Days of the Dead?

Last night, I watched La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead along with an audience of students and other faculty. This 50-minute documentary by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Munoz highlights the “Days of the Dead” ritual honoring of the dead that families in Mexico celebrate on the first and second of November. Based on traditions going back to Columbian times, individuals prepare for visits by departed ones while, in the streets, crowds sing, dance, and let go of their inhibitions. Using anonymous male and female voiceover narration and talking head monologues, the filmmakers document celebrations of La Ofrendain Mexican villages and in Hispanic neighborhoods in San Francisco where art, religion, and the disorder of fiesta all combine in a unique ritual.

For these people, death is no stranger but an essential part of their lives, the film explains. But one expert broaches the possibility that celebrations of the dead have a more universal appeal. A San Francisco Latina activist, she declares that we all gain strength from our respective cultures. As an American of Mexican descent, lamented the loss of culture caused by crossing borders, relocating from a homogeneous culture in Mexico to the more heterogeneous U.S. To regain that connection, she suggested, we must reclaim our rituals, especially those that honor the dead.

In the U.S., instead of “Days of the Dead” we celebrate Halloween or All Hallow’s Eve and, in the Catholic church and some protestant denominations, All Saints and All Souls Days. Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (pronounced "sah-win"). To honor the dead, we must acknowledge our place in the natural world. Like every other living thing, we will die, decompose, and sometimes rejuvenate the earth, bringing back life of some kind.

The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture. Samhain was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and prepare for winter. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped and the deceased would come back to life and cause havoc such as sickness or damaged crops. Samhain's long association with death and the Dead reflects Nature's rhythms. In many places, Samhain coincides with the end of the growing season. Vegetation dies back with killing frosts, and therefore, literally, death is in the air. This contributes to the ancient notion that at Samhain, the veil is thin between the world of the living and the realm of the Dead and this facilitates contact and communication. For those who have lost loved ones in the past year, Samhain rituals can be an opportunity to bring closure to grieving and to further adjust to their being in the Otherworld by spiritually communing with them.

Our own version of Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve has transformed into Halloween in our popular culture but still emphasizes death and dying, not as a source of celebration but of fear. Even the Canadian film Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain (dir. Christian Viel) 2002 illustrates how this celebration has been coopted and assimilated into American culture and the horror genre, showing us Celtic pagans who become cannibals rather than religious worshippers during Samhain. Despite this commodification of holy rituals during Halloween, we all find ways to celebrate an honor our deceased friends and relatives. The goal, then, might be to include other living things in that ritual.  

Bye Bye, Brasil (1980) and the Eco-Dangers of the Modern World

Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye, Brasil is a muted and low-key ensemble road movie and musical drama about a shabby circus, the Caravana Rolidei, crawling from small town to small town through the Brazilian backwaters to, it seems, avoid a modernity that is crumbling Brazil’s character and ecology. The caravan’s first show presents a medicine-show-like leader, Lorde Cigano (Jose Wilker), who keeps the audience mesmerized with magic tricks; an erotically charged, raven-haired dancer named Salome (Betty Faria) or the "Queen of the Rumba"; and a deaf-mute strongman Swallow, who doubles as a fire breather. 

When the troupe adds two more members shortly after the story begins, the strapping young accordion player Cico (Fabio Junior) and his expectant wife, Dasdo (Zaira Zambelli), however, the title Bye Bye, Brasil begins to resonate. Unlike Lorde Cigano, Cico and Dasdo find a legitimate way to mesh the idyllic Brazilian past with its modern Americanized future. Bye Bye Brasil illustrates well the cost of that modernization: ecodisaster, environmental injustice, and horrific exploitation of a land and its people.

Bye Bye, Brasil illustrates these environmental and social horrors by taking the troupe on a road trip through Brazil’s arid, poverty stricken northeast and across the jungles on the trans-Amazonian highway. The repeated shots of television antennae, or what Lorde Cigano calls “fish bones,” provide the first sign of an end to Brazil’s people and environment. Cigano remarks on the fish bones as a warning that villagers will no longer serve as rapt audiences for their show, but they also indicate a move away from nature and towards modern technologies.

That move reaches climactic levels once the troupe reaches the Amazon. Because their audiences have slimmed in villages where televisions have been introduced, Cigano points the caravan toward Amazonia under the advice of a truck driver carrying a huge load of lumber. The environmental degradation of the region is first associated with the trans-Amazonian highway they traverse toward what they hope are villages untouched by technology. As if announcing the end of Brazil’s pastoral past, the remains of clear-cut forests line the road, and a close up of a dead armadillo in the center of the highway explicitly demonstrates the devastation that may occur when a modern world literally rolls over nonhuman nature.

Once the troupe reaches the Amazon, the ecodisaster extends to include indigenous populations in the region, connecting destruction of the landscape with environmental racism. Television “fish bones” have replaced trees in once-idyllic towns, and decadence has replaced the interdependent relationship natives formerly maintained with the natural world. Townspeople boast that they emptied native villages by dropping dynamite and scaring indigenous populations into town, where they are rounded up and flown to Western-owned paper mills in the middle of the rainforest. As an apt illustration of the conflict between nature and culture occurring throughout the film, an indigenous tribe leader and his mother ride with the caravan into town while his mother listens raptly to a transistor radio and dreams of riding a plane.

Ultimately, the film attempts to reconcile Brazil’s idyllic past with its modern Americanized future. Although Cigano loses his caravan and prostitutes Salome in the Amazon, he recaptures his gypsy dream by smuggling illegally mined minerals and earning enough to purchase a larger van and hire more performers to accompany him and Salome. Cico and Dasdo, however, negotiate a less destructive resolution to the conflict between Brazil’s past and future. Unlike Cigano, Cico will not prostitute his wife Dasdo, and in the film’s final scene, they have resumed the musical life they abandoned in their barren village—with a modern twist. In the Brasilia cafe setting of the film’s conclusion, Cico and Dasdo perform to a café audience surrounded by television sets broadcasting their show. Bye Bye, Brazil, then, leaves viewers feeling the same ambivalence toward a devastating modernity faced by Cigano and his troupe.

Frontline's (PBS) Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria

Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria is a Frontline documentary that focuses on a set of medical crises that have much of its origins in environmental problems.The nightmare in question is a number of rapidly developing "superbugs" (bacteria/germs) that are hard or impossible to defeat once they enter a person's body. These antibiotic resistant superbugs are appearing all over the world and are becoming a critical threat wherever they exist. Doctors are quickly finding that no antibiotic protocols are working anymore to deal with the rapidly evolving bacteria that can kill people quickly if not diagnosed and brought under control. Without the basic tools of modern medicine, which usually is the use of ever stronger antibiotics, the medical profession is terrified that outbreaks can occur anywhere, even in the most prestigious of all hospital settings and once unleashed becomes nearly impossible to control.

Frontline uses the basic documentary strategy of introducing us to the problem by focusing on two personal stories, one of a young woman of eleven years of age and a mid-twenties man, both of whom develop devastating bacterial infections that cannot be controlled with most, if not all, means of modern medicine's protocols. Then the documentary moves on to the disaster at the National Institute of Health's Clinical Center, where 19 patients developed antibiotic resistant superbugs that deeply sickened them all, and eventually killed 7. The inability of one of the world's most prestigious hospitals to understand and then quickly handle the crisis points out the danger these new antibiotic resistant superbugs present to the world wide medical establishment.

Using basic reconstruction strategies, interviews with patients, family member, doctors, nurses and administrators, Frontline attempts to both personalize the tragedies, while also focusing on the universal problems these new "bugs" represent.The male patient had contracted his infection in India so Frontline dutifully shows us street scenes of incredible poverty and filth where citizens struggle with basic needs like washing, cleaning and drinking from disease ridden water supplies. They attempt to connect this state of affairs  with the obligatory shots of airline travel attempting to quickly prove that nobody is safe from these terrifying new problems.The young woman's relatives speak at length at her struggles and the repeated discoveries that her infection was impossible to stop using every antibiotic that was in their medical arsenal. Doctors, nurses and researchers confirm the serious nature of the problem by focusing on the tragedy of one woman's life.

The presentation of the crisis at the Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland ramps up the drama. We are shown numerous interviews with staff at the hospital, including the revelation that the problem was so severe that administrators considered closing down the hospital, because nothing could stop the spread of infections. Numerous recreations of the problems in the ICU unit were presented, emphasizing that no matter what the conscientious staff attempted, the bug was always one step ahead of them.
This medical nightmare combines with a medical detective story. How have the bugs appeared, how can they be detected, can they be stopped and with what protocols? There is no happy ending here and no closure. The problem is stated, but since no clear solutions are in place we seem to be warned to expect these outbreaks to occur anywhere and at anytime.The fact that 100,000 Americans die of hospital borne infections every year connects logically with Frontline's more intimate examination of this ever increasing crisis.

The environmental problems that have contributed to this new nightmare include poverty, mass populations struggling to survive without access to basic needs, the overuse of antibiotics by patients and doctors and the enormous introduction of antibiotics  into the world wide food chain.The ever increasing demand for meat, poultry and fish by ever larger populations has allowed factory farming techniques to employ the use of enormous amounts of antibiotics to quickly produce animals of the appropriate size for slaughter. The use of any antibiotics into the feed of animals is suspect, but the intense overuse of such medicines to not only protect against infections in such tight and compressed operations is exacerbated by the fact that these medicines can also help produce quicker growth spurts.

Thus profit is put before any concern about human health. The creation of superbugs at the point of basic food production is now becoming one of key problems for world wide health.As these food production techniques increase Frontline's documentary easily exposes what the results of these efforts can produce. Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria contributes to our understanding of the evolving nature of antibiotic  resistant "superbugs" but also sensitizes us to some of the reasons behind their success in the contemporary world.

Laughing at the Environment in Eight-Legged Freaks

Deep in Eight Legged Freaks, an ecological comedy from 2002, images from the 1954 film Them! appear briefly on a television screen, reinforcing the mutation of bug-like creatures that serves as the catalyst for the action in both films—ants in the earlier Them! and spiders in Eight Legged Freaks. The homage is direct and loving, but it is 2002, and mutation is now a source of comedy as well as fear. This juxtaposition of the 1950s film footage from Them! with its more recent version, Eight Legged Freaks, also points out the mutation of an older genre—the science fiction warning film—to its comic and, perhaps, less heroic form, from the late1980s until today.

Eco-disaster films have come of age, so their themes are now played for laughs, but this shift from serious to comic explorations of environmental issues also changes expected genre conventions. Eight Legged Freaks is an example of this shift, where allusions are made to serious eco-disaster films from Them! to Skeeter (1992), but a toxic waste disaster is played for laughs here, with giant spiders even personified as dirt bike racers in sun glasses. Ultimately spiders are defeated, and the desert town in which the battle is set grows rich on gold garnered from the mine that once stored toxic waste—one eco-disaster, then, is replaced by an eco-tragedy, pit mining, in an ironic twist that parodies resolutions sought in serious eco-disaster films. This shift from serious disaster films to parody aligns with the shift we see made in eco-disaster films from the 1950s to the present, a shift that moves eco-disaster films into the comic realm and (as we read it) away from a “nature attacks” vision to one in which humans attack the natural world.

Eight Legged Freaks serves as an eco-disaster comedy that illustrates both of these shifts. Ecological disaster—in the form of toxic waste dumping and its consequences—and a comic plot and characters meld well in the film and serve as a call to dispose of toxic waste in environmentally safe ways. Geoff King explains how satire is comedy with a “political edge” (18). Parody, on the other hand, shifts comic motivation from “the social-political arena to that of film forms and conventions, although this distinction is far from always entirely clear” (King 18). Eight Legged Freaks as comedy includes elements grounded in both satire and parody, since it couches a political message in comedy, while also responding to particular film forms and conventions.

Eight Legged Freaks responds to the heroic motifs of tragedy by comically constructing the characters of drama to serve both a comic purpose and a satirical premise and plot. In an eco-comedy, heroes with more than one tragic flaw are fore-grounded, according to Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival. Heroes in comedies tend to bumble and require a community of allies to succeed, as they do in Eight Legged Freaks, demonstrating the move from tragedy to comedy in an eco-disaster film.   Eight Legged Freaks, then, makes us laugh at the environment because it not only fits comic theories about humor; it also intertwines genres in which we expect serious issues to be tackled. Even though the film’s director argues that toxic waste dumping in the film serves only as a plot device, the film leaves spectators with the impression that the success of humanity depends on interdependence with the natural world and stewardship toward nature in a communal environment. But more than anything, Eight Legged Freaks provides a space in which we can laugh at eco-disasters, look at environmental catastrophe with a sense of humor and, perhaps, make changes that will serve both humans and the natural world best.