The Aesthetics of Oxygen in No Blade of Grass

The Aesthetics of Oxygen in No Blade of Grass

In Red Desert (1964), director Michaelangelo Antonioni's constructed world dominates the film's narrative. Combined with an outstanding and eerie electronic sound-scape, the film’s female protagonist Giuliana (Monica Vitti) 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. Her two competing lovers, husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) and Corrado (Richard Harris), walk past polluted lakes laughing about how people now complain that their food tastes of oil. In another scene, Corrado and Giuliana walk past a lone fruit and vegetable vendor. His outdoor display is full of ghostlike fruits and vegetables that have turned ashen and gray. Giuliana's son asks why birds avoid the smoke pouring out of factory smokestacks. "It's poison," Giuliana exclaims, and we see a bright yellow smoke streaming into the sky, a clear reference to the human costs of toxic air and a lament to loss of our most important basic need.

From ancient Rome to the contemporary world, clean air is a requirement for human and nonhuman life. It is a basic need we require and, perhaps without our knowledge, purchase, or, when unobtainable, suffer the consequences of a toxic atmosphere. Although recent political struggles in the United States over cap-and-trade legislation and changes to the Clean Air Act highlight this dilemma, filmic representations of these struggles, which draw on human approaches to ecology, may be the most dramatic and effective arguments for clean air.

Films with atmospheric pollution at the center underscore the costs of both clean air and its absence. Lumiere views of factory emissions and oil well fires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and films from the 1960s and 1970s such as Red Desert (1964) critique industrial waste with their narratives and/or aesthetics. Recent documentaries and animated films argue against air pollution and its negative climate change consequences in similar ways, as do the critically acclaimed documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the eco-drama, Safe (1995), and the animated features, WALL-E (2008) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). But the messages of atmospheric pollution and climate change merge most powerfully in a little-known science fiction film from 1970, No Blade of Grass. Despite its pre-climate change debate context, this film provides a compelling look at the dire costs of human’s exploitation of the natural world, places blame for the Earth’s health squarely on humanity, and maps out explicitly the consequences of humans’ disastrous choices.

No Blade of Grass sheds light on not only the economic costs to limit emissions and climate change, but also the human costs when these limits fall short. Unlike films showing pollution without commenting on human consequences, such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Molly Maguires (1970), or documentaries concentrating primarily on environmental rather than human disasters resulting from global warming, as in An Inconvenient Truth, explorations of toxic air in science fiction films demonstrate the importance of clean air as a basic need that must be met to reduce harmful effects on human and nonhuman nature. They also reveal the continuing truth of Ellen Richards’ 1908 assertion: “The essentials of public health are recognized as clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean and wholesome food. When people crowd into a limited space these must be secured by cooperation” (The Cost of Cleanness49-50).

Based on the 1955 John Christopher novel, The Death of Grass, No Blade of Grass provides a blatant and bleak picture of the costs of a toxic atmosphere to human and nonhuman life that brings to mind post-apocalyptic films such as Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973) and The Road Warrior (1981). Reinforcing Richards definitions of human ecology, the film powerfully illustrates the human causes for the disaster they now face: Because humans have polluted the Earth’s air, water, and soil, a strange new virus has appeared, which only attacks strains of grasses such as wheat and rice, and the world is descending into famine and chaos.  When the virus reaches London, architect and former military officer, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), escapes the city with his wife, Ann (Jean Wallace), daughter Mary (Lynne Frederick), and Mary’s boyfriend, Roger (John Hamill). Together with those who join them along the way, they fight their way to John’s brother’s farm where survival seems possible.  Despite this hopeful road film narrative, however, the film maintains its fierce critique of humanity’s destruction of the natural world.

As in films such as Soylent Green, No Blade of Grass opens with a montage of polluted scenes: factories spewing smoke, dead birds, arid land, traffic jams, and armed masses of people while in the music soundtrack, Roger Whitaker sings, “gone with the dawn.” An image of Earth from space pans into a crowded football stadium, and a voiceover explains, the environment has been destroyed. More scenes of dilapidated cars, factory smoke, car exhaust, and crowded city streets lining a smog-filled city of high rise apartments and human masses prove the narrator’s claim. And these shots are reinforced by another montage of industrial waste water, toxic smoke emissions, pesticides, strip mining, oil spills and red tides killing water birds, starving children, thousands of cars in an airport parking lot, and a nuclear explosion. “It’s the end of life,” the soundtrack tells us, and after a focus on the explosion, the camera pans back into space while the narrator exclaims, “And then one day, the polluted Earth could take no more.”

Because the eco-disaster has reached London, the military plans to close the city, so John and his family pack to leave, and a flashback reveals the reason for their departure. In a restaurant a year before, John and Roger share a lunch while a television in the background broadcasts images of famine in Southeast Asia and a message about a grass disease killing all the world’s grain. This famine contrasts blatantly with the plentiful plates of food in the restaurant. In the scene we learn that the world’s ecology has been poisoned by pollutants and pesticides in the soil and atmosphere, causing a grass disease that can be contained only by fire. In some world regions, martial law has been invoked to control the chaos. These dire warnings are juxtaposed with images of Londoners eating large forkfuls of food. One woman who is oblivious to the real eco-disaster around her even suggests that the disease is caused by the Chinese because they “fertilize everything with human shit.”

In the film’s present, the Custance family comprehends and fears the environmental destruction that has now reached London. As they leave, they hear on the radio that starvation deaths have reached 600 million, an astronomical human cost of a toxic atmosphere. After a series of mob and police incidents, they  do escape the city, taking another couple, Pirrie (Anthony May) and Clara(Wendy Richard), with them from a gun shop to the Custance son David’s (Nigel Rathbone) school. As they drive through the country, the landscape is brown and dying and festooned with dirty water full of industrial waste and smoking factories. Now in two cars, the Custance family and their friends kill for survival along the road.

They kill soldiers to get through military barriers and a group of rapists at a railroad crossing, but the polluted environment outside the car window is even more horrifying than this human violence. More polluted rivers and industrial smoke stacks provide the terrible backdrop for a truth exposed by the boy, David, who explains, “Earth gets warmer because of pollution,” and he maps out the aftermath of melting glaciers and polar ice causing flooded coastlines and cities, “so we all drown,” he exclaims. Humans have created the toxic atmosphere that bred a grass disease that may destroy mankind. According to radio broadcasts, it has caused cannibalism in Africa, Asia and Europe and uncontrollable panic in England because they fear they will be slaughtered with nerve gas. They must fight to live in this poisoned world. The human costs of this manmade environmental disaster are great, but the environmental losses are massive. Every animal that feeds off the diseased grass dies: calves, cattle, sheep, birds, deer.

Even when the group combines with a community that has lost their village and the accompanying score crescendos with hope, the tragic tone continues, with multiple scenes foreshadowing violent events amplifying the film’s sense of dread. As the group walks through a dying field, they pass an ancient Roman aqueduct that contrasts with lines of electric wires along a road. Ultimately the group must win two more battles for the chance to survive, one against a motorcycle gang called the Huns and one against John’s brother and his community within a gated pastoral fortress. After both John’s brother and Pirrie are killed, the last battle ends and the communities combine, but the film ends here without a sense of hope for humanity’s future. Instead, the film’s voiceover explains, “This is not a documentary, but it could be,” and Whitaker’s song of eco-disaster ends the film, highlighting the film’s connection with a human ecology that studies humans’ surrounding environment and its effect on their lives. In No Blade of Grass, those effects include both atmospheric pollution and deadly climate change.

           

No Blade of Grass complicates issues of atmospheric pollution, not only because of its genre (science fiction), but also because it explicitly connects global warming (climate change) with poisoning the air. Again, however, the film takes a human ecology approach to atmospheric pollution and clearly blames humans for the eco-disaster they now face. It also focuses on humans when illustrating the effects of environmental degradation. No Blade of Grass showcases a family’s attempts to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It illustrates the toxic environment created by humanity, but it purveys only a message of humanity’s preservation, not a biotic community. Ultimately, however the film draws on human approaches to ecology, perhaps demonstrating more effectively the costs of a toxic world.