The Colony (2013), Cl-fi, and Gender Roles

The Colony (2013) and Gender

Gender sometimes plays a complex role in contemporary cli-fi films. In The Colony (2013) directed by Jeff Renroe, masculinity takes center stage for the few human survivors forced underground by a sudden ice age caused by global warming. Colony 7, one of these outposts, receives a distress signal from another, Colony 5.

Masculine bodies rule in this post-climate apocalyptic world where its heroes and villains are all male. The leader of Colony 7, Briggs ((Laurence Fishburne), organizes an expedition with his assistant Sam (Kevin Zegers) and young recruit Graydon (Atticus Dean Mitchell) to investigate, leaving one of the few women, biologist Kai (Charlotte Sullivan) in charge.

But Briggs’ former military partner Mason (Bill Paxton) quickly seizes control. After a two-day walk, Briggs, Sam, and Graydon reach Colony 5 and discover the reason for the signal: a savage group of male cannibals has slaughtered all but one of the colonists. In The Colony, men (Briggs and Sam) must save humanity from other savage men (Mason and the cannibals).

The cli-fi message comes through mainly in the frozen landscape and a message showing that another colony has successfully manipulated the weather to reveal the sun and the fertile soil beneath the ice. Kai’s role connects to this message, since as a biologist, she has gathered and preserved the seeds they will need to survive in “the warm place” where Sam leads them.

The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road

I recently re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road and was struck not only by the film's messages about climate change, water rights, and gender, but also by its resemblance to the Fast and Furious films we wrote about years ago. Like the Fast and Furious films, Mad Max spends more time breaking down gender and class stereotypes than actually addressing the real costs of cars. The film's content contradictions its own transformation of the landscape, as discussed in this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/05/mad-max-fury-road-namibia

From an eco-critical perspective, Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious (2001) and its sequels, John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast and Furious (2009), and Fast and Furious 6 and 7, like the 1954 John Ireland film, The Fast and the Furious, which inspired them, not only illustrate the devotion to souped-up high-speed cars and the stylish culture they represent; they also take environmental degradation to hyperbolic levels. These films go beyond merely highlighting the car as an American icon and valorizing a concrete highway built for racing. In spite of the more liberal class and race politics in the later films that serve to critique human exploitation, all these Fast and Furious films advocate a heightened abuse of nature and ecosystems. They rest on transformed natural and man-made environments, and on the environmental impact that is inherently a part of car culture. 

In the contemporary Fast and Furious films, the situation is the same as it was in 1954—car culture celebrates speed and control, as well as the transformation of the natural landscape into a man-made landscape that is, in turn, itself transformed without questioning the environmental expense. These films demonstrate that the environmental impact of cars and the car culture in America has been treated as natural and desirable, as a given. Drivers in all the films appear to rebel against a conformist suburban culture that uses roadways for commuting and garages for parking instead of racing; however, they also conform to this same culture through their acceptance of environmental degradation in the form of both a transformation of natural and man-made landscapes, and reliance on nonrenewable fuels that contribute to global warming.

Drivers in all six films not only use artificial landscapes built on ecosystems, but they also further exploit this artificial landscape, transforming its former utility into a roadway for speed, thrills, and status. The 2001, 2003, 2006, 2009, and 2013 films merely mask their attitude toward the landscape by including one inconsequential difference, from an environmental standpoint: an updated race and class politics rooted in post-World War II Southern car culture that responds to The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985), a television series with similar roots. While racial and class hierarchies may have been deconstructed in the later films, exploitation of the environment is not only accepted but is presented as a way to even the class and race stakes. Even though hierarchies appear to have changed from 1954 to 2013, when it comes to the natural world, environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal. An eco-critical reading of these films suggests that little has changed between 1954 and 2006 in an ideology that worships speed and advocates the conquest of the natural world as a transformative development aligned with progress and democracy. The thematic and plot parallels between the films crossing 60 years are striking. They highlight a car culture that juxtaposes elements of consumption and consumerism, food and fast cars, with sex and power. Linking sex with food is a staple of cinema, since both work together to elicit desire and stimulate our appetites. In these films, viewers are asked to have our appetite for consuming the environment further stimulated and to think of that consumption as empowering and pleasurable.

Food, sex, and speed serve to foreground the social construction of cars and the car culture as desirable items of consumption. In the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, sandwiches are replaced by lunch on a mansion patio, Brian O’Connor’s (Paul Walker) and Roman’s (Tyrese Gibson) reward for winning a race to retrieve a Cuban cigar. In 1954’s The Fast and the Furious, Dorothy Malone’s character (Connie) must ride off in her two-seat Jaguar as Frank Webster’s hostage (before eating her sandwich).  In The Fast and the Furious, Tokyo Drift, Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) makes connections with Tokyo-bound Americans in a high school cafeteria before meeting them and other teenage “drifters” in a parking garage. Even in the latest Fast and Furious 6,  Han (Sung Kang) and his romantic interest, Giselle (Gad Gadot) share a meal from a street vendor in Tokyo.

All of these films also foreground an existing landscape that is already man-made, thus making it easier to forget that it is an already transformed landscape. The real natural landscape that serves as the basis of this transformation is not even evoked anymore. In Baudrillard’s term, it is all a simulacrum already. The receding natural landscape that is the basis of these films becomes furthered erased by the multiple transformations of the man-made landscape. It is not so much the landscape that is transformed—as the frontier closed in 1890— but the use that is made of this landscape. The only available frontier left is the new use one can make of what is there, following, of course, a similar ideology as the one that informed the transformation in the first place—a particular version of landscape and power.

As important as food, romance, and sex are, the cars, asphalt, and transformed landscape are the centerpieces of the films.  In the 2001 The Fast and the Furious, for example, kicked-up Japanese compacts are driven on Los Angeles pavement by an assorted group of multi-racial young male hellions. With an ethnically ambiguous leader—Vin Diesel’s Dominic—and street racers of Asian, African American, and Hispanic descent, the film shows us a globalized car-crazy, hip-hop-driven subculture where urban youth in their twenties invest thousands of dollars to soup up lightweight Toyotas, Mitsubishis, and Hondas for inner-city ultra-speed. Two big races and three car chases make up most of the movie, providing speed-driven highs to drivers, passengers, and (if box office numbers speak the truth) audience members. This loud and fast underworld thumbs its nose at the establishment—in this case represented by the FBI and, at first, its undercover agent, Brian. They even appear to reject the utilitarian reasons behind the construction of the asphalt and concrete landscapes they exploit, even as they re-appropriate it for their own use in a semblance of rejecting all that is bourgeois. 

No one can deny that The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tokyo Drift, Fast and Furious, and Fast and Furious 6 highlight a racially diverse cast that appeals to a broader demographic and makes a seemingly progressive point about race and class politics, especially in terms of the new ethnically ambiguous look. But the films also show what can happen to an urban landscape already altered—paved over—to accommodate the car and its driver. These films use the concrete landscape to assert individuality and a refusal to knuckle under to authority. With the exception of Brian and perhaps Roman, these inner-city car racers don’t want to be reintegrated into society. They race cars to gain status and money, to impress sexy women, and to defy the police—just like Junior Johnson and the Dukes of Hazzard. But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited. To them, the concrete paved landscapes of inner-city Los Angeles, Miami, and Tokyo are natural. Only their exploitative transformation of them provides them with what they see as a radical edge. When concrete landscapes go unquestioned, so do their transformations. 

Snowpiercer (2013) as/and Cli-Fi

The blatantly eco-horror cli-fi film Snowpiercer (2013) emphasizes both its climate change catalyst and its human focus through its steampunk sensibility. The film’s opening shows us the consequences of climate change and the negative repercussions of treating the warming atmosphere with an experimental chemical CW7 to cool the Earth. Instead of combatting climate change, the experiment froze the planet and killed all life, according to the opening narration. Only a few humans survive on a massive climate-controlled train and are relegated into carriages by class. 

Unsurprisingly, the third-class masses like Tanya (Octavia Butler) and her children envy the first class passengers in the comfort of the opulent front. As Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir explains, “In the filthy, overcrowded rear cars where Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell) and the cryptic, prophetic elder statesman called Gilliam (John Hurt) are confined, anger is building toward another uprising.” Set 17 years after the freeze, Snowpiercer shows us the results of such exploitation: a rebellion led by young revolutionary Curtis (Chris Evans) with sometimes devious goals.

The bulk of Snowpiercer examines this rebellion while also revealing the intricacies of the train as biosphere with every new carriage Curtis and his crew penetrate. The ultimate goal is disrupting the hierarchy by seizing the means of production—the engine that runs the train and its climate. In one car they free a drug-addicted security specialist Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song) and his daughter Yona (Ah-sung Ko). When Curtis offers him a month of the hallucinogen Kronole for every carriage door he opens, Minsoo agrees to join them. With Minsoo’s help, the rebels fight their way through a car where a sole worker cooks their insect protein blocks, a vegetable and flower garden carriage, an aquarium car where seafood is raised for the upper classes, and even an elite elementary school. The rebel group dwindles with each battle but, according to A. O. Scott, the sometimes slapstick violence “produc[es] a volatile blend of humor and horror that pays tribute to the source material while coloring its themes with the director’s distinctively perverse and humane sensibility.”

Ultimately Curtis reaches the engine at the front of the train, but the rebellion ends not in capturing control but in initiating a new beginning like that depicted in the cli-fi Noah (2014). As O’Hehir declares, “This may be the most ambitious and capacious dystopian critique since “The Matrix” 15 years ago, and it’s one that seeks to offer a hopeful and even transcendent vision.” The last scenes of Snowpiercer support this claim when Yona and Timmy climb outside the train and live to see a polar bear on a hill. In Noah, according the Noah’s vision, “water cleanses.” In Snowpiercer, that cleansing water is frozen.

Downsizing (2017) and the Comic Eco-Hero

Our chapter, “Housing, Labor, and Comic Evolutionary Narratives in Downsizing (2017) and Sorry to Bother You (2018)” will address the intersection of race and class intertwined with efforts to address housing, labor, and over-population. The chapter centers its reading of this important environmental issue around the odd science fiction comedies, Downsizing and Sorry to Bother You, which offer drastic housing and labor solutions to life on an Earth that has become an environmental disaster plagued by overpopulation and the crime and starvation it produces.

In the social satire Downsizing, occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) believes he will have a better life if he downsizes, shrinking himself to five inches tall to live in wealth and splendor. After his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) chooses not to downsize and divorces Paul, however, his dreamhouse turns into a one-bedroom apartment below party-friendly entrepreneur Dusan (Christoph Waltz). The film narrates Paul’s journey as a bumbling comic eco-hero who chooses to join forces with Vietnamese social activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) to address real environmental injustice and racism in the downsized community of Leisureland, rather than escaping potential climate calamities in the caverns of Norway with Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen (Rolf Lassgård) and the original downsized community.

Paul and Ngoc’s story illustrates Joseph Meeker’s description of the comic way arguing that participants are successful because “they live and reproduce even when times are hard or dangerous” rather than proving themselves “best able to destroy enemies or competitors” (The Comedy of Survival 20). They have fulfilled, as Meeker explains, an effective evolutionary process, “one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their existence” (164). 

According to Joseph Meeker, these evolutionary narratives explore what might happen if humanity did learn from these more stable comic heroes, since, as Meeker explains, “Evolution itself is a gigantic comic drama, not the bloody tragic spectacle imagined by the sentimental humanists of early Darwinism” (164). Rather, the evolutionary process is one of adaptation and accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their environments in search of a means to maintain their existence. Like comedy, evolution is a matter of muddling through.” (164). Paul and Ngoc choose to muddle through rather than pioneer a future that leaves so many behind.

First Reformed (2017) and the Tragic Eco-Hero

First Reformed (2017) and the Tragic Eco-Hero

In First Reformed (2017), Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) serves as a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. During the course of the film, Toller struggles with personal torment and eco-trauma, moving from tragic hero to something more ambivalent.

Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities, 5,000-strong flock, and charismatic minister, Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). When pregnant parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future. With an ending that begins with something out of Omega Man (1971) and ends with something closer to Mother! (2017), however, First Reformed left this audience member feeling like any environmental message gets lost in the folds of Toller’s bloodied robe, with Mary’s innocent embrace offering the sole redemption for Toller’s sins.

Toller at first seems like a a tragic eco-hero like that described by Joseph W. Meeker. According to Meeker:

literary tragedy and environmental exploitation in Western culture share many of the same philosophical presuppositions ….Three such ideas will illustrate the point: the assumption that nature exists for the benefit of humanity; the belief that human morality transcends natural limitations; and humanism’s insistence upon the supreme importance of the individual personality. (The Comedy of Survival 24)

In his earlier essay, “The Comic Mode,” Meeker defines the tragic hero in relation to biology: “Pioneer species are the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (161). Toller more than fulfills Meeker’s criteria for a tragic hero, gaining force as an eco-hero who both strives to save humanity and to remind them of their pristine past.  Toller is a pioneer, a tragic hero willing to speak up and resist homogenizing forces as an individual whose morality transcends all those around him. Drawing on Meeker, Toller is one of the pioneering outsiders “whose life styles resemble behavior that men have admired most when they have seen it in other men. We celebrate the qualities in human pioneers that we despise in the pioneers of other plant and animal species” (“The Comic Mode” 161).

Toller’s attempts to sway Jeffers and resist the wealthy industrialist Balq (Michael Gaston), who is financing the 250^th Anniversary celebration, highlights Toller’s tragic eco-heroic strategies. “Will God forgive us for what we're doing to his creation?” he asks Jeffers. And his resolution to the environmental disasters Michael shares with him also highlights a tragic eco-heroic approach. As he writes in his journal and we hear in voiceover, “Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.”

Yet two dynamic scenes interfere with this tragic environmental narrative. The first occurs as a climax in the film, when Mary visits Toller and shares an odd connective out-of-body experience with him that serves as the most powerful revelation of environmental disaster. During Mary and Toller’s laying on of bodies, the pair seem to levitate and float over multiple horrific eco-disasters serving as evidence of industrialists’ (like Balq’s) culpability in Earth’s demise. The revelation seems at first to move Toller toward the martyrdom we see in Omega Man, with Charlton Heston’s actual death on a cross. Yet a second final scene veers the film off in what some reviewers exalt as an ecstatic resurrection. Instead, I can’t help but view this cli-fi film through the lens of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! I did find some commentary on climate change in First Reformed. But I primarily found visually appealing homages to independent cinema that presents women and their bodies as muse and source of redemption rather than equal partners in a (nonviolent) battle for our World.