Watching the portrayal of Regency life in Austenland brought to mind earlier filmic critiques of our misguided relationship with the natural world. In Austenland, artificial animals are staked for shooting practice and arranged strategically to replicate the hunting experience. In at least two cartoons from the 1950s, similar artificial reenactments of natural phenomena are condemned: Tweet Tweet Tweety (1950, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng) and Hare Conditioned (1945, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones).
After World War II, Americans gained enough economic stability to not only purchase cars in record numbers but also use them for traveling across the United States on cross-country highways like Route 40 and 66. According to Ivan R. Dee, Americans increasingly vacationed in national parks and forests after 1945. And, “as more of them vacationed, exemplified by record numbers of visitors at Grand Canyon National Park each month after August 1945, they had an impact on the natural world that soon caused them to take notice” (85-6). Dee claims that “what Americans found in many of their national parks and forests shocked them: decrepit and outdated campgrounds, garbage piled high and a lack of facilities and staff to manage them” (86). Americans took to the road, towing trailers behind them, so they could experience some of the nature they had left behind when they moved to the cities and concrete suburbs surrounding them.
Vacationing Americans noticed the devastation in national parks and forests, but the Wilderness Act that served to protect and preserve them was not passed until 1964, almost 20 years after the end of the war. Alexander Wilson claims that Americans in the late 1940s and 1950s saw “the open road [as] a metaphor for progress in the U.S. and for the cultural taming of the American Wilderness” (34). Wilson even suggests, “What we saw out the window of a speeding car… was the future itself” (34). These views of nature through the window of a car—or even the window of a camper in a national park—skewed Americans’ vision of the natural world. Such confusion between seeking pristine nature and embracing progress at any cost complicated ideological views of the environment and environmentalism. In “Conservation Esthetic,” a section of his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold describes late 1940s’ views of nature and wildlife recreation well: “To him who seeks in the woods and mountains only those things obtainable from travel or golf, the present situation is tolerable. But to him who seeks something more, recreation has become a self-destructive process of seeking, but never quite finding, a major frustration of mechanized society. (165-6).
Tweet Tweet Tweety and Hare Conditioned illustrate Aldo Leopold’s view of recreation gone wrong. Tweet Tweet Tweety (1950 Warner Bros) opens in a National Forest overridden with Trailers. A sign commands, “Bird and Game Refuge—No Hunting or Fishing, by order of the Game Commissioner,” but, ironically, the object of the cartoon is Sylvester’s hunt for Tweety. The cartoon, however, does more than highlight Sylvester’s failure to capture his bird. Instead, as in Leopold’s explanation of recreation in a mechanized world, it juxtaposes natural wonders with signs of “progress” in a modern culture. In a National Forest, we see Acme Bridge Builders equipment. Redwood trees are cut down, too, their logs floating down a stream to a sawmill. A natural geyser erupts, but only when a clock (another sign of progress) urges it on. At the end, to save himself, Tweety shuts off dam water. Sylvester, as usual, fails, but dams, bridge building equipment and sawmills seem also to have won, mechanizing nature even in National Parks like Yellowstone.
Hare Conditioned (1945, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones), on the other hand, takes the artificiality of outdoor recreation to an extreme. The Bugs Bunny cartoon opens up in what looks like a campground in a national forest. Bugs hops beside a tent and a campfire, but then a whistle blows, the scene changes to a long shot that reveals an audience seated in front of Bugs and his camp, and the camp scene turns into a department store window display. Here outdoor recreation is not only mechanized (as Leopold argues). It’s an illusion.
As in other Bugs Bunny cartoons, in Hare Conditioned (1945 Warner Bros) Bugs ends up outsmarting his opponent—this time, the store manager—avoiding a more deadly artificial display of nature: the manager attempts (and fails) to add Bugs to his stuffed animal display in the Taxidermy department. Putting nature on display here highlights what Dana Phillips calls representation rather than presence. Hare Conditionedshows us nature—and outdoor recreation—in a showroom like the living room where Carl Hiaasen’s protagonist in Double Whammy, Dennis Gault, lays out his bass tackle. According to Phillips, the display window and the stuffed woods animals in Double Whammy act as “monuments to a disappearing natural world” (209), just like those on display in the taxidermy section of Bugs’s department store. These two cartoons seem to spring directly from Leopold’s esthetic philosophy. They also point to more contemporary critiques of artificial natural displays found in films such as Austenland(2013).
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