How to Boil a Frog: a Republican Presidential Candidate's Nightmare

In the last few months, Republican candidates have made clear their lack of faith in science. Few candidates will admit they believe in evolution, for example. And fewer still admit the scientific truth supporting climate change and its horrific consequences. Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann declared in a recent interview that she thinks climate change and “green” jobs are issues that “have to be settled on the base of real science, not manufactured science.” Texas Governor Rick Perry argues that "there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects." These claims look misguided based in ignorance at best, but these candidates’ assertions are relished by conservatives.

Climate skeptics love Perry because he valorizes their deluded points of view, but there is one film that may begin to soften the bias against climate change: How to Boil a Frog (2009). By infusing comedy into arguments for climate change and for actions we can take to address it, Jon Cooksey offers a viable argument for change that includes fun activities like making friends and making trouble. He’s not trying to save the planet; he’s trying to save himself. As Jon tells us jokingly, “I’m no tree hugger. I’m a people hugger.”

How to Boil a Frog compares our own experiences with climate change and its repercussions to a frog in a pot of water that starts out cool and then heats up slowly till it boils. The frog doesn’t jump out of the pot because it has become acclimated, just as we have become used to our warming environment. The problem with this acclimation is that we’re on a death course, the film suggests. But the film doesn’t stop there. It definitely demonstrates the horrific mess we’ve made of Earth’s environment, through a structured comedic argument. But it also provides multiple solutions that move the film beyond rhetorical documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which rely on individual and collective nostalgia—a look to the past—for their arguments.

As Cooksey makes clear, warnings about global warming have been around at least since 1827, when Jean-Baptiste Fournier suggested that an atmospheric effect kept the earth warmer than it would otherwise be – he used the analogy of a greenhouse.  But Cooksey doesn’t emphasize global warming as a problem but as a symptom of our “overshooting” nature’s curve. When we go past things nature can give us, we “over shoot,” Cooksey explains. There are too many of us, and we keep on growing, and we consume too many resources.

Cooksey outlines the problem first, as a way to highlight the solutions. First of all, overpopulation is a problem that isn’t addressed because of religion and sex. The war on nature is a second problem that hasn’t been addressed but is destroying oceans (with gyres and plastic plankton) and fish, trees, animal species, and land and air. In 50 years, at the current rate of population growth and polluting, the world’s population will double; all the ocean’s fish will die; half of animal species will be extinct. Yet conservatives argue that we can’t do anything to hurt the economy so the third problem is the conflict between rich and poor. Cooksey also argues that oil production has reached its peak, and now extracting oil takes as much energy as the energy the oil produces. Overconsumption, though, is a problem we all can address through conservation.

For Cooksey, individuals can address all of these problems by making a few lifestyle changes. He tells us to drive past Exxon/Mobile gas stations because they have produced more than three percent of global warming since 1982. He tells us to change our “life bulbs” instead of our light bulbs, as Al Gore suggests, cutting our own emissions in multiple ways (stop eating beef because they cause more than ten percent of global warming, have no more than one child, buy used, and live in smaller dwellings with locally grown produce. Most importantly, however, he tells us to make trouble by posting video of environmental disasters on YouTube.

This last solution lines up well with the conclusion of the film, scenes of devastation meant to parallel the crash films from Driver’s Education classes. Cooksey says we should “view it so we don’t have to do it” before showing scenes of eco-disasters: garbage, pollution, nuclear explosions, oil spills, human deaths, and spectacular fires and smoke. Cooksey ends his film by again encouraging viewers to make trouble. Perhaps that trouble should include posting How to Boil a Frog on Michele Bachman’s and Rick Perry’s websites. 

*The Red Desert*: An Industrial Hellhole

Michelangelo Antonioni once said "There are people who adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are tied to ways of life that are now out of date". Clearly the heroine of The Red Desert (1964) has failed to adapt. Antonioni's film focuses on the psychological disintegration of Giuliana (Monica Vitti) who finds herself in an industrial hellhole that dominates the Italian landscape where she lives. Her husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) is busy running a large factory and is seemingly oblivious to her recent suicide attempt while he was away on business in London. He is content to accept the story that Giuliana was in an auto accident. Their young son has a large erector set robot with glowing eyes that prowls his bedroom at night and he ultimately mirrors some of Giuliana's anxiety by feigning paralysis for a few hours that pushes his mother deeper into despair.

Only Corrado (Richard Harris), another prosperous industrialist, notices Giuliana's condition and becomes sympathetic to her despair. Since he appears to be the only human being in a world dominated by smoke stacks and enormous factories belching pollution that is interested in her feelings she is willing to develop a relationship with him as long as it provides her with some measure of support. The fact that they have a brief affair is meaningless.

It is Antonioni's constructed world that dominates the film's narrative. Combined with an outstanding and eerie electronic sound-scape, Giuliana and the contemporary viewer become trapped in a world that is overwhelmed by industrial waste, noise and fear. The natural world becomes pushed to the edges of the frame. This world is filled with ghostlike freighters that dock with quarantine flags run up their masts. Ugo and Corrado walk past polluted lakes laughing about how people now complain that their food tastes of oil. Corrado and Giuliana walk past a lone fruit and vegetable vendor. His outdoor display is full of ghostlike fruits and vegetables ashen and gray. Giuliana's son asks why the smoke pouring out of the factory smokestacks is so bright. "It's poison," she exclaims and we see a bright yellow smoke streaming into the sky.

Critics both in 1964 and to this day have marveled at how Antonioni shaped the visual world with overdetermined colors that made the world his own. The director was determined to paint his world with the exact pallete he envisioned and in this, his first color film, he was enormously successful. But it is naive to assume he was not also determined to define the post World War II success story of industrial Italy as a nightmare of success. Giuliana walks through this landscape, her son in tow, as if she witnessing the aftermath of an enormous war-scape. She may have not succeeded in adapting, but she is also falling apart in a world that gives her no room to breathe or see. She is out of date and Antonioni succeeds in creating a credible character who makes us feel what she is seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. And it is the taste and feel of waste.

The Great Flood, The River, Wild River, and Environmental Racism

This weekend we attended a screening of The Great Flood (2011) as part of the Ellinora Guitar Festival at the Krannert Center in Champaign Urbana and were reminded of two earlier films that draw on the floods of the 1920s and 30s, The River (1938) and Wild River (1960). Pare Lorentz’s The River describes the work mankind has done to keep the river’s waters in its banks, flooding needing control because of humans’ exploitation of the land, damage only humans can repair, according to The River. Elia Kazan’s Wild River, on the other hand, focuses on the consequences of the damming The River promotes. While The River accurately highlights the environmental problems of the Tennessee Valley and offers a definitive solution, it depends on recent historical memory for the force of its argument. The catastrophic floods of 1927, ’36, and ’37 were still fresh in the nation’s memory. But this film only provides a generalized portrait of the human hardships before the TVA project and can only speculate about the future benefits the dams and they would produce would create.

Elia Kazan’s 1960 Wild River, a narrative film deriving its plot from the TVA’s work in Tennessee, lacks the recent historic memory reflected by Lorentz’s film but tells a more human, although fictionalized, story about the repercussions of the TVA project—racism associated witht the TVA and the displacement of individuals by the “controlled” flooding caused by the dams themselves.

Elia Kazan’s 1960 film Wild River shares valorizes TVA and its successes. After providing the documentary shots of homeowners standing on their rooftops to avoid flood waters, the film switches perspective to a color view of the landscape from the window of the plane carrying Chuck down south 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.

The film also bifurcates characters by race, beginning to illustrate the racism associated with flooding and flood relief from 1927 forward. For example, John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America and Nancy L. Grant’s TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo illustrate not only the results of such flooding but also some of the human causes of ideological changes that prompted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election and the New Deal policies his administration implemented. Although The River and, to a certain extent, Wild River, acknowledge the great flooding of the Mississippi and its tributaries from 1903 until 1937, when The River was filmed, neither focuses particular attention on the greatest of those floods—the 1927 flood that changed voting patterns of African Americans and helped, in part, fuel the Democratic Party’s rise to power in 1932.

Barry’s research reveals some startling statistics about this devastating flood. According to Barry, during this flood year, the Mississippi River expanded to 125 miles across and covered 127,000 miles of what was arable land in the South. As a result of the flood, more than one million people’s homes were washed away, which, at the time, accounted for almost one percent of the population of the United States, and almost 700,000 of these people were forced to subsist on rations from the Red Cross for months. Most of those affected were African Americans, over 300,000 of whom fled to refugee camps where the National Guard ensured that no one could enter or leave without a pass and all were forced to work for no wages (285-86).

Barry argues that those African Americans served as slave labor to maintain the economy of the Mississippi Delta. Since at the time the Republican party was in power at both the federal and state levels, African Americans reacted against a government that nearly enslaved them by shifting party allegiances from Republican (the party of Lincoln) to Democrat, a shift still maintained today. The abandonment of the Republican Party (the GOP) by black voters first in 1928, and to an even greater extent in 1932, was a direct result of the 1927 flood. Hoover lost about 15% of the Black vote in 1928 because Black newspapers endorsed the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, over Hoover, who, as Vice President under Calvin Coolidge, had betrayed them after the flood. Since Al Smith was Catholic, however, Southerners who were historically Democrat (the party that destroyed Reconstruction and enacted Jim Crow laws) voted Republican and helped provide Hoover with a landslide (Barry 414).

According to Barry, Blacks' defection from the Republican party was a direct result of "uncertainty in many sections as to [Hoover's] attitude toward the Negro in the Mississippi disaster (413). Barry argues that before the floods, the Mississippi Delta provided blacks with a relatively safe haven, where Whites actually protected Blacks from vigilantes and refused to tolerate the Ku Klux Klan. The flood and the economic devastation it spearheaded changed all of that, leading Blacks back into serfdom and, consequently as of 1932, away from the Republican party and its representatives that had oppressed them. In rebellion, Blacks moved to the Democratic party led by FDR (see also Grant). This monumental flood and its aftereffects are all but forgotten, even in these two films meant to highlight the ramifications of humans’ exploitation of nature and the solution to the flooding human waste had caused. Only subtle signs of these consequences remain.

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.

*Salt of the Earth* and Environmental Justice: Human Ecology and Gender in the Mines

Salt of the Earth and Environmental Justice: Human Ecology and Gender in the Mines

In Salt of the Earth (1953), the female star of the picture, Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, entered New Mexico illegally to complete her role in the film, a semi-documentary sponsored by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers which, according to a March 16, 1953 Time article, was “ousted from the CIO in 1950 for being Communist-dominated.” The resistance highlighted here in Silver City, New Mexico was fierce and resulted in townspeople threatening the movie-makers with guns and instigating fistfights with the film crew. According to Time, “50 Silver City men tussled with the camera crew until state police broke it up. U.S. immigration officers arrested the feminine star of the picture, Mexican Cinemactress Rosaura Revueltas, for illegally entering the U.S.”

The Internet Movie Database reveals more signs of resistance. According to IMDB, “Because the producers feared both sabotage and destruction of the film, the exposed footage had to be developed in secret, and at night, by a sympathetic lab technician, with the film delivered in unmarked canisters.” And Salt of the Earth was the only film ever blacklisted in the United States. Although the filmmakers’ physical resistance was short-lived and resulted in the film crew moving to Mexico by the end of the week, when the film was released in 1954, it was first shown in Silver City. The act of making and releasing the film served as a powerful act of resistance, an act explored in-depth in Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt’s commentary on The Salt of the Earth that accompanied its screenplay.

Salt of the Earth (1954) tells the story of a New Mexico coal mining community struggling to improve not only working conditions but (more explicitly) living conditions, the focus of the human ecology movement. Here women lead demonstrations not only to support their husbands’ efforts to improve working conditions, especially for Mexican miners, but also to improve their own home lives, again as active sources of resistance. Women’s efforts serve to improve sanitation in homes of non-white miners, bringing hot running water and electricity that increases their quality of life at home. In Salt of the Earth, women serve not only their men—the male miners—but work for themselves and benefit directly from their efforts. According to Rosenfelt, “Here was a film that presented housework, child care, sanitation as important political issues; that used humor to deflate macho attitudes; that recognized the necessity of rejecting the ‘old way’ but acknowledged the difficulty of creating something new; that had chosen a woman as protagonist and entrusted to her the role of narrator” (93).  

Despite this clear female-centered resistance, because their efforts center on the home and on ways to ease their work there—usually seen as women’s work—women in Salt of the Earth maintain gender binaries and gain a sense of “sexual equality” only by leading a call for improved sanitation. Neither Salt of the Earth nor Harlan Country U.S.A., although clearly foregrounding women’s role in coal-mining resistance movements, shows us images of women coal workers like those in “A Day In the Life of a Coal Miner” or Coalmining Women whose resistance transcends their gender roles. Despite this missing element, both Harlan County U.S.A. and Salt of the Earth reveal women as active sources of resistance in movements to improve living and working conditions for miners.

Salt of the Earth foregrounds “the woman question” throughout the film, telling the story of a mining strike (in New Mexico) from the point of view of one female character. To emphasize the film’s feminine perspective, the film opens on a scene of a woman chopping wood and then boiling water over an open fire (she has lit) in the desert, with her daughter looking on. She carries a large tub of hot water towards a clothes line, and washes clothes, again outside. Only after the film’s union endorsement (“Independent Production Corporation and The International Union of Mine, Mil, and Smelter Workers Present”) and title (Salt of the Earth by Michael Wilson) comes on the screen does it show scenes of a mine. Women may not work in or above the mines in Salt of the Earth, but they do take center stage—because of their working conditions at home and their fight for equality.

After an inter-title explaining the film’s setting—New Mexico—the film shows a mine in the distance appearing out of the dark, and a woman’s voice asks, “How should I begin my story that has no beginning?” As in Harlan County U.S.A. the film shifts from the mine to the miners’ town—called Zinc Town, New Mexico, USA by the “Anglos.” The narrator reveals her name—Esperanza—and explains that she is a miner’s wife, who owns only the flowers around her house, even though the land once belonged to her husband’s grandfather. So from its outset, the film tells the story of a miner’s strike from Esperanza’s perspective, as a narrator and a woman seeking change. Esperanza, then, serves as a powerful source of resistance, as the film’s narrator and protagonist, as well as the Mexican actress playing her.

As a fictional narrative film, Salt of the Earth tells Esperanza’s story in a traditional fashion. After showing us visual representations of women’s suffering, the film establishes the plight of the local Mexican-American miners who are more exploited than their “Anglo” counterparts. Yet these same male miners exploit their women and deny them the equality they seek. The film sets up Ramon, Esperanza’s husband, as an example. When Esperanza asks him, “Why can’t you ask for different plumbing, too?” Ramon argues, “You’re a woman. You don’t know what it’s like up there. First we’ve got to get equality on the job. Then we’ll work on these other things. Leave it to the men.”

Women begin at the bottom of the hierarchy in Salt of the Earth, but the film is organized around a central theme: everyone, regardless of race and gender, should work to rise and push everything up. The Mexican-American (male) miners seek equality with the Anglo miners, but, according to the film, they should also seek equality for their women and allow them the same rights that they seek. After a mine injury caused by a company policy that requires miners to work alone, men gather for a strike, and the women join them and voice their concerns. Consuela, Esperanza’s friend, tells the men, “The ladies have been talking about sanitation, and if the issue is about equality, then maybe we oughta have equality in plumbing too. I mean, maybe we could make it a strike demand. Some of the ladies thought it might be a good idea to have a ladies’ auxiliary. Well, we’d like to help out if we can.” But the men refuse their help, table their suggestion, and adjourn.

The film shows the evolution of the women’s movement towards equality (as they have defined it) and toward becoming active sources of resistance. One older woman starts marching with the picketing men. Then women start bringing their husbands coffee and tacos. The food and drink women provide leads the union to allow a ladies’ auxiliary. Esperanza tells us (through her narration) that Ramon won’t allow her to participate, but because he prefers her coffee, he acquiesces. Eventually, after drama on the picket line that includes Esperanza having a baby while the police beat her husband, the company procures an order to stop the miners’ picketing. Since women are not miners, they are not prohibited from picketing and take their husbands’ places on the strike line.    

On the picket line, women demonstrate that they are a source of resistance as they hold their ground so adamantly that they are arrested and jailed for four days until the police have, as Esperanza puts it, “had enough of them in jail.” That jail time gives men a chance to experience the hardships women endure at home. Ramon exclaims, “Hot running water should have been a union demand from the beginning.” And one of his friends talks about the “woman question” while hanging out laundry: “Give them equality in jobs, in the home—and sex equality.” But when Esperanza returns from jail and meets with other women about the picket line, Ramon rushes off in a huff to the beer hall. When he returns home, Esperanza explains that she’d like him to think of her as a friend, yet Ramon continues to “tell her to stay in her place, just like the bosses keep Ramon down.” Ramon goes hunting the next day instead of supporting the women’s picket line, but Esperanza’s (and the film’s) message is heard.

Ramon returns just in time to lead a revolt against the company’s attempt to evict him and his family. Together they return all the goods the sheriff and his men have taken from the house. Ramon’s last speech and Esperanza’s ending narration provide a clear explanation of the film’s point. It also illustrates the portrait of resistance presented there. Ramon explains, “Then I knew, Sisters and Brothers, Esperanza—thank you for your dignity…. Together we can push everything up with us as we go.” They had built solidarity around the concept of equality for all, and especially for women and their representative, Esperanza. Esperanza states it well: “We had won something they could never take away. And they, the salt of the earth, would inherit it.” Salt of the Earth presents images of resistance in a narrative where success is not only possible but inevitable.

The ending portrait of men and women joined together leaves us with a vision of hope that—even though the company men are just up the road—all their demands will be met, both in the mines and at home. The power of women’s voices—and especially of Esperanza’s voice—has been heard and images of women’s resistance heighten their force. Yet women work to improve their own traditional sphere—the home—in Salt of the Earth. Even though equality is described as extending to work, for women in this film work means completing domestic duties. Women’s strike efforts merely reinforce the need to lighten their burden and improve sanitation at home—with running water and indoor plumbing. Gender roles are maintained in Salt of the Earth and after the strike it seems that women will return to their rightful sphere and traditional feminine roles. Resistance in Salt of the Earth is limited for women. They can participate in the strike, but only if they are fighting for either their men’s protection or for their home’s improvement.