The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) listserv has lately been discussing texts that address the metamorphosis of one creature into another, sparking descriptions of metamorphosis found in children’s literature, American Indian Mythology, and science fiction stories and novels. Mark Giles noted a Philip K. Dick story, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.”
H.G.Wells’ The Food of the Gods also highlights metamorphosis, growth of animals to a gigantic size, and has inspired multiple filmic adaptations. Bert I. Gordon directed two of these: The Village of the Giants (1965) and The Food of the Gods (1976). A third, Gnaw: Food of the Gods Part 2, directed by Damien Lee, was released in 1989. In The Village of the Giants, a young boy’s (Ron Howard) experiments result in the formula that expands the size of animals, including a few ducks that become the centerpiece of a teen barbecue, and in Gnaw, scientists are the cause, but in The Food of the Gods, the source of mutation remains unnamed.
Many science fiction films center on animal growth or mutation, but the source of the metamorphosis varies according to the films’ contexts. For example, Them! (1954) highlights giant ants that grow to an enormous size because of atomic radiation. In Frogs (1972), however, after the creation of the EPA, frog mutations are blamed on toxic chemicals Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) uses to rid his property of pests. To emphasize the film’s environmental message, a free-lance photographer (Sam Elliott) unearths the consequences of Crockett’s chemical dumping for Ecology Magazine. Mutated frogs and other animals avenge Crockett’s destruction of nature, in a campy conclusion to a film that mingles horror and eco-disaster.
John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy (1979) takes this genre further by extending it from individuals to corporations. The film warns of the real consequences of toxic waste dumping through a shocking monster movie with an environmental message: A lake, river, and its tributaries are polluted by the treatments used at a lumber company and paper mill in Maine, creating evolutionary monsters that attack indigenous people, both literally and through their deformed fetuses.
The lake at what one Indian elder calls “the Garden of Eden” is fed by the river where the mill treats lumber and extracts toxic waste. We see the industrial process from lumber in the river to paper in the huge mill. Once it is constructed, the pulp is bleached with chlorine and dried using a caustic solution. Although the lumber folk claim it is biodegradable, approved by the EPA, and does not get into the watershed, the chemical is revealed to be methyl mercury.
Ultimately Doctor Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) discovers that local tribal members, fish, and raccoons suffer from mercury poisoning and compares the disaster to an mercury poisoning catastrophe in Minimata, Japan that resulted in a hundred thousand deaths. Indigenous residents eat fish infected with mercury and act as if they are drunk because mercury attacks the nervous system. The same symptoms appear in a raccoon. The mercury also affects human fetuses because it jumps the placental barrier and results in freakism and stillbirths, even like a deformed bear monster that attacks backpackers.
The mutations continue in contemporary science fiction films. In ExistenZ (1999), for example, David Cronenberg uses mutated amphibians as a plot point to explore the ethics of reality-based videogames. A two-headed lizard is seen as a sign of the times, so mutated amphibians are raised deliberately in controlled aquatic farms, at least in the videogame world Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Ted (Jude Law) enter, presumably to infiltrate a videogame company and assassinate its chief game creator. The film’s message seems focused primarily on the ethics of videogames, but it also bases game play on mutations constructed by humans. Mutations continue in comic monster movies such as Eight Legged Freaks (2002) and Monsters Vs. Aliens (2009), suggesting the plot device will continue, but the type and source of the mutation will change.
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