Water Rights in Fictional Film Part II--Rango and the Desert Land Act

 

Rango (2011) deliberately addresses water rights issues as it both elucidates the environmental history surrounding water rights in the American desert and critiques current water rights practices in the Las Vegas area. In an obvious homage to Chinatown noted by critics from Time Magazine to Salon.Com, Rango explores a hero’s attempts to “save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers” (O’Hehir “Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation”). 

In fact, the mayor of Dirt (Ned Beatty), the Western town Rango must civilize, modeled his performance on that of John Huston in Chinatown. With help from a variety of anthropomorphized western characters, Rango (Johnny Depp) successfully returns water to the desert, defeating the water baron mayor and rehabilitating his henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), an obvious homage to Lee Van Cleef’s characters in his Western Films. 

Although A. O. Scott declares, “I confess I wanted a tighter gathering of loose ends, and a more thorough explanation of the politics of water and real estate in the fast-changing American West,” Rango effectively illustrates the continuing influence of nineteenth-century water rights issues. The animated film especially reinforces the ramification of those connected with the Desert Land Act of 1877.

Water Rights in Fictional Film, Part I

 

Multiple films fictionalize the actual water war in documented in Bolivia, where citizens kicked out its private water companies and began a sustainable water plan. For example, Andrew Hageman examines this issue in a dialectical reading of Even the Rain (2010), and

Abuela Grillo (2009) (66) that shows parallels between these fictional films and the documentary The Corporation (2003). 

This issue is also explored in more detail in the documentary Flow: For Love of Water, which documents the 1999 water privatization in Bolivia forced by the World Bank, which excluded 208,000 people from portable water in Cochabamba. Water was returned to the people of Cochabamba in 2000 and to citizens of La Paz in 2007, according to the film. 

Although the Nairobi summit’s solutions are not discussed, and the local solutions seem limited, the multiple problems associated with water rights are revealed and illustrated well in Blue Gold and reinforced by Flow. Contemporary films in a variety of genres reflect the ongoing influence of this doctrine of prior appropriation. Chinatown (1974) most clearly draws on the doctrine, and Quantum of Solace (2008) and Rango (2011) demonstrate the doctrine’s continuing influence.

The Rhetoric of Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008)

 

 

To move toward a solution to this conflict between profit and need, Blue Gold establishes the problem and supports it with illustrations from around the world. Our water is in crisis, a title card explains, and a World Social Forum in Nairobi is examining the evidence to determine the best ways to ensure water is available and affordable for everyone. According to Maude Barlow, fresh water only comprises three percent of the total water on Earth; yet, most of that is undrinkable because it is polluted by farmers, cars, and industrial wastes that cause miscarriages, low sperm rates, and disease. The Rio Grande River in the United States, for example, is so polluted that anyone entering it would need eighteen vaccines and shots to survive. Around the world, cholera, a water-borne disease, kills more than wars because of this overt pollution, and over 60 percent of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed. 

According to the documentary, the water crisis is a product not only of water pollution; however, it also is a repercussion of the mining for water by industry, farming, and the bottled water corporations. The world’s fresh water supply is becoming polluted so fast that corporations are mining it faster than it can be replenished. Individuals, factory owners, and farmers overuse groundwater, sometimes because of the doctrine of prior appropriation that states if farmers or factory owners do not use the water, they may lose their water rights. Urbanization and overdevelopment accelerates groundwater depletion because a paved land devastates the water cycle. Dam projects exacerbate the problem, according to Vandana Shiva, “choking the artery of the planet” and breaking a sustainable water cycle. 

To overcome this water crisis, Blue Gold declares that we need to work on a renewable supply and determine how much we really have to work with and live within those limits. The film asserts that water should be a public commons rather than a privatized source of profit, as it is now around the world—with help from big companies such as Veolia, Suez, Vivendi, and Nestle. The last scenes of the film highlight ways to solve this water crisis. A final documentary chapter, “The Way Forward,” introduces multiple examples of local residents usurping the power of these corporate giants. Uruguay rid itself of the Suez Water Treatment Company by changing its constitution. And Fryeburg, Maine poured Nestlé’s bottled water back into its aquifers. The film ends here, but the suggestion is that together, and primarily on a local level, the water crisis can be solved. Although these hopes seem unattainable as climate crises exacerbate droughts, the rhetoric of the film still resonates.

The Appropriative Doctrine and Contemporary American Film, Part I

Documentary films such as Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008) begin to elucidate U.S. water rights issues like the appropriative doctrine. In contrast to the Clean Water Act, the appropriative doctrine, “is a queuing system that rewards first movers.” Although those with water rights again hold only usufruct rights, “in this system, the first claimant to a water source has the highest priority to divert water, so long as the withdrawal is for a ‘reasonable and beneficial use’” (Donohew 89). The appropriative water rights doctrine, however, serves as “a basis for water markets. The doctrine allows for water to be claimed, diverted, and separated from land through which water flows. It can be transported out of a basin for use elsewhere. 

As such, those who buy water rights or lease water can change the location of diversion, timing of use, and nature and site of ultimate use, subject to regulatory approval to protect downstream claimants” (Donohew 90). Vandana Shiva agrees, arguing “the doctrine of prior appropriation established absolute rights to property, including the right to sell and trade water” (22). Because the appropriative doctrine “gave no preference to riparian landowners,” even those far from water sources could compete for water, a principle that “provided the essential ingredients for an efficient market in water wherein property rights were well-defined, enforced and transferable” (Anderson and Snyder 75). 

 As the title suggests, Blue Gold: World Water Wars also examines the worldwide consequences of commodifying water and offers grounding for narratives explored in fictional films like Quantum of Solace (2008), released the same year. And Blue Gold defines its purpose and rhetorical approach in its opening claim: “This is not a film about saving the environment. This is a film about saving ourselves,” narrator Malcolm McDowell declares. “Whoever goes without water for a week cries blood.” An historical overview of ancient cultures’ attempts to manage water reinforces the film’s premise. The Egyptians and Romans succeeded, where the Mayans did not because they had too little water, the film argues. Today water is a source of profit for a few but necessary for us all. Negotiating a viable resolution between these two world views serves as an objective for the film.

A Civil Action (1998) and Water Rights

 

 

Ultimately, in A Civil Action Attorney Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) and his law firm settle with both Grace and Beatrice, but Schlichtmann also sends his case files to the EPA, including a report from a worker who witnessed the cleanup that proves toxic waste had been dumped in the city’s water supply, and the EPA forces both Grace and Beatrice to pay 69.4 million dollars in cleanup costs because both companies violated the Clean Water Act.

According to a summary of the Clean Water Act from the EPA, “the Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” but not groundwater sources. Based on this 1972 Clean Water Act, the EPA “has implemented pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry” and “set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters,” making it illegal to “discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained.” 

The Clean Water Act helps control one important element of the riparian doctrine, ensuring that downstream water uses are not adversely affected by those upstream. The Clean Water Act and the EPA monitoring it become integral agents in A Civil Action and the actual court case it inspired.

Water Rights and Film: A Civil Action (1998)

 

In A Civil Action (1998), the “reasonable use” of water is under question. The film explores whether or not those who used the same water source as does a leather tanning company were adversely affected by the company’s water use. 

Although the film primarily centers on Jan Schlichtmann’s (John Travolta) failed attempts to sue both Beatrice and W.R. Grace, he ultimately proves that the tannery these companies manage dumped silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE), toxic waste that contaminated a town’s water supply and caused multiple cancers in its townspeople. 

The film traces attorney Schlichtmann’s investigation into a case that revolves around a woman whose son had died of leukemia two years before, along with more than a dozen other townspeople. The city’s drinking water is blamed, but the townspeople seem unaware of the source of this water pollution. 

It is Schlichtmann who discovers a tannery connected with W.R. Grace dumping toxins into the river beside the factory. When he learns representatives of Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace are culpable and have big pockets, a lawsuit begins. Schlichtmann’s investigation is meant to determine that silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE) were dumped into the water supply by the tannery and causing the cancers in townspeople.

U.S. Feature Films and the Riparian Doctrine

 

 

Water has been considered a natural right around in the world and treated as a usufructuary right for thousands of years. Such a right gives temporary possession and enjoyment to those who use water, as long as that use does not cause damage or change it. According to this perspective, water can be used but not owned. The Riparian Doctrine clarifies this natural right. As economist Zachary Donohew explains, because water is typically seen as a usufructuary right, rivers and streams cannot be owned but their water can be accessed by those who live and work beside their banks (90). 

Although current riparian principles draw on private ownership to define reasonable water use, the doctrine primarily applies to public riparian lands, as activist Vandana Shiva notes in her discussion of communal water use in Colorado’s Rio Grande Valley (27). The Riparian Doctrine still prevails in much of the Eastern United States because water is much more abundant there than in the Western states, but it also serves as a guiding principle for community rights and water democracies in India (Shiva 29), which hold that “Water is a commons…. It cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity” (36). 

Both fictional features and documentaries with water at their center draw on the tenets of the Riparian Doctrine. Westerns such as The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) emphasize riparian principles, especially in relation to the Desert Land Act, but contemporary feature films also draw on riparian ideals, which, in these cases, are in conflict with the Clean Water Act and its roots in human approaches to ecology.

Water Rights and Genre Film

 

Water rights also connect explicitly with human approaches to ecology that not only draw on riparian rights and the appropriative doctrine, but also helped to foster the EPA’s Clean Water Act of 1972. For example, Ellen Swallow Richards explains how human approaches to ecology encourage the right to water, explaining “In common law, water is held to be a gift of nature to man for use by all, and therefore not to be diverted from its natural channels for the pleasure or profit of any one to the exclusion of the rest” (Air, Water, and Food 57). But for Richards, it was not enough to ensure water was available. That water must also be clean, asserting, “A city or town is under strict obligation to furnish a safe supply of water as it is to provide safe roads” (59). For Richards, everyone should have access to water free of contaminants or “objectionable substances, mineral and organic” (61) because it is “a necessary condition of life” (67). 

Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009). 

All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films that are at least partially based on America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. Although this connection to environmental law is most explicitly illustrated by the documentary Tapped (2009) and an animated feature, Rango (2010), it reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in Quantum of Solace, an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right.

Water Rights and Chinatown, Continued

Water rights are steeped in environmental history in films with water at their center. Chinatown explicitly highlights the continuing influence of the 1877 Desert Land Act and the doctrine of prior appropriation. Water rights in America respond to at least three political, historical, and economic perspectives, all of which have throughout U. S. history addressed water distribution during times of both drought and abundance of water. The first of these, the riparian doctrine, connects water with the land adjacent to it, so that “Riparian land owners can access water for a ‘reasonable use,’ so long as downstream users are not adversely affected” (Donohew 90).

A second approach, the appropriative doctrine, provides grounding for legislation that opened up the West to pioneers. See, for example, the Desert Land Act (1877), the General Mining Act (1872), and the Homestead Act (1862) which rested on the doctrine of prior appropriation: “Water rights with older priority dates are more likely to receive their full allocation and hence are more valuable” (Donohew 89). 

A third perspective focuses on groundwater rights, which are more difficult to define and measure, so specifications differ from state to state. For example, “In some states, including parts of Texas, unlimited ground water pumping is allowed by a landowner so long as it is put to a beneficial use” (Donohew 91), but in others, state or local agencies regulate groundwater usage more closely.

Water in the Desert: Chinatown (1974) and California's Continuing Drought

The current drought in California broaches multiple multiple perspectives on water rights. But these responses rest on a cultural and legal history that goes back to at least the 19th century. Water rights films like Chinatown (1974) illuminate this history for a popular audience. Chinatown serves as the quintessential water rights film: Murder, infidelity, and incest all become integrally connected with water as a commodity in 1930s Los Angeles, a context established by an FDR picture in the opening shot of the J.J (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) private investigator’s office. Jake is introduced to an infidelity case but discovers the perpetrator is Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Water and Power. 

According to Water and Power, Los Angeles is on the edge of the desert. Without water, the valley would turn to dust, and the Alto Valley Dam will save it, but Mulwray opposes the dam because it is shoddy and ineffective and because he discovers his former partner Noah Cross (John Huston) is dumping gallons of water from the Los Angeles reservoir into the ocean to prove the need for the dam. Ultimately Mulwray is murdered by the very water he serves. “Los Angeles is dying of thirst,” says a sticker near Jake’s car, but, as one police officer explains, “Can you believe it? We're in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

While investigating Mulwray’s murder, Jake discovers that the water department is not irrigating as they claimed. A clandestine group is poisoning the farmers’ wells and shooting out their water tanks, so they will sell their property to “ghost” buyers who are either dead or elderly relatives of wealthy LA socialites. In fact, Noah Cross killed Hollis when he hindered his plan to incorporate the valley into the city of Los Angeles by buying up farmland to grow even richer on its resources, declaring, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” underpinning the continuing connection between water rights and environmental history in Chinatown and other films centering on water.

Water as Protagonist

Water rights also connect explicitly with human approaches to ecology that not only draw on riparian rights and the appropriative doctrine, but also helped to foster the EPA’s Clean Water Act of 1972. For example, Ellen Swallow Richards explains how human approaches to ecology encourage the right to water, explaining “In common law, water is held to be a gift of nature to man for use by all, and therefore not to be diverted from its natural channels for the pleasure or profit of any one to the exclusion of the rest” (Air, Water, and Food 57). But for Richards, it was not enough to ensure water was available. That water must also be clean, asserting, “A city or town is under strict obligation to furnish a safe supply of water as it is to provide safe roads” (59). For Richards, everyone should have access to water free of contaminants or “objectionable substances, mineral and organic” (61) because it is “a necessary condition of life” (67).

Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and more contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009).

All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films that are at least partially based on America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. This connection to environmental law reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in Chinatown, an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right.

Digital Documentary and Green Hollywood

 

Making documentary films accessible to a wider audience may also create other economic and financial problems. New York Times reporter Nancy Ramsey highlights the hidden costs of documentaries in her exploration of Jonathan Caouette’s distribution experience with Tarnation (2003). Although the film cost as little as $218 to make, once the film gained distribution, costs exceeded $500 thousand, with rights to the music included in the film accounting for $230 thousand of the total. The difficulty attaining distribution also limits low-budget documentaries’ accessibility. Peter Judson’s Nobody Wants Your Film (2005) provides a, sometimes, comic perspective on the problems director Alexandre Rockwell and writer Brandon Cole face when attempting to market their film, Thirteen Moons. Nobody Wants Your Film collects and augments footage shot on the set of Thirteen Moons, as well as a series of interviews with cast and crew members and e-mails between Rockwell and possible distributors to provide a semi-fictionalized story of difficulties gaining distribution, illustrating the problem many of the films explored here face when their films are only available through a small distributor’s website. 

 Of the twelve mountaintop removal mining films we watched, for example, only two gained a wide release: Coal Country, as a regional festival favorite, was broadcast on PBS in the fall of 2009, perhaps because it was directed by Mari-Lynn Evans and Phylis Geller, the filmmakers who brought The Appalachians to PBS in 2005. With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at its center, Bill Haney’s The Last Mountain acquired a limited theatrical release after premiering at the Sundance and Seattle Film Festival. Another documentary examining mountaintop removal mining, On Coal River (2010) became a festival favorite like Coal Country and The Last Mountain, but it chose a different distribution route: iTunes. The film is available as a DVD for schools, libraries, and universities, but individual films are only available through the iTunes library. Even though only two of these films have found limited distribution success, however, all twelve draw on the experiences of the nearly the same anti-MTR activists, including Maria Gunnoe, Joe Lovett, and especially, (before her death), Julia/Judy Bonds. They also all highlight MTR incidents primarily in and near Boone County, West Virginia, even though other parts of Appalachia are suffer the results of MTR, including Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and other counties in West Virginia. 

Which brings us back to the original question: Can the film industry and environmental movements mix? With cautious optimism, we can give only a qualified “yes” to the new attempts because of the enormous energy expenditures used to create film and the yet uncalculated waste levels associated with its distribution and exhibition. Hollywood film studios are making the move to “green,” partially because of economic issues, partly because of California’s environmental laws which regulate greenhouse gas emissions more stringently than the federal government, and partly because Hollywood film stars from George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio demand it. As the Warner Brothers website declares, “It takes creativity to entertain the world while conserving resources on our planet.” Although some succeed more than others, the films we explore in Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters, attempt to do both.

Greening the Film Industry

 

Eco changes made to the film industry also beg a final question: How green is the theatre experience (now that at least some folks are returning after Covid)? The changeover to total digital production in both the filmmaking process and in the delivery and projection of film may create a new manufacturing paradigm that is greener than the nineteenth century model being phased out. But the final third leg of the nineteenth century model still exists: the theatre, which is dependent on enormous energy expenditures to entertain and inform mass audiences in locations that usually average 300-1200 seats per screen, not to mention the enormous energy used to get people from home to theatre and back. 

The need to light, heat, and cool these multiplexes (numbering approximately 35 thousand screens in the United States in 2012) is seen as an economically feasible expenditure. Spending billions of dollars alone to transition theatres worldwide to digital projection means the industry calculates the mass consumption of films will continue well into the future. 

Digital filmmaking does make it possible to produce the low-budget independent films we explore in our book Film and Everyday Eco-disasters. The digital cinematography used in the powerful anti-mountaintop removal mining films of B.J. Gudmundsson and the humorous call to address climate change found in Jon Cooksey’s How to Boil a Frog lower their budgets, making them more financially feasible to produce and distribute. Even larger budget documentaries such as The Last Mountain and Blue Vinyl lower production costs using digital filmmaking processes. Technologies such as digital cameras, computer generated editing for both image and sound have made the whole process of filmmaking truly democratic.

Greening Hollywood, Continued!

 

During the early 2010s, the rapid technological changeover from film to digital projection was reaching high speed. As Nick Leiber of Bloomberg Businessweek explains, “To induce exhibitors to purchase the equipment, celluloid prints of new movies form majors will no longer be available in the U.S. by the end of 2013, according to John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners”(53). According to Leiber, “about 26,000 of the 40,0000 screens in the U.S. have already converted” to digital (54). The changeover to digital eliminates production of celluloid, chemical processing, and the physical delivery of thousands of film prints per major feature release. This “greening” of film production distribution and exhibition had been jump-started by the success of digital films and 3D blockbusters such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011) (1.3 billion in worldwide ticket sales) and Avatar (2009) (2.75 billion in worldwide ticket sales). Since 3D is now a major theatrical draw for audiences, theaters have been forced to adapt quickly by phasing in digital projection at a far higher rate than previously anticipated. IMAX Theatres, for example, have completely transitioned to digital projection. A majority of theaters worldwide will soon be projecting feature films digitally, now that box office potential for 3D has become a financial reality. 

 This success now forces far greater beneficial environmental results throughout the whole process of filmmaking and film viewing. The digital age may reduce the carbon footprint of film companies in major ways that are still being calculated. As Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller suggest, “The question is whether the digital transition will make motion pictures less ecologically destructive” despite their high-energy use and toxic waste production, especially if home viewing screens are included (75). With studio practices becoming more environmentally sound and environmental messages becoming more audience friendly, however, digital films like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, can reach worldwide audiences, serving audiences with a potentially lighter carbon footprint. In fact, as Gendy Alimurang states in an April 12, 2012 Los Angeles Weekly piece, studios “no longer want to physically print and ship movies” because it costs only $150 for a digital copy, rather than the $1500.00/print times 4000 theatres for 35mm film. Although, as Alimurang suggests, the shift to digital will have negative consequences for independent theatres, projectionist jobs, and classic film distribution, it may also help “green” the movie business.

Greening Hollywood, Continued

 

Warner Bros. Pictures (the studio that brought us both Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011) has made an effort to obtain carbon neutrality and nurture conservation initiatives on its movie productions. According to their website, “All Warner Bros. Pictures Productions use a carbon calculator to measure their footprint and inform future green production initiatives.” They note the success of the 2005 film Syriana and 2010’s New Line Cinema film Valentine’s Day as films that have “implemented numerous sustainable practices, including a first-of-its kind hybrid base camp utilizing solar power and bio-diesel-fueled generators; reusable water bottles, to eliminate the use of single-use plastic water bottles; clean-air vehicles, for both talent and equipment transportation; recycling and composting efforts; and biodegradable food ware.” According to the site, eight of the studio’s last 25 films were carbon neutral, including Due Date (2010), Flipped (2010), Green Lantern (2011), Inception (2010), The Town (2010), and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Warner Bros.’ animated films also lessen their carbon footprint (as well as their production costs) by implementing digital cinematography and distribution. 

Other studios have made the move to digital cinematography for their live-action films, such as Paramount Pictures’ Hugo (2011), or live-action/animated films, such as Twentieth-Century Fox’s Avatar (2009). Since 2007, sales of film cameras have rapidly declined, and all new cinema cameras introduced since 2007 are digital, a change that contributed to Eastman Kodak’s bankruptcy in January 2012. The success of this move to digital is demonstrated by the preponderance of digital films winning the Academy Award for cinematography. Slumdog Millionaire (2009) and Avatar’s digital production is seen by most as a large step towards “greening” Hollywood, a move that has not negatively affected either film’s profits. The success of digital blockbusters creates an even more inviting atmosphere for digital filmmaking and video digital projection. The ultimate goal is that all theatrical projectors will be digital video. 

This goal of transforming all theatres to digital projection will mean the end of using film in the production process. Computer-generated video production and exhibition, like that produced for Hugo and Avatar, ends the chemical links of producing film prints, eliminates the need to create and deliver thousands of prints for exhibition, and ends 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. In Greening the Media, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller provide a detailed description of the environmental destruction associated with celluloid film (71-75).

Greening the Film Industry?

 

Twenty-first Century films rely more fully on CGI and digital production, but even when the films blatantly address the detrimental effects on our basic needs or the dire consequences of meeting them, they still struggle with maintaining the realism expected by both Hollywood and its audiences while encouraging environmentally friendly production practices. With a budget of $200 million and a gross profit of $586 million, Quantum of Solace, a blockbuster with a blatantly environmental message against commodifying water, serves as an apt example of the dilemma filmmakers face: How can a film company provide an effective and lucrative film product and limit negative environmental externalities? 

In many ways this Bond film failed to achieve the “green” message of the story in its production practices. According to Randee Daniel of Hollywood Reporter, for example, Quantum of Solace was shot in six countries, and this on-location film is, according to RPS Group “among the most expensive and carbon-intense stages of film production. Large crews and quantities of equipment must be flown abroad, and diesel generators are used to power the lighting and heating of temporary sets.” In Bregenz, Austria during the scenes of the performance of Tosca and its aftermath, 1500 extras were used, and for a later scene, the Palio di Siena at the Piazza del Campo in Siena was recreated in Italy; for a scene where Bond emerges from the Fonte Gaia, 1000 extras were hired, according to the film’s production diary on the MI6 website. Bill Dawes of FX Guide also reveals that a full-scale replica of the hotel building’s exterior was used for the exploding segment in which Bond and Camille escape in South America. 

Yet efforts were made to “green” this film production, as well. Although six Aston Martins were destroyed during the making of Quantum of Solace, the film also featured environmentally friendly Ford Motor Company cars: A Ford Ka EV, which seems to be electrically powered, and a fleet of Ford Edge Fuel-Cell EVs. The film also relied heavily on CGI, with over 900 visual effects shots stirring up adventure, according to a VFX World interview recorded by Bill Desowitz. Like other James Bond films, Quantum of Solace was produced at Pinewood Studios, whose carbon footprint was recently evaluated by RPS Group to support its plan to build a “1400 unit residential development – that also doubles as a giant 15-location film set for Pinewood Studios.” The assessment report suggests that between 60% and 90% reductions of greenhouse gas emissions may be possible if the development is approved, and using “streetscapes for filming will achieve a 44% annual reduction over business-as-usual location shooting abroad.” 

 These changes to the studio seemed to bode well for future James Bond productions until the carbon footprint-heavy Skyfall (2012), but other action adventure films have more successfully implemented “green” production practices. With a budget of $90 million, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) for example, “exemplifies eco-friendly filmmaking,” according to Gerri Miller of the Mother Nature Network, and still has already grossed $543 million. Because the film was part of Warner Brothers’ Green Initiative, the studio brought in Greenshoot as a consultant to “assist the production in lowering the carbon footprint [of the film] and to help implement more sustainable production practices in conjunction with and to complement the Green initiatives already set out by Warner Bros.” According to Co-producer Lauren Meek, “Construction set waste and food waste were key issues for us” (quoted in Miller). As Meek explains, “We diverted 756 tons of film waste from landfill with a recovery rate of 98.6 percent which was a zero landfill achievement. We saved 2500 tons of CO2 form being emitted by using Greenshoot and adopting green practices throughout the production, and saved money through Greenshoot's services into the productions” (quoted in Miller). Some of this was achieved by making the film digitally, but “visual effects enabled the production to cut down on travel and shoot everything in England, except for a few establishing shots” (Miller).

Can the Film Industry and the Environmental Movements Mix?

Even though oil drilling films we examined in Film and Everyday Eco-disasters attempted to show us that oil and water can mix, at least if appropriate safety precautions are in place, the filmic representations of everyday eco-disasters explored throughout this book all highlight the negative consequences (externalities) of fulfilling our basic needs. They also demonstrate that, more often than not, these eco-disasters also jeopardize those needs. Total Recall, for example, illustrates the repercussions of oxygen deprivation, but it also emphasizes the cause of unequal distribution of air: turning resources into commodities. Quantum of Solace, despite its James Bond action-adventure genre, demonstrates similar consequences, this time in relation to water as a necessary resource. Our Daily Bread, The Cove, Norma Rae, Blue Vinyl: The World’s First Toxic Comedy, The Last Mountain (and the other eleven mountaintop removal mining documentaries), and Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez primarily emphasize the eco-disasters associated with fulfilling our basic needs, yet they also effectively illustrate how these everyday eco-disasters threaten the needs of both human and nonhuman nature. 

All these films, to a greater and lesser extent provide an environmental reading based on everyday eco-disasters associated with our everyday lives. Some focus on how our acquisition of our needs sometimes causes an everyday eco-disaster. Others highlight how our drive to commodify those needs endangers both the resources and ourselves. And still others show how our consumption practices risk the resources that sustain us. Yet, because these are all products of the film industry, whether made independently or as a Hollywood blockbuster, they all also contribute to the environmental degradation that translates into an everyday eco-disaster when it affects our ability to meet our basic needs. 

To illustrate, Total Recall was one of the last major blockbusters to make large-scale use of miniature effects rather than computer generated imagery, a carbon-heavy approach that draws on multiple resources, leaving behind waste that is typically disposed in landfills rather than recycled. According to Eric Lichtenfeld, five different companies were brought in to handle the film’s effects. The only CGI sequence was a 42-second scene produced by MetroLight Studios that showed the x-rayed skeletons of commuters and their concealed weapons (258). In contrast only a year later, blockbusters such as James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) moved almost entirely to CGI. In spite of its message about the negative ramifications of turning oxygen into a commodity available to the privileged rather than the “commons,” Total Recall integrated production practices with a heavy carbon footprint. 

The Rhetoric of Fishing: Best Approaches to Support Sustainability

 

The focused rhetoric of The Cove succeeds where the environmental ethics perspectives of Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line fail to convey the same emotional power. Ultimately, even though animal liberation arguments may privilege some elements of the natural world over others, such an individualized approach has been shown to have more effective results. According to Ric O’Barry, the Taiji dolphin slaughter was suspended in September 2009 because of the publicity surrounding the film, The Cove (“Save Japan Dolphins), and as late as March 2, 2011, Taiji fishermen were returning to traditional fishing practices rather than dolphin slaughter. Even though dolphin killing continues, it has “drastically decreased compared to previous seasons,” O’Barry explains (“Save Japan Dolphins”). 

Today O’Barry is continuing to garner support from Japanese journalists and local students and community members in Wakayama City, Tokyo, and other towns throughout the country. O’Barry sees this response to The Cove as a major victory because, “Our Save Japan Dolphins Team and I have been meeting with media for years about the dolphin slaughter in Japan, but now the Japanese media is coming to us!” According to O’Barry, they opened The Cove in Japan despite intense opposition and a press conference after the film’s release “was attended by over 100 media representatives, including every major broadcast outlet” (“Save Japan Dolphins”). Because of the continuing success of The Cove, dolphin slaughter is on the wane. 

Perhaps, then, films taking an organismic approach to eco-resistance might learn from the strategies invoked in a powerful animal liberation film like The Cove. As Holmes Bolston, III explains, “Development in the West has been based on the Enlightenment myth of endless growth…. [Yet] none of the developed nations have yet settled into sustainable culture on their landscapes” (528). By moving from an animal rights perspective to an animal welfare approach, environmentalists may find a way to individualize environmental issues without diluting the need for a biotic community. An animal welfare approach can provide an emotional center missing from both Darwin’s Nightmare and The End of the Line and, perhaps, facilitate an eco-activist response that culminates in the powerful eco-resistance that is central to The Cove. The End of the Line could, for example, “humanize” selected species of aquatic life, demonstrating that they, like humans, have rights. A film similar to Darwin’s Nightmare might both highlight aquatic biospheres in which environmental changes might address species disruption and highlight native species worth saving because of their sentience. Such a focus on both individual species and their biotic communities could have the same result as the animal rights focus of The Cove: more than two million signatures on a petition that will, it is hoped, end dolphin slaughter for good.

The Cove and Dolphin Sentience

 The slaughter Ric O'Barry and his crew capture on film becomes the climax of The Cove, serving as the strongest animal rights argument in the film. Before all cameras have been planted in the hidden cove, from a distance the team films a dolphin trying to get away, leaving a trail of blood in the water in its wake. After the team plants the audio equipment, they listen to the dolphins scream in the cove. The sounds demonstrate that each dolphin is aware of its coming death. They anticipate their own slaughter, O’Barry explains. 

But it is after cameras are planted that the most shocking evidence against such slaughter is revealed. Ric and the team watch monitors showing fishermen on shore around a fire telling stories about whaling missions around the globe. Other shots show fishermen standing in boats and placing barriers across the cove. The fishermen herd in dolphins, disorienting them with constant tapping noises. Once they herd in the dolphins, fishermen begin the slaughter, stabbing dolphins repeatedly with harpoons. The water turns red with blood. Dolphin screams fill the soundtrack. The harpooning continues until all the dolphins are dead. The water is ruby red, but dolphins caught in nets are pierced again and again. They try to escape but are caught in this cove fortress. Carcasses are ripped on board the boats, but fishermen smoke nonchalantly, even diving into the bloody water in search of more bodies. The dolphins are dragged like harpooned whales. These images contrast with majestic shots of dolphins swimming freely in the sea. 

 The footage of the slaughter becomes O’Barry’s proof of dolphins’ sentience. Their suffering is clear on the video screen he shows a town spokesman and the members of the International Whaling Commission. And these shocking images get results. Small countries paid off by the Japanese leave the IWC, and dolphin meat is no longer allowed in school lunches, for example. By building an argument that first demonstrates dolphins’ equality because they, like humans, are both sentient and self-aware, The Cove draws on animal rights arguments. It also effectively takes that argument one-step further. Because dolphins are sentient and self-aware, their slaughter must end.

The Cove and Logical Reasoning

 

The Cove asserts both logical and emotional reasons why the dolphins should be saved. For example, the film provides practical reasons why humans should avoid dolphin meat, if they value their health, explaining that dolphin meat has toxic levels of mercury; yet, it is donated to area schools for lunch programs and disguised as whale meat in Tokyo markets. 

A history of problems with mercury poisoning is shown to support this claim, especially those recounting mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan in 1956, where the government covered up toxicity levels caused by industrial dumping. Fetuses were most affected, so children were born deformed, losing sight and hearing. Dolphins’ connection with humans is also used as a reason to stop the dolphins' slaughter. 

As perhaps the most intelligent sea creature, dolphins have been known to protect humans, are self-aware, and have the ability to learn language, skills only intelligent creatures can achieve.

The Cove as Rhetorical Documentary: Part I

 

The Cove establishes the worth of dolphins but also assumes, because they have historically been viewed as sentient creatures, that viewers will immediately call for action, once the slaughter at Taiji Cove is revealed. “We tried to do the story legally,” we’re told at the opening of this documentary revealing this dolphin slaughter in a cove in Taiji, Japan, “A little town with a really big secret.” 

Ric O’Barry’s attempts to film the slaughter are continually hampered by local authorities until he partners with the film’s director Louie Psihoyos. O’Barry never planned to be an activist, he explains, but after one of the dolphins he had trained killed herself in his arms by cutting off her own oxygen supply, he became a dolphin advocate, freeing as many as possible and preventing their slaughter. But dolphins are such great performers they have become a huge commodity worth $150,000.00 apiece for Sea World shows. Because thousands of dolphins come to Taiji each year, dolphin trainers collect dolphins there, bringing 2.3 million dollars a year to the area. The remaining dolphins herded into the cove are slaughtered for food, O’Barry explains, but he needs filmic proof to present to the world, so he can stop the catastrophe. 

Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and Netscape CEO Jim Clark join forces with O’Barry to accomplish this mission, helping him build a team of experts to plant cameras and microphones, even hiring George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to construct artificial rocks in which they can hide cameras in the cove. They bring in world-class divers, a military expert, and a rock concert organizer to facilitate the mission, and the film documents the process these experts follow to plan and execute their goal to film the slaughter in two stages: they first plant audio equipment, and then, in Mission 2: The Full Orchestra, the team hides cameras around the cove.

ASLE Conference 2021

 

Dolphins and Sentience in The Cove

 

The Cove demonstrates dolphins’ connections with humans first through Ric O’Barry’s recollections of interactions with the dolphins he captured and trained for the television series, Flipper (1964-1968). According to O’Barry, he captured and trained the five female dolphins that played Flipper in the television series, translating the script into dolphin action each day. The dolphins’ skills and intellect surprised and impressed even O’Barry. They even recognized themselves in the show, when they saw themselves on O’Barry’s television. O’Barry lived in the house at the end of a dock featured in the series, so he came in contact with the dolphins almost every waking hour. When the show ended, however, the dolphins were sold to an aquarium where they entertained crowds, seemingly smiling throughout the show, “nature’s greatest deception,” according to O’Barry. 

This connection with humans unfortunately leads to their harm or even death. According to O’Barry, the aquarium life is so stressful for dolphins, they must take Maalox and Tagamet every day. They travel forty miles a day in the wild. Captivity not only confines them, but also interferes with their sonar. O’Barry explains, “When they are captured and put in a concrete tank surrounded by screaming people, the noise causes stress.” The sound of the filtration system was found to kill dolphins and had to be modified. O’Barry’s commentary demonstrates both their sentience—ability both to feel pleasure and pain—and their self-awareness—ability to recognize themselves on television, arguing effectively that dolphins should be preserved because destroying them means destroying persons of equal value to humans. 

The Cove also valorizes dolphin’s intelligence as a connection to humans through information provided by Dr. John Potter, who measures intelligence in dolphins. Dolphins respond to signals in American Sign Language, but they also connect with humans on an emotional level. According to Mandy-Rae Cruikshank, one of the divers in the film, a dolphin swam with her and invited her to rub its belly. Surfers recount stories of dolphins saving them from shark attacks. According to the film, then, dolphins have worth, so they deserve to live. They also deserve the freedom all persons of equal worth deserve.