Under the Dome and the Power of Credibility

As in An Inconvenient Truth, Chai ends her documentary with a view of Earth from space to universalize her argument.  For Chai, we must protect the rivers, skies, and land for all children, enjoying the clean nature of individual and collective memory. But to restore these memories, all of us must act, Chai declares. As Mufson asserts, Chai’s conclusion “does something few Chinese ever do publicly: She calls for action, urging her fellow citizens to ‘stand up,’ report violations of environmental laws and demand change.” Although Senses of Cinema critic Dan Edwards asserts Under the Dome responds to Chinese documentary traditions that include “address from a Chinese citizen (the filmmaker) to a wider public of fellow citizens (the audience)” and  “an overtly expository approach,” Chai’s call to action gains strength because of its roots in nostalgia. 

What makes this call reach such a large audience so quickly, however, is its medium and distribution model, a model that also may be inherently more “green.” Instead of taking a more traditional route to the production, distribution, and viewing options for her documentary, Chai used her own money, “more than 1 million RMB ($159,000…) to fund the film,” according to Celia Hatton’s BBC China Blog, and posted the film online rather than distributing through DVDs or in theatres. These choices increase both the ethos and green footprint of the documentary. 

Chai Jing’s expertise remains unquestioned in reviews and critical responses to Under the Dome.BBC News reporter Celia Hatton praises Chai as a “renowned investigative journalist.” History professor Dwight W. Morrow also notes Chai’s success as “a former investigative reporter at CCTV, China’s national television network.” It is because of the respect Chai has earned as a reporter that she “manage[s] to film so much raw truth. Everyone seems, if not eager, at least willing to answer her questions. In some cases her Western counterparts wouldn’t have managed to get through the door or past the ‘no comment’” asserts Diana S. Powers. And even though critic Dan Edwards suggests Chai draws on Chinese documentary’s focus on the filmmaker as ordinary citizen, he too states Chai “requires no introduction, since she is one of China’s best known and most trusted investigative journalists, and was a constant presence on local television screens until her pregnancy in 2013.” 

The conclusion of Edwards’ review also highlights some of the ways Under the Dome moves filmmaking towards a greener future. Although he ties Chai’s film production and distribution to Chinese documentary tradition, Edwards emphasizes the rhetorical power Chai’s work gains by “bypassing of traditional broadcasting and film exhibition by rapidly disseminating her work on the Internet to generate online public commentary and debate.” In Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (2009) and Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters (2014), we highlight how the turn to digital has helped move the film industry toward “green.” As we note in the conclusion of Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters, 

Computer-generated video production and exhibition … ends the chemical links of producing film prints, eliminates the need to create and deliver thousands of prints for exhibition, and obviates the need to destroy the prints after their theatrical runs. This transformation also means millions of dollars will be saved on every major release, while also substantially reducing the carbon footprint that creating, delivering, and exhibiting films has caused since their invention in the late nineteenth century. (187)

The changeover to digital eliminates production of celluloid, chemical processing, and the physical delivery of thousands of film prints per major feature release, according to ecocritics and film scholars Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, authors of Greening the Media(71-75). But theatre exhibition still remains a huge contributor to energy consumption and CO2 emission levels in the U.S. and around the world. Because it was almost exclusively experienced online, Chai’s Under the Dome eliminates the environmental problems associated with maintaining theatres for film viewing.

Under the Dome, Environmental Nostalgia, and the Power of Structure

Chai amplifies this trope with images of a child staring outside and the words of her daughter asking, “Mama, why do you keep me shut inside?” As Diana S. Powers explains in aJournal of Public Health review, “Each morning she consults the air quality index to decide if the air is clean enough to take her daughter outdoors, and about half the time it isn’t” (98). According to Chai, all her research this year “is to answer the questions her daughter will ask her in the future. What is smog? Where does it come from? What can we do with it?”

These three questions provide the organizational structure for Chai’s documentary, but they also reinforce the environmental nostalgia underpinning its rhetoric. Chai answers these three questions for her child, highlighting how the problem that darkened China’s urban skyline can be solved. But Chai also seeks answers, so she and her daughter can go outside and enjoy clean air and natural wonders Chai enjoyed as a child. Chai’s solutions draw on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia, since clearing the air will allow not only Chai and her daughter but also the large audience watching her lecture to see the blue skies and white clouds Chai remembers so fondly. 

To answer the first question, what is smog, Chai incorporates an animated video depicting how pollution affects humans, breaking down immune systems and sometimes causing cancer and heart attacks. Graphs illustrating increases in deaths caused by air pollution substantiate the cartoon’s claims. Although this segment is primarily evidence-based, it also recalls Chai’s daughter and the environmental nostalgia connected with her. Of the 500,000 deaths per year caused by air pollution, for example, infants and children are the most susceptible, Chai explains. To reinforce the emotional appeal a child’s welfare broaches, Chai spends time focused on how parents attempt to address the dangers children face when subjected to smog. She discredits arguments that children can cope better with smog if exposed to it with evidence from an American scientist showing clear evidence that children do not adapt to air pollution. Yet we still see children playing basketball outside on smoggy days. Chai shows a video of a woman with lung cancer, nodes blackened from inhaling coal dust, to illustrate the extensive damage caused by breathing such toxic air. 

Chai’s slideshow also documents evidence that smog produced by coal has polluted China’s cities since at least 1976, increasing lung cancer by 46.5%. But environmental nostalgia again adds weight to the data on display. Instead of only highlighting smog and its causes, Chai remembers spring breezes and sunshine, winter snows, nature, and the beauty of life as both memories and goals underpinning the Air Pollution Prevention plan of 2012 and the solutions broached in the documentary. The documentary emphasizes these goals by universalizing the causes of smog and illustrating how other cultures overcame it. For example, London’s great smog of 1952 killed 12,000 people but also led to the Coalition for Clean Air. By the 1960s, the UK had their smog problem under control. Developing countries like China and India face similar problems, Chai explains, but can solve them by enforcing environmental laws and moving away from coal and oil. Chai provides multiple images and videos to substantiate the lack of compliance with environmental rules by government-controlled heavy industries. 

These images also point to answers to Chai’s third question, what can we do about it, and the most effective motivation for implementing the answers: environmental nostalgia. The desire to enjoy nature rather than just watching it through the window again is broached as the chief reason for sustainable urbanization. And a video montage of solutions to environmental degradation is reinforced by nostalgic images of the greenery surrounding the Forbidden City. Experts who substantiated evidence for smog and its causes remember the clean cities of their past. We can return there by cutting pollutants, getting back to blue skies, they claim. Although Chai does note that the low carbon path can transform an economy and increase employment, as it did in the U.S. and the UK, environmental nostalgia serves as the most powerful reason to embrace the Environmental Protection Bureau and decrease fossil fuel use. As Chai explains, she will do whatever it takes to protect her child. Her daughter loves nature and animals but cannot enjoy them outdoors. Now she can only offer her a flowerpot and pet snail to assuage this need. For Chai, the rivers, skies, and land belong to them and must be protected. 

Under the Dome and Personal Eco-Trauma

Under the Dome and Personal Eco-Trauma

Chai frames Under the Dome with a personal eco-trauma that gains strength when amplified by nostalgia for a less polluted past. Mufson asserts, “Chai combines personal heart-tugging narrative, investigative reporting and explanatory skills to dissect the reasons for the dire air pollution that plagues Chinese cities.” Although much of the film “draws on some aspects of what Bill Nichols calls the ‘expository mode,’” (Edwards) by documenting a slideshow lecture on the stage of a large hall, Chai’s stories transform academic lists of facts into personal portraits. With references to her own personal journey from childhood to motherhood and photographs documenting changes to her own hometown, Chai draws on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia to encourage ecologically sound change.

The most effective example of individual nostalgia revolves around her own pregnancy. By talking about the sore throat she had during her pregnancy, Chai connects pollution with individual trauma. Chai thought nothing of her symptom until her unborn daughter was diagnosed with a benign tumor. The infant had surgery right after her birth, so Chai had to quit her job to take care of her. Because Chai connected the smoke and air pollution with both her cough and her child’s tumor, she only took her daughter outside on clear days, covering her mouth even then. Before her daughter’s birth, Chai had not noticed the toxic air, even though face mask filters looked black after spending only a day outside. Now she yearns for the clean air and water she enjoyed as a child not only for herself, but also for her daughter. To amplify the emotional appeals of such personal nostalgia, the film continually cuts to the audience watching the narrator with grave attention.

            This nostalgic memory ties in with Beijing’s twenty-five days of severe smog alerts in 2013, but her research reveals an ongoing battle with coal smoke from at least the 1970s in China and the 1800s around the world. What make the litany of facts documented by the film palatable are the touches of environmental nostalgia. When discussing the increased amounts of carcinogenic toxins at mining sites, Chai shows us graphs and videos of smog, but these images gain resonance when accompanied by a 2004 portrait of a young child, who had never seen blue sky and white clouds. The girl’s sense of loss broaches the possible future of her own daughter but also draws on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia. We must clean up the air so all of us can see clear blue skies again, Chai asserts through these images.

Chai’s powerful introduction juxtaposes graphs and photographs of cities suffering more polluted days each year with these personal portraits of children unable to remember the clear skies Chai and her audience long for. As in Stephen King’s series,Under the Dome, a series she acknowledges in her film’s title, toxic air has left them feeling trapped and isolated in their homes and businesses, cut off from the outside world of nature.

Under the Dome and the Future of Global Cities Part I

Jing Chai’s Internet sensation Under the Dome is universally heralded by reviewers in the U.S. and Europe. Each reviewer first notes how the online sensational feature-length “Ted”-like talk drew more than 200 million views from Chinese audiences in the few days before being taken down by Chinese government censors. According to Yan Ren of The Guardian, “For three days straight, it was the only topic on China’s social media platforms.” But as Steven Mufson of The Washington Post notes, the documentary also “alters the way we see the world around us.” As a high tech Silent Spring, according to the Wilson Center’s Jennifer Turner, Under the Dome applies a rhetoric and structure similar to that of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) with one major difference, its exclusive focus on pollution in the cities of China (Mufson).

Like An Inconvenient Truth, Under the Dome succeeds not because of its predictions but because of the eco-memories it evokes. And like Gore’s film, Chai’s documentary draws on environmental nostalgia we share for a better, cleaner world. Although environmental nostalgia is by definition limited, since a pure, untouched, and unpolluted past projected onto a now lost wilderness cannot recover its history, as in An Inconvenient Truth, Chai’s message gains rhetorical force when the emotional appeal of environmental nostalgia is evoked within a comparison and contrast mode. But Chai’s film also makes the ecocity global and attainable by defining and illustrating practical solutions everyone can apply