Who is Designing a Home in *Dark Days* (2000)?

In modern mythology, the underground has served as the site of technological progress where excavation produces not only the means of production—coal and oil, for example—but also the foundation for the urban infrastructure—sewage and water systems, railways, gas, and lines for electricity, telegraphs and telephones.

What, then, happens when humans not only enter this technologically-driven underworld, but also domesticate and humanize it as a space to escape from the savage city above them? And how might documenting their re-adaptation of a savage underground serve as another form of construction? In such a domesticated underground, those who have very little struggle to make a home while their lives are traced in narratives of adaptation.

Such a fabricated context is both explored and constructed in Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000), a black and white documentary that records the lives of several “homeless” people living in subway tunnels underneath New York City, a practice, according to Margaret Morton, begun with the arrival of the Hudson River Railroad in the mid-1850s (The Tunnel ix) (see also, Fragile Dwellings).

The homeless people Marc Singer documents have built themselves houses to, as Henry (one of the older homeless) puts it, “stop you from being helpless, not from being homeless,” houses that have become homes with domestic comforts like electric lights, hot plates, and coffee pots. Like Flaherty’s subjects in films like Nanook of the North, Singer’s homeless have adapted the environment to meet their needs. But also like Flaherty, Singer further transforms his subjects’ context by both physically altering it and manipulating his subjects’ stories into a traditional narrative.

Dark Days illuminates urban underground adaptation as it is fed by stolen technology: Electricity and (at least for a time) running water from above ground is accessed cost-free by the homeless living in the tunnels built for the New York subway system. However, documentary realism or facticity is complicated as Singer’s Dark Days seems to portray a realistic representation of homeless New Yorkers living in shanties built under the city—in an underworld created by the subway tunnel system. Here, Singer controls not only the perspective and point of view of his camera, but also the world above ground, which the homeless enter to “earn” a living and then return to their underworld homes. The city streets Singer shows are nearly devoid of human activity, even during the daylight hours when several of the homeless forage for cans, bottles, compact discs, books, and discarded television sets to sell for an income. Singer seems to have constructed this above-ground city as a “wilderness” the homeless must escape because they cannot tame it. And they only reenter this “wild” urban world to acquire subsistence. Below ground, however, domestic life flourishes in a world the homeless, according to Singer’s perspective, have adapted to serve their needs. Singer, too, then, takes a “hands on” approach to filming Dark Days because he represents the city as virtually devoid of the human (and natural) life that thrives (or shall we say, prospers) below.

Singer interviews subjects to reveal back stories, and they both build narratives out of individual tales of environmental compromise. To construct this narrative, Singer and his subjects create a world where the city is a dangerous place, a wilderness, and the homeless seek shelter where no one else will go. Singer and his subjects work together to alter the underground landscape to accommodate filmmaking, as well. In Singer’s discussion about the making of Dark Days, he explains how involved the homeless he interviewed became. Singer had lived with these homeless long enough to learn about their skills and the jobs they had worked above ground, so the homeless became both cast and crew in the film. For example, “one of the guys” (“Making of Dark Days”)—who had worked on the railroad—built the dollies that facilitated the film’s tracking shots. And Henry “tapped into” the city’s electrical system, so Singer and the crew could construct power lines with sockets throughout the tunnels. Ralph took on the most responsibility, acting as Singer’s primary assistant, helping with every step of the process—from filming to editing.

Homeless in Dark Days adapted the underground environment to serve their domestic needs, but altered it even further for their own documentary, a film built on a traditional narrative that advocates both interdependent living and progress. Their work also reveals the complex structure behind the documentary filmmaking process.

designing the city

I had a nice talk to a friend from the Chicago area who started to describe the plans being made by city designers in that area preparing for what the city would be like in 50 years. Planning has to take decades into consideration and it seemed clear that the architects, landscapers, infrastructure engineers were all on the same page: Global warming is a fact and cities have to plan for new climates that will take place because of it. So roadways and walkways have to be more permeable. Chicago is going to get more rain. Tree and shrubs have to change. The estimate is that Chicago's climate will be more like Baton Rouge's in 50 years, so what kinds of trees should be planted now to deal with such changes?

Just the discussions of these preparations means a number of things: the serious people who have to act like adults and actually plan and build have decided that science and its ability to measure makes it clear that temperatures are going up. Let people who have the time debate. Builders and designers and engineers have to get ready for the future now. I am guessing that many other cities are preparing in similar ways. While talking heads chatter about the "many sides to the arguments about global warming" people who are asked to measure, design and build have to work off of far more accurate calculations.

One day we will have a city planner write for this site and hopefully this person can expound on the problems they see with future plans with rising temperatures in mind. Till then we can think about it, watch films like Wall-E and Bladerunner or documentaries that examine the issues of cities in change like Dark Days , The Unforseen or Into Eternity, but by looking at the work of the planners and builders it seems that the narrative is now established and in place: the world is getting seriously warmer.

Tapped (2009): Democracy and Community Action Vs. Groundwater as Commodity

         A documentary focused primarily on the dangers of mining water to sell, Tapped (2009) addresses issues surrounding exploiting groundwater as effectively as does Gasland. Tapped establishes the problems related to our water use and their source, but also proposes a viable solution based in the premise that meaningful change comes from local grassroots movements. According to the film’s narrator, by 2030, two third of the world will lack access to clean drinking water because water is being treated as a commodity. When we treat water as a commodity, the film asserts, we end up with corporate control and thirty-nine billion plastic bottles of water per year in the United States alone. Representative Dennis Kucinich takes this premise further when he argues, “When we start commodifying necessities, serious political instability may result.” Tapped effectively illustrates some of the negative consequences associated with turning water into a product or commodity. 

            The first problem the film documents is the water mining itself. A case in Fryeburg, Maine serves as an ample example of how difficult it is for a small town to battle a large corporation over water rights. Scenes of a pristine lake and small waterfall highlight the idyllic Maine setting where Nestle, that large corporation, is bottling water nearly for free. The narrator explains that Nestle is mining water and compares Nestle’s exploitation of resources to the oil rush of the 1930’s. In Fryeburg, the town is waging a losing battle against Nestle because whereas surface mining of water is controlled, groundwater is under different rules. In Maine, the rule of absolute dominion is followed, so that the biggest pump takes the most water. No one was notified in town when Nestle arrived. They just bought land in places where they thought there was water and started pumping. Instead of working with the townspeople, Nestle refused to pay taxes at the wellhead of one cent per gallon. Because of the rule of absolute dominion—a rule based in the appropriative doctrine, Nestle has precedence over the town, even if aquifers that supply the town’s drinking water are in jeopardy.

            According to Tapped, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, and other states are affected by this greed for water, as well, because Nestle defines control of water in relation to these states’ laws and has overwhelming legal resources. The people in Fryeburg have been out of water for days when their reservoir ran low, but Nestle kept on pumping. Other documents reinforce the film’s arguments. A March 20, 2009 article in the Portland Press Herald, documents Nestle’s success at the Maine Supreme Court level: “The decision by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court clears the way for Poland Spring to build the facility that it had hoped to begin four years ago. The pumping station would be capable of filling up to 50 trucks each day with water piped underground from aquifers in Denmark,” Maine, a decision Fryeburg’s Western Maine Residents for Rural Living had been fighting for more than four years.

            To reinforce the repercussions of this ruling and others, the film asks, Is water a basic human right? According to the film, it should be. According to corporations such as Nestle, the narrator explains, water is a money-making commodity that should be mined and sold for, according to the film, 19 hundred times the cost of tap water. The World Bank estimates that water resources are worth $800 billion. Water is a commodity to those in power, even though climate change is causing more drought and deluge. We must protect our fresh water supplies, the film asserts. Other corporations mine water in similar ways, seeing it as blue gold. Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca Cola’s Dasani are highlighted in the film. Because of their powerful advertising arm, these company’s bottled waters became increasingly popular with little criticism until recently, even though bottled water is rarely tested, and at least forty percent of bottled water is tap water.

            A second problem highlighted in Tapped is related to the plastics used in the bottles themselves. The plastic used in these bottles is stamped with a PET (Petrochemical) recycling code. Companies manufacturing these bottles use 74 million gallons of oil to make them and release benzene into the water and air around them. Eighty percent of PET manufactured in the United States comes from Flint Hills in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the effects of toxic waste in air and drinking water has been devastating. Cancer rates increased dramatically. Birth defects increased by 84%. Yet by law the EPA could not inform citizens they could complain, the film explains. Only one person oversees all of the bottled water at the FDA, so the production is virtually unregulated.

            Plastics used in large bottles and sports and baby bottles, polycarbonate plastics, are also critiqued by the film. These bottles contain BPA which acts like an estrogen and damages reproduction systems, even at low doses, affecting other cancers and obesity rates. According to the film’s narrator, there are 30 million bottles in landfills. We recycle only 20% of bottles in the United States unless states have return deposit policies. We use 80 million plastic bottles in one day in the U.S., so sand on beaches is now plastic, and, as of 2007, oceans have 46 times as much plastic as plankton, so fish are being poisoned and our food web is under attack.

            These problems seem overwhelming; yet, according to the film, we can take steps to change them. Activists around the United States are shown successfully battling big companies. Action in Corpus Christi prompted EPA action against the Flint Hills plant. Fryeburg, Maine residents are still fighting, as well, within the film’s context. And residents in rural Western Maine have won some battles against Nestle and Poland Springs. Residents of Shapleigh, Maine passed an ordinance that gives its citizens the right to local self-governance and gives rights to ecosystems but denies the rights of personhood to corporations. This ordinance allows the citizens to protect their groundwater, putting it in a common trust to be used for the benefit of its residents.  Other solutions include new bottle deposit laws, but democratic common trust rights serve as the ultimate goal of the film. According to Tapped, water is not a commodity. It is a basic human right.

The American Lawn

A conversation with a friend about mowing a three-acre lawn reminded me that short grassy lawns are a relatively recent development in the U.S. but have become so normalized that historical films highlighting grasses--especially on golf courses--depict them as uniform and perfectly sheared.

The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), for example, shows us the costumes, hairstyles, cars, houses, and even golf clubs of the period from the 1890s to 1913, but it fails to maintain historical accuracy on two counts: lawns and golf course greens. With all this attention to detail, films like The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) missed the point on grass because engineered lawns have become so naturalized that it is assumed that they were always a necessary component of a home; the same might be said of the short, striped, and irrigated weedless greens and fairways passed off as historically accurate in all three films. These three films maintain historical accuracy except when it comes to lawns and golf courses because the grass aesthetic is seen as a given so deeply engrained that we now consider a perfect lawn and golf green natural. Grassy lawns and golf courses are a construction, not a natural phenomenon.

Few would argue that sports drives (as it has from the beginning) the need for pristine turf grass on lawns as well as fairways. According to Niveau, “Golf courses were the earliest instigators of lawn competition. With the development of public courses in the late 1800s, many homeowners found that keeping their lawns up to the exacting standards of the fairway was time-consuming and expensive. … Thoroughly engineered and subject to the laws of industry, horticulture, genetic science, and applied botany, the lawn is anything but natural.”

A good example of this American grass aesthetic comes from Bruce Dawson, the production designer for Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. When he talked about the historical accuracy of Bobby Jones, he validated the use of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, saying it hadn’t changed, but he admitted, “Maybe a bit on the golf course where they’ve added irrigation, but audiences will believe it’s period” (quoted in Kelley).

Filmed on location in Atlanta, Covington, Southern California, and, of course, St. Andrews Golf Course in Scotland, Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004), like the other two historical golf films discussed here, presents current golf course greens as “period,” and audiences believe it. Although The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) was filmed in Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada, it too passes off a present day golf course as the same as one at the turn of the century. And The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) includes film footage from various golf courses in South Carolina and Georgia, including Hilton Head, South Carolina and Jekyll Island, Georgia, all in 2000, not the 1920s.

Setting these present day golf courses up as historically accurate representations of courses from the turn of the century through the 1930s serves as a reminder of how normalized grass lawns and greens have become. Viewers fail to notice the lack of weeds and even dandelions in any of these films. Golf courses grasses are presented as a uniform length, color, and texture, with no mixing of grass seed. And homes near courses, even in the city, have bright green lawns in front of them. Grass lawns and greens have become so normalized that it’s almost impossible to imagine a home without a grass lawn or a golf course without unified green grass, free of weeds and pests and cut short with a striped pattern.  

In fact, until the twentieth century, most Americans had no lawns at all, and pristine front lawns were impossible to attain until after World War II. Instead, if Americans’ houses were in town, they were “built close to the street with perhaps a small, fenced front garden. On farms, houses and farm buildings were surrounded by pasture, fields, or gardens and a bare, packed dirt farmyard” (Jenkins 2). Houses in Southern American states had “yards of swept dirt or sand, covered with pine straw. In the Southwest, adobe houses turned inward on interior courtyards” (Jenkins 2). Instead of a natural given, then, the grass lawns we now see as the norm were a constructed idea, with definitions of “lawn” changing from the sixteenth century till today. Unfenced front lawns have become normalized in the United States today but were a relatively recent addition to American culture and are still shunned by some European, South American, African, and Asian immigrants (Jenkins 3).

Lawns—and our view of them as natural—are clearly a cultural construction. According to Virginia Scott Jenkins, “American front lawns are a result of two separate, although equally important, influences: the ability to grow appropriate grass and to keep it irrigated and mown, and the aesthetic desire for a lawn in front of the house” (9).  The idea of the front lawn in America, then, was not always the norm. In fact, until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, grassy lawns were not possible in the United States and, until at least the 1950s, could not be weed free and homogeneous.

Jenkins recounts how lawn grasses were actually imported from Europe because they were not indigenous to the United States and reminds us that “before the invention of the hand-pushed lawn mower, the rubber hose and sprinkler, pesticides, herbicides and commercial fertilizer, and the introduction of appropriate lawn grasses, lawns as we know them today were impossible” (9-10). Jenkins asserts that Americans, who moved to homes in the suburbs from the late 19^th until the mid-twentieth century “were taught to incorporate the new lawn aesthetic into the landscape and had to learn how to take care of their lawns” in a “slow process” that ensured that by the 1950s “front lawns had become thoroughly integrated into the American landscape” (10).

The drive for an ideal lawn aesthetic, however, was also influenced by “the development of public golf courses in the late 1800s” (“The American Lawn”). Rich homeowners with houses built near these golf courses “felt a great deal of pressure to conform,” since “Poorly kept lawns provided a breeding ground for weeds, insects, and undesirable grasses that might spread to the fairways” (“The American Lawn”). Jenkins concurs, asserting that the American lawn industry that began with the first lawn mower in 1869, “nurtured the aesthetic that called for a smooth, green lawn in front of American homes. Advertising and popular magazines, the increasingly popular game of golf, labor-saving inventions, new grasses, and shifts in living and working patterns, combined with tremendous personal mobility, all contributed to a domestic landscape in the United States that is similar from coast to coast” (183-84).

Uniform front lawns and golf courses, then, were constructed as necessary elements of the American aesthetic from the late 1800s forward. Golf courses required closely mowed grasses, and that aesthetic spread to homeowners, especially near greens and fairways. Yet we should keep in mind that the first 18-hole golf course in the United States was not founded until 1893 (in Wheaton, Illinois), and the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) was not founded until 1916. And tournament golf became seen as a spectator sport only during the 1920s (“Golf History: Historical Facts About Golf”). The technology necessary to maintain such a uniform bed of grass was unavailable until after World War II. According to Wendy Munson Scullin, “During World War II, …. it became apparent that a synthetic version of a plant growth hormone could be used to kill plants, thereby disrupting the enemy’s food supply.” H. Patricia Hynes, a professor of environmental health at Boston University explains that “The pesticide [and herbicide] industry is derived from war research, and pesticide-based agriculture constitutes a virtual peacetime war on nature” (quoted in Scullin).

The slow movement toward normalized suburban lawns until World War II is reinforced by economic evidence. Advertisements from the late 1800s (when lawn mowers became available) forward sought to normalize closely-mowed lawns, but, according to Jenkins, “Sales grew slowly despite advertisements that idealized lawn cultivation.” Jenkins argues that “The suburban ideal of 1944—a single-family house, two children, and ‘a carpet of sparkling green turf’—was out of reach for most Americans until the postwar prosperity of the fifties.” It wasn’t until the 1950s that both advertisements for and articles about lawn care burgeoned. Lawn equipment was sold through advertisements featuring sexualized females, but it was also sold by golf greats like Sam Snead. In a 1951 advertisement from Flower Grower, for example, Sam Snead asks readers, “Want a lawn that’s fairway-smooth?” (quoted in Jenkins).

Economic conditions after World War II combined with what John K. Grande calls “a post-War aesthetic born of unbridled optimism about progress.” For Grande, “The American lawn is all about the notion of unlimited resources, of suburban sprawl.” The idea of an unfenced front lawn builds on two fantasies attached to suburban living: “conformity… to maintain the suburban landscape’s illusion of an open, democratic community of neighbors” and “the equally powerful fantasy of individual control of private property” (quoted in Veder). Suburbs produced by inner-city industry contributed both to lawn aesthetic and the development of more egalitarian golf courses.

Lawn care and golf course management seemed to go hand in hand from the late 1800s through the 1950s. Neither lawns nor golf courses could reach the aesthetic ideal sold by advertisements and magazine articles until necessary grass seeds, chemicals, and technology became available after World War II.

Yet golf courses and lawns of today (in the United States and Canada and Scotland) are passed off as exactly the same as those of the 1800s, 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s in the historical golf movies we viewed. Green, weed free and uniform grasses have become not only an expected norm, but also an ideal aesthetic seen as both natural and essential—a given so apart from its origin that it no longer seems like a construction. These grasses seem so normal that viewers of The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius (2004), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) notice only the precise historical accuracy of the films. They don’t notice the anachronistic portrayal of grasses and greens because they assume lawns and golf courses have always looked that way.

 

*Wild River* and the Flood Plains of Missouri and Illinois

Farmland flooded to save Cairo, Illinois, reminded me of the 1960 film, Wild River, a fictional feature film validating the TVA projects along the Tennessee River in the 1930s. To save the town of Cairo from flooding, levees were breached to divert water to Missouri farmland. According to local farmers, an entire season of crops was destroyed by the floodwaters, and damage has been estimated at $100 million. Farmers have filed a class action suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, saying it will be years before their soil can recover from the tsunami of water that hit it.

Set in 1936 Tennessee, during the height of New Deal programs like the TVA, Kazan’s 1960 film, Wild River, had been called “an anomaly—a social-issue film from a major Hollywood studio that refuses to take sides” (Chase 1). Yet critics define that social issue not in terms of the environmental (and economic) reasons behind the TVA project the film highlights but in relation to the class structure called into question by the romance between the northern TVA representative, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) and the rural southern daughter in law, Carole Garth Baldwin (Lee Remick) of the woman Chuck has come down from the North to “relocate,” Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), a Southern island landowner. The film, however, highlights the environment and the consequences of environmental catastrophe almost immediately: it opens with black and white documentary footage of flooding along the Tennessee River which, according to the film’s voiceover narration, will be eliminated with the help of TVA projects comprised of a series of dams intended to stop the loss, devastation, and waste caused by the Tennessee River floods.

Yet in Wild River it is the river that is blamed for the devastating flooding, not humans’ overuse of the land. And the federal government, represented by the TVA projects, is the only possible savior for the South. In Wild River, a film shot around 1960 but foregrounding problems and solutions from the mid-1930s, the TVA brings rural poor out of poverty, provides them with housing wired for electricity, and finds jobs for all men, no matter their race. Here the benefits of TVA projects are highlighted, especially in relation to economic and race issues. TVA projects will extend Civil Rights to the oppressed and underprivileged rural Southerners, according to the film’s narrative. Positive consequences of TVA projects rather than human causes for the flooding these projects curtail are the focus of Wild River.

Kazan’s Wild River provides a positive perspective of the TVA and its successes. After providing the documentary black and white footage of people avoiding flood waters, even on their rooftops, the film switches perspective to a color view of the landscape from the window of the plane that is carrying Chuck to the South of the Tennessee River region to take over the local TVA office. Such a contrast suggests that the technologically advanced North must rescue Southerners from not only Tennessee River flooding but also from the stagnant rural life that stifles progress.

Because Wild River looks back on the devastation caused by the flooding of the Tennessee River from a perspective influenced by post-World War II prosperity that has seemingly transformed the Tennessee River Valley, the film establishes several binary oppositions in which Chuck, who represents the TVA and all it stands for, acts as the superior end of each, especially those in which nature and the environment play a role. Ella, Carole’s mother-in-law and the owner of an island that will soon be flooded by waters from a dam, seems most to represent nature and the natural, since she argues that taming the river goes against nature. She refuses to leave her land and clear the way for the river’s dammed waters, an act she sees as unnatural and soul-wrenching. The TVA, on the other hand, is seen as a civilizing influence, giving Southerners the chance for a soul by providing them with electricity, jobs, and economic freedom.

Ironically, however, reliance on such skewed historical memory hides the human reasons behind the flooding and incorrectly defines both nature and the natural as based on private ownership because they are shown from the perspective of Ella’s own misinformed historical memory. The film does underline some of the negative ramifications of a flooding Tennessee River—loss of homes and homeland and of human life—but unlike The River, the film does not explain the reasons for the river’s flooding—humans’ overuse of the land. Instead of demonstrating that the troubles characters like Ella are enduring happened because they exploited nature, Wild River highlights Ella, an old woman living with her family and her Black laborers on a small island, who refuses to leave her land, seemingly to undermine the TVA’s plan to dam the river and flood her island, a plan she sees as going “against nature.”

The film’s narrative resolves in favor of Northern progress, but Ella leaves her island only by force, while waters rise toward her home. And, still the rugged individual, she watches Black workers cut down her large trees as she floats away. On her new home’s front porch, Ella refuses to sit in a rocker, refuses the services of her Black Mammy, and asks Carole to pay off her last debts: “That’s all I owe anybody,” Ella says, just before she dies, alone and unencumbered by obligations. Chuck looks on in dismay as Ella’s island house burns down, but an American flag flies on the boat, as they watch. Only the cemetery where they bury Ella remains above the rising waters. Carole and her children leave Tennessee and the South with Chuck, and they all look down on the island as they fly away, but the film closes on a bird’s eye shot of the dam, with an iris in to highlight its prominence and perhaps suggest that Chuck, or at least other TVA representatives, plan to continue the work of the TVA. 

Wild River, then, argues for the benefits the TVA produces: electricity, work for both Blacks and Whites, and revitalization of a failing agrarian economy. But at the same time, because of its reliance on a dimming historical memory, the film fails to show the human reasons behind the flooding and seems to assert that taming the river with dams goes against nature—as Ella proclaims—and creates problems for White Southerners and, perhaps, the lands The Tennessee River floods when the dam is closed. Although the film illustrates that racism serves as an essential cog in the Southern economic ecosystem, it does not offer a viable alternative for slave-like labor. In fact, Chuck uses Blacks to serve his own purposes, just as did Ella and the other propertied Whites. The environmental message here is confused, perhaps as confused as the conflict between farmers and Cairo residents recently established by a breached levee and a flood plain turned into farm land.

The River

The River, written and directed by Pare Lorentz and released in 1937, has once again become relevant to contemporary concerns about the rise of the Mississippi River and the threats to cities like Memphis, Tennessee.

The National Weather Service reports that floodwaters are cresting at 48 feet in the Memphis area and this is just under the 1937 record. The big changes that have taken place since the 1930's has been the enormous amount of work throughout the Mississippi and Ohio Valley river systems to contain such threats. As The River pointed out, much of the problems caused by flooding are man made and the product of centuries of environmental destruction through mining, logging and farming. Add the problems of population spreading to flood plains and we are lucky that these new flood protection systems are in place.

The River remains a must see. Like John Barry's book, Rising Tide, our memories of flooding and the incredible disasters they can cause are short lived. But if we are surprised by the damage that these new floods are causing, we would be even more amazed at what would happen if decades of work to contain natural events like enormous rain fall over extended periods of time had never been completed. Watching Lorentz' film and reading Barry's book would put things into perspective.

Comic Eco-Disaster Films

Films dealing with eco-disasters in the 1950s through the 1970s and early 1980s were a serious affair: See in addition to Them! (1954), Silent Running (1971), Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), The China Syndrome (1979), and Silkwood (1983), and even Frogs (1972) and Humanoids from the Deep (1980). But later films highlighting similar eco-disasters—beginning with the late 1980s Toxic Avenger series (1985 and 1989) and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and its sequels (1986-1989)—look at toxic waste dumping, energy over-consumption, and radiation poisoning from a more comic perspective. Eco-comedies like these broach a variety of  questions: How can the same environmental message be presented at least as effectively in a comedy in 1985 or today, rather than a serious science fiction film in 1950? What are the consequences of such a genre change? And, more importantly, what made such a dramatic genre shift possible?

Comic eco-disaster films illustrate the seriousness of current environmental problems by making us laugh within different contexts and with different intentions and results. For example, the Class of Nuke ‘em High films (1986-1990s) rely on the dangers of nuclear power waste production for their humor, with students mutating because of uncontrolled radiation leaking. Biodome (1996) and Blast from the Past (1999) include environmental concerns only as a backdrop for comedy. The Freshman (1990), Crocodile Hunter (2003), and Rugrats Go Wild (2003) look at abuse of endangered animal species from a comic angle, and Naked Gun 2 ½ examines out-of control nonrenewable energy companies through a parody highlighting Frank Drebin’s (Leslie Nielsen) slapstick. WALL-E (2009) examines humans' over-consumption and its destruction of Earth and offers a comic solution to a post-apocalyptic problem.

The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ‘Em High, and Men at Work take a hyperbolic approach to comedy and the environment, concentrating on thwarting real and possible environmental disasters caused by dumped or leaked toxic waste of various kinds. And Naked Gun 2 ½ and 8 Legged Freaks spoof more “serious” film genres—crime dramas and science fiction films, respectively. But mainstream “straight” comedies like The Freshman, Arachnophobia (1990), and WALL-E may also carry environmental messages hailing “mature” ecosystems where the community is valued over individual exploitative pioneers. 

But, again, why did filmmakers highlighting eco-disasters shift genres from serious science fiction and other genres before 1980 to comedies—spoofs, parodies, and playful crime, slapstick, and anarchic film comedies—after 1984? The environmental problems seem the same—but the cultural context and audience responses have changed. Like Arachnophobia, Rugrats Go Wild ((2003) argues against human exploitation of the natural world, and like The Freshman, the film opposes poaching, in this case of elephants’ tusks. In this animated comedy, however, human and animal characters work together, and environmental messages are far from subtle. Crocodile Hunter (2003), too, makes a blatant cry to preserve the natural world and its animals—even crocodiles—through the voice of the Crocodile Hunter stating his message directly to the audience. But Crocodile Hunter also mixes genres, this time nature documentaries and comic feature films. Other film comedies integrate environmental messages merely as plot devices—see Biodome (1996) and Blast From the Past (1999). Early eco-comedies like Godzilla, on the other hand, speak directly to the Cold War paranoia and fear of environmental catastrophe presented in films like Them! just like 8 Legged Freaks.  

So do these eco-comedies present more mature environmental messages in spite of their clearly immature comic bent? One thing seems sure—they show us compromises, with the human community prospering (not just its pioneers) and the natural world surviving (or at least saved from certain death from toxic chemicals). In 8 Legged Freaks, for example, the town of Prosperity regains economic strength because gold is found in a mine. And mining clearly exploits the natural (if not living) world. But mining disrupts the natural world much less than does toxic waste dumping—a plan sure to kill human and nonhuman nature.

Eco-comedy films of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s also grew out of the environmental movements that came before them. The year 1970 served as a turning point for environmental programs, services and agencies like the EPA. In the 1970s, however, filmic representations of environmental problems were much more earnest and intense, since the environment and its exploitation were taken seriously at local, state, and federal levels of government. Even science fiction films of the period like Silent Running and Soylent Green were serious fare.

By the late 1980s, problems associated with environmental disasters seemed old hat because EPA controls seemed firmly in place: Gas was unleaded, catalytic converters were mandatory, and recycling was on the rise around the country. Film audiences no longer needed to be warned about environmental problems, it seemed, since the United States already had institutions in place that tackled the issue. After the fall of the USSR in 1989, Americans also felt no threat of a nuclear holocaust. It may be that American film audiences grew complacent about eco-disasters and bored with serious discussions about environmental issues.  Media representations of environmentalists as “granola eaters” and “Birkenstock Bourgouisee” perhaps made it easier to laugh at environmental problems—the context for environmentally conscious films changed in the 1980s, and so did audience reactions to environmental issues.

Environmentalism seemed more like an “ivory tower” issue, taken seriously only by politically correct actors like Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood, who had no financial or survival concerns to challenge their belief in environmental protections. Environmentalists seemed laughable to people in the mainstream who could not afford to luxuriate in the ideals of the Sierra Club. Working class people of the 1980s were more concerned with loss of jobs and lack of support themselves and their families than with protecting and/or nurturing nature.

The cultural and historical context of the period seems to have made it possible to laugh at the environment—to find a way to represent environmental concerns in comic ways. But the translation of that comedy into a different view of the hero—a more communal and interdependent one—may be how these eco-comedies actually communicate important messages about the environment. Environmental exploitation now serves as fodder for comedy because audiences know enough about it to find it funny. Comic films make fun of issues audiences understand, and those issues change as times and audiences change. So now—with the first Earth Day far behind us, and eco-solutions under debate—the environment offers us room for laughs.

Humanoids from the Deep

Humanoids from the Deep (1980) was directed by Barbara Peeters and financed by Roger Corman. I think about this crazy film every time I see someone post something about being surprised at how much of our fish diet now depends on farm raised product. They are stunned to learn how this food is produced, what it eats, how it affects their health and the environment. They are just flabbergasted that aquaculture has become such an enormous ever expanding industry.

Fish farmers are expanding as fast as they can. The whole world seems to love to eat flesh and fish is a staple of many diets and becoming more popular through cheap feeds at franchise joints all over the globe. Or your ever ubiquitous 69 cent can of tuna in your local supermarket. But the farmers know that need outweighs nature and when the oceans are completely fished out they will have even a larger market to service.

Anyone who has seen The Cove, Darwin's Nightmare or End of the Line can witness the end of fish in nature. The blue fin tuna may be extinct in ten years. Cod off the coast of New England has been wiped out. Drag lines are destroying significant portions of all sea life.

So plans are being made. Need blue fin on your plate? We can do it for you genetically. You'll never tell the difference.

Cut to Humanoids. Here the plan is to increase the size of salmon by genetically enhancing the fish before releasing them into the wild. But once released they are eaten by coleacanths (a fish that goes back 65 million years and was rediscovered in 1938) and the result is a horde of creatures that go on land and look a lot like cheap versions of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But it's 1980 so we get graphic murders, rapes, big fires at carnivals and the bone tossed to eco-issue and American Indian rights. Plus a surprise ending inspired by Alien.