What's so Funny about Eco-Diasters Part I

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.

Films dealing with eco-disasters in the 1950s through the 1970s and early 1980s were a serious affair: See in addition to Them! (1954), Godzilla (1956), The Birds (1963), Frogs (1972), The Swarm (1978), and Silkwood (1983). But later films highlighting similar eco-disasters—beginning with the late 1980s Toxic Avenger series (1985 and 1989) and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and its sequels (1986-1989), and including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Naked Gun 2 ½  (1990)—look at toxic waste dumping, energy overconsumption, and radiation poisoning from a more comic perspective. More recent eco-comedies from Smoke Signals (1999) and Eight Legged Freaks (2002) to Enchanted (2007) and Warm Bodies (2013) continue this move toward comedic eco-disaster.

These films beg the question, what’s so funny about environmental disasters? But they also point out a change of strategy—laughing about the environment and its degradation may not only stimulate awareness; that laughter might also point out a path toward change, perhaps even showing the consequences of disturbing a pristine ecosystem and offering viable solutions to greedy humans’ exploitation of the natural world. These films suggest, first, that the eco-disaster genre has come of age and can now be satirized through comic versions. They also point to a movement from rugged individualism to a more communal approach to solving ecological problems, producing comic eco-heroes and comic evolutionary narratives. Ultimately, these comic eco-disaster films all exploit historical and current events, either explicitly or implicitly, to make us laugh.

As comic eco-disaster films, Eight Legged Freaks and WALL-E help illustrate the shift toward satire and parody. Ecological disaster—in the form of toxic waste dumping and its consequences—and a comic plot and characters meld well in Eight Legged Freaks encouraging 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 includes elements grounded in both satire and parody. When reviewer Rebecca Murray asks director Ellory Elkayem what “the mutant bugs [were] a metaphor for now,” he replies, “If you want to take anything away from [the film], it would be don’t pollute the environment and be careful with toxic waste.” Elkayem also talks about the B-movies from the 1950s he most responds to in his work: Tarantula, Them!, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). For Elkayem, the tribute he plays to these films in Eight Legged Freaks is meant to tell viewers, “Okay, we know what kind of movie we’re in for. Just go with it and have fun and escape for a couple of hours.”

WALL-E also includes elements of satire and parody. It argues against the overconsumption and waste that (ironically, coming from Disney) destroys our planet’s ecosystem. But it also parodies multiple films in various scenes, from Star Trek in a “Space the final fun-tier” ad and Silent Running (which influenced Director Andrew Stanton) to Blade Runner (1982—and ads encouraging people to leave an overcrowded earth) and RobocCop (1987—as when Eve re-holsters her blaster arm, closely resembling the look and sound of RoboCop stowing away his pistol, including the twirl.