Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis

“Robert Geal’s meticulous and wide-ranging discussion seeks to understand why despite the heavy presence of environmental issues in film … things are getting much worse. Rather than promoting action, Geal argues, contemporary … films … reinforce the Cartesian separation between the human and nonhuman, what Geal calls the “epistemology we live by.” This timely book is refreshing and original, persuasive and accessible, complex and provocative.” — Simon Estok, Professor, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul. Author of The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018). “This is an engaging and compelling analysis of how various filmmaking traditions express, reinforce, and normalize our dominant dualistic Cartesian worldview grounded in a subjectivity of human separation from and domination over nature. Robert Geal productively applies various theoretical strands to the study of cinematic form and content, revealing how films both repress and resurface our awareness of the “ecological precipice at which we stand.” This eye-opening study concludes with a cautiously optimistic exploration of a potentially non-Cartesian cinematic practice that, if embraced, could offer an alternative form of spectatorship, one that might be capable of meaningful action in the face of ecological disaster.” — Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Champlain College. Editor of Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (2010). “This accessible, interdisciplinary and carefully argued book contributes to ongoing environmental theories about the impact of dystopian films on spectators. Geal argues that realist dystopian Hollywood films construct the spectator as mastering environmental devastation—a mastery that prevents our taking responsible action. An important book that should be required reading in Environmental Media Studies and beyond.” — E. Ann Kaplan, Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Gender, and Sexuality, Studies at Stony Brook University. Author of Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Literature (Routledge, 2015). “In Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, Robert Geal brings psychoanalysis to bear on our response to the oncoming environmental disaster. This approach enables him to see the ideological forces responsible for our inability to act in a way adequate to the disaster. This urgent book is necessary for gaining our bearings today and for understanding the reasons why we can’t.” — Todd McGowan, Professor, University of Vermont “Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis addresses the urgent question: What cultural biases might explain our lack of action in response to ongoing ecological destruction? Looking at how a broad range of films deal with non-human beings, ecologies, disasters, and environmental crises, Geal ultimately discovers, like Lacan, that “this lack is beyond anything which can represent it.” The challenge of this book lies in the very lack of cinematic solutions it finds to the symbolic hold of Cartesian subjectivity, which reinforces human alienation from the biosphere with every monocular turn of the camera.” — Thomas Lamarre, Professor, University of Chicago “In this timely book, Geal contributes to the field of ecocriticism and ecocinema studies by developing a new Lacanian psychoanalytic ecocritical methodology. This book convincingly explains why a rationalistic, Cartesian response to ecocrisis fails. The potential cure, Geal argues, lies in a radical, non-Cartesian turn in aesthetic and cultural practices. A must-read for environmental humanists!” — Chia-Ju Chang, Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College “An ambitious and daring work distinguished by a rare clarity of expression that adds force to its argument about the psychological alibis enabling our ecological crimes. This is a study of the separation ideologies of our time. … Geal’s theoretically surprising, even bracing, approach illustrates that the “ecological unconscious” glimpsed and obscured in contemporary cinema is the very terrain of the frightening unknown that governs our collective impotence in responding to our ecology crisis.” —Anil Narine, Professor, University of Toronto, Editor of Eco-Trauma Cinema (Routledge, 2015) Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic realworld changes in how people treat the environment. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema’s inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the ‘lifeboats’ on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book’s new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive ‘symptom’ that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy. Robert Geal is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, where he teaches classes on film spectacle, representation, adaptation, psychoanalysis and Japanese cinema. He is the author of the monograph Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, as well as numerous articles and chapters on topics including science fiction spectacle, sexuality and gender in animation, race in television comedy, adaptation studies and film theory. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media Series editor: Thomas Bristow The urgency of the next great extinction impels us to evaluate environmental crises as sociogenic. Critiques of culture have a lot to contribute to the endeavour to remedy crises of culture, drawing from scientific knowledge but adding to it arguments about agency, community, language, technology and artistic expression. This series aims to bring to consciousness potentialities that have emerged within a distinct historical situation and to underscore our actions as emergent within a complex dialectic among the living world. It is our understanding that studies in literature, culture and media can add depth and sensitivity to the way we frame crises; clarifying how culture is pervasive and integral to human and non-human lives as it is the medium of lived experience. We seek exciting studies of more-than-human entanglements and impersonal ontological infrastructures, slow and public media, and the structuring of interpretation. We seek interdisciplinary frameworks for considering solutions to crises, addressing ambiguous and protracted states such as solastalgia, anthropocene anxiety, and climate grief and denialism. We seek scholars who are thinking through decolonization and epistemic justice for our environmental futures. We seek sensitivity to iterability, exchange and interpretation as wrought, performative acts. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media provides accessible material to broad audiences, including academic monographs and anthologies, fictocriticism and studies of creative practices. We invite you to contribute to innovative scholarship and interdisciplinary inquiries into the interactive production of meaning sensitive to the affective circuits we move through as experiencing beings. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema Robert Geal Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place Lenka Filipova For further information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Environmental-Literature-Culture-and-Media/book-series/RELCM Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema Robert Geal First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Robert Geal The right of Robert Geal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Geal, Robert, author. Title: Ecological film theory and psychoanalysis : surviving the environmental apocalypse in cinema / Robert Geal. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge environmental literature, culture and media | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021000655 (print) | LCCN 2021000656 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367373412 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367373429 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism in motion pictures. | Ecology in motion pictures. | Environmental psychology. | Motion pictures--Psychological aspects. | Motion pictures--Philosophy. | Environmental disasters-Psychological aspects. | Ecocriticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E78 G43 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.E78 (ebook) | DDC 791.43--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000655 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000656 ISBN: 978-0-367-37341-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-02776-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-37342-9 (ebk) DOI: Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books For Abby and Livia Contents Introduction 1 Environmental crisis and epistemological crisis: Ecologicallydestructive Cartesian subjectivity 1 4 2 Cinema spectatorship as an illusory Cartesian ‘symptom’ 39 3 Realist film as cogito-centric film 85 4 Surviving environmental disasters in film ‘lifeboats’ 113 5 Surviving environmental apocalypse in film ‘lifeboats’ 154 6 Survivors in post-apocalyptic environmental dystopias 187 7 The possibilities of non-Cartesian film 204 Conclusion Index 234 246 Introduction Humanity stands at what Toby Ord calls The Precipice (2020), a unique historical period in which our use of technology has the potential to cause human extinction. Some of the existential risks we face are dependent on the occurrence of specific conditions, such as the choices of politicians and military leaders about whether to fire nuclear weapons; and some existential risks are dependent on developments that technology may take in the future, such as artificial intelligence and anthropogenically-engineered pandemics. Other existential risks, however, are bound up with our everyday economic, social and cultural practices. The industrial exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources has created an existential risk to humanity through various forms of ecological degradation, most notably anthropogenic climate change. This risk is unfolding in slow motion, with a growing consensus (some notable dissenters aside) that the risk is real, and that we must take action to change our behaviour in order to avert disaster. This book is part of a body of scholarship which explores the reasons why we are not taking sufficient action to ameliorate anthropogenic ecological degradation. The first chapter outlines the contours of this ecocritical academic project, focusing particularly on the idea that contemporary human subjectivity is grounded in the illusory separation of humanity from the rest of the world. The alienation of humanity from ostensibly separate and external ‘nature’ underpins our disregard for that which is not ‘us’. I discuss how this form of human subjectivity emerged from a series of historically specific circumstances which informed occidental thought.1 This subjectivity is exemplified in the dualistic philosophy of René Descartes. I claim that the Cartesian illusion that we are separate and hierarchically positioned over and above the ostensibly passive environment is an ‘epistemology we live by’ – our damaging behaviour towards the natural world is an inevitable result of our ingrained alienation from the natural world. Existing ecocriticism makes a similar claim, but generally asserts that the problem can be resolved by consciously rejecting alienating dualism. This book argues, however, that humans do not have direct control over their consciousness, and that ecophobic dualism cannot be willed away. It utilises various strands of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate that a wilful rejection of this ecophobia is not possible, with Cartesian dualism DOI: -1 2 Introduction operating at the unconscious level through what Jacques Lacan calls the Symbolic Order. This Order is a matrix of possible thoughts, beliefs and behaviours which any given human subject assents to adopt, without being aware that those ostensibly internal forces are imposed from without. Our Symbolic Order is inherently anthropocentric, so that our dualistic alienation from the nonhuman world is both an integral element of who we are as contemporary Cartesian subjects, and also something that is unconsciously imposed upon us through all the subtleties and complexities of our Cartesian culture. The first chapter outlines these differing scholarly approaches to conceptualising human responses to anthropogenic ecological degradation. Chapter 2 then addresses how various aesthetic practices, including film, transmit and normalise our Symbolic Order’s alienating dualism. I discuss how the dominant occidental form of film positions the spectator as the Cartesian master of perception and meaning, unconsciously reinforcing the idea that the external world extends out from the centralised locus of the individual human subject. This idea is then applied to a particular body of films that relate, in various different ways, to the ecological precipice at which we stand. Our culture is aware of the existential risk, but represses this awareness, and this repressed trauma then resurfaces. The films analysed in this book are all expressions of this ecological trauma, which I call the ‘political-ecological unconscious’, in one way or another. Chapter 3 considers how film regulates borders between the human and the nonhuman. Chapter 4 explores films which stage large-scale ecological disasters as enjoyable spectacles, while Chapter 5 analyses those films which raise the narrative threat level up to the explicitly apocalyptic. Chapter 6 discusses dystopian films set in the aftermath of ecological catastrophes. What the films explored in these chapters all have in common is a formalised film grammar which privileges the spectator’s perceptual mastery. The films’ narratives vary more from chapter to chapter, but they all align the spectator with active survivors rather than with passive victims, and they mostly cathartically resolve the environmental problems which they stage, with humanity emerging renewed and cleansed by the ordeal. The effect of these combined formal and narrative conventions is the normalisation of the spectator’s Cartesian subjectivity, so that the films essentially suggest that the spectator would survive a similar real-world environmental disaster, like a protagonist, rather than be destroyed by it, like the hordes of antlike figures which the films represent as part of the spectacle of destruction. The films provide various types of ‘lifeboats’ for the protagonists to escape on, and function as vicarious cinematic ‘lifeboats’, offering the spectator the means to imagine that (s)he too would escape a real-world ecological disaster. There is still the possibility, however, for film to challenge these Cartesian conventions, and Chapter 7 looks for the potentially non-Cartesian components of documentary ‘nature’ films, avant-garde ‘ecofilms’, various avant-garde practices that may be employed by mainstream films, and certain non-occidental filmmaking traditions, such as Japanese cinema. Although I am only tentative about the potential for these filmmaking practices to remedy humanity’s alienation from nature, any possibility that we have to make such a change in human subjectivity Introduction 3 will need to expand on and develop non-Cartesian aesthetics, and there are signs, in some of the films addressed in this chapter, of how this might be done. I begin, however, with an analysis of the illness before I come to a discussion of the potential cure. Immediate and radical action is required if humanity is to survive the existential risks posed by anthropogenic ecological degradation. There are many reasons why we fail to take this action, and our cultural practices are inextricably bound up in this failure. This book is an analysis of how films represent and cathartically resolve our repressed anxieties about ecological degradation, and about how this traumatic exercise both expresses and contributes to our culture’s ecophobia. Note 1 The term ‘occidental’ is problematic, given how it potentially equates a historicallyspecific culture with a geographical region, without adequately acknowledging how people living in various parts of that geographical ‘Western’ region have been colonised by cultures conceptualising themselves as occidental/Western. The term is also problematic because of another culturally constructed binary opposition between ‘West’ and ‘East’ which is the focus of Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism (1985). For Said, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either” (1985: 4, original emphasis), so that “as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (5). I don’t want to repeat that binary in this book, particularly in the sense of Said’s claim that “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West” (20–21). Nevertheless, in the sense that Said claims occidental ideas about the orient are culturally constructed, I also conceptualise occidental culture as similarly constructed. The book is principally focused on how an occidental culture derived from specific historical circumstances produces a certain form of subjectivity, and Chapter 7 also considers how certain aesthetic traditions which are not exclusively derived from these specific historical circumstances might represent and/or facilitate a different form of subjectivity. I therefore use ‘occidental’ as a historically-specific socio-cultural term, rather than as a geographical term. Bibliography Ord, T. (2020) The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. London: Bloomsbury. Said, E. (1985) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Notes Introduction 1 The term ‘occidental’ is problematic, given how it potentially equates a historicallyspecific culture with a geographical region, without adequately acknowledging how people living in various parts of that geographical ‘Western’ region have been colonised by cultures conceptualising themselves as occidental/Western. The term is also problematic because of another culturally constructed binary opposition between ‘West’ and ‘East’ which is the focus of Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism (1985). For Said, “the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either” (1985: 4, original emphasis), so that “as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (5). I don’t want to repeat that binary in this book, particularly in the sense of Said’s claim that “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West” (20–21). Nevertheless, in the sense that Said claims occidental ideas about the orient are culturally constructed, I also conceptualise occidental culture as similarly constructed. The book is principally focused on how an occidental culture derived from specific historical circumstances produces a certain form of subjectivity, and Chapter 7 also considers how certain aesthetic traditions which are not exclusively derived from these specific historical circumstances might represent and/or facilitate a different form of subjectivity. I therefore use ‘occidental’ as a historically-specific socio-cultural term, rather than as a geographical term. Chapter 1 1 There is a longstanding affiliation between ecological activism and activism against various forms of discrimination and oppression. Recently, activist groups like Extinction Rebellion and Zero Hour have been emphasising the intersectionality of these causes. Jamie Margolin, for example, writing on behalf of the latter organisation, states that “[w]e have to dismantle the systems of oppression that gave rise to and perpetuate the climate crisis, including colonialism, racism and patriarchy” (2019). 2 Estok’s explanation for ecophobia is more complex than many of the historical explanations, because he thinks of human alienation from nature as both socio-cultural and fundamentally inseparable from the biological human organism’s genetics: “Ecophobia, like any other human behaviour […] is written into our genes. It cannot be otherwise since there is no magical ventriloquism here, no enchanted space outside of our genes from which human behaviour can reasonably be thought to originate” (2018b: 12). Therefore, “[e]cophobia is vestigial genetics gone to seed, things in evolutionary biology that have preserved us but are no longer necessary and yet form the basis of a very destructive set of behaviors” (2019: 44). Although I am also interested in the relationships between evolutionary psychology, culture and psychoanalysis, this genetic component is beyond the scope of this book, which focuses on how a particular element of ecophobia is the result of specific historical circumstances. 3 Taken to its logical conclusion, this notion of nature as landscape as representation of certain aspects of the character of certain people belonging to/owning that landscape might lead to the kind of possessive attitudes towards nature derived from what Albert Boime called the The Magisterial Gaze (1991). 4 Patricia Yaeger’s notion of an ‘energy unconscious’ is closer to my own approach than Roszak’s or Buell’s, because Yaeger thinks of the unconscious components of texts as operating in ideological terms rather than terms which can connect humans with the plenitude of the ecological/environmental unconscious. Analysing fictional texts referring, in various oblique ways, to how humans use energy sources, Yaeger asks whether Jameson’s “model of the political unconscious also describe[s] an energy unconscious? […] Energy invisibilities may constitute different kinds of erasures. Following Jameson, we might argue that the writer who treats fuel as a cultural code or reality effect makes a symbolic move, asserts his or her class position in a system of mythic abundance” (2011: 309). As such, Yaeger and I share an understanding of the unconscious as an arena of ideological mystification, in contradistinction to Rosazk’s and Buell’s understanding of the unconscious as an arena of ‘authentic’ interaction with the environment. However, Yaeger’s ‘energy unconscious’ is more narrow than my approach, in the sense that she is concerned with our culture’s unconscious attitudes to a particular aspect of ecological degradation – energy use – whereas I am concerned with our culture’s broader unconscious attitudes to ecological degradation. Chapter 2 1 See Geal (2019: 14–25) for a fuller account of these academic trends’ historical development. 2 For a more detailed account of the development of geometric perspective painting in these terms see Geal (2019: 44–51) and Panofsky (1991 [1927]). 3 Art historian Erwin Panofsky argues that the ostensible perspectival painting of classical antiquity is not the same as Early Modern geometric perspective because it is “the expression of a fundamentally unmodern view of space. […] Systematic space was as unthinkable for antique philosophers as it was unimaginable for antique artists” (1991 [1927]: 43). 4 Fissures in the Symbolic Order are so ubiquitous that the very foundation of the Cartesian cogito is grounded in a suturing process. As Žižek puts it, Descartes was the first to introduce a crack in the ontologically consistent universe: contracting absolute certainty to the punctum ‘I think’ opens up, for a brief moment, the hypothesis of the Evil Genius (le malin genie) who, behind my back, dominates me and pulls the strings of what I experience as ‘reality’. […] However, by reducing his cogito to res cogitans, Descartes, as it were, patches up the wound he cut into the texture of reality. (Žižek 1993: 12, original emphasis) Lacan demonstrates that le malin genie cannot be banished though recourse to “I think” (Descartes 1982 [1644]: 5), because the ‘I’ is an illusion constructed by the Symbolic Order, but Descartes utilised that “I think” to suture over this revelation. 5 Shot/reverse shot conventions are so ubiquitous that they are often used even when characters are not being depicted in the same literal fictional space, such as when they are conversing on the telephone. In 2012, when geologist Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) phones his father Harry (Blu Mankuma) to tell him that the environmental apocalypse is about to begin, each shot cuts from the son looking right to the father looking left, as though they were sharing an eyeline match in the same fictional space. Comparison with the real world is again indicative – two people conversing on the phone are unlikely to be pointing towards one another across potentially vast distances, but if the film were to show them pointing in different directions it might suggest a problematic lack of interconnectivity between the two images. Having the two characters facing one another elides this problematization, and sutures the images together. 6 Sontag does recognise that resolution is part of the appeal of disaster films, arguing that they “reflect real-world anxieties, and they serve to allay them” (1966: 225), in a proto-Jamesonian sense, but she does not account for the masochistic element of the “aesthetics of destruction” (1966: 213). 7 Chapter 3 addresses the issue of the cinematic experience as a specifically human experience in more detail, exploring how realist film anthropomorphises ostensibly nonhuman perspectives and experiences. 8 Ivakhiv has developed a subtle tripartite taxonomy of how film constructs impressions of fictional environments. He calls these three categories geomorphic, biomorphic/ animamorphic and anthropomorphic cinema (2013: 7–10). However, each of these categories is still inherently Cartesian, unless a film adopts any of the elements that might problematise the anthropocentric, as discussed in this chapter and in more detail in Chapter 7. In the first of Ivakhiv’s categories the “geomorphic dimension of cinematic experience […] deals with cinema’s production of territoriality, of hereness and thereness, homeness and awayness, public and private spaces, alluring destinations and sites of repulsive abjection” (7–8, original emphasis). But this geomorphic ordering of space is necessarily part of linear perspective’s geometric ontology, and therefore, as discussed above, necessarily Cartesian and anthropocentric. Similarly, Ivakhiv’s “biomorphic or animamorphic […] produces the sensuous texture of what appears to be life. […] Insofar as film is primarily visual, it is specifically the optical axis, comprising the relationship between seer and seen, subjects and objects of the act of seeing” (8, original emphasis). This visual relationship, too, principally operates within the context of Descartes’s geometric perspective, unless, again, a film specifically disregards or interrogates perspectival conventions. Finally, Ivakhiv states that “because film shows us human and human-like subjects, beings we understand to be thrown into the world of circumstance and possibility like us, it is anthropomorphic. It produces subjects more like us and those less like us, characters and character types we relate to in varying degrees” (9, original emphasis). This register is the most clearly anthropocentric – film’s geomorphic geometry and biomorphic/animamorphic relationship between seer and seen is accompanied, in Ivakhiv’s anthropomorphic dimension, with characters and narratives who share and reinforce our anthropocentrism (unless, again, such films explicitly challenge this anthropocentrism). Chapter 3 1 Non-realist film, as I discussed in the previous chapter, has the potential to challenge various elements of cinematic realism, and filmic boundaries between the human and the nonhuman can therefore be problematized by avant-garde filmmaking practice. As with other avant-garde challenges to realism’s Cartesian form, this potential is explored in Chapter 7. 2 Just as the aforementioned monstrous human/nonhuman hybrids and zombies are frightening not only because they narratively threaten to kill, but because they also threaten to collapse the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, so too films in which humans become food are frightening both because of the direct threat – characters being killed – and also because the reduction of a human to food is akin to the reduction of the res cogitans to the category of res extensa that is reserved for animals in the real world. Films like Jaws do not just threaten fictional characters with death by predator, they also threaten the traumatic revelation that the res cogitans mind is inextricably linked to a res extensa body that certain parts of the biosphere might treat just like any other res extensa animal prey. As such, within the logic of abjection and the masochistic fort/da game, such traumatic revelations are encountered so that they may be resolved, with Jaws’s devouring threat removed, by the end of the film. 3 It is possible for a film to make a distinction between res cogitans-like animals and res extensa-like animals. In the fictional Narnia universe, for example, there are ‘talking animals’ who befriend the protagonists, the Pevensie siblings. When the children return to Narnia in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Andrew Adamson 2008) they find a world losing its magic. Lucy (Georgie Henley) sees a bear running towards her and, assuming it is a ‘talking animal’ does not appreciate that she is under attack. Her companions do understand this, however, and kill the bear. Narnian native Trumpkin (Peter Dinklage) demonstrates the distinctions between res cogitans and res extensa when he comments ‘you get treated like a dumb animal long enough, that’s what you become’. Cogito-like subjectivity may be extended to certain fictional animals, then, but this does not mean that all animals, even within the fiction, are promoted to that status. Chapter 4 1 The following year also saw the release of another two films demonstrating apocalyptic anxiety, in the form of Armageddon (Bay 1998) and Deep Impact (Leder 1998). These films depict natural disaster caused by extraterrestrial factors rather than explicitly geocentric factors, and are therefore not addressed in detail here, but they also feature spectacular destruction including tsunamis and so on, and demonstrate broad fears about potentially violent nature. 2 Another environmental disaster film, Deepwater Horizon (Berg 2016), has a similar foreshadowing shock. A helicopter transporting a crew out to the titular oilrig is struck by a seabird that shocks both characters and spectator, but the helicopter, crew and passengers are unharmed, and this incident foreshadows the impending more serious disaster, which has also been foreshadowed by numerous incidents which privilege a spectatorial vision that is unavailable to characters. 3 This masochistic pause in reviving a drowned family member also occurs in The Wave (Uthaug 2015), an environmental disaster film that also utilises the various components discussed in this chapter, such as a privileging of spectatorial vision, sublimated human causes, resolved confusing imagery, and so on. The film concludes with a family rescue in another flooded room, but this time the rescuing father Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) has drowned. His wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) gives him the kiss of life in an attempt to revive him, and she and son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) both desperately pump his chest. The unsuccessful nature of the pause is emphasised by Idun closing Kristian’s eyes. But, like Raymond in San Andreas, Sondre, who had inevitably been in conflict with his father earlier in the film, refuses to accept this family breakup, resumes the CPR, so that Kristian spews up water, and the reunited family hugs. 4 When Paul, Harry’s boss, arrives, he agrees with this scepticism although, like Stan in Volcano, he will have a redemptive arc, helping out when disaster does strike, which culminates with his death on the bridge, as discussed above. Chapter 5 1 The film first depicts the effects of the cessation of the core’s movement through a more subtle breakdown in various animals’ natural behaviour. The main focus of this, in a reference to how Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) depicts the breakdown of the natural order, is a scene in London’s Trafalgar Square where pigeons become (accidentally) destructively monstrous, with multiple shots of birds smashing through office windows, a taxi windscreen, a bus window, and finally, in repeated shots and in slow motion, the large windows of a theatre where people have run for shelter. Amongst the confusion, two people cover a damaged eye, reprising the infamous scene in Hitchcock’s film where a farmer is found with an eye eaten away. The Trafalgar Square sequence had also begun from the birds’ perspective, from the top of Nelson’s Column, like another famous scene in The Birds, where the camera adopts the position of seagulls flying above Bodega Bay, after a petrol station explodes. In The Core’s next scene, Josh tries to link the events he is seeing on the news with the deaths of people with pacemakers, which he had discovered earlier, and asks his research students to investigate cases of ostensibly ‘unnatural’ whale and dolphin beachings, although these are not shown in the manner that they are in World War Z, as discussed in Chapter 2. 2 2012 is also masochistically reflexive because it was released in 2009, three years before the events depicted in the film which refer approximately to real-world predictions about the end of the world based on popular misunderstandings about the Mayan dating system, and which are included in the film amongst other dramatised pieces of diegetic television news footage. I have already argued that the natural catastrophes depicted in the films discussed in this chapter relate to anxiety about potential real-world apocalypse. 2012 puts this broad anxiety into a particular context, so that it begins with characters finding out about impending disaster in a fictional 2009, and stages events that the spectator watching the film in the real 2009 might have some form of more specific real-world anxiety about. Chapter 7 1 This account of digital animation as a flying form of hyper-Cartesianism helps to clarify my analysis of animated movements in films like Bee Movie in Chapter 3. Conclusion 1 https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/02CF6781?bcast= 130942470 Bibliography Ord, T. (2020) The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. London: Bloomsbury. Said, E. (1985) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ayres, E. (1999) God’s Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future. London: Four Walls Eight Windows. 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