*Shane* and *The Searchers* as Environmental Films

Perhaps the two most iconic western films of the 1950s, The Searchers (1956) and Shane (1953), have invited a variety of critical readings, most of which highlight conflicts between the side of right (aligned with the hero) and that of a misguided antagonist (American Indiansⁱ and corporate ranchers, respectively), as well as between civilization and savagery. The homesteaders conquer their enemies in both films, with the help of a hero who seems to embody elements of both a civilized and savage world. In both films the hero must return to a savage wilderness because he sees himself as unfit for the (better) civilized world. What is missing from these readings, however, is a closer look at the historical context behind the dramatic narratives that drive the films and their heroes. The real battle in these films, and in many western films, is not between the little guy and the big guy or even between civilization and savagery. Instead, these films draw on environmental battles that are ongoing and potentially devastating for what we think of as the American West. We argue that western films like these call for environmental readings based in ecological dichotomies that break down when read in relation to the historical and cultural contexts of the films and their settings.

In The Searchers, for example, numerous scenes call for an explicit eco-critical reading: The first occurs early in the film when Ethan (John Wayne) and a posse of Texas Rangers take off after some cattle stolen by what they think are Caddo or Kiowa Indians. After riding through the majestic landscapes of Monument Valley, Ethan and the rest of the newly deputized Texas Rangers find the cattle forty miles away from the ranches from which they were stolen, deliberately killed with Comanche lances, slaughtered but not eaten for food. Another scene highlights a third flashback during Laurie’s (Vera Miles) reading of Martin’s (Jeffrey Hunter) one letter. In the flashback, Martin and Ethan approach a snow-covered area where buffalo are gathered. Ethan shoots one of the buffalo, causing the rest to stampede. Then he goes into a passionate frenzy, shooting wildly at the herd. His senseless slaughter of the buffalo is intended to starve and deprive the Indians of food. Marty protests the deliberate killings to deny food to the Indians but Ethan doesn’t listen: “At least they won’t feed any Comanches this winter.” Ethan’s proclamation parallels earlier tactics of Scar (Henry Brandon), the chief of the tribe that slaughters Ethan’s family, when he kills homesteaders’ cattle to lure the white men away from the ranch. This parallel complicates any attempts to distinguish American Indians from white settlers; it also reinforces an anti-environmental message, seemingly shared by both cultures, that valorizes death and destruction not for food or survival, but for revenge.

In Shane, the conflict is not between white settlers and American Indians, but between white homestead-ers and white ranchers. Here the conflict is skewed against the open range and in favor of raising cattle, as well as grain and vegetables, in fenced-in enclosures, because this method is deemed better for the cattle, the agriculture that sustains them, and the environment. Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), the chief home- steader in the film, tells Shane (Alan Ladd):

In case you wanted to know, that’s Ryker’s (Emile Meyer) spread all over there. He thinks the whole world belongs to him. The old-timers can’t see it yet, but runnin’ cattle on an open range can’t go on. It takes too much space for too little results. Those herds aren’t any good. They’re all horns and bone. Cattle that is bred for meat and fenced in and fed right, that’s the thing.

According to Starrett, then, open-range ranching is inefficient and wasteful, destroying more land than it needs to and resulting in marginal beef. Grain-fed cattle, on the other hand, are fat and happy and cause little damage to an open range. For Starrett and the other homesteaders“This is farming country, a place for people to bring up their families. Who’s Ryker to run us away from our own homes? He only wants to grow beef, and we want to grow families, to grow them good and strong, the way they were meant to be grown. God didn’t make all this country just for one man like Ryker.”

Ryker, on the other hand, believes his free-range ranching is better not only for him and his way of life, but for the environment. Ryker first asserts he has earned his right to ranch an open landscape and resents how easily homesteaders usurp it:

When I came to this country, you weren’t much older than your boy. We had rough times. Meand other men that are mostly dead now. I got a bad shoulder yet from a Cheyenne arrow head.We made this country, we found it and we made it, with blood and empty bellies. Cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother you much any more because we handled ‘em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doing it, but we made it. Then people move in who never had to rawhide it through the old days.

But Ryker also resents the environmental consequences of the homesteaders’ presence:

“They fence off my range and fence me off from water. Some of them plough ditches, take out irrigation water. So the creek runs dry sometimes and I gotta move my stock because of it. And you say we have no right to the range. The men that did the work and ran the risks have no rights?”

Both Starrett and Ryker believe they have the right to the land not only because they’ve earned it—either through hard work or law—butalso because their methods coincide best with the landscape, and they preserve the land as well as fattening the cattle. Each of these examples rests on conflicting views of how best to address the wilderness. By focusing on environmental issues discussed in traditional western films, however, we can read western films through an eco-critical lens and make the history behind the environmental debates found in western films transparent. The binaries represented in these films typically blur when examined more closely,and such blurring demonstrates the complexity of environmental history and environmental degradation.

Human Approaches to Ecology Versus Comedy in The Simpsons Movie

The Simpsons Movie recalls a sing-along cartoon from 1948, Little Brown Jug because of its blatantly environmental message with a foundation in human ecology and an ending that may eclipse those ecological leanings. Little Brown Jug demonstrates how a stream can become polluted by human waste, in this case from a cider mill producing hard cider. Although humorously showing animals getting drunk when they drink water from the stream, the cartoon also depicts the stream’s changing color as the cider spills into it. And the pollution is caused by negligence that results in overproduction: The animals produce so much cider that the kegs break, spilling over into the stream. In The Simpson’s Movie, the environmentally driven conflict arises when Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) adopts a pig. The pig serves as the catalyst for environmental catastrophe because Homer pours the pig’s waste into Lake Springfield despite EPA warnings, causing what Nathan Rabin of The Onion A.V. Club calls “an ecological disaster of extinction-level proportions.”

Lake Springfield is so polluted that its acid content destroys the band Green Day’s barge and sinks them, so the town is on notice. It must clean up its lake, or the EPA will intervene. Waste dumping is prohibited in Springfield’s lake, and a barrier is erected. But Homer breaks that barrier and by accident dumps the pig waste in the Lake instead of at an environmentally sound site when he sees a sign for free doughnuts. Environmental disaster takes center stage immediately after the pig waste hits the water: Lake Springfield turns black, and a squirrel grows multiple eyes when it falls in the toxic water. 

Instead of attempting a clean-up effort, however, in the context of a Simpsons’ film, the EPA suggests containing the toxic lake by placing a dome over both the lake and the city of Springfield. Everyone will be trapped there, and, when the town finds out it is Homer’s fault they attack the Simpson’s home. A sinkhole in their yard provides an outlet for the Simpsons, through which they escape to Alaska.

When the EPA’s first efforts fail because citizens madly attempt to escape the dome, the EPA offers another suggestion. Again instead of cleaning up the lake, they suggest blowing up the city of Springfield and creating a new Grand Canyon (as Tom Hanks asserts in a public service announcement). Safe in Alaska, Homer first refuses to stop the bombing, but when Marge (Julie Kavner) and the children leave him, he has a change of heart, returns to Springfield, and, with help from Bart (Nancy Cartwright) and his newfound motorcycle skills, destroys the bomb before it wipes out Springfield.

The town rebuilds, and Homer continues his goofy adventures to end of the film, leaving the ecological problems unresolved. In fact, the film suggests that neither the town nor the government can or will solve them. Instead, the film plays up pollution for the sake of comedy, merely “seizing on an environmental theme,” according to Brian Lowry’s Variety review, and perhaps erasing any possible environmental message on display. A.O. Scott of The New York Times sees the rendition of the themes as part of the expectations for a summer blockbuster movie: “Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been elected president of the United States; the elite forces of the Environmental Protection Agency; and the near-destruction of Springfield” (“We’ll Always Have”). Still, the toxic Lake Springfield serves as the catalyst for the fun, drawing on pollution control tenets of human approaches to ecology.

Happy Feet and Human Ecology: A Century of Environmentalism

Although animated features from 1937 to the present reflect their own cultural and historical contexts, they also continue to follow narrative and aesthetic patterns found in our investigation of animated shorts of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Perhaps because they are products of either modernist industrial culture or a postmodern culture driven by technology, animated features embedded with environmental messages also continue to reflect the influence of human, economic, organismic, and chaotic approaches to ecology, illustrating aesthetic patterns that encourage separation between human and nonhuman nature or their interconnection through interdependent relationships. Happy Feet (2006) is a case in point.

Harking back to the species survival message of Fox Pop, Happy Feet is, according to an Onion A.V. Club review by Tasha Robinson, “a gorgeously rendered marvel that pulls out all the stops to wow its viewers” while maintaining “its integrity with a smart and surprisingly deep story.” Employing long takes and a moving camera, the film provides “heightened elegance and precision as well as a strong sense of space” and effective use of motion-capture techniques, according to Variety’s Todd McCarthy. But the film also attempts to convey two perhaps conflicting themes which Jordan Harper defines as “be yourself” and “we must regulate the overfishing of the Antarctic oceans” in his Village Voice review. Harper suggests these dual themes dilute the film’s message, but we see the environmental theme overshadowing the individualist motif Harper describes, providing environmental messages grounded in organismic and human ecology coupled with tenets of the animal rights movement.

Happy Feet highlights nature from its opening forward, with shots of Northern Lights that look like the Milky Way and an opening camera move toward a globe from space, as in films from Dark City to An Inconvenient Truth and WALL-E. The camera pans onto an icy surface in helicopter shots, revealing a community of penguins to individualize this view of the natural world. In this idealized animated world, however, penguins sing “heart songs” that demonstrate their inner essence and connect them with other members of their species. In this opening scene, two of the penguins, Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) and Memphis (Hugh Jackman) mate by singing a duet of “You Don’t Have to be Rich,” eventually hatching the egg that incubates the film’s protagonist, Mumble (Elijah Wood).

From this point, the film broadcasts at least two social and potentially environmental messages. The first serves as a catalyst for Mumble’s journey to the human world: Because Mumble is born with different skills than the other penguins, dancing rather than singing like his parents, he teaches them a lesson of acceptance and tolerance rooted in organismic ecology after demonstrating the folly of their choice to ostracize him.

The second combines tenets of the animal rights movement with human approaches to ecology: Penguins will starve if humans continue to over fish and pollute the seas. Because they blame the diminishing sea life on Mumble and his inability to sing, the penguin community banishes him, and Mumble discovers a large Caterpillar earth mover near the shore that suggests some other reason for the penguins’ lack of food. He recruits a group of smaller penguins and their oracle, Lovelace (Robin Williams), slowly being strangled by plastic from a six pack burrowing into his neck, to discover both the reason for the diminishing fish supplies and the species behind the huge machine.

Ultimately Mumble and his entourage discover the cause for their famine, what elephant seals call the “annihilator,” humans that even eat whales. At a shipyard, they discover the source of the fish shortage: unrestrained fishing and waste disposal. But since Mumble and the others are powerless to stop this large force, Mumble swims after the ship to appeal “to its better nature” and is “carried endlessly across vast oceans to worlds unknown,” according to the narrator.

When he climbs on shore, however, Mumble is captured and placed in a penguin habitat and finds a way to save himself and his fellow penguins from starvation. While trapped in the zoo, Mumble dances in front of a glass window. And when a little girl dances along with him, a crowd watches in amazement. The humans all think Mumble communicates with them through his tapping so, as a sentient being, he and his fellow penguins are seen as valuable enough to save. They have the same rights as humans and deserve to survive, so, after placing a locator on his leg, they take him back to his icy home.

The film’s conclusion resolves both social issues. Mumble is accepted back into his now more tolerant “biotic” penguin family. And, in a narrowly-focused environmental outcome, ocean fishing is curbed to ensure penguins survive after humans follow his locator and again respond to his dancing. Mumble’s transmitter has brought them there, and Mumble explains that the alien humans put the food chain out of whack, and they want to help. All the penguins now dance and sing. Humans watching from a snowy hill exclaim, “Are they trying to tell us something? We’re messing with their food chain. Abandon all marine harvesting!” Now fishing will cease because these humans can’t imagine a world without penguins, a resolution that may disregard greater environmental problems like global warming but at least points toward the need for maintaining both human and nonhuman nature, a significant starting point perhaps drawn more from both the animal rights movement and a conservation movement grounded in human approaches to ecology.