In both 20th and 21st century movies, nature and culture are bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and sometimes deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.
In Nicholas Ray's great film noir On Dangerous Ground (1952), for example, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted. This perspective on the nature/culture binary, however, changes in several recent films with women at their center. In Rosetta ( Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 1999), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), and The Girl (David Riker, 2012) the nature/ culture binary blurs or reverses in less explicit ways.
Rosetta promotes a separation between nature and culture but valorizes the bourgeois lifestyle "culture" will allow over the lack of security found in what counts as "nature" in the film. The Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) of the film's title fights to escape the hopeless "natural" life she and her mother survive in a trailer park on the other side of a forest lining a highway. The 18-year-old title heroine (a remarkable nonprofessional) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother, suffers from stomach cramps, and battles to find a steady job that will free her from the burdens a hard life outside of culture. In a powerful scene in her one friend's apartment, Rosetta's mantra highlights the drive for identity showcased in the film. Over and over she tells herself, "Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You've got a friend. I've got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall in a rut. I won't fall in a rut. Good night. Good night."
Wendy and Lucy also reverses the binary, but only for the film's protagonist Wendy (Michelle Williams). The film recalls the dangers associated with wild nature in films such as Agnes Varda's Vagabond (1985). In Vagabond, Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) becomes so tied to the natural environment that she is nearly lost in it, buried in winter weeds on the side of a road. In Wendy and Lucy, Wendy Carroll has left a home behind to search for a job and a new life in an Alaskan cannery. When her car breaks down in an Oregon town, her dog is stolen when she ties it outside a grocery store. During the rest of the film, Wendy seeks to reunite with her dog Lucy, but when she finally finds it living happily on a farm, she leaves it behind. The pastoral environment does not offer Wendy solace in this haunting film, but it does offer Lucy a happier life than she can provide.
The Girl comes closest to reinforcing the traditional view of nature and culture presented in films with masculine protagonists. Here, however, the binary is not between nature and culture but between two rural ecologies separated by boundaries. In The Girl Ashley (Abbie Cornish), a young rural Texan mother who loses her child to foster care, begins smuggling Mexicans across the border. After a failed smuggling attempt, Ashley is left with a Mexican mother's daughter Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez). Ultimately, Ashley returns Rosa to her grandmother's rural home. In The Girl, the Mexican village is idealized despite its poverty. Ashley's rural Texas home becomes livable only because Ashley secures Rosa's future. Now she too can work to reunite with her child, the film suggests. All three of these films complicate the traditional views of nature and culture to differing degrees. Perhaps because of its female director, Wendy and Lucy provides the most complex vision of the binary, highlighting how individualized our responses to it may be.
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