Quantum of Solace Continued

 

Quantum of Solace, however, goes further than earlier Bond movies. It not only examines a contemporary environmental issues, whether or not water is a resource to share or to sell but also individualizes that issue, connecting it explicitly to an actual event, the Bolivian Water Wars that began less than a decade before the release of the film. 

Many reviewers highlight the film’s topical nature, but they fail to connect water rights with the particular water war that sparks the film’s narrative. Roger Ebert scoffs at the film’s villain, a “fiend [who] desires to corner the water supply of … Bolivia.” Stephanie Zacharek describes Greene as “a baddie who poses as an environmentalist so he can pull off crazy schemes, like causing drought that will allow him to barter a deal with a creepy exiled South American general.” And Anthony Lane describes Bond’s role as “fussing about with water supplies at the back end of Bolivia.” These reviewers, like most others, either laud or lampoon Bond’s changing character, as well. 

Joshua Clover, however, documents in detail Quantum’s connection with the Bolivian Water Wars, declaring that in the film, “Bechtel returns as Greene Planet, ecopolitics merging with corporate cynicism” (8). 

 Clover explains the water war and its source well: 

 In 1999, Cochabamba … privatized its water supply—as a condition of receiving a loan continuation from the World Bank. The Aguas del Tunari consortium, as it was called, was an international combine including a couple of local corporations but led by International Water Ltd., a subsidiary of Bechtel Corporation. Their pricing meant that the Bolivians were paying in some cases a quarter of their income for water. (8)

Quantum of Solace and Water Rights, Continued

 

 

Most notably, however, Quantum of Solae addresses water rights issues in Bolivia, drawing overtly on the 2000 Bolivian Water Wars for its narrative. The film merely replaces the World Bank and Bechtel Corporation of the actual water war with a military coup and a secret organization fronted by Greene Planet whose mission is to acquire and commodify environmental resources, an act which amplifies the tenets of the appropriative doctrine. 

Although the film’s plot obviously parallels the Cochabamba Water Wars, however, only one review mentions this connection. Joshua Clover calls it “wholly plagiarized from the archives of reality” (8), but other reviewers focus on changes to the Bond genre and the Bond character, either praising or lamenting differences from the previous installments instead. Tobias Hochsherf’s Film and History review, especially, lauds how well the film transforms the Bond character from “gentleman spy” to “more a tough, rugged and uncompromising agent in the tradition of violent hard-boiled detective” (78). As Clover declares, “None of them manage the word “Cochabamba.”

Even though James Bond films are rarely topical, they do sometimes tackle environmental issues. In A View to a Kill (1985), for example, James Bond (Roger Moore) must stop a greedy industrialist from triggering a massive earthquake to destroy California’s Silicon Valley and corner the microchip market. In The Living Daylights (1987), Bond (Timothy Dalton) combats an organization trading clearly non-conflict free diamonds for weapons. And in The World is Not Enough (1999), Bond (Pierce Brosnan) must protect a beautiful oil heiress from a notorious terrorist.

Quantum of Solace: When Water Rights Meet the Mainstream

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace (2011), with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.” These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of
Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). 

Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155). 

Quantum of Solace takes the appropriative doctrine further, since it puts water at the center of an international film genre, the James Bond film. Juxtaposing a secret organization fronted by what looks like an environmental group against Bond and the British Secret Service, Quantum constructs water as a commodity worth more than oil, the resource the organization, Quantum, claims to be seeking on its now environmentally protected lands in Central and South America.

Rango and Historical Context

 

Rango’s historical narrative, however, is also connected with the contemporary world and highlights more current issues surrounding water rights. When Rango is thrown out of his human family’s car, he seems to enter the Old West. 

Yet because the mayor seeks to recreate a desert paradise similar to Las Vegas and its surrounding golf courses in that desert landscape, the Old West becomes connected with the new irrigated deserts of the twenty-first century. 

 The film fails to address the fact that “Las Vegas is far more advanced in both water consciousness and water management than almost anywhere else in the country” (Fishman 52?). But by both integrating innovative CGI and animation techniques from Industrial Light and Magic and translating the film’s narrative to a videogame format, Rango also effectively demonstrates the ongoing effects of the Desert Land Act and the exploitation of water rights it sometimes encouraged.

Rango and Water RIghts, Continued

 

 

Rango plays on water rights history, revealing ramifications of the 19th century agreements. The Desert Land Act offered 640 acres (2.6 km2) of land to an adult married couple who would pay $1.25 an acre and promise to irrigate the land within three years. A single man would receive half that amount of land for the same price. But individuals taking advantage of the act were required to submit proof of their efforts to irrigate the land within three years. Since water was relatively scarce, however, a great number of fraudulent "proofs" of irrigation were provided, a form of corruption evident in Rango. 

This connection with the Desert Land Act also highlights Rango’s homage to the Western and its typically desert-like setting. 

As Roger Ebert asserts, 

    Beneath its comic level is a sound foundation based on innumerable     classic Westerns, in which (a) the new man arrives in town, (2) he         confronts the local villain, and (3) he faces a test of his heroism.         Dirt has not only snakes but also vultures to contend with, so                 Rango's hands are full. And then there's the matter of the water             crisis. For some reason, reaching back to the ancient tradition of         cartoons about people crawling through the desert, thirst is always a      successful subject for animation.

Homages to a variety of Westerns reinforce this connection, but the references to Spaghetti Westerns, especially, amplify Rango’s unlikely heroic persona. The Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant) character, for example, is modeled after Clint Eastwood’s Western roles.