that we were somehow effete Californians or easterners or city dwellers who were coming after their

[turf]…” 22 The performance of a western identity was also about who could rightfully claim to speak for the west. Mahoney explained that the friction between the ranchers and developers and the buckaroos was partially about who was entitled to claim the ideological genealogy of the west, stating “We felt like we were descendants of the frontier ethic, not them.”23

The reputation of Foreman and the other Buckaroos followed him to Washington, where he and a few other westerners got a house in Rosslyn, Virginia, that they christened the Buckaroo Bunkhouse. The Bunkhouse became a haven for environmentalists from the west who would stay with the Buckaroos on business trips to D.C. Susan Zakin, in her chronicle of Earth First!, Coyotes and Town Dogs, attempts to paint the Buckaroos as not solely a boys’ club by relaying an anecdote in which Susan Morgan, another Wilderness

Society employee, visited D.C. and stayed at the Buckaroo Bunkhouse. Akin explains that in order to be truly accepted into the Bunkhouse, female visitors had to “win their spurs” as “Buckarettes.” Morgan, however, refused the initiation ritual, which phallocentricly involved urinating off a bridge. Zakin tries to stress the inclusiveness of the Buckaroos, despite the entrenched anatomical assumptions, assuring us that

“[f]ortunately, the requirements were flexible. The only things you needed to qualify were balls, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Morgan became a Buckarette.” She then

22 qtd in Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 67.

23 ibid

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continues her defense, stating that “[e]ventually, they all decided Buckarette was sexist and she became a Buckaroo.”24 Somehow, however, a machismo aura continued to follow

Foreman and his compatriots into the founding of Earth First!; one well known but apocryphal version of the founding story claims the originating conversation in which the founders agreed to start the radical organization occurred in a whorehouse.25 As Foreman was well known for performing the frame that Abbey preferred, that of the outlaw cowboy, it is not surprising that Abbey would eventually tap Foreman as his narratological successor.

Abbey and Foreman met officially during one of the most enduringly famous public actions of Earth First!. Six years after the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang, on

March 21, 1981, Dave Foreman and Earth First! gathered, along with Abbey, at Glen

Canyon Dam in Arizona which provides the setting for a bombing that constitutes the climax of Abbey’s novel, when the protagonists manage to crack it open using explosives. After a speech by Abbey, Foreman and his cohort unfurled a very long piece of fabric over the dam in order to make the fictional crack from the book visually real to the watchful media and police surrounding the dam.26 This performative passing of the torch from the fictional characters of The Monkey Wrench Gang to the very real members of Earth First! marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would endure for the rest of Abbey's life. Additionally, it institutionalized Abbey as a sort of

24 Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs, 85.

25 See Rik Scarce, Eco-Warriors, 61.

26 Sarah Ann Standing, “Earth First!’s ‘Crack the Dam’ and the Aesthetics of Ecoactivist Performance” in Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J May, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 113-126.

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prophet that served as the harbinger of the movement. Rik Scarce, author of Eco-

Warriors, notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang served as a spiritual text for Earth First!.

He states, “[t]o some, the Cracking of the Glen Canyon Dam even must have bordered on the religious in significance, calling forth as it did the cult heroes and heroine of Abbey’s book, The Monkey Wrench Gang…Abbey the prophet was even on hand to see his vision made real.”27 Indeed, apostle Foreman advocated that aspiring radical environmentalists treat the book as such: in his introduction to his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior,

Foreman stated in manifesto form that the Earth First! mission was to “inspire others to carry out activities straight from the pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang…”28

These charismatic and influential figures at the start of the movement granted social capital to each other and their disciples for sticking to the frame. Throughout the course of the movement, the touchstone of the western genre has given activists a way to radically imagine themselves as participating in a mythic storyline, and to live out their politics in a creative way—as part of something larger than themselves, in terms of both purpose and community.29

In addition to generating excitement, however, the western framing has proven a regulatory tool to maintain a solidarity of message. As Abbey and his ideological progeny translated monkey wrenching from reality to fiction and back to reality while keeping the western frame, they ultimately demonstrated that the integrity of the divide between

27 Scarce, Eco-Warriors, 58.

28 Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1991).

29 Here I am drawing upon Linda Zerilli’s Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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reality and fiction was less important to them than the aggressive maintenance of the frame.

Earth First's decision to have no official leadership made the message and the actions of the group harder to control. “Members” engaged in the conversation often pulled the organization from both ends—on one end of the spectrum, individuals worried about the image of the group and wanted a gentler image and more engagement with mainstream politics. On the other end of the spectrum, individuals wanted to tackle the system as a whole and argued that the environment could not be saved without the overthrow of capitalism. Throughout the 1980s, Earth First! would hold nationwide meetings somewhere in the wild to debate issues such as these, and as time went on these conclaves got more heated and divisive.

Abbey witnessed the changes that took place in Earth First! as it grew in popularity over the next half a decade, and witnessed the infighting between factions that became rampant. Abbey jumped back into the fray in an attempt to maintain the frame he had crafted. Throughout the decade, he had dabbled in the fracas by writing editorials in the

Earth First! Journal. However, in order to really get his point across, he returned to his foundation text and as one of his last literary acts, he penned Hayduke Lives! in order to revive the characters through which he could weigh in on the division plaguing the movement. During the writing of Hayduke Lives! Abbey was wrestling with chronic internal bleeding that was painful and would eventually prove fatal, but he nevertheless managed to complete a full draft prior to his death that his editors were able to publish.30

The publication got mixed reviews, but a particularly enthusiastic reviewer captured the

30 See David Peterson, “Ed Abbey’s final novel is a solid good read,” Now Magazine, February 9-15 1990, page 5. From Abbey Archives.

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gist of the enthusiasm from his fans, exclaiming of the contents of the book, "We're talking myth, transcendence, legendary cowboys (including a Lone Ranger), good guys and bad guys, Old Abbey's on a roll here.” The reviewer is excited about not only the western tropes, but also the politics: “The classic theme of the western: the triumph of good over evil. With the eco-outlaws, of course, wearing the white hats, according to the book of Abbey—chapter and verse on every page…"31 Abbey not only penned a final book in the novelistic sense, but another book in the radical environmentalist bible— additional discrete set of information that appended his canon—if we take earlier comments about Abbey being the movement's prophet at face value.

In Hayduke Lives!, after introducing the concept of Earth First! to his readers by having a group of them bravely face down bulldozers early in the book, he eventually brings his characters to an annual meeting in the woods in order to caricature the radical environmentalists he both agreed with and disagreed with. Those that he agrees with (like

Dave Foreman, whose fictional doppelganger emcees the meeting) come off quite well in the book, as their living counterparts had maintained the frame that Abbey has set: they are the redneck cowboy protagonists he envisioned. These “beer-drinking fun-loving gun- happy trailbusters in sweat-rich camouflage T-shirts and worn-out steel-sole jungle boots” are contrasted favorably against “Zealot-eyed unisexual fun-hating sectarian Marxists in corduroy and workman shirts,” silly and unrealistically utopian hippy women, and wary feminized men. 32 Abbey’s most vicious ire, however, is saved for intellectual elites and

31 Norbert Blei, “Saving Mother Nature: Heyduke fights the good fight in Abbey’s last book” [sic], The Milwaukee Journal, March 18, 1990. From the Abbey archives.

32 Edward Abbey, Hayduke Lives! (New York: Rosetta Books, LLC, 2011), Kindle Edition, chapter 24

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communists, who were questioning the direction of Earth First! in real life, and who are represented in the book most visibly by a character called “Bernie Mushkin” (a thinly veiled caricature of socialist and eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin, who had a long-running feud with Abbey, who he considered sexist and racist).33 It is telling that there is an emphasis on feminization and effeteness in Abbey’s description of “Mushkin,” whose voice, we are told, breaks during moments of stress and who is as “bald on top, flatfooted at bottom, wide-assed narrow minded and slope-shouldered, he resembled in shape a child’s toy known as Mr. Potato-Head. (Life is not fair.) He suffered furthermore from inadequate chin whiskers: despite forty years of concentrated effort he still had not succeeded in growing a man’s beard.”34 Abbey’s maintenance is aggressive and clear: some belong in the movement, and some do not—and masculinity, bravery, and rugged individualism are qualifying characteristics. In limning the lines this way, Abbey is drawing the boundaries of a radical environmentalist in-group, but he is also foreclosing alternatives that are threatening to his framing—such as more socialistic thinking, or frames that might be less endemically sexist, racist, or nationalistic, or violent.

Abbey never lived to see either the end of the publication of the Earth First! Journal in 1990 or the release of Hayduke Lives! in 1991. He died in 1989 from problems with his pancreas. In a poetic way, he controlled certain aspects of his death in terms of an outlaw narrative as well: Though he died in ignominy in the estimation of mainstream culture for taking risks others wouldn’t and that society deemed outmoded, he lived and died the way he thought best. Abbey “escaped” from the hospital (by leaving without permission) and chose to die in his home. As he requested, he was illegally buried by his friends in the

33 See Dryzek, Politics of the Earth, 175-177.

34 Edward Abbey, Hayduke Lives!, chapter 24.

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desert just deep enough so that the coyotes cannot pick at his bones, and covertly enough so that bureaucrats cannot move his body or otherwise disturb his final resting place. In his final act of rebellion, the iconoclast becomes one with the land he loved and fought for, an outlaw even in death. The rock that served as his tombstone reflected the taciturn ways of the cowboy, stating simply “Edward Paul Abbey, 1927-1989 - No Comment.”

Ann Ronald writes, “A man of mysterious origins rides into the novel for the purpose of redressing certain ethical wrongs. Confronted by a host of enemies and by a hostile land as well, the man prevails through actions both chivalrous and brave.”35 In this quote,

Ronald is describing a narrative structure, of which she considers Riders of the Purple

Sage and Shane paradigmatic, on which Abbey patterned his novels The Brave Cowboy and Fire on the Mountain. But this archetypal story was far more than a literary inspiration to Abbey—it was the pattern by which he structured his own story and performances—and it is was through adhering to this same mythic model that some in the radical environmental movement won his approbation while others did not. In this way, the frame of the western is not just coincidentally selected or tactically used, but maintained by peer groups and made dogmatic by those that had the most power over the framing. Edward Abbey did not start the radical environmental movement, but he gave it a form, and defended that form against perceived enemies.

At the end of Hayduke Lives!, Earth First! is not effective enough to enact the destruction of a monstrously large machine that is the book’s target—it is once again up to the original gang, and particularly George Hayduke, to take down the forces threatening the frontier. Hayduke, after taking the machine over the edge of a cliff, flees

35 Ann Ronald, The New West of Edward Abbey (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 16.

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from men with guns to the edge of the ocean. He is rescued when he swims out to sea to be met by a ship. That ship belongs to the Sea Shepherds and is captained by Paul

Watson, who is called by name in the novel. In this way, Abbey passed the torch to

Watson and named him as a rightful heir—the “keeper of the frame” of the movement.

*******

When George Hayduke swims out to sea at the end of Hayduke Lives!, the moment does not only represent the transfer of the narrative to another major figure in the movement; it also takes the radical environmentalist fight to a different location.

Hayduke, the most powerful avatar that Abbey wrote as a stand-in for the ideal radical environmentalist, removes himself from the West by swimming into the ocean, whereupon he boards what the novel describes as a “pirate ship” and thereby participates in and sanctions the hybridizing of the frame. A new kind of frontier, international waters, presents the opportunity to shift away from the problematic aspects endemic to the western, particularly androcentrism, misogyny, racism, and imperialism. While I would argue that the opportunity afforded by the hybridizing of the subgenres is not fully capitalized on, nevertheless the narrative tropes of pirate tales allow for increased collective action, racial and national diversity, and even slightly increased gender parity as traditional concepts of the domestic get voided in most sea tales.36

That being said, western and pirate narratives are comprised of two frames that are not radically ideologically at odds with each other and can therefore be hybridized fairly easily. Pirate and cowboy narratives share a lot in common. Both are often built around

36 Similarly to the way Hayduke Lives! ends, Dave Foreman’s manual Ecodefense ends with an epilogue called “Marine Monkeywrenching,” which also calls out Sea Shepherd by name. See Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, (Tucson, Ariz.: N. Ludd, 1987), 342.

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ideas about freedom, and both laud characters an ambivalent or antagonistic relationship with the law. Violence, or the threat of violence, is present in both types of narratives.

Chases and cat and mouse games with the enemy often drive the plot forward. The protagonist’s elocution is marked by bravado and pithiness. Both groups generally make decisions using gut instinct. Both favor distinctive headwear.

Rudolph Durand and Jean-Philippe Verne, in their book The Pirate Organization:

Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism offer a valuable and rare theory of piracy that includes major categories of pirates from individuals interfering with the British Royal

Navy to those that distribute copyrighted content online. They summarize what connects all of these groups, stating

…Our theory of piracy shows that pirates, regardless of the time period, share the following features: they enter into a conflictive ‘relationship’ with the state, especially when the state claims to be the sole source of sovereignty; they operate in an organized manner on uncharted territory, from a set of support bases located outside this territory, over which the state typically claims sovereign control; they develop, as alternative communities, a series of discordant norms that, according to them, should be used to regulate uncharted territory; and ultimately they represent a threat to the state because they upset the state’s control and the activities of the legal entities that operate under its jurisdiction, such as for-profit 37 corporations and monopolies.

What is significant about this list of traits is that nearly any of the defining features that

Durand and Verne identify could be applied to the moral outlaw cowboy—if one voided each and every mention of collectivity. Pirates, as opposed to cowboys, are allowed to find strength in numbers. As Durand and Verne note, pirates “organize themselves into groups, which in some cases grow to several thousand strong. These groups are built to

37 Rodolphe Durand, and Jean-Philippe Vergne. The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), 14-15.

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reach specific goals, forge alliances, negotiate with enemies, and engage in conflict…”38

This playful scriptive collectivity is useful in a culture that is flooded with frames that put a primacy on exceptionally individualist protagonists.

The icon of the pirate flag has, at times in the Sea Shepherd’s history, signaled this hybridity. One of the original “jolly rogers” of the Sea Shepherds replaced the bones under the pirate skull with a monkey wrench crossed with a tomahawk; this was, for a time, the logo of Earth First!. As time has passed and Earth First! has largely become defunct, the visual western legacy of Earth First! has been tweaked—the monkey wrench remained, but the tomahawk was replaced with a shepherd’s crook. In the most recent incarnations of the flag, the monkey wrench has been replaced with a trident.39

Though cowboys and pirates have a lot in common, there are differences in their ideologies. Pirates are not presented as having reliable moral centers (which is most likely why the western frame is reiterated whenever a question of morality or violence comes up), but they could be perceived as more progressive than cowboys; at the very least - in popular culture, anyway—they are burdened by less ideological baggage. We don’t associate pirates with explicitly racial antagonisms—in fact, pirate crews are often presented as international and diverse. Though there are generally no women in popular culture pirate crews, there is also not a less visible politics of the heroic man and the helpless woman. One could make the argument that pirates are progressive cowboys of the sea, as they retain the individualist bravado and frontier mentality but reject conservative values and engage in redistributionist politics. Watson and his crew tend to invoke the western in order to signal moral positions, but they invoke the pirate adventure

38 ibid, 2.

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to try to signal progressivism, inclusiveness, transnationality, even as both frames legitimate and glorify extrajudicial tactics.

While Watson and crew turn to pirate tales to broaden the appeal of their narrative and move away from some of the problems of the western, other radical environmentalists are trying other complementary narratives that still fall within the meta-genre of action adventure. In order to understand better introduce the heist/espionage framing of The Cove and the war story or Rhino Wars, I will briefly turn to the meta-genre of action adventure.

According to scholars who study action adventure films, the genre is generally not taken seriously. Though Geoff King examines action adventure cinema at the level of myth, he nonetheless derides the narrative conventions of the non-western action film.

Though he acknowledges that “[m]ythic narratives often entail a move toward the imaginary resolution of contradictions that cannot be resolved in reality,” he asserts that, in the non-western,

the imaginary reconciliation offered by such articulations is a rhetorical construct, a largely unexamined assertion, far more than any coherent or rational argument. In Hollywood cinema it is usually dependent on identification with characters, emotional manipulation and narrative sleights of hand, rather than a more substantial engagement with the issues.40

Lisa Purse is one of the only action adventure scholars to refute this idea, pointing out that action adventure is a site to work out "deeply felt socio-cultural desires and anxieties" and to explore historically specific questions "about the basis upon which it is right or necessary to take violent action, about what constitutes heroism, and more

40 Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London; New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000), 6.

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generally about what can and cannot be represented on screen in a cinematic fiction at this contemporary juncture."41 One thing that radical environmentalists are fairly consistently pointing out is that violence against people is often treated more cavalierly in mass culture than anti-corporate violence. Some pro-monkey wrenching voices assert that the media will show violent deaths, and destruction or infiltration of the property of those who are othered or perceived of as doing wrong, but it is still very controversial to glorify the destruction of American corporate property. The fact that no one has yet been able to successfully get The Monkey Wrench Gang produced as a film (although it has been licensed several times) is sometimes pointed to as evidence of this.

Many of the pieces of scholarship that take seriously the anxieties worked through in action adventure films often focus on either the problem of violence in society or the crisis of masculinity in a post-feminist era. However, perhaps the most continuous motif in action adventure films revolves around the anxieties inherent in the genre about the failure of the state, particularly the impossibility of the state to move quickly, due to its bondage to bureaucratic regulations or inept politicians that are abhorrent in action narratives. Often, the protagonist rises because the state can't do what needs to be done, but the individual can, though it often means ostracization and self-sacrifice of some sort.

Whereas in the western the individual needs to rise due to the almost total absence of the state, in the meta genre as a whole it is the failure of the state to protect helpless or oppressed individuals that makes the protagonist’s actions necessary.

The embrace of the action adventure genre is a logical choice for the radical environmental movement because both the movement and the genre are premised around

41 Lisa Purse, Contemporary Action Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Ltd, 2011), 5.

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the failure of mainstream legal action. Whereas the western often operates in a space of pre-legality or legal ambiguity, action adventure narratives as a whole also commonly deal with a legal system that is inadequate or failing. Radical environmentalists often present themselves as having turned to extreme methods only after they had personally experienced the impossibility of mainstream success. Desperation drives the would-be action adventure heroes to extra-legal tactics and certain types of violence. The audience is expected to accept this departure from society because they recognize the failure of the state, the need for someone to protect/save/recover the helpless, and the time pressure the hero or heroine is under.

We have seen that the frame of the specific radical environmentalist action is often altered based partially on the setting of the action. The western was an easy fit for actions occurring in the American West; the pirate adventure was an obvious narrative for monkey wrenching exploits perpetrated by an international band of misfits on a ship. The

Cove, which tackles a group of environmentalists who attempt to sneak into a secret cove in Taiji, Japan sabotage the Japanese dolphin trade mafia by exposing their slaughtering of dolphins is initially presented as a heist film.

In the opening shots of The Cove, a beam from a lighthouse sweeps a darkened sky like a searchlight. The viewer is then transported into the passenger's seat of a car where the driver is hiding his face as sirens race by his window. A voice—which we will soon learn is the voice of Louie Psihoyos, the director and co-protagonist of the documentary—sets the frame for the whole project in his first statement: “I do want to say that we tried to do this story legally…”

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From its opening frames, the movie telegraphs its generic framing as a heist, using hidden identities, the evasion of authorities, the feeling of danger, and the semi-cheeky assertion of the necessity to circumvent the law. Viewers of The Cove who saw a preview or glanced at the DVD cover were prepped for the generic framing even before the film, by reviewer's quotes such as "a cross between 'Flipper' and 'The Bourne Identity'” in the theatrical trailer, and “The film itself is an act of heroism,” on the cover of the DVD.

The Cove is a documentary that was released in 2009, and I would argue that it has been the most mainstream narrative of radical environmentalists yet to be produced. It won the Oscar in 2010 for Best Documentary Feature and has been widely respected and widely viewed. The Cove was produced by the Oceanic Preservation Society and features a number of activists who attempt to raise awareness about the ongoing slaughter of dolphins in a hidden cove in Taiji, Japan. The fisherman of Taiji use boats to intercept pods of dolphins and, using sticks submerged in water that they bang on to create a wall of sound, drive the dolphins into a large bay. The are netted in and kept until a large number of dolphin handlers assemble. The dolphin handler test various dolphins to find the most trainable animals, which are then sold to amusement parks and dolphinariums worldwide for $150,000 a dolphin. The rest are herded around to a cove that is hidden from public view and speared to death. Their meat (which the film argues contains dangerous amounts of mercury) is both sold and given to schoolchildren. Often, it is bogusly represented as “whale meat.”

The protagonists of this film are the director and producer, Louie Psihoyos, who is head of the Oceanic Preservation Society, and Ric O’Barry, who feels personally responsible for the worldwide fascination with captive dolphins that drives the market in

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Taiji. O’Barry captured and trained all of the dolphins for Flipper, and after working with them and having one of the five dolphins he trained die in his arms after becoming suicidally depressed in a dolphinarium, has spent the last 35 years or so fighting to get dolphins out of captivity. He has been arrested numerous times for illegally “kidnapping” and releasing dolphins by sneaking them out of captivity by elaborate means, or by simply cutting nets to free them. He is a famous, renowned, and paradigmatic radical environmentalist.

O’Barry is not the only expert voice featured in the film. In the style of many documentaries, several experts appear onscreen at various points to provide background information and give testimony as to the righteousness of the illegal actions the protagonists of the film undertook. The Cove positions itself as part of the lineage of radical environmentalism, as one of the first experts it presents is Paul Watson, who is, significantly, called upon to explain the nebulous legality of hunting cetaceans. After confirming that the International Whaling Commission—the same international body that allowed Japan a certain number of whale kills for "scientific research” —is largely

"toothless," he asserts, "Governments are really great at getting together and holding meetings and conferences and glad-handing each other and everything, but they never ever ever seem to accomplish anything.” He then goes on to quote Margaret Mead:

“[N]ever ever ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problem.

All social change comes from the passion of individuals." Watson reiterates his purpose in this movement: to emphasize the lack of judicial clarity and moral governmentality, and to affirm the vital power of the moral outlaw.

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I assert that The Cove was largely successful because it sold a story about dolphin murder - a difficult topic to sell to the film-going public—with the framing of the film as a espionage heist movie. This emphasis on the undercover operation made the film more palatable to audiences and provided an exciting focus for the movie that allowed the filmmakers to address its gruesome subject without making a film that was an off-putting grim and gory slog. The film shifts dramatically in the second act after offering gentle exposition on the issue and the background of Psihoyos and O’Barry to providing the audience with a thrilling will-they-or-won’t-they undercover mission.

Psihoyos and O’Barry decide in the course of their conversations that the way to get the killings to stop was to show the world in graphic detail what goes on in the cove itself during a dolphin slaughter. In order to get that footage, they needed to illegally infiltrate cordoned off land and plant video cameras that wouldn’t be discovered by the fisherman before the needed footage was captured.

The team of protagonists are assembled mid-way through the film, when the decision is made to attempt to record the events that occur in the sequestered cove. At the beginning of the introduction of the team is sonically announced with upbeat music with a driving beat and a lot of cymbal. Psihoyos tells us, “The first person I called was my buddy Charles Hambleton.” We see Hambleton looking cavalier in a white t-shirt, sunglasses, and a hat, captaining a fast boat on a body of blue water. A title appears at the bottom of the screen, situating the scene in Antigua in the West Indies. Psihoyos describes Hambleton as a cosmopolitan “adrenaline junkie.” We are informed of his adventurous bonafides: he “has a heart of gold and nerves of steel—he’ll do anything”

Psihoyos tells us. Hambleton worked as a sail master on the Pirates of the Caribbean

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films, and after a cut to a shot of him using his full body weight to control a panoply of ropes holding up a sail, the film shows us Taipei 101, described as the “World’s tallest building.” We see Hambleton standing on top of the sphere that caps the tower’s pinnacle, looking nonchalant.

Hambleton and Psihoyos meet with the mayor of Taiji and other town officials for two days to try to get permission to film the hunt that occurs around the cove.

Negotiations were ultimately futile. We are told that the officials presented the two filmmakers with a map marked with red x marks to indicate locations they were forbidden to visit. Hambleton relates, with a verbal wink, that he queried the officials,

“Can we hang onto this? Just so we know where not to go?” Psihoyos elaborates on the wisdom of the plan of acquiring the map, confirming that the document “then became our template of where we had to go.” A visual of the paper chart from the officials morphs into a topographical map as Psihoyos describes the area surrounding the cove and relates the various fortifications that make it nearly impossible to film the events that occur there.

We cut to footage of Rick, Hambleton, and Psihoyos sneaking up to one of the forbidden areas, Tsunami park, and crouching on a crest in the land that allows for a view of the visually sequestered cove where the dolphin slaughter is occurring. They know they’re being followed by cops, so they decide to leave the park and ease suspicion by visiting some tourist sites. They arrive at a rock garden where many Japanese tourists come to contemplate the artfully arranged stones. It is in this moment, Psihoyos relates, that he had an epiphany that would solve the problems with filming the carefully guarded cove. “Suddenly, we got this idea: “what if the rocks looked back?”

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Immediately, we see a dam breaking, which serves as both a metaphor for the tactical breakthrough and our introduction to the Kerner Optical (formerly known as

Industrial Light and Magic), which constructs realistic models and special effects for cinema.42 The breached dam, we learn, was a shot the famous special effects company created for the biblically-inflected comedy Evan Almighty. We learn, through Psihoyos narration, that the head mold maker at the studio is a friend and former assistant. He has been commissioned him to make realistic rocks to hide high definition cameras. We have now met the daredevil and the tech wiz that constitute the beginning of a classic heist team. Psihoyos is employing buddies and professional connections that are experts in their given field to pull off a difficult and dangerous caper that has the potential for a big payoff.

Psihoyos acknowledges this parallel and makes it explicit by comparing the group of the heist participants he had begun to assemble to the most famous heist team in cinematic history: “We needed a special group of people to implement this mission. We needed people with a special set of skills. We started to set up this team—this Ocean’s 11 type team.” The thrumming music resumes as Psihoyos continues to introduce the rest of the conspirators. First, he intros Simon Hutchins, the model-maker and he lets us know that he’s “the only guy that had military experience.” We see Hutchins with the rocks and birds nests he’s created, testing the cameras hidden within them. He’s a “mad genius,”

Psihoyos tells us. “If we could dream it, Simon could build it.”

A quick cut to a man on a motorcycle advancing on the camera and then stopping short provides the visual introduction to Joe Chisholm, organizer of tours and events for

42 The shot also echoes, intentionally or unintentionally, the focal point of the formation of the radical environmental movement and the symbolic cracking of Glen Canyon Dam.

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rock bands. Psihoyos explains the fit and emphasizes the renegade parallel of their operation, noting “we were kind of like a rock concert, but, you know, incognito.”

Chisholm is the team member meant to be the fixer, responsible for logistics and importing all the devices the team would need to pull off the covert mission. Psihoyos and the others discuss the advanced nature of the equipment, which included military grade thermal cameras, a miniature helicopter, hydrophones (for recording sounds underwater), and an unmanned drone with a gyrostabilized camera.

We are then introduced to Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and Kirk Krak from Vancouver, who are “world-class free divers.” We see Cruickshank win a free-diving competition by descending to startling depths without the aid of an oxygen tank, and then we get a backstory as to the moral reasons the two are joining the team to plant the hydrophones in the cove. We see an implied flashback of the pair swimming with dolphins and whales as

Cruickshank relates a tale of having a tactile encounter with a dolphin. We see the footage of her in a yellow bikini wearing her freediving flipper, which is one piece she wears on her feet that resembles the flipper of a porpoise and gives her the appearance of a mermaid; the female member of this team is, like most female members of heist teams, is above average in both the categories of physical fitness and conventional attractiveness.

She tells us, and we see, that recently a dolphin swam into her outstretched hand, and then consented to, and seemingly encouraged, having its belly rubbed. This experience, and others like it, gave the pair emotional incentive to join a team trying to end the dolphin slaughter in Taiji.

The team undertakes two expeditions to get all of the equipment in place. Many exciting scenes are filmed in “night-vision” or in black and white infrared and are scored

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with orientalized mission-impossible-y music. Danger is emphasized as we see through the thermal vision camera potential threats to the team’s covert operations. Ultimately they are successful, and the payoff footage is truly gruesome. The subsequent screening of the resultant footage is as devastating as you might expect, but is emotionally tempered by the feeling of success that derives from the recognition that a few brave souls managed to undertake a seemingly impossible mission and carried it off for a payoff of increased awareness for their legitimate cause. We partake in the adrenaline rush of the successful mission even as we are cowed by the fruits of that labor.

A documentary about pulling off a high-stakes, difficult heist is much easier to handle emotionally than a movie that is solely about dolphin murder. Additionally, we are trained to root for the protagonists of heist movies, even if their actions are totally illegal, as the actions of the filmmakers were. We don’t care that Danny Ocean is a con man who is stealing millions of dollars, because we know that the casino owners are morally depraved and, even though the casinos themselves are legal, their associations with the mafia underground serve to mark them as criminals. Similarly, the Japanese fishermen, even if they are not doing anything illegal, are marked as analogously morally bankrupt and in league with a Japanese mafia that is violent and controls sketchy international business deals.

Psihoyos put up a Kickstarter account for a sequel project focused on saving endangered species shortly after the success of The Cove. The working title of the film was, and remained for some time, The Heist. Though the title was eventually changed to

Racing Extinction, the film still sought to mitigate some of more exclusive tropes endemic to the western by emphasizing the internationality of the group that worked

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together. Even so, as in The Cove and most other heist films, the crew that worked together to produce large scale projections of endangered species and CO2 on sensitive sites such as coal-burning plants was overwhelmingly white and male. Problematically, it also focused on Asian consumption habits as being primary drivers of the extinction crisis it examined.

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The action adventure narratives forwarded by radical environmentalists offer us differentiated performance positions. One can take a strong role and become a cowboy rebel outsider, join a pirate organization, or pull off a heist. This involves foreswearing one’s life and dedicating oneself wholly to acting outside society’s norms. It is acknowledged by radical environmentalist groups that not many will make this choice.

That is why the western narrative also offers a “soft” invite in contrast to the “hard” invite to become a hero, and that is to become a sympathetic “townsperson.” In the western and other action adventure narratives, the moral outlaw is supported and given aid and comfort by a supporting cast of individuals who sanction and defend their actions in conversations with other citizens while supplying the material resources that those doing the hard work need to survive.

In the radical environmentalist narrative, the state and nation are potential enemies that will not always do what is right. They need to be kept in check by moral outlaws.

Idealized nature is presented as wilderness—a site reserved for rugged individualists that needs to be, on the whole, protected from human involvement.

All of the charismatic figures in the movement are men, and the “fathers” of the movement have a tradition of sexualizing women in problematic ways. Abbey’s writing

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file at the University of Arizona reveals pearls of wisdom that he recorded on index cards including "The mattress is the foundation of womanhood," and "When rape is inevitable, lean back & enjoy it.” 43 These two “jokes” were important enough to Abbey that he consolidated and reiterated them on a second card. Another vignette was recorded as a dialogue between a trial lawyer, a female plaintiff, and a judge: “Trial questioning - 'so you charge him w/ rape, miss?' 'yeah.' 'Stick your finger in this ink well.' 'I can't.' 'Why not?' 'the lid's on.' 'Judge?' 'case dismissed.'" The same file, however, contains extensive notes that are drawn from the Norton Reader on Sexism. Abbey is not a flat caricature of a misogynist—but he certainly played up the redneck trouble maker as part of his personal performance.

The radical environmental movement has real problems with racism, from

Abbey’s racist polemics against immigration to the reiterated narratives of contemporary activists that paint Japanese whalers and enemies as the new “bad Indians” in their neo- western narratives. The radical environmental movement is arguing for a new definition of what it means to be “civilized;” this vision of the future is being ushered in by these white men. In this sense, these narratives reiterate some of the problems of imperialism that the western promoted.

On one hand, Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society seem to be sensitive to the genocidal implications of the “civilization” project. From Watson’s stories about fighting with AIM to the fact that they have claimed to have Native American elders bless their ships, their attitude toward Native Americans has often ranged from respectful to downright appropriative. The mobilization of Native Americans as figures

43 Series 271, Edward Abbey Papers, 1947-1990 Abbey Archives, University of Arizona, Special Collection.

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who can inspire ecological visions and sanction environmentalist crusades reiterates the trope of the ecological Indian that began in westerns of the 1960s and 70s when America began to come to terms with the complicity of the white populace in native genocide—a recognition that was also connected with an anti-imperialist sentiments and a questioning of American exceptionalism in the wake of the Vietnam War. However, as Noel Sturgeon points out, even in more culturally sensitive westerns, this acknowledgment of racial violence did not erase the trope of the “wild Indian;” instead, in westerns of the period, the white male protagonist became allied with the ecological Indian, while both were threatened by wild Indians and bad white men.44 Even the supposed elevation of Native

Americans in these narratives was a way to critique white society through “othering”

Natives and othering their society to contemplate cultural alterity. Sturgeon discusses a

1985 movie called The Emerald Forest in which the two tribes are named as “The

Invisible people” and “the fierce people.” This is the dynamic, I argue, that plays out in the Sea Shepherd narrative; the organization can claim to be sensitive to the violences inherent in imperial ambitions while still venturing into contested territory and painting the Japanese fishermen as bloodthirsty savages who flagrantly misuse natural resources and are in desperate need of civilization.

The western narrative and action adventure narratives as a whole are not necessarily racist, sexist, and heteronormative. But the long history of the genre’s engagement with misogyny and racism means that narratives told in this vein will carry a

44 Noël Sturgeon, Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 4. See also John Saunders, The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey (London: Wallflower, 2001, 108-110. Saunders uses the terms “good Indians” and “bad Indians” to examine the native dichotomy presented in films such as Dances with Wolves and Little Big Man.

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ghost of those assumptions unless the implied content is actively contradicted. It is true that while we could have female heroes, or leads of color, in almost of all the radical environmental narratives examined herein, we do not. Therefore, some of the sexist and racist assumptions about the frame are reified even as they are implemented to supposedly progressive ends.

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For as much as the more recent narratives examined in this chapter are using hybridized frames that allow them to mitigate some of the rugged white male exclusivity implied by the frame of the western, pop culture products about radical environmentalism are not necessarily following that trend. In 2013, Animal Planet released one season of a new series called Battleground: Rhino Wars. The name is obviously meant to be evocative of the extant Whale Wars, but the cast members were completely unaffiliated with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The frame, however, holds. The “wars” of the title gets even more literal/evocative.

The opening language of the press release mirrors the opening statement of each episode of Whale Wars (“a war is raging in the Southern Ocean”): “A war is raging in

Kruger National Park, located just outside Johannesburg, South Africa.”45 The press release exhorts the reader to realize the moral imperative of immediate, extreme action:

The death toll is astonishing; last year alone, nearly 700 rhinos were killed with baby rhinos and calves separated from their mothers and left to fend on their own. The human toll too is steep. More than 100 park rangers have been killed by these poachers in the battle to halt these criminals. The

45 Animal Planet. “Battleground: Rhino Wars.” http://press.discovery.com/us/apl/programs/battleground-rhino-wars/. Accessed 03/02/13.

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situation is worsening. Park rangers and security forces are desperate for help. And now four U.S. Special Forces veterans have come to help fight for the rhinos…”46

Radical environmentalism has consistently tried to distinguish itself against ecofantastic environmentalism by presenting itself as more masculine than other types of environmental groups. For example, Watson wrote of an encounter with Greenpeace that

“Greenpeace made it clear that they were not associated with us in any way. We hold our own press conference to say that we are not associated with the wimps on the Sirius

[Greenpeace’s vessel] in any way.”47 Rhino Wars transparently continues this focus:

‘Battleground: Rhino Wars is the next evolution in Animal Planet’s muscular conservation strand,’ says Marjorie Kaplan, president and general manager of Animal

Planet. “The men and women protecting rhinos on the ground in South Africa are outgunned and outmanned. This is not an issue of rhinos being dangerous or competing for food or other resources. This is purely greed and profit. There is absolutely no justification for these creatures to be dying, and the people risking their lives to protect them are heroes.’”48

46 Animal Planet. “U.S. Military Forces Are South Africa’s Latest Weapon in Rhino Poaching War in New Animal Planet Series.” http://press.discovery.com/ekits/rhino- wars/press-release.html. Accessed 03/02/13.

47 Paul Watson in John Davis, ed, The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991), 29. I do not consider Greenpeace to be a radical environmentalist group because they continue to work within legislative systems to make change; the unique place the organization occupies, both generically and in a spectrum of environmentalism, will be further discussed in the conclusion.

48 Animal Planet. “U.S. Military Forces Are South Africa’s Latest Weapon in Rhino Poaching War in New Animal Planet Series.” http://press.discovery.com/ekits/rhino- wars/press-release.html . Accessed 03/02/13.

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Though the press release gestures to men and women who work in the park, the

American special forces sent over presumably to do the job right are four men—three navy seals and a green beret—and the muscularity of muscular environmentalism is emphasized. Since special forces military men represent perhaps the pinnacle of machismo, one can argue that Animal Planet sees increased value in heightening the androcentric facets of the frame.

Though problematic in myriad ways previously detailed, this distinction does seem to be working to draw in some non-traditional demographics. A post by a moderator on the website surplusrifleforum.com, example, excitedly asks

Anyone else stoked to watch rhino wars on animal planet this Thursday. [sic] It's like whale wars but instead of hippies it looks like 4 SF cats setting up deliberate point ambushes on poacher scum! Epic!” Before further gushing that “these guys look like they are rockin some pretty sexy modern assault rifles.49

Action adventure narratives have a marketing appeal in an increasingly transnational media marketplace. Around the same time as the release of Rhino Wars, a review of the most recent Die Hard film appeared in The New York Times and drew attention for its assertions about globalism and violence and drove home a connection between action adventure narratives and transnationalism: “The movie’s real idiom is the

Esperanto of violence—sex is a more culturally sensitive issue, so there’s none of that— and sweaty machismo. Mr. Willis himself is something of a universal language, or at least a popular international brand…This is what the new global cinema looks like."50

49 http://www.surplusrifleforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=87&p=948247. Accessed 03/02/13.

50 A. O. Scott, “‘A Good Day to Die Hard,’ With Bruce Willis,” The New York Times (13 February 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/movies/a-good-day-to-die- hard-with-bruce-willis.html.

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Action adventure narratives rely on a presumed universal recognition that you have the right to defend the things you love with force. Abbey states, “If a stranger batters your door down with an axe, threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants, he is committing what is universally recognized—by law and morality—as a crime.” Abbey, here, is speaking about the raiding of public lands which he believed should belong to all Americans, and believed that “[i]n such a situation the householder has both the right and the obligation to defend himself, his family, and his property by whatever means are necessary. This right and this obligation is universally recognized, justified, and even praised by all civilized human communities…”51

Abbey saw his writing as this type of defense. He stated, “In such a world, why write?…To oppose injustice, defy the powerful, and speak for the voiceless.”52 However, in addition to upholding the more noble aspects of the action adventure frame, Abbey also recognized the pleasurable side. In the text he wrote for a Sierra Club coffee book in answer to the question "Why Wilderness?," he gives a range of responses to satiate a

Sierra Club audience used to ecofantastic narratives—reminding us about our need to be responsible for the land, and towing the mainstream environmentalism line that contact with nature feeds the soul—answers which he says are "...all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb degrading question as "Why Wilderness?" But then

51 Edward Abbey in Ecodefense, 3

52 Edward Abbey, “Preface” in The Best of Edward Abbey (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), xx.

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he goes further saying, "To which, nonetheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom. Because we like the smell of danger."53

Image 5

53 Edward Abbey and Philip Hyde, Slickrock: the Canyon Country of Southeast Utah (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971), 24. Italics his.

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Images 6 & 7: Screen captures from Stagecoach and Whale Wars

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Chapter 3: Melodrama and Global Warming

In 2008, the American Advertising Council, the successful non-profit entity responsible for the “crying Indian” ad of the 1970s, teamed up with the Environmental

Defense Fund to produce a public service announcement about the dangers of global warming. The thirty-second spot begins with a series of rapid cuts that show train tracks running through a pastoral setting as the sound of a locomotive grows louder, more ominous, and ever closer. Tension builds as an authoritative male voiceover intones:

“Global warming. Some say irreversible consequences are thirty years away.” We see the man to whom the voice belongs: clean-cut and middle-aged, he appears calm though he stands on the train tracks. He stares haughtily into the camera as the locomotive appears behind him and begins to rush towards the viewer, stating, “Thirty years? That won’t affect me.” The sound of the train becomes thunderous as he steps aside to reveal a small blonde girl who was hidden behind him; she looks sad, confused, and worried as the train rushes towards her, drawing perilously close. A smash cut to a black screen seeks to convert our distress for the girl into action by slowly revealing the words “There’s still time,” which then dissolve into an imperative in the form of a web address:

“fightglobalwarming.com.”1

The melodramatic elements that comprise the narrative of this ad are recognizable to those familiar with the most stereotypical scenario of melodrama: the callous villain, the damsel in distress, the rushing train, and the imperative for an in-the-nick-of-time rescue. Viewers of the public service announcement who have been conversational in the

1 Ad Council, “Train,” 2006, Accessed February 27, 2016 from mojobloggerjamie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOi5FclEh_Q.

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language of American culture during the twentieth century will easily recognize this scenario, as it is reiterated and parodied relentlessly: it conjures forth visions of crackly black and white film and bound gamines in white dresses, mustachioed and caped villains, or even hapless cartoon Canadian Mounties—the scene is so familiar it has become cliché.2 Though the man in the public service announcement lacks conspicuous outward markers of villainy, his malefaction is transparent as is the innocence of the small (problematically) blonde white girl he is willing to sacrifice to the train. The viewer understands that the presence of a “damsel in distress” on the train tracks necessitates an

“in the nick of time” rescue by a hero. The last frames of the ad seek to make clear that the person watching the ad spot must be that hero and must act immediately.

Because the elements of the basic narrative that the ad reiterates are so familiar, the culturally fluent viewer will not only quickly recognize the scenario that is scripted but will also understand how he or she should feel about the stock characters and events and what she or he should do in order for the story to conclude with a happy ending. She or he is meant to understand that it is her or his responsibility to save the girl from the train tracks, with instructions for how to do so presumably provided on the website at the end of the ad. In this way, the viewer is primed to understand the problem of global warming through the lens of the melodrama, the tropes of which include not only nick-of-time rescues, but also Manichean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering

2 It is easy to find YouTube Channels devoted to the reiteration of this trope, such as “Railroad Damsels,” which has 89 videos of women tied to train tracks by villains, including not only scores of examples from early silent melodrama serials such as the Perils of Pauline and The Hazards of Helen, but also figures such as Lois Lane.

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is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action in order to solve the crisis and return the world to an innocent, happy, “natural” state.

This ad spot reveals something significant about what both of these experienced and successful non-profits think is most tactically efficacious and efficient for shifting public perception and eliciting action on an issue. The mission statement for the Ad

Council reads, in part, “Our mission is …[T]o create awareness, foster understanding, and motivate action.”3 It is important to note that as a form of communication that seeks to “foster understanding,” this PSA contains no actual information about the empirical causes or dangers of global warming—it relays no facts, figures, or statistics. The language of the ad spot also treats concepts like expertise and consequences (that might have been very helpful in fostering a certain type of understanding) in a very vague and general way (“some say,” “consequences”). Instead, the PSA is focused on communicating with the viewer on a level that is primarily grounded in morality and affect. It asks the viewer to see stopping climate change as a matter of right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, heroism vs. villainy. These ideas are organized within a framework proscribed by the genre of melodrama, which acts as a shorthand to communicate a constellation of ideological imperatives swiftly, and effectively functions as a vehicle through which to bring potential audience members in line with the Ad Council’s conception of right and wrong. The way in which melodrama is blatantly invoked and foregrounded in order to tell a story about why people should care about global warming, paired with a lack of concrete information about the causes or dangers of global warming, suggests that the Ad Council and the Environmental Defense Fund believe that the form

3 Ad Council, “Mission,” Ad Council. http://www.adcouncil.org/About- Us/Mission (Accessed May 20, 2012).

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that a story takes may be as important as, or possibly more important than, the individuated content of that story.

This chapter examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Everything’s

Cool (2007), and The 11the Hour (2007) as paradigmatic of a cluster of global warming messaging that was most prominent late in the first decade of this century. My examination of the 2007 Academy Award winner for best documentary feature and its successors engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse to offer the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The chapter examines the tropes of melodrama—which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action—in order to analyze their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change.

Though An Inconvenient Truth did not introduce melodramatic framing to the environmental movement, the phenomenal success of the documentary served to codify a particular narrative frame around discussions of climate change in the years following its release, and established melodrama as a performative framework for a certain type of scriptive politics, which I call environmental melodrama. Gore’s documentary and the two other films examined herein circulated as only a small portion of a cluster of public service announcements, documentaries, and the attending discussions about their claims

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that were all melodramatic, highly visible, and produced roughly between 2006 and

2010.4

Melodrama as a performative framework asks the viewer to take on the role of the hero in order to rescue the distressed earth in the nick of time from an impending crisis, and to return the environment to its original “state of innocence” through individualist actions.5 In the case of environmental melodramas, the form serves to concatenate certain anxieties about environmental degradation and feelings of helplessness in order to mitigate them through the promise of heroic rescue.

Environmental melodramas purposefully present incomplete narratives that end in a set of instructions. They follow three-act structures, in which acts I and II mirror the rising arc of a typical melodramatic narrative: act I offers exposition, presenting the setting and the characters and establishing the parameters of the conflict, while act II allows for the suffering that is necessary in melodrama for the generation and recognition of virtue. Act III, however, which can only be completed when the hero enacts an in-the- nick-of-time rescue of the virtuous victim, occurs only if the viewer recognizes the story as a script and takes on the mantle of the hero. Producers of environmental melodramas are relying on the idea that the framework is familiar enough that audience members sympathetic to the message will be able to improvise within it to produce a happy ending.

This positive conclusion is accomplished by a performance of a certain kind of

4 For example, Planet in Peril, (Warner Home Video, 2008); Six Degrees Could Change the World, Ron Bowman, National Geographic Television & Film, and Warner Home Video, (Washington, D.C.: 2008); Ad Council, TICK, GreenCollegeOnline, Accessed February 27, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OuGKCH79M0.

5 see Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (U of California P, 1998), 42.

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environmental citizenship based in heroic suffering that is endorsed by the form. By setting up a familiar melodramatic arc and then disrupting it by turning the responsibility of the resolution over to the audience, the documentary is intentionally structured to remain incomplete and unsatisfying without the viewer’s intervention and authorship through performance.

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Unlike the other genres examined in the dissertation, much attention has been paid by scholars from multiple fields to the ways in which melodrama shapes political discourse. Linda Williams in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson argues that melodrama has become the primary form of rhetorical address in American culture, and several scholars in recent years have shown how the form not only underpins most popular American cinema, but also state and legal discourses from across the political spectrum.

The release of An Inconvenient Truth came at a moment when the American public had proven responsive to solicitations of melodramatic performance. Its success dovetailed with an explosion of melodramatic political rhetoric that occurred in America in the wake of September 11th. As Elisabeth Anker has recently argued, following the attacks, President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative backers successfully mobilized melodramatic rhetoric to sell war and domestic surveillance to the American public. This deployment of melodrama served to mitigate feelings of helplessness experienced by Americans by channeling them into a perceived battle of morality

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between good and evil.6 Anker’s argument builds on the work of a scholarly cluster of theorists who draw on Peter Brooks’ conception of melodrama as a mode that structures ideological discourse. Brooks examined “not melodrama as a theme or a set of themes, nor the life of the genre per se, but rather melodrama as a mode of conception and expression, as a certain fictional system for making sense of experience, as a semantic field of force.”7 Additionally, framers of these messages are able to call on the notion of a melodramatic “moral occult,” which posits a transcendentalist ethics detached from a specific notion of the divine.8 Though Brooks was writing about a circumscribed set of theatrical conventions and literary texts, several scholars have drawn on his conception of mode to demonstrate how it operates in modern politics. Linda Williams, for example, has implied that melodrama acts as a vehicle for American culture to work through ethical quandaries, that melodramatic framing constitutes “the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has “talked to itself” about the enduring moral dilemma of race.”9 Others have focused on how melodrama works through issues of modernity, patriarchy and gender.10

6 Elisabeth Robin Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014).

7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess: With a New Preface (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). xvii.

8 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

9 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv.

10 See particularly Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Christina

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Though there has been some disagreement about whether or not to refer to melodrama that operates in a political register should be called a genre or a mode, I choose to refer to it as a genre because of its scriptive properties. Climate change narratives that deploy melodrama do so in order to not just echo the moral principles and tropes of melodrama, but the plot structure as well. This organization of narrative has to be clear in order for it to make sense for the audience to take over the heroic role in the third act. Since melodramas did not only have reliable plots, but also stock markers in their plot structures, the third act is familiar enough that the parameters of the heroic rescue do not need to be spelled out for the audience.

What is often referred to as stage melodrama began in the wake of the French

Revolution. Only licensed theaters were allowed to perform scripted dramas, and so dialogue required express permission. Because of the limited amount of dialogue that the actors were able to speak, emotions and ideas needed to be conveyed through alternate means. What resulted was a series of narratives in which the emotions were so heightened that they exceeded words, and a system of dealing with these ineffable sentiments arose.

Because speech was limited, communication occurred through gestures and recognizable characters that had clearly defined relationships. The mise-en-scène absorbed the emotions of characters and amplified them through music (the “melos” of melodrama), lighting, costuming, and sets.11 The hyperbolic, which resulted from a set of material

Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre” in Linda Williams and Christina Gledhill, eds Reinventing Film Studies (New York: Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2000), pp 42-88; Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” In Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

11 Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 4.

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theatrical conditions, came to define the form. A system of easily readable signs developed so that the audience could understand what was going on in the absence of words. Manichean dichotomies of good and evil in which characters were one or the other and were unburdened from expectation of psychological motivations from their actions resulted in plot lines which consisted of a triptych of a hero, victim, and villain that resolved in the triumph of good over evil.12

With the advent of silent cinema, this form easily transferred to film. The hyper- legibility of characters, scenarios, and affects of the melodrama transferred to silent narratives in a way that did not place undue burden on the intertitles. Additionally, the spectacle that was a hallmark of stage melodramas was taken up in spectacular ways by melodramatic filmmakers, who were able to use actual rushing trains and cascading waterfalls that were filmed on location rather than flashy bits of stagecraft. These films retained the “astonishing twists and turns of fate, suspense, disaster and tragedy, its last minute rescues and happy endings” for which stage melodrama was known.13

Melodramas continued to be thought of as action narratives full of twists and turns, largely until the middle of the century when the term began to be applied to what are often referred to as “family melodramas” or “women’s weepies.”14 Feminist and psychoanalytic film scholars beginning in the 1970s used the category of the family melodrama, represented especially by the films of Douglas Sirk, in order to note the ways

12 ibid, 5.

13 John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London; New York: Wallflower, 2004), 9.

14 See Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London; New York: Routledge), 2000.

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the tensions of a society in a period of intense transformation were expressed melodramatically. The term, first introduced by Thomas Elsaesser in 1971, was quickly picked up and expanded upon by other scholars.15 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, for example, focused on the ways in which repressed emotions manifested in the mise-en-scène of many family melodramas.16 Christina Gledhill, similarly, argued that melodrama was a safety valve for gender and family contradictions under patriarchy.17 Though family melodramas and the more formulaic melodramas that descended more directly from the

French stage tradition diverge in significant ways, scholars of both take seriously the ways in which large social issues get worked out through narratives that many critics would dismiss as trite.18

Melodrama has a long history of addressing social issues. Many melodramas begin with the patricide of a benign patriarch, that leaves the virtuous progeny vulnerable to evil. This narrative trope contains resonances of the generation of the form in the wake of the French Revolution; the dual patricide of royal and religious authority created a moral void that needed to be filled. Peter Brooks avers that the religious upheaval left in the wake of the French Revolution necessitated the “moral occult” of melodrama in the wake

15 Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 278-308.

16 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, edited by Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).

17 Christina Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre.”

18 See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1989.

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of the destruction of traditional arbiters of morality.19 This narrative patricide has deep ramifications as human society continues to play out a sacred/secular dialectic.

Given the long history of antagonistic relations between science and religion, it is not astonishing that arguments about disputed scientific phenomenon utilize a melodramatic framework when venturing to make moral assertions. Science and religion have a predominantly inimical relationship in the present day United States, with debates about empirical phenomenon such as evolution being hotly contested. Some feel that science bears some blame for the aforementioned “patricide” of a central religious authority, and distrust the products of scientific methodology. Moral discussions about science must therefore invoke an alternate moral order, and melodrama fills that void.

This easy recourse in melodrama to a comforting sense that virtue that will be rewarded and villainy that will be punished is a familiar way to invoke moral legibility without venturing into the societally controversial realm of religion. Even though modern society is far from secular, religion is a partisan issue, and therefore an obstacle to be overcome in terms of environmentalist rhetoric. The genre of melodramatic provides pervasive story lines that seek to properly align our moral compasses without being sectarian. In a world increasingly fraught with a sense of anomie and politically conflicting conceptions of ethics, melodrama seeks to soothe anxiety by providing absolute moral legibility and guiding societal actions toward a commonly held set of

“good” behaviors.

The temporal urgency and recourse to an ostensibly secular morality that melodrama allows for has made the genre a ready fit for decades for environmentalists

19 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

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seeking to convey what they perceive as necessary information to stave off ecological apocalypse. As with so many other influential facets of the environmental movement, scholars generally trace the genesis of the popularization of apocalyptic rhetoric back to

Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. After the cognitively estranging fable that begins the book (described in chapter one of this text), Carson switched generic modes and hybridized vivid descriptions of environmental changes with scientific data in order to convey the urgency of the problem of pesticide use, the imperilment of the innocence of nature, and the villainy of the chemical companies who occluded the public’s access to knowledge of the harmful effects of poisonous chemicals. Throughout the text, Carson describes the suffering of the innocent to highlight the virtue of protecting the environment and the villainy of the chemical companies that put profit over biodiversity.

In a particularly affecting passage, Carson quotes scientific observations of the effects of poisonous chemicals on wild animals, including vivid descriptions of a dying meadowlark and the twisted body of a squirrel who had died in agony biting at the ground. Carson states that these acts, “raise a question that is not only scientific but moral.” To further underline the moral dimension of the damage that the pesticides have wrought, she emphases that “[t]hese creatures are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant. Yet he rewards them with a death that is not only sudden but horrible…”20 After carefully laying out the ethical and scientific case about pesticides, Carson concludes the iconic text with a chapter called “The Other Road,” which emphasizes the temporal urgency of the problem and the apocalyptic consequences if making the wrong choices: She tells the reader, “We

20 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 99.

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stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.”

She offers this urgent warning: “The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’— offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.”21

Although Carson was writing about environmental apocalypse before scientific awareness of global warming, her text is a touchstone for the figures who are the most visible narrators of blockbuster climate change media products. A common thread between many of the most prominent figures who have authored the most popular books on the subject and appear as pseudo-celebrity figures or talking heads in the documentaries examined below is the desire to pen a watershed book that combines poetic language with hard fact in order to spur a revolution in the understanding of the science of climate change that proves that global warming is happening now, is happening fast, and will have dire consequences.

Two such texts include The End of Nature by Bill McKibben (1989) and the Boiling

Point by Ross Gelbspan (2004). Bill McKibben’s text is publicized as a “soulful lament for nature” and mixes appeals to morality alongside scientific facts emphasizing the direness of the problem.22 The parallels to Silent Spring did not go unnoticed by the media, and the comparison was embraced by McKibben and his publishing team. The

21 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston ; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 277.

22 See http://www.billmckibben.com/end-of-nature.HTML. Last accessed 26 February 2016.

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End of Nature made McKibben an enduring figure in the environmental movement, and he continues to both publish and be a prominent activist, heading the organization

350.org. The cover of latest edition of The End of Nature boasts a quote by a reviewer from the Baltimore Sun: “[McKibben] may well already have taken his place next to

Rachel Carson and Silent Spring.”

McKibben’s book appeared the year after one of the hottest summers that the

United States had ever experienced and in the midst of one of the worst draughts to ever hit the mid-American farmlands. In 1988, the catastrophic effects of the climactic fluctuation threw the burgeoning conversation about global warming into the spotlight, so much so that in that same year that Time magazine decided to eschew its normal practice of naming a man of the year in favor of naming Earth “Planet of the Year.” Time explains its choice by noting that

Everyone suddenly sensed that this gyrating globe, this precious repository of all of the life that we know of, was in danger. No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home. Thus in a rare but not unprecedented departure from its tradition of naming a Man of the Year, Time has designated Endangered Earth as Planet of the year for 1988.23

Time, in invoking earth as a home space that is has been degraded and is imperiled, was invoking one of the primary tropes of melodrama that will be examined further below: that of the domestic space of innocent imperiled by villainy. Additionally, though no train tracks are present in this iteration of the climate change narrative, we do get a trussed victim in a perilous position: for the cover, Time commissioned famous environmental artist Christo (famous for draping canyons in fabric and stretching plastic across islands).

23 “Planet of the Year,” Time Magazine, January 2, 1989. 7-8.

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Christo took a photo on a beach of a globe wrapped in plastic and tied with rag rope entitled Wrapped Globe, 1988.24 The lighting in the photograph makes it difficult to discern the location of the globe, but instead emphasizes a strong abstract horizontality created by color fields gradating from black to red as they move from the foreground to the background create the sense that the bound globe is alone in a vast and menacing space, emphasizing its vulnerability. The image of a trussed and vulnerable globe invokes a victimized innocence, and the content of the magazine calls for a heroic rescue.

For the content of the “Planet of the Year” issue, Time convened a panel of environmental experts in order to discuss potential solutions to pressing environmental problems. One of their featured speakers was Senator Al Gore who gave an impassioned speech that was excerpted in the issue. In the article, which is entitled, “What is Wrong with Us?” Gore uses a comparison that would become a stock metaphor in his global warming repertoire. A frog dropped in a pot of water that is slowly heated will not be alarmed by the slight increases in temperature, and because of the gradualness of the change will remain in the pot even as the water begins to boil and kills the frog. Gore uses this metaphor to argue to the reader that society is at the “boiling point” of climate change and must act immediately in order to avoid catastrophe.

In 1994, journalist Ross Gelbspan released a successful text examining the ways in which the scientific facts of global warming have been purposefully occluded and titled it

Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster. Not only does Gelbspan indicate his narrative and professional solidarity with Gore by invoking the frog metaphor

24 See image 8.

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in his title, but the cover’s most prominent blurb is an excerpt from Gore’s New York

Times review of Gelbspan’s work: “[A] blend of passionate advocacy and lucid analysis…Gelbspan’s point is a powerful one and well-argued.”25 By noting Gelbspan’s blend of polemic and fact, Gore initiates Gelbspan into Carson’s narrative legacy, a piece of capital Gore had the standing to grant in 1994, as evidenced by the fact that in the same year he was also tapped to write the introduction for a 1994 reprint of Silent Spring.

This appending of Gore’s words to Carson’s iconic text represents part of a weaving of

Gore into the intellectual genealogy of Carson’s work.

There are two things to note about these confluences: First, there has long been an emphasis on the misrecognized virtue of maligned journalists and scientists in the modern

American environmental movement. This has been key to environmental melodramas from Silent Spring onward. Secondly, this cluster of activists is instrumental in the three documentaries herein, and has been granting each other social capital for using the same narrative frame for decades. (Gore, McKibben, and Gelbspan’s endorsements appear in prominent places on the dust covers of all manner of climate change books, indicating how coveted the seals of approval these men have the authority to grant). Maintaining the frame of environmental melodrama is part of this trading of charismatic capital within the performative public.

Some of the most urgent messaging needs of climate change activists fit neatly into the framework provided by the tropes of melodrama. Perhaps most obviously, melodrama’s focus on rescues that are enacted “in the nick of time” dramatizes a sense

25 Al Gore, “Hot Enough for Us?” The New York Times, August 15, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html.

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of urgency that is commensurate with the scale and speed of the crisis as it unfolds in geological time. Rob Nixon calls this type of devastating but incremental harm “slow violence,” and notes that the fight to combat slow violence “…requires that we attempt to give symbolic shape and plot to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time.”26 Nixon himself notes how the events of

September 11th changed the narrative landscape of American politics:

Efforts to infuse slow violence with an urgent visibility suffered a setback in America with the events of 9/11, which reinforced a narrow image of what it means to be at risk – as a nation, species, and a planet. The fiery spectacle of the collapsing towers was burned into the national psyche as the definitive image of violence, exacerbating for years the difficulty of rallying public sentiment against attritional violence like global warming, a threat that is both incremental and exponential.27

It makes sense, then, that Gore and those that followed him would use the same rhetoric that Bush used to “rally public sentiment” and “what it means to be at risk.”

As Anker notes, melodramatic rhetoric proved appealing to a nation traumatized by an act of violence with complicated roots and looking for an enemy to fight.28 However, by 2006, American public sentiment had turned against the conservative policies that had resulted from such rhetoric, which resulted in a Democratic majority being swept into

Congress in the midterm elections. The Left’s deployment of a melodramatic narrative constitutes an attempt to capitalize on a surge of support for liberal ideas in order to refocus a previously successful narrative on an issue that progressives hold dear; to create a sort of “do-over” scenario. Who better to lead the left in this ersatz alternate reality

26 Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2–14.1 (July 2006), 14.

27 ibid, 15, original emphasis.

28 Anker, Orgies of Feeling.

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exercise than Al Gore, the one man who many Americans imagined as the rightful patriarch according to popular vote? An Inconvenient Truth—part informative slide show, part biopic—gives Gore a platform to reiterate the righteousness of his impulse to lead by using his patriarchal power to draw attention to a different transnational danger than the then unpopular War on Terror; in order to do so, he co-opts the frame of melodrama from the political right.

This rhetoric was very successful for An Inconvenient Truth, in that it garnered a huge audience and critical acclaim. The narrative of An Inconvenient Truth, like many blockbuster narratives, did not resonate solely in the United States; out of the nearly

50 million dollars the film has grossed, more than half of it came from foreign markets. In addition to the box office success of the film, it was lauded critically, receiving the Oscar for best feature-length documentary. Another marker of the success of An Inconvenient Truth is how many narrative imitators it generated—the film’s perceived resonance inspired not only the public service announcement mentioned above, but also many documentaries that employ similarly melodramatic rhetorical maneuvers, including Everything’s Cool (2007), The 11th Hour (2007).

Everything's Cool is a slightly snarkier and more grassroots seeming documentary than An Inconvenient Truth.29 Self described as a "toxic comedy about global warming," the film focuses most on the rift between scientific knowledge and political response, pinning the responsibility for the disconnect on certain political and business figures. The film follows several different threads—a road trip across the

29 Alexa Weik von Mossner calls the narrative documentary style that Everything’s Cool engages in the “ironic mode.” See Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, 2014.

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country interviewing "plain folks" about their thoughts on global warming with a billboard on wheels as a conversation starter, a snow groomer for a resort responding to the climate changes he's personally witnessing by attempting to convert his car to biodiesel, Ross Gelbspan's efforts to bring the monetary motivations of climate change deniers to light, and Bill McKibben's efforts with his non-profit 350.org.

The 11th Hour is a documentary that weaves together examinations of multiple types of environmental crises and emphasizes the “almost-too-lateness” of the plight of the planet. As a voiceover intones in the trailer for the film, “Not only is it the 11th hour…it’s 11:59.” Leonardo DiCaprio leads the viewer through a more traditional talking-heads-style documentary in which expert testimony is interspersed with illustrative footage. The film bills itself as an exploration of disasters and potential solutions the viewer can involve themselves in. As the trailer tells us in an intertitle,

“The Hope Is You,” which presages the hailing of the viewer as hero.30

By structuring An Inconvenient Truth using the other devices of melodrama (a plot that is spurred on by an expulsion from, and desire to return to, a home space of innocence; a dialectic of pathos and action; a Manichaean dichotomy of good and evil; suffering as a maker of virtue; ineffable and excessive emotion that is absorbed into the mise-en-scène), the idea of impending doom and the need for dramatic and immediate rescue is reinforced. However, though the form is handy for conveying a sense of urgency surrounding the crisis, it also constrains the types of actions that are legible within the storyline, and often reifies the gendered and colonialist assumptions inherent in the genre. As disturbingly, it individualizes the problem in a moment when

30 11thhouraction. The 11th Hour Trailer. Accessed January 8, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY.

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it is becoming clearer and clearer that what is needed is sudden and massive collective action and dramatic change in order to avoid an extremely dystopic future.

*******

Act I of a melodrama lays out the character triptych in such a way as to make the moral legibility of each clear—the victim, the hero and the villain. These first two categories can also be collapsed when the suffering of the victim confers enough moral authority for he or she to take on the mantle of the hero. Otherwise these categories must be clear, because the tension of the plot arises from the simultaneous misrecognition of virtue and villainy by the characters in the play, and the recognition of right and wrong by the audience. This tension builds pathos as the audience watches the virtuous suffer through misrecognitions that could lead to tragedy if not reversed in the final act. The victim can become the hero by accruing virtuous capital through suffering, a process that

Linda Williams notes is integral to the moral legibility of melodrama. Williams further notes that melodrama values innocence, and often begins and ends in settings that represent or telegraph “innocence;” narratives about climate change glorify untouched pastoral settings and vilify industrialized urban spaces, and position the earth as our

“home.”31

Act I of An Inconvenient Truth opens on an Edenic setting—an idyllic view of a sun dappled landscape of a river shaded by trees. The melos is completed by sounds of gently lapping water, buzzing insects and chirping birds. A voice-over begins, and Gore narrates our experience:

You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds. You hear the tree frogs. In the distance

31 Williams, Melodrama Revised, 1998.

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you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the riverbank. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gearshift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going: “Oh, yeah, I forgot about this.”32

This opening is a clear glorification of the pastoral; it represents an unvictimized earth, and the narrative indicates that it is the space we as humans should long to return to if we wish to stop global warming.

This beginning is consonant with a key trope of melodrama, which is that the narrative begins, and wants to end, in a “space of innocence.”33 In early French stage melodrama, the site of pastoral virtue was often represented by a garden. In later melodramas, if the setting was not expressly pastoral, it was located within the home sphere. Narratives about climate change often bring these two notions of pastoral virtue—the garden and the home—together. In the melodrama of global warming, the space of innocence is the Eden-like setting of the untouched Earth, our ultimate home.

Not only do discourses about climate change glorify untouched pastoral settings and vilify industrialized urban spaces, but familial dialogues about the earth also assert that it is our “home,” and refer to the planet as “Mother Earth.” This nomenclature is meant to remind us that the unblemished earth is our true home, the space we should, if we are virtuous, want to protect and return to.

However, the scene set before us is more than this simple metaphor, as we find out later that the river we are gazing at runs through Gore’s family farm—it is, quite literally, the home space of his childhood. That Gore’s sensuous description is narrated in second person sets up the idea that Gore is the avatar for the viewer, because the “you” he

32 An Inconvenient Truth, 2006.

33 Williams, Melodrama Revised, 1998, 65.

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addressing is being positioned in Gore’s personal memory of his childhood home. By asking the viewer to focus on a memory of his or her feet sinking in the mud on this particular riverbank, in an imaginative way we are literally being asked to step into

Gore’s shoes.

The film juxtaposes the natural warmth of the first scene with a jump to a darkened interior space and a close-up on a laptop that holds an image of the first picture of the earth from space. After lingering on this shot for a moment, a montage begins that features primarily the eager faces of attentive audience members, modeling an enthusiasm for Gore’s words. Myriad locations and groups of people give the viewer the sense that he has traveled far and wide and exhaustively attempted to deliver his message to whomever he could get to listen. When we finally do see Gore’s face as he is introduced and steps out onto the primary set from which he delivers the slideshow that comprises the bulk of the documentary, he delivers a self-deprecating introduction: “My name is Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America.”

When the audience laughs, he deadpans, “I don’t find that funny.”

Gore may appear to be joking, but those sympathetic to him will that he is invoking what many feel is a miscarriage of justice—that although he won the popular vote, the

Supreme Court of the United States determined the outcome of the election, inserting

Bush into the White House in a way many United States citizens felt represented a suppression of democratic principles. Thus, Gore reminds us from the outset that for those who are already on his side, he is a figure who is marked by his misrecognized virtue and suffering, and a figure that many people watching the film suffered with and alongside.

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Melodrama depends on suffering caused by misrecognition, because suffering in melodrama is central to moral legibility—authentic suffering is how we know a character is good. Those who suffer righteously can occupy one of two roles: the innocent victim, whose goodness must be recognized in order for the narrative to have a happy ending, or the victim/hero, who accrues the moral capital to defeat the villains through suffering. If the narrative successfully hails the viewer, he or she understands that in order for the story to end happily, the virtue of those suffering figures must be recognized so that they may overcome the villains and help to enact a knick-of-time rescue. Part of the conversion of hailed audience members from spectators to interpolated members of the story occurs through their recognition of the moral correctness of the actions of the scientists and politicians trying to raise awareness about climate change, and their realization of the deception and villainy of those who oppose the vital truths they are espousing.

Act 1 of An Inconvenient Truth casts the three stock characters of melodrama: victims, victim/heroes, and villains. Directly after his self-effacing introduction, Gore begins to talk about those segments of humanity that he implies were spectacularly harmed by the misrecognition of his virtue and previous attempts at warning the public about impending environmental catastrophe. He begins by way of a sort of apology to the viewer, stating that he's “…been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as though I've failed to get the message across.” For a moment the camera sweeps through idyllic scenes of glaciers and forests accompanied by peaceful string music, but then it quickly transforms into the sound of dissonant screeching as the images become more disturbing – parched land, smokestacks and wildfires. Gore explains that he is proud of

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his political service, but this voice-over is almost drowned out by the audio from videos of Hurricane Katrina that Gore is perusing on his laptop. We hear the distressed voice of a man who has called into a radio show to despair over the government’s lack of response to the crisis. The viewer gets the sense that the political marginalization of Gore is partially to blame for this catastrophic merging of natural and man-made catastrophe. He is a would-be hero whose misrecognition has led to the conflict that must be resolved.

Gore is not a singular figure in this documentary, however; instead, he operates as a sort of mouthpiece-stand-in and spokesperson for a particular category of potential heroes whose virtue has, in Gore’s opinion, failed to be recognized: climate scientists.

According to the narrative, this failure to listen has led humanity to a point where it is almost “too late” to stave off the devastating effects of climate change. Gore establishes himself as a mouthpiece for these climate scientists early on by referring to Roger

Revelle, one of his professors at Harvard who was at the vanguard of predicting climate change, as a hero before he ever mentions his name. Gore nearly always emphasizes his personal and affectual connection to the individual scientists, with allusions to his “friend

Carl Sagan,” and multiple anecdotes in which his intimacy with important individuals gave him access to remote research sites, from pole to pole, that fostered his understanding of the science of global warming.

Gore conveys the findings of these scientists through his PowerPoint. At times, the

PowerPoint becomes spectacular; in presenting a chart demonstrating the correlation between global temperature and concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over time, Gore needs to get on a mechanical lift in order to reach the top of the chart that shows the projection of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the next

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half a century. After this particularly impressive maneuver, Gore takes the opportunity to drive his point home with a blunt statement: “Ultimately this is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue…if we allow [this] to happen, it is deeply unethical.”

Directly after this comment, we flash to a montage of Gore’s tribulations with the

American political system. He explains “I had such faith in our Democratic system, our self government—I actually thought and believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea change in the way that Congress reacted…I thought that they would be startled too…and they weren’t.” We see several video segments of a younger

Gore, looking tired or dejected in front of hearing committees, as sad music begins. The video freezes on Gore’s downward turned face as white light begins to seep through the center of the frame dissolving the still portrait into grainy series of black and white hospital scenes and the headline “Senator Gore's son, 6, hit by car near stadium, condition serious.” Gore explains that his son had let go of his hand to chase a friend across the street. Shots of the halls of the hospital double shots of the halls of Congress that we had seen moments before. Gore’s voice breaks as he explains that a machine was breathing for his son, and slow repeated piano notes fill the empty space. He explains that his son was in the hospital for a month. A black and white picture of a wan looking Gore by his son’s bedside switches to a black and white photo of him standing behind a microphone in a room full of officials, looking despondent. This suffering, he explains, renewed his commitment to his quest: “My way of being in the world – it just changed everything for me. How should I spend my time on this earth?”

This pathos-ridden sequence does more than delineate a turning point in Gore’s life; it marks him with the suffering necessary for the audience to continue to recognize him

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as virtuous. In so doing, it places him within the trope of the victim/hero, as suffering in melodrama equates to moral authority. The virtuous capital gained by this suffering allows Gore to continue to be our representative in such an important debate. This suffering authorizes and necessitates the rising action of Act II.

Gore’s suffering also helps us to identify the villains of the piece: those who stymie the vital changes needed to save the earth. After painting those who opposed him in the

American Congress as enemies of the democratic system, Gore presents numerous instances of villainous cronies of the Bush administration trading virtue for cash, lingering on the undermining of a worrisome NASA document on climate change by

Bush appointee Philip A. Cooney, who worked for the oil and gas lobby prior to his appointment and for Exxon Mobil after his resignation.

The villain’s purposeful maligning of the virtue of the victim coupled with a deliberate stymieing of the hero sets up the second act of the melodrama, in which the victim and victim/hero suffer and the virtuous rush headlong towards a doom that can only be averted by a corrected recognition by the other actors in the narrative. In the case of climate change, those obscuring the truth or blocking the facts that the scientists are trying to disseminate are the ones who have the opportunity to harm the greatest number of people. Recognizing the narrative conception of virtue and villainy begins the audience’s identification with the victim/hero, which in turn allows them to begin to accrue the moral capital attained through suffering that will assist with interpolating them into the narrative.

The beginnings of documentaries that followed in An Inconvenient Truth's wake also each have an Act I that provides exposition by presenting the setting and the

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characters and establishing the parameters of the conflict. Everything's Cool begins with a loud ticking noise as part of a musical motif, emphasizing the temporal aspect of the crisis. We see a time lapse image of the stacking of hundreds of boxes containing

"several thousand tons" of printed scientific studies that all support the idea that "Human beings are changing the climate a lot." The screen goes black, and the phrase "Houston: we have a problem" appears in on the screen for a moment, before the setting before the colon begins to scroll through major world cities—Miami, Venice, New Orleans, Beijing, and many others—before fixing on the message "Planet Earth: we have a problem."

These first few moments set the tone and message for the remainder of the documentary: sites of human culture and existence are threatened everywhere, and that threat stems from ignoring the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence that points toward cataclysm to a point where the earth is on the brink of climate disaster.

Whereas Everything's Cool chooses to begin its narrative journey by emphasizing the cause of the problem to global home spaces, The 11th Hour chooses to emphasize catastrophic destruction of home spaces that is already occurring. The documentary opens with the sound of a heartbeat growing louder before a series of rapid cuts reveals scenes of disaster and mayhem that are presumably being wrought by global warming: Tornados, roiling clouds, a sick child with flies on his face, sirens, factories, a polar bear walking by a structure on fire, starving people, flooding, war, a knife cutting into meat, people fleeing destruction, a glacier calving a large piece of itself into the sea. These images are intercut with images of a fetus—presumably as a symbol of innocence contrasted against and threatened by the foibles of humankind—and scored by heavy metal instrumentation and operatic vocal lamenting. The effect is truly disorienting and prepares us for the idea

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that "our biosphere is sick"—a message repeated by multiple expert talking heads who appear before Leonardo DiCaprio, the narrator of the documentary (as well as its co- writer and producer) appears and describes "the collapse of our planet's ecosystems and our search for solutions to create a sustainable future" as the "greatest challenge of our time," a force that has caused a "large-scale impact on our home—planet earth."

It is significant that Leonardo DiCaprio is the “host” of The 11th Hour, because he was one of the most visible environmental celebrities of that time period. The same year of the release of the documentary, DiCaprio graced the cover of Vanity Fair’s second

“Green Issue,” as will be discussed in chapter four; in that issue, DiCaprio is described as taking the baton from Al Gore, signaling him as a legitimate expert in climate change.

The 11th Hour also notably enlists Stephen Hawking in its bid to get its message across, emphasizing "Life on earth is possible only because certain parameters lie in very narrow ranges. Some of these are clearly environmental…" in order to highlight the fragility of the small window of proper environmental conditions for life. The 11th Hour relies heavily on notions of celebrity and expertise as a marker of virtue and reliability; there is perhaps no living scientist as famous as Stephen Hawking present in mainstream culture.

As in An Inconvenient Truth, these two other documentaries spend time in act one focusing on the suppression of the “truth” that Gore refers to in his title. Whereas The 11 th

Hour implies the truth of its message through mobilizing recognizable celebrities and experts to make its message seem obvious, Everything's Cool emphasizes how misinformed the public is about the reality and consequences of climate change. The makers of the film rent a portable billboard that they tow around the country that has a fill-in-the-blank phrase "G _ _ B _ L _ _ R _ _N G" accompanied by the warning "more

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dangerous than weapons of mass destruction" that is meant to spur discussion. A montage of reactions in the first few minutes of the film reveal the disconnect between scientific concern and public perception of "regular Americans" who are coded as rubes. One guy creates what is meant to be a humorous moment when he sees the truck and professes to be "really good at Jeopardy" (when he obviously means Wheel of Fortune, a temporally adjacent television show that involves finishing partially completed words). Other interviewees parrot climate change denial talking points: one man tells the filmmakers that the temperatures of the planet fluctuate normally without human intervention, and a drunk woman in New Orleans wearing a ludicrous outfit combines the natural warming theory with citations from the Bible. In Washington, D.C. a callous youth says global warming sounds good because it is cold outside, before the title of the documentaries appears on the screen: Everything's Cool. It is presented as the mantra of the ignorant.

This is contrasted with visions of the virtuous, whose authority the rubes from the opening montage fail to recognize. Al Gore is back in news footage, and joining him in the pantheon of the just but maligned is Ross Gelbspan, the newspaper reporter and editor cum climate change activist who is the author of the aforementioned Boiling Point.

Gelbspan acts as an investigative voice and guide for the viewer through the bi-partisan politics of climate change, which he blames for the rift between public perception and scientific knowledge. Through Gelbspan and others, we are presented with much more clearly agentic villainy than in the other documentaries. Gelbspan pits NASA, which he presents as "responsible for protecting the planet," against the Bush administration's budget office, which he names as being "responsible for protecting profits.”

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What we get in these documentaries is a detailed recounting of the scientific facts of global warming and details about the attempts of would-be climate heroes trying to bring the facts to the public but being deliberately thwarted. All three narratives spend significant portions of their first acts linking the disruption of the Edenic home sphere to the misrecognition of virtuous scientists and experts. They also introduce a category of villains—those that would repress the truth of climate change science. Those are the individuals who, in the unhappy fulfillment of the melodramatic narrative we are currently enacting, have the opportunity to harm the greatest number of people. This is partially due to the urgent nature of the problem—the idea that imminent destruction is nearly upon us and we must act immediately.

Act II of the environmental melodrama allows for the suffering that is necessary in melodrama for the generation and recognition of virtue, and anticipates the consequences that will result from enduring misrecognition. The plot is driven forward by what genre scholar Linda Williams calls “a dialectic of pathos and action—a give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time.’”34 This temporal and effectual interplay is clearly evident in messages about global warming that stress the need for immediate action and stress that we are getting close to a tipping point in climate change. An apocalyptic deadline is often intended to create the alternating modes of emotion and action, as melodramatic tactics seek to inspire pathos by playing off of the temporal crisis of global warming.

Ultimately, the pathos in these narratives leads to intended to spur the audience on to action, thus moving the plot forward.

34 Williams, Playing the Race Card, 30.

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It is important to note, then, that whereas the potential victim/heroes we are shown on-screen are nearly all white men, the objects of their attempted rescue are, in keeping with antiquated notions of heroism and victimization, feminized, infantilized and primitivized. This serves to posit the earth and inhabitants of so-called “third world” nations as agentless and passive victims in need of rescue from a colonialist, androcentric heroes.35

In melodramatic narratives of climate change, the anthropomorphized earth and her

“children” suffer helplessly. A 30-second computer animated sequence in An

Inconvenient Truth focuses on a sad-eyed polar bear trying in vain to climb up on a sheet of ice that keeps breaking under its paws. We see the distress in its eyes and watch it swim out into vast expanse of ice-free water as Gore tells us that, for the first time, scientists are finding polar bears that have drowned from not being able to find ice to rest on. Pathos is also generated for children suffering from famine or drought in images visually coded as belonging to the “third world,” whose visible suffering calls upon us to recognize their virtue and save them from harm. The American disaster that gets dwelt on the most is, unsurprisingly, Hurricane Katrina. Predictably, most of the victims shown as being in need of rescue are people of color.

This is a trope that runs through essentially all of the environmental melodramas examined herein. The featured cover article in the Time "Endangered Earth" issue was accompanied by several splashy photos: pictures are of arid land, smoke stacks, and multiple images of "foreign" people of color suffering from floods and famine. Not a

35 Leo Braudy, “Genres of Nature,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1998.

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single white person is pictured in the photos that are illustrative of environmental suffering. Instead, the reader is shown a series of issues that conflate environmental degradation with the suffering of racialized bodies, while the reader and experts are almost exclusively coded as white.

All of the documentaries examined spend some time focusing on hurricane Katrina and punctuate the discussion with pathos inducing images of dead or fleeing black

Americans. Everything's Cool spends some time with Gelbspan explaining an article he wrote called "Hurricane Katrina's Real Name," in which he explains that what injured

New Orleans could more rightly be identified as global warming than as a simple hurricane. The 11th hour returns to Katrina several times, including as part of a montage of news clips that include draught, tornadoes, and George W. Bush acknowledging climate change, and again later as part of a section about food and water scarcity.

Casting these victims as “innocent,” and helpless without the presence of intervention echoes colonialist narratives by directing these ostensible appeals for help at

American documentary audiences, and often implies the need for militarized or imperialistic rescue. Lauren Berlant argues in her article “The Subject of True Feeling:

Pain, Privacy, and Politics” that desire to change conditions for another is predicated on infantilization or feminized innocence.36 Similarly, Mary Ann Doane reiterates that pathos is “reinforced by the disproportion between the weakness of the victim and the seriousness of the danger” and quotes Northrop Frye as stating that “the pathetic is

36 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

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produced more easily through the misfortunes of women, children, animals, or fools...”37

An Inconvenient Truth evinces the suffering of all four of these groups; the feminine earth, children born and unborn, entire species of sad-eyed animals in jeopardy, and a foolish human race that imperils itself with its own selfish actions. This semantic linkage is problematic, as it concatenates children, the racialized bodies of those experiencing the most immediate effects of climate change, and animals in ways that echo discourses of primitivism.

Melodramas are extremely adept at portraying the affective state of entities that cannot speak for themselves. Because stage pantomimes during the French Revolutions served as the precursor to melodramas, the form is extremely adept at dealing with mute communication, as the atmosphere and melos needed to function symbolically for that which could not be spoken.38 In this context, then, it is easy to interpret extreme weather as the mute earth’s psychic distress manifesting itself in the mise-en-scène of the environment. The environment as mise-en-scène absorbs the psychic energy of the earth and allows it to “speak;” it makes its ineffable distress legible. The fact that this distress can be interpreted as destructively excessive – even hysterical – is meant to be evidence of just how deeply the earth suffers.

In the logic of An Inconvenient Truth and its successors, what is ultimately most important is that the viewer suffers in the second act, as this suffering will endow her or him with the moral capital needed to become the hero in the yet-unwritten third act. In

37 Mary Anne Doane, “The Moving Image: Pathos and the Internal,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, 283–306. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 286.

38 See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

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order to do this, the viewer must reconcile the split subject position they have occupied in the first two acts. If they occupy the subject position the documentary has been soliciting of them, they have recognized the virtue of the earth since the beginning of the documentary. However, part of the pathos of this position is the realization that they are also characters in the narrative who have failed to defend the virtue of the earth through environmentally unsustainable actions. If successfully hailed by the narrative, the audience member recognizes himself and herself as a character that suffered from an inability to see before, who is implicated in the delay of recognition of virtue. Though not malicious, they as characters have been “blind” to the full extent of the suffering (and therefore virtue) of the earth. In order to absolve themselves of villainy, hailed audience members must acknowledge and reject their previous misrecognition and suffer in order to accrue the virtue needed for them to transform into the hero. The pathos imbues the viewer with righteousness, and the ownership of that righteousness indicates that he or she will act a certain way in the third act.

The second acts of Everything's Cool and The 11th Hour also allow ample opportunity for the viewer to suffer, especially alongside and for virtuous misrecognized scientists, which allows us to expand the psychic gap between the villainy of those who refuse to recognize and understand the scientific fact of climate change and ourselves.

A particularly striking instance of this occurs in Everything's Cool, as its ambassador of virtue, Ross Gelbspan, sorts through a pile of climate assessments that the

Bush administration, in his words, "sent into a black hole." Gelbspan himself was partially responsible for putting together a report to Congress before he and others assembling the report got a call from the White House to cease and desist. Emphasizing

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the nefariousness of the communication, Gelbspan points out that the phone call amounted to political censorship with no paper trail that might tarnish the administration's public image. Gelbspan decided that he wanted to reclaim freedom of speech and do more elsewhere. He tells the camera about how with most of the stories he worked on, some good came out of them; however, with this particular issue, he explains, he feels as though he's "thrown his body across the tracks, probably to no avail." In mobilizing this metaphor, Gelbspan is emphasizing both the villainy and power of his enemies with his self sacrifice and urgency through once again mobilizing the melodramatic scenario par excellence.

The 11th Hour has a more nuanced view of the doer behind the deed of global warming, and is more quick to turn a mirror on the audience's habits. DiCaprio observes this concretely when he states, "While we weren't looking...we created climate change."

This assertion skirts direct accusation while still assigning partial culpability to the viewer. The documentary further specifies: "Oil is the basis of which we sustain complexities—we are subsidized by oil. When we buy things, we're not paying the cost.

We borrow from the world to the tune of about a billion dollars a day to finance our oil imports." The film than details all of the environmental harm that oil does including increasing rates of asthma, causing acid rain, speeding up global warming, and providing incentive to keep troops from the United States military in the middle east. By drawing a line between the "we" that uses oil and the harmful effects that the usage of the substance causes, the documentary forces us to recognize our complicity in villainy. Not that The

11 th Hour lets conservative politics off the hook, exactly. Just before we see coverage of

Hurricane Katrina, we are shown video of Senator Jim Inhoffe giving a speech in the

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Capitol Building, averring that man made global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. " The quick cut to the devastation wrought by

Katrina followed by the images of the destroyed houses that remained in ruins at the time of the release of the documentary underscores the harm in the statement and implies a cause and effect relationship. To drive home the point of the maligning of scientific fact by political villains, Stephen Hawking again speaks next clearly and plainly about the fact that there can be no doubt about climate change or what is causing it. He states, "one of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming brought about by rising of levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels." These sequence is followed shortly thereafter by a coverage of Philip Cooney's editing of a government solicited climate action report in 2002 to make the science seem much less certain than it was and his subsequent abdication of his position as the chair of the White House

Council on Environmental Quality to work as an oil lobbyist. This incident is a clear example of the villainy that causes the deliberate misrecognition of scientific virtue.

Unsurprisingly, it is referenced in all three documentaries.

The absent act III represents the would-be completion of the narrative arc of the melodrama; the happy ending in the form of the recognition of the virtue of the victim and hero resulting in the undoing of harm, and the naming and punishment of the villain.

These documentaries cannot give us a satisfying happy ending, because the climate crisis has yet to be solved and the viewer has yet to become the hero of the narrative. Instead, these are partial narratives that function as exposition and provide the rising action of a story: they make people aware of the problem, they give them a hero to identify with and

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emulate, and they allow them to suffer in order to accrue the moral capital that they will need to become new heroes in the story.

At the very end of An Inconvenient Truth, we return home. The insects buzz, the piano plinks. Gore intones, “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, what were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had the chance? We have to hear that question, from them, now.” The last shot is taken from the banks of the river, standing in the mud. We understand that our successful return here is predicated on saving the space ourselves, and relatedly, becoming a hero for the children the documentary assumes we have, or will, produce.

The bucolic scene slowly dissolves and is replaced by a negative space that asks us, “Are you ready to change the way you live?” The text then assures us, “Climate crisis can be solved,” before giving us particulars of the script we are meant to carry out, signaled by the phrase, “Here’s how to start.” For the rest of the credits, the names of those involved with the production of the movie alternate with environmental imperatives, such as “Buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs” and “recycle.”

Though some of the instructions do begin to push towards the idea of collective actions, such as “write to Congress” and “speak up in your community,” most are individualized, and many make assumptions about the class status of the viewer. For example, though the list of instructions does acknowledge “if you can, buy a hybrid car,” it problematically fails to qualify other statements like “weatherize your house,” which assumes ownership of a dwelling and the financial means to invest in improvements. Over all of this, Melissa

Ethridge croons the documentary’s Oscar winning theme song, “I Need to Wake Up,” doubling the presumed change of consciousness of the hailed viewer. This presages the

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structures of many narrative emulators that came after An Inconvenient Truth, which prescribed behaviors including everything from giving money to “green” organizations, to changing light bulbs, to planting trees.

Both of the subsequent documentaries do include some hints about what the viewer can do within the film, before ultimately directing the viewer to internet sources to continue their journeys to become heroes.

Everything's Cool glorifies collective action in a concrete way by showing multiple ways that people participate—including talking hopefully to a group of upcoming voters of high school age who are convinced of the perils of global warming, focusing on the five day walk for climate action spearheaded by Bill McKibben, and highlighting politicians (including conservatives) who signed a pledge that resulted from the walk.

The actions scripted on the website are divided into separate categories. "Speak up and Get Involved" calls for actions such as "support sound science" by writing to congressional representatives, supporting green energy by sending emails to the head of local electric companies, and spreading the word about the documentary. The section

"Increase your energy efficiency" urges the viewer to turn off lights and unplug appliances when not in use, use renewable energy, and purchase food that is both organic and local. "Contact these organizations and campaigns" lists thirteen groups ranging from

Greenpeace to Utah Green Energy that the viewer might become involved in.39

The 11th Hour provides a veritable laundry list of all of the changes that viewers need to make in order to counteract the panoply of elements of environmental destruction

39 Daniel B Gold et al., Everything’s Cool: A Toxic Comedy about Global Warming ([New York, N.Y.]; [Burbank, Calif.]: City Lights Home Entertainment ; Distributed by Warner Elektra/Atlantic, 2007).

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it previously outlined. Some of these are societal changes, such as the need to overhaul our industrial system, revolutionize the way we design buildings and communities, develop better methods of green energy and public transportation. Some of these are individual changes, such as mitigating our rapacious desire to consume (Leo tells us that we are "anesthetized by our own wealth"), recognizing our complicity in issues of environmental justice, becoming more involved in collective movements, and yes, changing our light bulbs. In addition to the multiple suggestions offered in the documentary, there are two extra-filmic sources seeking to script behavior, and they offer different types of suggestions. The option on the main menu page of the documentary that directs you to "solutions" is extensive and continues the format of experts doling out nuanced and involved advice. The web presence on the other hand, is much more basic, suggesting only atomized responses to the crisis, such as "turn your thermostat down by 1 degree," use your cell phone as long as possible, and wash your clothes in warm rather than hot water.

Ultimately, the deployment of melodrama makes sense for global warming activists for a number of reasons. Crucially, the melodramatic mode provides pervasive and persistent story lines that seek to properly align our moral compasses. Melodrama seeks to soothe anxiety by providing absolute moral legibility and guiding societal actions towards a commonly held set of “good” behaviors that should structure human conduct, but that are disconnected from any concrete sense of the divine. This “moral occult,” which provides an ethical compass without appealing to religion, is often inimical to environmentalist causes, especially because some of the most voracious deniers of global

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warming have referenced the Bible to justify their positions.40 This morality is grounded in affect and empathy, which help create connection through pathos and narrative to a topic that might otherwise be perceived as dry and scientific; it helps the audience understand why they should care deeply about a debate that could easily be reduced to facts and figures. It also conveys an urgency that compensates for the temporal problems of global warming. As Nixon notes, instances of slow violence “…pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and activists alike. How, in an age that venerates the instant and the spectacular, can one turn attritional calamities starring nobody into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment?”41 I believe that crafters of these types of melodramatic global warming messengers have found a sort of an answer by using the rhetoric of the right following September 11th to alternate political ends.

However, there are also many dangers inherent in the form for climate change activists. The too late/nick of time trope may also lose its urgency when employed repeatedly over a long amount of time, and the environmental movement has been utilizing it for at least 40 years. If we examine the newspaper coverage of the first Earth

Day that took place on April 22nd, 1970, we find much of the same rhetoric that is present in An Inconvenient Truth. An ad placed by Environmental Teach-In, Inc. in the

January 21st, 1970 edition of The New York Times states ominously, “The weak are already dying. Trees by the Pacific. Fish in our streams and lakes. Birds and crops and sheep. And people.” It concludes by asking for a donation to “help make April 22

40 see Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination; Darren Samuelsohn, “John Shimkus Cites Genesis on Climate Change” POLITICO (online) (10 November 2010). Available at: Accessed 31 October 2014.

41 Nixon, “Slow Violence,” 14.

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burgeon. For you. For us. For our children.” A sympathetic short article called “Now or

Never” in the same issue details a group called Environment! which was calling for an actual state of emergency to be declared to deal with the environmental crisis, the author addresses a most appropriate question: “Melodramatic? No more so than the statement by

President Nixon himself that the fight for a livable environment is a ‘now or never’ undertaking if we are not inevitably to have “a poisonous world.” Upon first glance, this rhetoric may seem overblown. After all, the “children” that The Environmental Teach-In,

Inc. was so concerned about are all grown up and ostensibly doing just fine. The “now” that Nixon articulated has passed, and the “never” has not yet come. This provides ammunition to critics that claim that figures like Gore are unnecessarily alarmist, even if what they are saying is scientifically sound.

Additionally, the narrative is, in a way, setting the interpolated audience up to fail—the individual who takes on the role of hero cannot actually ever finish the story.

There is not time or agency enough to do this, and yet melodrama displaces social problems onto the individual, so the narrative might seem to be, at first glance, sending the hailed subject on a kind of doomed mission. Yet I would argue that the attainment of virtue and the recognition of the hero are vital to bringing melodramas to a successful close. Though we are not going to see the reversal of global warming in our lifetime; though the earth will not be “saved” nor will it return to a pastoral Eden if the hero completes the tasks put forward for him or her, this may not matter in the logic of the narrative, if the ultimate aim of melodrama is the attainment and legibility of virtue.

Additionally, as previously discussed, melodrama can problematically reify the idea of the white male hero, and imply diminished agency for other categories of people.

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There is friction in melodramatic narratives in global warming around the figure of the villain. In order to ameliorate the problem, we must all admit that we have contributed to it and change our damaging habits; we must admit that we are all responsible for the suffering of the earth in various ways. However, the genre unequivocally requires dichotomies of good and evil. One of the ways out of this quandary that documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth take, is to place the mantle of villainy onto the entity of “industrialization” which takes its precedent from early film melodramas, in which the villain is modernity, and that the hero or heroine, then, is the person who can triumph over the perils of modern life.42 Evil then is easy to represent by towering smokestacks and urban cityscapes. These images occur repeatedly in narratives about global warming, and present an easy foil for the misplacement of anger.

Overcoming this industrial evil is required in the fulfilment of the melodramatic wish to return to the naturalized home space.

But in order for this narrative to have any teeth, villainy cannot be displaced entirely onto an agentless socio-historical process; the interpolated hero needs something more concrete to fight against, so these narratives often gingerly locate human villainy as well. The villain in a melodramatic narrative is generally the figure who puts the victim in danger, and who, importantly here, stymies the hero’s efforts to save the victim.

Generally, this person is someone who is misdirecting the public’s attention, ridiculing the victim/hero and putting the virtuous in danger.

Ultimately, environmental activists need to pay attention to two important metrics when considering the success of a narrative frame. Does the frame generate interest in the

42 See Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity.

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issue and motivate the viewer to affectively and performatively engage with the problem?

And, does the narrative ask the engaged actor to take actions that will ultimately ameliorate the crisis? It is my argument that environmental melodramas succeed by the first metric more than the second; by stressing suffering and individualist, small-scale and short-term actions through both form and content, the film succeeded in generating a lot of interest and concern in the problem of global warming, but did not foment the sustained collective action needed, and the climate crisis continues to grow more dire everyday.

By way of an end cap to this particular point (of the imagined ending of the story in the absence of a successful hero), we can actually observe a concrete intertextual twin to

An Inconvenient Truth. The idea for the documentary came about when Laurie David saw

Al Gore give a speech for the opening of the brilliant work of cinematic fiction that is

The Day After Tomorrow. Both were active in the promotion of that movie, and though they acknowledged its extreme creative license in showing the earth quickly plunging into an ice age, they argued that one thing that the film got right was the administration’s response to dire warnings from climate scientists. Thus, what is only hinted at in Gore’s doc is made flesh in the fiction.

The protagonist of The Day After Tomorrow, Dr. Jack Hall, is a virtuous climate scientist who discovers evidence that climate change is threatening to stop the flow of the gulf stream, which will have the effect of suddenly and dramatically plunging the earth into a new ice age. Understanding that time is short before apocalyptic weather develops everywhere, Dr. Hall gives a presentation before a United Nations climate conference, predicting that if humans do not drastically reduce levels of atmospheric pollution, the ice

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age could begin in as little as one hundred years. His message is dismissed by a cabal of the unconvinced who are led by the Vice President of the United States.

Though his message is ignored by the elite, the conference allows Dr. Hall to connect with similarly minded climate scientists who have access to startling data that

Hall was not aware of. Working together, a group of scientists put together a model that shows that the onset of the ice age is imminent at a scale of days, not centuries. Their pleas to be heard and taken seriously continue to be ignored as we see Tokyo hit by murderously large balls of hail and Los Angeles is destroyed by a cluster of massive tornadoes. Hall’s son, Sam, is caught in New York City as it experiences a massive storm surge that drowns scores of people and sends a Russian tanker ship careening down Fifth

Avenue. Though he and his friends manage to seek refuge in the New York Public

Library, they remain imperiled by a superstorm that causes a sudden temporary temperature drop of the air to negative 150 degrees Fahrenheit and heralds the onset of the ice age. Dr. Hall fights the storm as he treks up to New York to save Sam, as the government evacuates the southern half of the country to Mexico (the residents of the northern half of the country being presumed lost).

Because The Day After Tomorrow is a complete, fictional text, we get to see the end of the melodramatic environmentalist narrative, and it is grim. Though the film follows the classic melodramatic arc of presenting a happy ending on a personal level

(son reunited with father, heterosexual family reunited), the audience has witnessed the implied deaths of much of the world’s population had the devastation of the ramifications of climate change impressed upon them. In the disaster narrative, virtue goes unrecognized until it was, in fact, too late. The climate scientists presented their findings

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to a government that would not listen or change or prepare its citizens for the inevitable wrath of mother earth, and though Hollywood gives us a handful of main-character survivors, what amounts to apocalypse is wrought around the globe. It’s a warning, really—a cautionary tale to insist that we recognize Gore and his message. In this way we might imagine the environmental disaster film as a fulfillment of the promises of the unfulfilled narrative of the environmental melodrama.

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Chapter 3: Melodrama and Global Warming

In 2008, the American Advertising Council, the successful non-profit entity responsible for the “crying Indian” ad of the 1970s, teamed up with the Environmental

“fightglobalwarming.com.”1

1 Ad Council, “Train,” 2006, Accessed February 27, 2016 from mojobloggerjamie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOi5FclEh_Q.

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“in the nick of time” rescue by a hero. The last frames of the ad seek to make clear that the person watching the ad spot must be that hero and must act immediately.

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is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action in order to solve the crisis and return the world to an innocent, happy, “natural” state.

3 Ad Council, “Mission,” Ad Council. http://www.adcouncil.org/About- Us/Mission (Accessed May 20, 2012).

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that a story takes may be as important as, or possibly more important than, the individuated content of that story.

This chapter examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Everything’s

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that were all melodramatic, highly visible, and produced roughly between 2006 and

2010.4

This positive conclusion is accomplished by a performance of a certain kind of

5 see Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (U of California P, 1998), 42.

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*******

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6 Elisabeth Robin Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014).

7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess: With a New Preface (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). xvii.

8 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

9 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv.

10 See particularly Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Christina

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What is often referred to as stage melodrama began in the wake of the French

11 Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 4.

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12 ibid, 5.

13 John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London; New York: Wallflower, 2004), 9.

14 See Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London; New York: Routledge), 2000.

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French stage tradition diverge in significant ways, scholars of both take seriously the ways in which large social issues get worked out through narratives that many critics would dismiss as trite.18

15 Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 278-308.

16 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, edited by Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).

17 Christina Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre.”

18 See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1989.

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of the destruction of traditional arbiters of morality.19 This narrative patricide has deep ramifications as human society continues to play out a sacred/secular dialectic.

“good” behaviors.

The temporal urgency and recourse to an ostensibly secular morality that melodrama allows for has made the genre a ready fit for decades for environmentalists

19 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

140

20 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 99.

141

Two such texts include The End of Nature by Bill McKibben (1989) and the Boiling

21 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston ; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 277.

22 See http://www.billmckibben.com/end-of-nature.HTML. Last accessed 26 February 2016.

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End of Nature made McKibben an enduring figure in the environmental movement, and he continues to both publish and be a prominent activist, heading the organization

350.org. The cover of latest edition of The End of Nature boasts a quote by a reviewer from the Baltimore Sun: “[McKibben] may well already have taken his place next to

Rachel Carson and Silent Spring.”

McKibben’s book appeared the year after one of the hottest summers that the

23 “Planet of the Year,” Time Magazine, January 2, 1989. 7-8.

143

In 1994, journalist Ross Gelbspan released a successful text examining the ways in which the scientific facts of global warming have been purposefully occluded and titled it

24 See image 8.

144

in his title, but the cover’s most prominent blurb is an excerpt from Gore’s New York

This appending of Gore’s words to Carson’s iconic text represents part of a weaving of

Gore into the intellectual genealogy of Carson’s work.

There are two things to note about these confluences: First, there has long been an emphasis on the misrecognized virtue of maligned journalists and scientists in the modern

25 Al Gore, “Hot Enough for Us?” The New York Times, August 15, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html.

145

September 11th changed the narrative landscape of American politics:

It makes sense, then, that Gore and those that followed him would use the same rhetoric that Bush used to “rally public sentiment” and “what it means to be at risk.”

26 Rob Nixon, “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2–14.1 (July 2006), 14.

27 ibid, 15, original emphasis.

28 Anker, Orgies of Feeling.

146

147

“The Hope Is You,” which presages the hailing of the viewer as hero.30

30 11thhouraction. The 11th Hour Trailer. Accessed January 8, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBG2V98IBY.

148

it is becoming clearer and clearer that what is needed is sudden and massive collective action and dramatic change in order to avoid an extremely dystopic future.

*******

“home.”31

You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds. You hear the tree frogs. In the distance

31 Williams, Melodrama Revised, 1998.

149

32 An Inconvenient Truth, 2006.

33 Williams, Melodrama Revised, 1998, 65.

150

Gore’s shoes.

When the audience laughs, he deadpans, “I don’t find that funny.”

Gore may appear to be joking, but those sympathetic to him will that he is invoking what many feel is a miscarriage of justice—that although he won the popular vote, the

Supreme Court of the United States determined the outcome of the election, inserting

151

152

Gore conveys the findings of these scientists through his PowerPoint. At times, the

153

Directly after this comment, we flash to a montage of Gore’s tribulations with the

This pathos-ridden sequence does more than delineate a turning point in Gore’s life; it marks him with the suffering necessary for the audience to continue to recognize him

154

Gore’s suffering also helps us to identify the villains of the piece: those who stymie the vital changes needed to save the earth. After painting those who opposed him in the

Bush appointee Philip A. Cooney, who worked for the oil and gas lobby prior to his appointment and for Exxon Mobil after his resignation.

The beginnings of documentaries that followed in An Inconvenient Truth's wake also each have an Act I that provides exposition by presenting the setting and the

155

156

“Green Issue,” as will be discussed in chapter four; in that issue, DiCaprio is described as taking the baton from Al Gore, signaling him as a legitimate expert in climate change.

As in An Inconvenient Truth, these two other documentaries spend time in act one focusing on the suppression of the “truth” that Gore refers to in his title. Whereas The 11 th

157

158

Ultimately, the pathos in these narratives leads to intended to spur the audience on to action, thus moving the plot forward.

34 Williams, Playing the Race Card, 30.

159

In melodramatic narratives of climate change, the anthropomorphized earth and her

“children” suffer helplessly. A 30-second computer animated sequence in An

35 Leo Braudy, “Genres of Nature,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1998.

160

All of the documentaries examined spend some time focusing on hurricane Katrina and punctuate the discussion with pathos inducing images of dead or fleeing black

Americans. Everything's Cool spends some time with Gelbspan explaining an article he wrote called "Hurricane Katrina's Real Name," in which he explains that what injured

Casting these victims as “innocent,” and helpless without the presence of intervention echoes colonialist narratives by directing these ostensible appeals for help at

American documentary audiences, and often implies the need for militarized or imperialistic rescue. Lauren Berlant argues in her article “The Subject of True Feeling:

36 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

161

produced more easily through the misfortunes of women, children, animals, or fools...”37

37 Mary Anne Doane, “The Moving Image: Pathos and the Internal,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, 283–306. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 286.

38 See Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.

162

A particularly striking instance of this occurs in Everything's Cool, as its ambassador of virtue, Ross Gelbspan, sorts through a pile of climate assessments that the

163

11 th Hour lets conservative politics off the hook, exactly. Just before we see coverage of

Hurricane Katrina, we are shown video of Senator Jim Inhoffe giving a speech in the

164

Capitol Building, averring that man made global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. " The quick cut to the devastation wrought by

Council on Environmental Quality to work as an oil lobbyist. This incident is a clear example of the villainy that causes the deliberate misrecognition of scientific virtue.

Unsurprisingly, it is referenced in all three documentaries.

165

emulate, and they allow them to suffer in order to accrue the moral capital that they will need to become new heroes in the story.

Ethridge croons the documentary’s Oscar winning theme song, “I Need to Wake Up,” doubling the presumed change of consciousness of the hailed viewer. This presages the

166

Greenpeace to Utah Green Energy that the viewer might become involved in.39

The 11th Hour provides a veritable laundry list of all of the changes that viewers need to make in order to counteract the panoply of elements of environmental destruction

39 Daniel B Gold et al., Everything’s Cool: A Toxic Comedy about Global Warming ([New York, N.Y.]; [Burbank, Calif.]: City Lights Home Entertainment ; Distributed by Warner Elektra/Atlantic, 2007).

167

168

Day that took place on April 22nd, 1970, we find much of the same rhetoric that is present in An Inconvenient Truth. An ad placed by Environmental Teach-In, Inc. in the

40 see Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination; Darren Samuelsohn, “John Shimkus Cites Genesis on Climate Change” POLITICO (online) (10 November 2010). Available at: Accessed 31 October 2014.

41 Nixon, “Slow Violence,” 14.

169

burgeon. For you. For us. For our children.” A sympathetic short article called “Now or

Additionally, the narrative is, in a way, setting the interpolated audience up to fail—the individual who takes on the role of hero cannot actually ever finish the story.

Additionally, as previously discussed, melodrama can problematically reify the idea of the white male hero, and imply diminished agency for other categories of people.

170

Overcoming this industrial evil is required in the fulfilment of the melodramatic wish to return to the naturalized home space.

Generally, this person is someone who is misdirecting the public’s attention, ridiculing the victim/hero and putting the virtuous in danger.

Ultimately, environmental activists need to pay attention to two important metrics when considering the success of a narrative frame. Does the frame generate interest in the

42 See Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity.

171

issue and motivate the viewer to affectively and performatively engage with the problem?

By way of an end cap to this particular point (of the imagined ending of the story in the absence of a successful hero), we can actually observe a concrete intertextual twin to

An Inconvenient Truth. The idea for the documentary came about when Laurie David saw

Al Gore give a speech for the opening of the brilliant work of cinematic fiction that is

172

age could begin in as little as one hundred years. His message is dismissed by a cabal of the unconvinced who are led by the Vice President of the United States.

Though his message is ignored by the elite, the conference allows Dr. Hall to connect with similarly minded climate scientists who have access to startling data that

Avenue. Though he and his friends manage to seek refuge in the New York Public

173

174

Image 8

175 Conclusion

In the first few months of 2016, the mainstream media has been once again flooded with dismal reports of ecological disasters and increasingly frightening climate change projections. From environmental racism manifested in poisoned drinking water in Flint,

Michigan, to news of unprecedented coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, to the release of new scientific predictions that allow for a more-than-three-foot rise in sea level by the end of the century, this recent spate of news has demonstrated that our culture has yet to absorb the lessons of the environmental justice movement, and continues to fail to take substantive action on climate change even as the devastating effects of greenhouse gasses continue to manifest more rapidly and to greater degrees than previously anticipated. These news stories have all broken concurrently with attempts by conservative legislators and Supreme Court Justices to block even the anemic promises of future regulation made at the Paris climate talks of 2015.

On balance, human beings are not yet taking the actions required to sustain a recognizable version of human life and culture on this planet past the next fifty years.

This lack of action indicates that the stories activists are currently telling about the relationship between our species and the environment are not working as effectively as needed to stave off ecologically apocalyptic scenarios. “Appealing to Better Natures” analyzes the ways in which common environmentalist narratives are repeatedly deployed in the hopes that to critique such narratives is to strengthen the future prospects of environmental storytelling. Key to the project of the examination of repeated narratives is the recognition that such stories are most often generically coded, and that all genres are political.

226 Genres encode distinct sets of ethics, and different forms of environmentalism use different narrative forms to quickly communicate moral blueprints. For example, action adventure narratives encode an ethical worldview in which a perceived righteous truth supersedes the laws of the state. The narrative form allows that some forms of violence are acceptable in defense of the weak and the vulnerable, especially violence against property. The genre of fantasy, on the other hand, often suggests that aggression is a sign of moral bankruptcy and instead privileges an affectual shift that promotes states of wonder, awe, and respect in order to foster an ethics of caring that is meant to result in an increased attention to the preservation of so-called “natural” resources.

While the morality of melodrama also centers partially on the affectual state of the protagonist/hero, the emotions solicited by the form are distinct. Suffering in melodrama is essential to the attainment of a type of virtue that acts as a prerequisite to heroism. The makeover also mobilizes a politics of suffering but privileges the ethics of individual change in a way that is different than the other genres. While the end goal of other forms examined herein is environmental improvement, which may have the added benefit of societal acclaim for those individuals participating in ecologically friendly actions, mainstream environmental makeovers like those promoted by the green issues of

Vanity Fair flip that acclaim/activism ratio by making increased social capital for the individual the primary goal. In order for the citizen to become his or her best self he or she must consume better, which often means shopping more, but for different products.

This, as I have argued, is one of the reasons why anti-consumption makeovers, such as the No Impact Man project, may receive such dissonant receptions in the popular press.

227 Sets of generic ethics are not only political but also as performative. As I have argued, Erving Goffman’s definition of performance—as activity intended to influence others—offers us a lens with which to think through social movement tactics as scriptive.

The resulting performances of environmental citizenship are used, in Schechner’s terminology, for purposes of “make-belief” rather than “make-believe.”

By calling on individuals to step into the role of protagonist in various environmental scripts, activists are offering potential allies a range of performance positions through which to engage in environmentalist practices. For each genre, there may be one or more promoted performance positions. In western narratives, for example, not everyone is called upon to be the outlaw hero; the genre provides for a supporting cast that lives within the bounds of the law while verbally sanctioning the actions of the outlaw hero and occasionally providing material aid and comfort. Melodramatic narratives, on the other hand, insist that the imagined viewer or reader must become the hero and must act to avoid ecological apocalypse before it is too late.

Within the boundaries of these scripts, some assertions, affects, and actions make narrative sense while others do not. For instance, in an action adventure narrative, a protagonist can covertly break the law—he or she might blow up a dam, for instance, as the main characters aspire to in The Monkey Wrench Gang—but in an ecofantastic narrative, this act of violence would seem dissonant. Even in fantasy narratives that have strong action adventure components, such as Avatar, the righteous might lead an army that acts in defense of a home space, but such heroism is almost never offensive and covert. Though melodrama and the makeover share suffering as a basic component of transformation, the anticipated affectual outcomes deviate significantly. In the makeover,

228 the end goal of environmentalism is that the individual becomes more glamorous, which is presented not only as a reward for becoming more environmentally conscious but an essential goal in its own right. Glamor is meant to mark the successful end of suffering and the attainment of a better life. This outcome would be a dissonant or even downright repugnant outcome in any of the other genres. Additionally, the proposed solution of the makeover—that the only thing you must do to be a good “green” citizen is to shop more, but consume differently, would be voraciously contested by most advocates that subscribe to other forms of environmentalism.

Generic forms do not just contain narratives, they also sediment through repeated tropes. Concentrating on the forms that environmental stories take allows for the examination of the ethics and performative politics of each genre. “Appealing to Better

Natures” argues that generic stories have some use in attracting and engaging potential movement members, as sharing a semantics of forms imbricates members of generic constellated communities by necessitating that the individual fills in key gaps in stories with personal knowledge. This shared system of information assists in the creation of performative publics that strengthen the line between in group and out group members partially by doling out social capital to those taking on performance positions that are legible within the frame. This transfer of capital may occur between particularly charismatic and highly visible figures within a movement, as in the generic genealogy of radical environmentalism that includes Edward Abbey, Dave Foreman, and Paul Watson, or the capital granting mechanism might be more diffuse, as when green consumers literally “buy in” to the idea that eco-consumption is “cool” or desirable to emulate.

229 Sets of performative politics are distinguished from each other by generically scripted practices of citizenship that allow for differential clusters of improvisatory politics guided by form. By telling distinct types of stories, different factions of the environmental movement can engage in a sort of segmentation of the ideological marketplace by appealing to audiences of different ethics toward similar environmentalist ends. This friendly distinction creates a kind of symbiotic antagonism in which radical and mainstream politics might work in tandem to achieve a range of environmentalist goals simultaneously.

Because genres provide strong roadmaps for what the protagonist and supporting characters must do to make the story conclude with a “happy ending,” it is important to focus on whether the ethics are commensurate with the scale of the problem regardless of specific narrative content. For each genre, would the actions that are scripted, if they were actually to be received and performed, stop—or even substantially mitigate—the most pressing of environmental crises? Do the ethics encoded in each form promote the types of changes necessary to allow for the sustained existence of human life on earth in some form analogous to how we now know it? Though it might seem that more eco- friendly products pitched through green makeover narratives draw more attention to the causes of environmentalism, many scholars have argued persuasively in recent years that a large scale ramping down of free-trade capitalist consumption is a key part of any environmental plan that might hope to make a difference in slowing climate change.1

Similarly, the increase in eco-consciousness promoted in most mainstream fantasy

1 See particularly Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

230 narratives does virtually no good unless it results in large-scale collective action, an outcome that is not inherent to the form.2

Additionally, much of the content that gets sedimented includes reiterated tropes that calcify assumptions about race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, necessitating an examination of the types of hierarchies and historical violences that are embedded in each form. Genre codifies ideas about who is assumed to have power and agency to make change. In three out of the four narrative forms examined within

“Appealing to Better Natures,” white men function almost exclusively as the assumed protagonist. In ecofantastic narratives, white male heroes encounter women, who are almost always also coded as non-white, who are generally present solely to teach men to care by being sensual objects that stand in for the feminized environment. The white male protagonists get to take that knowledge and lead others to higher forms of consciousness.

In western narratives, masculinity is prized above most other traits and protagonists are almost without exception white men who are not only attempting to fight government inaction but also “civilize” racialized others. Melodrama, too, relies on masculinized heroes that must rescue racialized and feminized victims. In makeover narratives, the subject is often assumed to be female, but assumptions about class and nationality often exclude swaths of the global population from being legible as proper subjects for the glamorously “green” transformation it promises.

2 This is not to assert that large scale changes in affect are necessarily antithetical to group action, but to argue that often in ecofantastic narratives conversion to collective politics is not strongly scripted. For an excellent example for the ways in which movements can use affect to script particular forms of activist citizenship, see Deborah Bejosa Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).

231 These assumptions about who is the subject and who is an object in generic stories are not intractable; certainly, ecofantastical narratives with a female protagonist are possible. However, the narratives examined herein do not bear out the potentiality for parity that these forms hold, but instead most often fall into default tropes that reiterate presumed cultural hierarchies and historical violences. This dissertation solicits scholars of social movements and social message makers to rethink the questions they are asking of activist storytelling to focus on form. A broadening of focus allows activists not only to think about how storytelling might conscript individuals into forms of environmental citizenship but also whether or not those forms of citizenship are as liberatory and inclusive as possible. This dissertation, hopefully, explores a methodology that might help answer these questions not only for environmental activists, but progressive activists focused on a range of issues.

There is one major problem I identify with every narrative examined herein, and that problem is endemic to stock American mythology in general. The stories we tell ourselves as a nation have a reciprocal relationship with the country’s valuation of radical individualism. American myths, especially American myths about nature, whether they come in the form of the rugged cowboys of the frontier myth, or the idea that heroes are needed to rescue the innocent and suffering from impending doom, or the idea that one can reinvent one’s own habits and therefore the nation’s, all emphasize the role of the individual over the collective. Even in the myths that imply that caring together will prompt change, the individuals are encouraged to remain politically atomized.

Narratives that glorify individual heroism are not necessarily useful when actual solutions necessitate individual sacrifice, global cooperation, and collective action. To

232 even significantly slow the worst environmental disasters we are facing, we need to rally together and make big changes to society at large. As a culture, however, we have very few narrative models for such a scenario. The exception, of course, is the narrative of

World War II, which in the American imaginary serves as a touchstone of individual sacrifice in service of a clearly moral cause, and collective heroism and international support. The problem becomes how to tell a story that inspires such an upwelling of nationalism when the enemy is not another nation that is undertaking exceptionally monstrous and genocidal actions but is instead ourselves and our everyday way of life.

At the very least, scholars and activists can be more conscious of the forms of stories circulating within the environmental movement, and work to deconstruct the violent hierarchies that might be codified within them. In the best case scenario, culture would rally around the search for new types of stories, better stories, that could provide fresh scripts to encourage performance positions that might actually result in the

“happiest ending” yet possible for the planet and its inhabitants.

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