Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Big Bugs and DDT

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) argues that food is the reason spiders are killing livestock and humans. Excessive use of DDT is killing off the spiders’ natural sources of food, so they are becoming more aggressive and grouping as social beings to fight the enemies stealing their food, or at least that’s what the entomologist Diane asserts. They try to burn down a spider hill, but more escape beneath it. Diane (Tiffany Bolling) and Rack (William Shatner), the town vet, become a couple and protect Linda (Natasha Ryan), Rack’s niece, after her mother (Marcy Lafferty) is also killed by spiders. 

When the mayor orders the crop duster to spray the area with paraphyron, a chemical much stronger than DDT, Diane erupts, arguing that pesticides only make it worse. The migration was caused by their overuse. We “killed all their food with your stupid DDT.”

Others are also killed by these giant spiders, but Rack, Diane, and Linda escape to a vacation lodge. When the deputy (Jay Lawrence) goes to town and finds it covered in spiders, and he too is killed by a driver knocking over the water tower. People are dead and wrapped in webs throughout the town within minutes.

Chemical fire extinguishers kill the spiders, so Rack, Diane, Emma (Lieux Dressler), Linda, and a visiting couple find ways to survive in Emma's lodge. Even when Rack is bitten restarting the electricity, he’s saved by treatments. The next day, Rack looks outside, and the spiders are gone. The radio announcer says it’s 61 degrees and sunny, making it seem as if they are safe. But an areal shot of the town reveals that every building is covered with spider webs, and the film ends, suggesting the overuse of pesticides cannot be overcome.

Big Bugs in 1977: Empire of the Ants

Empire of the Ants (1977) takes an approach like The Hellstrom Chronicles in its voiceover but with a campy tale of Florida swampland sales behind it. The narrator explains: “This is the ant. Treat it with respect, or it may well be the most dominant creature on earth.” He explains that it makes crops of fungus for food, herds aphids, acts as a warrior, and builds bridges—It “rank[s] next to man in intelligence… with a sophisticated communication system with obligatory responses.”

Then radioactive waste is dumped into the ocean from a boat with labels reading “Do not open.” “Active,” “Danger,” they say  as a man in a suit pushes them into the sea by machine. The boat drives away, and one of the barrels floats on shore near a long pier. It’s oozing, and ants enjoy it.

The scene is set for a tragedy at the Pelican Yacht Club where a corrupt landowner is selling property. A group comes for a free tour and snacks: an old couple with a camera, a young couple, a single blonde woman, a single drunk guy, a dark-haired couple from a bus, a single guy in a sports car, and a single redhead “not under obligation to buy property.” Marilyn Price is the owner, and her partner and a boat captain accompany them. The group shares relationship discussions as they tour, but then ant point of view shots come in, and prospective buyers are killed one by one. Eventually survivors must escape through the swamps to the river where a boat is waiting. Dan the boat captain rows, and ants seem to be herding them. “Oh my God! They’re herding us like cattle!” (or aphids).

They make it to civilization—an old farm couple—and the sheriff picks them up, driving them past a sugar refinery near the river. “Whatever you do, don’t let them take you to the sugar refinery,” the old farm wife had whispered. They can’t get a rental car, so they steal one and try to get out of town. There’s a roadblock up ahead. Joe and the blonde run away. Dan is knocked out. “We have enough here to begin with,” the sheriff says. Joe and the blonde run through sugar cane. The others go to the sugar refinery—there are now only five left altogether. There is enough sugar there to feed an army—but they must turn out that much every day. Prisoners are in trailers—worker slaves.

A whistle calls, and ants arrive covered with sugar. Joe and the blonde can’t get away from the ants. All the workers and the tour group are led up stairs—almost all are expressionless. The sheriff says, there’s nothing to fear. “Isn’t she beautiful,” he says, pointing to the queen ant. “She needs it. That’s why it has to be this way. We have no choice.” Every week they must be indoctrinated by the ant so can all work together. “We can all do what they want us to do.” The tour group members are pushed to the front of the line. The ants are making sure townspeople will grow and refine sugar for them. The owner Marilyn is indoctrinated. Dan takes a flare into the queen ant’s room, disturbing the pheromones she is using to communicate with them. Everyone runs, no longer indoctrinated. Joe and Dan burn up the sugar cane and ants. Joe jumps from the truck, and it explodes inside the sugar storage site. Owner is killed, but four escape, but the radioactive waste source again goes unaddressed.

Enviro-Toons

Review: Pike, Deidre M. Enviro-Toons: Green Themes in Animated Cinema and Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012.

Deidre M. Pike’s Enviro-Toons provides a broad overview of animated feature films and television shows with environmental themes.  After an engaging Preface and traditional introduction, chapter one of the work begins this exploration with a focus on selected Felix the Cat shorts. This chapter provides a brief historical overview of some of the early American animated shorts before discussing the origin of Felix the Cat during what the work calls “America’s Jazz Age.” To illustrate Felix as “a modern cat, born of new media, intended purely as entertainment,” the chapter includes plot summaries of several Felix the Cat shorts. The description of the first of these, Comicalamities (1928), highlights Felix’s thwarted attempts to win the heart of a female cat. Another summarizes Felix as a “Jazz Age” street musician in the animated short Oceantics (1930). The last of the summaries provide brief overviews of Felix Trifles with Time (1922), Felix Saves the Day (1922), and April Maze (1930). The chapter ends with a reiteration of Felix as a Jazz Age character eclipsed by Mickey Mouse once the sound era began.

Chapter two focuses on Bambi (1942) and provides a plot summary of the film and a comparison of the film to its novel source, Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods. After this lengthy plot summary that foregrounds the hyper-realistic construction of the animated forest creatures and their setting, the chapter attempts to contextualize the film in relation to a Bakhtinian readings of its possibility as an example of the epic genre. In the conclusion, Pike asserts, “Bambi operates as a narrative that centralizes power, concocting a portrait of transcendent natural order that can only be observed, appreciated, and obeyed. The viewer is not invited to engage—merely to accept or reject this film’s faulty syllogism: Nature is good. Humans are not Nature. Humans are not good.”

Chapter three highlights Homer as a comic hero in The Simpson’s Movie. The chapter first provides an introduction to the film’s context and its plot, peripherally connected to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. The chapter then includes a detailed summary of the film as both tragic and comic. According to the chapter, Homer Simpson is a comic hero who succeeds “only through sheer luck.” As if to substantiate this claim, the chapter concludes, “From a cool, multiple-voiced animation filled with laughter comes humility, responsibility and joy. That’s the message of The Simpson’s Movie—a laughter-filled epiphany, shared by the multiple voices of a community, and couched in the cool medium of ugly animation.”

Chapter four focuses on the television series Futurama as an ecofeminist cartoon sitcom. The chapter begins with a summary of the episode, “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” concluding “Futurama’s themes provide grist for ecological awareness and, at the same time, complicate a stereotypical environmental agenda.” Again drawing on Bakhtin, the chapter attempts to demonstrate that Futurama is a dialogic enviro-toon. The chapter then includes an extensive summary of the “Into the Wild Green Yonder” episode, with emphasis on the character Leela and her connection with the Ecofeminist Collective. In this chapter, there are nods to early ecofeminists such as Karen J. Warren and Carolyn Merchant, but the bulk of the work provides a lengthy overview of the episode, even ending with the final scene in the show. As the chapter states, “The ship’s recalcitrant robot Bender pops open a bottle, the label of which reads, ‘Old Fortran Malt Liquor.’ He shouts, “into the abyss, meatbags. Or not. Whatever.’”

In chapter five, “Farting Hybrids in South Park’s Rainforest,” the notion of the dialogic enviro-toon again becomes the focus. After a brief overview of the series’ origin and context, the bulk of the chapter summarizes a series of “green” episodes: the April 7, 1999 episode, “Rainforest, Schmainforest,” the March 29, 2006 episode, “Smug Alert,” and the April 26, 2006 episode, “ManBearPig.” Eventually the chapter emphasizes the dialogic character of these episodes, and of South Park in general. According to the chapter, “The carnivalesque discourse of South Park reminds us to laugh at ourselves, even when our cherished environmental values are the object of scathing satire.”

Chapter six offers an overview of Happy Feet (2006), with some comparison to The March of the Penguins (2005). As with other chapters in the work, this summary of Happy Feet highlights its epic qualities with the assertion that the plot of the film “moves forward like a Homeric poem, narrated in the booming preacher-like voice of Robin Williams’ Lovelace  character.” The chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which the film lines up with Bakhtin’s description of the epic genre, as well. It also gives a nod to definitions of tragic narratives, suggesting, “despite its blissful ending, it exemplifies … tragic discourse.”

Chapter seven reads the animated feature WALL-E (2009) as both a tragic and comic narrative. The suggestion is that this dual approach helps the film “resist [ ] epic status.” And chapter eight examines Avatar (2009) from the perspective of the character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as a tragic hero, thus relegating the film to the status of monologic enviro-toon. Both of these brief chapters include some contextual information, but the bulk of each is devoted to summaries of the film’s plotlines.

Chapter nine explores selected films of Hayao Miyazaki through the lens of deep ecology. The chapter begins with an extended summary of the plot of Spirited Away (2002). Then it offers a brief overview of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononake (1999). After a short biography of Miyazaki, the rest of the chapter primarily summarizes in more detail both Nausicaa and Princess Mononake, with special attention given to the latter film. The chapter ends with the assertion, “The best advice, according to the deep ecology of Miyazaki, is to eschew hate and ‘go on planting your trees.’”

The final chapter serves as a conclusion to the work and seeks to explain the lenses broached in each of the short book’s chapters. Overall, the book may introduce readers to animated green media, such as television series and episodes through its plot summaries, but the most enlightening section of the text for this reviewer was the entertaining Preface. Here the text demonstrated how a multi-media approach might also line up with the more traditional Bakhtinian dialogism. The personal narrative approach reaches out to readers here, revealing the ramifications of what the author calls mediated environmentalism both for herself and her students. The last sentence of that Preface perhaps also broaches the rationale behind the media choices included in the text: they may provide ways to communicate environmental issues to a wide audience.

  

The Johnson County War, the Western, and the Environment

Much has been written about Shane as a classic western responding only peripherally to the Johnson County war of 1892 and (more often) as the embodiment of the ideal western hero. Because the film is a product of a period in which positions on ranching methods were ambivalent, however, its environmental message is limited by its cultural and historical context. Later western films addressing the Johnson County War and its consequences, however, were produced after issues surrounding the environmental impact of various ranching methods had been resolved. Westerns from Rare Breed (1966) to Tom Horn (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Monty Walsh (1970, 2003) begin to demonstrate another, perhaps more crucial, struggle underlying all of their battles—that between land use and environmental conservation and preservation; or ultimate destruction and, hence, failure. The battle between cattle ranchers and homestead farmers grows more complex once environmental and legal history are mined and reveal that cattle ranchers gained more land from the Homestead Act than did family farmers.

The rise of cattle barons in the western United States coincides with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which, along with the Preemptive Act of 1841, provided means for cattlemen to obtain vast acreages of land for little or no money. According to John Upton Terrell, cattle barons used relatives, employees, and even prostitutes to gain the land they wanted to support their free-ranging cattle—160 acres from each person they employed (210). Passage of the Timber Culture Act of 1873 provided them with another way to gain land, this time with the promise to grow trees on at least 40 of the additional 160 acres they gained at no cost to them (210-212). The Desert Land Act of 1877 helped ranchers secure 640 acres more from each of their proxy, as long as they promised to irrigate at least part of it (212-213).

The legal system seemed to be behind ranchers, in spite of what look like attempts to secure land for poor homestead farmers, until the blizzards of 1886-1887 destroyed the ranch economy. The blizzards of 1886-1887 might also be a product of overgrazing. According to Harold E. Briggs, in the fall of 1886,  the Little Missouri Stock Growers’ Association “decided that the ranges were badly overstocked in that roundup district and that in the future ranch hands there should refuse to work with new outfits running either cattle or horses” (533). The blizzards came soon after, with storms so powerful and temperatures so low that they killed from 80-92 percent of all cattle (Briggs 535). These blizzards, interspersed with drought conditions that destroyed grasses by drying them up or burning them away, nearly eradicated both ranchers and farmers. This is mentioned in The Sea of Grass when Brewton contemplates stocking shelters with water and hay.

The Rare Breed (1966) highlights the consequences of these blizzards in the 1880s’ West, in the context of the introduction of Hereford cattle as a crossbreed for Longhorns. The film is loosely based on the life of rancher William Burgess, who was responsible for bringing the Herefords into the American West from England. The film’s opening at an 1884 St. Louis Exposition (exhibited on a banner) establishes the context of the film. And  Englishwoman Martha Evans’ (Maureen O’Hara) Herefordshire bull takes center stage. A bulldogging cowboy, Sam Burnett (James Stewart), leads the bull to its new owner in Texas with some intrigue behind his decision, where Evans attempts to convince Alexander Bowen (Brian Keith), the bull’s new owner, to crossbreed it with his longhorns. After the bull is set free on the open range, a worse than usual winter hits. Blizzards destroy most of Bowen’s cattle, both the longhorns and the Hereford bull, but crossbred calves survive and provide Burnett and Evans with the basis for a growing mixed-breed herd.

After blizzards and droughts in the mid-1880s that nearly annihilated both farmers and ranchers, especially in Wyoming, the conflict between ranchers and farmers came to a head—in the 1892 range war in Johnson County, Wyoming. On the surface, the “war” certainly looks like that between economic classes (with homesteaders on one end, and cattle barons on the other) or, as Richard Maxwell Brown argues, between those in favor of and those against incorporation. In an attempt to eradicate homestead farmers, cattle barons who had rebuilt their ranches and their association after the blizzards and droughts found a way to justify violent action against homesteaders because they branded them as criminals.

With the help of a “literary bureau” (Terrell 256), the Cattle Association flooded newspapers and magazines with false claims that cattle rustlers had run amok in Wyoming and must be stopped using frontier justice, since the local legal system was corrupt. Wyoming law was changed so a state militia would not interfere with the Cattle Association’s hired guns (which they called Regulators). Eventually these Regulators were defeated by a small army of homestead farmers, but Wyoming’s Governor Barber (Terrell 259) intervened, sending false reports to President Harrison and the United States Senate, although newspaper accounts made clear that the Cattle Association’s claims regarding rustlers were completely untrue, and homesteaders “had gathered to defend their lives against hired gunmen and cattlemen bent on destroying them” (Terrell 261) and had not incited war. Tom Horn (1980) highlights gunman Tom Horn (Steve McQueen), who not only works for John Coble (Richard Farnsworth), the land baron behind the Johnson County Wars, but also destroys so many homesteaders that the baron himself supports legal action against him. One of the most notorious film versions of the incident is Heaven’s Gate (1980).

On the surface, cattle ranching seems like a natural choice for the desert like grasslands of the nineteenth century. In fact, like the original in 1970, a remake of Monte Walsh (2003) responds to the frontier’s close after the 1892 range war and valorizes the cowboy mythology as much as did its 1970 original. The film opens in a turn-of-the-century present but then flashes back to Monte’s (Tom Selleck) last winter in a cattle camp. In a clear parallel to the blizzards prior to the Johnson County Range War, the winter wiped out most of the ranchers, and Eastern corporations threatens to destroy a free-range lifestyle that is again depicted as more in harmony with the natural world than is fenced ranching. The conflict between free-range ranchers and corporations is manifested by a cowboy’s killing himself after stringing too much barbed wire. The film even ends with Monte and his horse jumping over an automobile stuck in the mud—a clear dramatization of the superiority of his more natural lifestyle and closer and more environmentally conscious relationship with the natural world. Here it’s not the war that is highlighted but the cowboy lifestyle lost after homestead farmers and corporations won the West—at least within the Western film.