Green and an Animal Rights Aesthetic

The March 25, 2012 issue of The New York Times “International” section offers a bleak picture of the plight of forestland in Paraguay. In recent years, the article explains, ten percent (at least 1.2 million acres) of the Chaco forest has been cleared by farmers and ranchers, many of them foreigners. This forest, dubbed “green hell” because of its high temperatures, “covers an expanse about the size of Poland,” the article states, and still houses bands of hunter-gatherers, jaguars, maned wolves, and biting insects that would make the land uninhabitable for modern humans if not for the bulldozers brought by Brazilian and Mennonite ranchers. As Jose Luis Cassaccia, a prosecutor and former environmental minister explains, “If we continue with this insanity, nearly all of Chaco’s forests could be destroyed within 30 years.”

This destruction of forests highlighted in this recent article is made transparent in two films by Patrick Rouxel: ALMA (2011) and Green (2012). Together, these films serve as powerful critique of this deforestation, not only because of its immediate consequences but also because of the long-term repercussions associated with the ranching, dairy farming, feedlots, and soy and palm cultivation for which these forests are destroyed.

 In Green (2012), Patrick Rouxel takes the same direct cinema approach as he did in ALMA (2011), but here the powerful images of forest destruction are juxtaposed with emotion-packed scenes of a dying orangutan mother saved from a decimated jungle. Unlike ALMA, the film is framed not by the sounds of a pristine jungle before its destruction but by images of this orangutan in a truck bed, bagged and jostling past lines of palm trees. Because the orangutan is constructed as a sentient sympathetic being from the film’s opening forward, the jungle destruction gains an added weight missing from ALMA. The species-specific animal rights focus of Green adds an ingredient missing from Rouxel’s earlier documentary that may encourage audiences to act, just as The Cove enticed audiences to fight for dolphin rights because it too drew on the emotional power of an animal rights argument.

The shot of the orangutan mother in a truck bed that opens the film is immediately juxtaposed with the same orangutan lying helplessly on a bed with only an IV to sustain it. The first scenes of a pristine forest are constructed as memories the orangutan ponders, since we see the room around its bed from her point of view: a lizard behind a clock drifts into shots of the forest before its destruction. Fog covers a forest and stream where animals call and drink. Various species share the stream: monkeys, deer, lizards, and birds. But the orangutan and her infant serve as the centerpiece of this jungle scene.

A scene of the orangutan mother nursing her child is broken by the repeated shot of her dying figure on the bed. As the dying orangutan sleeps, we see what seem like her dreams of playful tree swinging and views of beauty in a mountain jungle before the peace is broken by chainsaws. The noise is paired with the in-scene sound of a weed-eater against which the orangutan covers her ears. Chainsaws and falling trees shower the ground with leaves and bark, just as the weed-eater showers grass.

Music accompanies machinery hauling out the tree trunks and flattening the ground. A synthesizer again emphasizes the massive numbers of logs loaded onto trucks and the dire consequences for wildlife caused by this destruction. In town, monkeys are caged while more trees are removed and piled on massive barges. Indigenous workers spray lumber, creating hardwood strips for flooring, producing towers of lost hardwood. Music amplifies the montage of wood furniture, flooring, stairs, and planters constructed from this wood. Even the orangutan’s bed on which she dozes, barely alive, is built from lumber of his forest, just as the Goofy Gopher’s tree is constructed from furniture in Lumberjerks (1955).

In another memory portrait connected with the orangutan, she and her infant chew on bark in search of insect. The chewing sound is connected with the current images of the orangutan who eats only a few bites of the fruit offered to her. The infant now seems to be caged in a menagerie beside a busy city street. Other animals in small cages are exhibited for sale, just as the orangutan seems to examine a picture of jungle animals. The orangutan’s calls are juxtaposed with the cries of elephants captured from the destroyed jungle, as well. 

A pan of the landscape reveals only scrub remains for birds and monkeys. Soon that too will be gone as machines flatten the ground. The roar of machines cutting out all the forest, leaving nothing behind connects with the rumble of trucks carrying loads of tree limbs to the sawmill where flags of various countries, including the US, wave over smoking stacks. This is the ASIA Pulp and Paper Company, which makes magazines, books, and newspapers, all revealed in a montage which includes a shot of a bookstore display of Thinkers of the Jungle, a book about orangutans. Even a worker watching the dying orangutan reads magazines.

The eco-disaster surrounding the dying orangutan is emphasized with portraits of caged animals with empty eyes. Fires remove all living things on the pampas constructed from the jungle to plant palms for palm oil. Workers harvest the palm while an orangutan searches for food between rows of scrub. The orangutan crosses the road while chirping and falls into a ditch where workers capture and tie her up, stretching her between arms and legs, an image that reinforces the nearly lifeless state of the orangutan now lying on her deathbed.

The process of growing and harvesting palm contrasts with the pristine jungle of the orang mother’s memories. Palms grow taller, and nuts are harvested and trucked to plants for processing. The plant provides cooking oil for Indonesia, as well as other foods, lotion, and make-up. This montage drifts into perhaps the last memory of the orangutan’s connection with her child. On the one tree remaining in a nearly barren field, the orangutan holds her child until the dead branches crack and the orangutan crashes to the ground.

A truck’s painted message declares that they are refining the future with biodiesel from the palm nuts, but that future is connected with the dying orangutan now placed in the truck bed, taking us full circle. The lizard still hides behind the clock, and the orangutan is still lying in its bed alive only because of its IV. But now we hear the sound of a drum that replicates a heartbeat coming to an abrupt stop. This silence is broken by sounds of insects and soaring birds calling to one another, a final memory of a lost forest and its creatures.

The room is empty now, and the orangutan is bagged in plastic and removed in a wheelbarrow. What looks like an eagle overhead is revealed to be a kite flying over a vacant lot, which is also desolate and empty of life.  As with ALMA, music disrupts this otherwise powerful visual message of Green. In spite of its ending titles against deforestation in Indonesia, Green stands out as an effective eco-argument. By combining a primarily direct cinema approach with an animal rights message, Green may motivate real change. Robin and Joe

ALMA As Visual Rhetoric

ALMA (Patrick Rouxel, 2011), a documentary close to maintaining a direct cinema approach like that of Our Daily Bread (2005) and Zoo (1993), provides a strong argument against deforestation and its accompanying environmental disasters: loss of old-growth forest, jungle habitat for multiple animal and plant species, and industrialization of cattle and soy industries. With its reliance on a primarily non-diegetic soundtrack and observational cinematography, the film provides a strong argument against environmental degradation for human gain. Despite its sometimes off-putting insertion of non-diegetic music, in Alma, visual representations of eco-disasters gain force as they come close to capturing the truth, offering fragmented observations that closely replicate the segmented process of industrial food production, effectively revealing its consequences to human and non-human nature because the intermediary veil of direct cinema has been lifted.

ALMA opens in what looks and sounds like a pristine jungle with insect and bird calls accompanying an alligator sunning itself and playful monkeys in trees above a stream. A hawk swoops over the trees where colorful tropical birds collect food. A close-up of ants pans out to reveal an untarnished landscape. More close shots reveal the various forms of life thriving here: bright-colored flowers, leaves, a bird’s eye, spider’s web with spider, grasshoppers, a lizard feeding. And then the shot pans out to show a crane beside a pond, a large hamster, butterflies, a heron, an alligator, an egret feeding on fish, and trees reflected in the pond.

This pristine world is broken by the sound of saws, cattle in stalls, and their race to death through more and more narrow chutes. This death of beeves is juxtaposed with visions of forests destroyed both for wood and cattle pampas. Images of workers in the slaughterhouse are paired with those of lumberjacks dragging logs through the jungle. Slaughterhouse hides are collected while forests are burned. A turtle tries to escape the flames set to burn underbrush and create a field. The smoke streams for miles with the roar of fire and red flares seeming to cover the moon.

After the fire, the forest is lost, and music replaces the sounds of nature as felled logs smoke. Insects, the turtle, and a parrot are now silent, their death providing read earth to grow only grass for cattle. In the context of this direct cinema film, cattle seem indigenous, since they have so quickly and readily replaced the jungle and its life. The flute songs emphasize loss, but the manmade pampas grows quickly, a huge plain still surrounded by sparse forests.

School children draw animals lost in the jungle eco-disaster. A cow gives birth as birds fly overhead, and the music stops. The process of raising these cattle for milk and beef is emphasized in scenes showing the calf first feeding on mother’s milk in the pasture that now looks permanent. Other animals forage in the pasture while the calf plays and a macaw calls. But then a rancher separates the calf from its mother, so he can milk her.

A PRIMO truck illustrates how industrialized this milking process has become, as milk is processed in a dairy factory. Music accompanies workers skimming cream for butter and ice cream. City people eat the ice cream and prepare for a rodeo. Cattle are prodded down chutes like those found in the slaughterhouse, but this time they are forced into a ring where cowboys rope and wrangle them. Non-diegetic music comes and goes between announcements.

In contrast to the rodeo, cattle groom each other in the pasture with sounds of birds and insects in the background instead of music or microphones. The cattle and their calves look free on the pampas, running together and playfully butting heads. An overhead shot shows the huge size of this pasture that once was a massive jungle. On a road cut through the grass, trucks loaded with huge stacks of logs roll by as a reminder of the lost woods and enter a humungous sawmill.

These images of the sawmill are again juxtaposed with views of the slaughterhouse where carcasses are cut and hides are cured in the adjoining tannery. A scene of old growth tree trunks in the sawmill is matched with shots of the slaughterhouse and tannery. Hides are cleaned in large tumblers, and beeves are cut for parts while lumber is sawed and prepared. This cutting is accompanied by non-diegetic voice and guitar. Cowboys herd cattle into a feedlot where cattle are prepared for auction. The process is intricate and includes multiple chutes to vaccinate and separate cattle.

A rodeo is paired with the auction, complete with dancing and bull and roping competitions. Scenes of celebrating people are contrasted with shots of cattle crowded in feedlots where they can no longer play. They lie in the dirt and try to nudge each other before prodded into trucks that roll by green pampas and more cattle. Some cattle die on the way to the final feedlot where beeves feed on soy pods, another destructive food source.

The final scenes of the film show the environmental degradation caused by soy planting and harvesting, which includes spraying of toxic chemicals that poison water, as well as further de-forestation and destruction of jungle habitat. The industrial nature of soy is emphasized by the name on a truck—Agro-Sojo—just as the milk industry is illustrated by its company name. Truck loads of soy drive by dead jungle animals to a town and its factory on the coast. Soy is dumped in huge grain bins before being loaded onto Brazilian cargo ships.

Here the process is dramatized by non-diegetic guitar music. This same soy is used to feed cattle on a dairy farm where a milking machines rhythm aligns with the non-diegetic synthesizer. Even calves feed from artificial nipples in this industrial complex where cheese, milk, and ice cream are prepared for market. Beef cattle products are also shown—a McDonalds sign and beef packages in a grocery store, as well as leather products, which, the film makes clear, are harvested from the cattle on display at an exhibition. A tourist audience watches indigenous dancers before the film ends with a pan out to the over-size figure of a Christ figure that looks over the city of Rio de Janeiro, an ironic image contradicted by the singing insects and sunset that end the film in a fade to black.

This stark image is disrupted, however, by the ending credit message to Save the Planet and particular advice to cut down on meat consumption, leather, milk, and exotic woods. In spite of this post-film ending, however, ALMA serves as a powerful visual argument, as it eschews any voice-over narration or commentary from experts, relying on the sounds and images of factory farming to make its point, a minimalist unveiling that effectively reveals the horrors of the factory food chain. The film makes both the reality and the myth of the pastoral transparent without diluting the powerful visible rhetoric on display.

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

UPA Animation and the Environment: A Celebration of the New DVD UPA Cartoon Box Set

The UPA and the Environment: A Modernist Look at Urban Nature

            At the same time the Disney Studios were producing animal rights-driven animated features, a new animation studio was born, United Productions of America, a studio that drew its stance on ecology from its technology-driven modernist perspective that is reflected in both the narrative and aesthetic content of its animated films. United Productions of America (UPA) grew out of the 1941 strike at Walt Disney Studios that enticed three ex-Disney artists, Stephen Bosustow, Zack Schwartz, and Dave Hilberman to leave Disney and challenge its anti-union culture. Since the UPA studio also grew during the World War II era, they first produced industrial films for the then liberal policies of the federal government.

As the “Industrial Films and Poster Service,” for example, their company name before UPA, they produced an election film for Franklin Delano Roosevelt entitled Hell-Bent for Election (1944) and a human rights film about race relations, Brotherhood of Man (1946). Both of these films not only demonstrated their support for Roosevelt’s governmental programs, but also illustrated the studio’s own leftist politics and, at least to a certain extent, its modernist aesthetic. Hell-Bent for Election immerses a pro-FDR political message in a Chuck Jones-directed cartoon “with the same self-conscious use of both modern design and film techniques (matched dissolves, odd angles…)” (Barrier 511). The backgrounds in Hell-Bent for Election described as “very designed and abstract” (Barrier Hollywood Cartoons 511) anticipate the later work of UPA, the “stylization of movement, of what Hilberman called ‘a different kind of animation that came out of the stylized characters’” (Barrier 514).

UPA embraced a philosophy that advocated making the presence of the animator transparent and foregrounded stylized representations of figures and setting within a modern technologically driven socio-cultural context manifested in the abstract. UPA’s aesthetic contributes to a modernist view of culture driven by a Bauhaus-like vision of balance rather than existential doom, especially that found in Gyorgy Kepes's Language of Vision. Kepes asserted that “Visual language … must absorb the dynamic idioms of the visual imagery to mobilize the creative imagination for positive social action, and direct it toward positive social goals (14). The artists at UPA embraced this philosophy of the activism driven by an abstract image refined to its most elementary structure. For Kepes, art should serve society as “a positive popular art, an art reaching everybody and understood by everyone” (221). UPA saw animation as the popular art that could best serve society’s needs.

            

Although it grounds earlier political cartoons like Hell-Bent for Election and Brotherhood of Man, this philosophy is most evident in shorter animated works like Gerald McBoing Boing (1951) and Rooty Toot Toot (1952). We assert, however, that it continues to resonate in two of the animated feature films produced by UPA, 1001 Arabian Nights (1959) and Gay Purr-ee, a film that highlights urban nature through both its narrative and aesthetic, foregrounding the interconnections between nature and a culture driven and constructed by technology. 1001 Arabian Nights builds on the modernist narrative of Gerald McBoing Boing in which human nature becomes subsumed by technology, even within the fantasy world of the “Arabian Nights.” Gay Purr-ee takes a more blatant human and organismic approach to ecology as it heightens the modernist aesthetic of Rooty Toot Toot in a narrative valorizing pastoral nature over corrupt urban technology.

            Created by children’s book author Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel) and the writer for Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, Gerald McBoing Boing centers on Gerald, a boy who can only speak in sound effects. Instead of inhibiting his success, however, Gerald’s “defect” becomes an asset when a radio station hires him as its sound effects department. This premise embraces an environmental message that takes an ambivalent stance toward technology. Although Gerald does find his sound effect voice beneficial when a mysterious corporate officer stops him at the railroad tracks and hires him to work for the radio station, he is shunned by friends and family and nearly runs away from home to escape their scorn. In Gerald McBoing Boing, technology becomes a tool only when it subsumes the language that would make Gerald human and connect him with both the human and natural worlds.

The aesthetics of Gerald McBoing Boing foreground the immersion in a modernist perspective and hark back to UPA’s mid-1940s Bauhaus-like philosophy behind Brotherhood of Man. Gerald echoed the ideas that had shaped UPA’s films in the middle forties, the ideas that Gyorgy Kepes had advanced in Language of Vision. Cannon and Hurtz avoided the violence of Warner Brothers and the conservative aesthetic of Disney to produce “inventive stylization of movement in Gerald McBoing Boing; it shows up, for instance, in the way a doctor’s slightly gawky legs accent his rigid verticality” (Barrier 525).The goal for Cannon and Hurtz was to, as Hurtz put it, “boil[ ] it down” (qtd. in Barrier 525). UPA emphasized this minimalist aesthetic rather than narrative and conveyed its political stance in the same way abstract modern art communicates its message—through visual symbol and metaphor.

The same thematic and aesthetic philosophy underpinning Gerald McBoing Boing guides 1001 Arabian Nights. Gerald McBoing Boing has clear connections to Mr. Magoo, the protagonist of 1001 Arabian Nights. In 1001 Arabian Nights technology plays a vital role in building not only the stylized aesthetic, but also in driving a narrative in which Magoo’s bumbling character assists his hapless son only because technology intercedes. The sophisticated design and color of the film augments a narrative in which the technology of a genie in his bottle, a flying carpet, and a magic flame supersede bumbling and incompetent human and nonhuman nature. Yet technology does not serve as a tool for destruction in 1001 Arabian Nights. Instead, it serves to preserve and protect humans and their natural world and illustrates the interconnected interdependence between culture and the nature of humanity. The supernatural, however, most powerfully facilitates this “technology,” so its connection to the modern world is diluted. 

Gay Purr-ee, on the other hand, highlights a pastoral nature like that contrasted with the corruption of urban space and depicted, if briefly, in Rooty Toot Toot. Rooty Toot Toot is arguably one of the best cartoons to come out of UPA. It tells the story of Frankie and Johnny through song and from the perspective of two lawyers, a bartender, and Nellie Bly, Frankie’s rival for Johnny’s love—all in a Technicolor stylized courtroom setting complete with judge and jury. Although the lawyer prosecuting Frankie for Johnny’s murder, the bartender, and Nellie Bly all tell their tale within the confines of the bar in which Johnny is shot, Frankie’s defense lawyer paints a pastoral image of Frankie’s home that highlights her innocence and her connection to nature and connects Rooty Toot Toot with Gay Purr-ee.

Although Maltin asserts that Gay Purr-ee is “too labored” and “too coy,” (Seven Minutes 336) and Newsweek claims “There seems to be an effort to reach a hitherto undiscovered audience—the fey four-year-old of recherché taste” in its review of the film (qtd. in Maltin 336), Gay Purr-ee continues stylistic and thematic patterns found in Rooty Toot Toot, especially in developing its Technicolor pastoral and urban settings. The feature’s modernist aesthetic highlights a dynamic landscape that valorizes both urban and rural nature. But the film’s narrative, as in Rooty Toot Toot, validates the pastoral as a space where the natural world can thrive.

Lymelife

Lymelife (2009) is a family melodrama/coming of age film that focuses on the lives of two families deep in the surburbs of Long Island in 1979. Both homes are wildly disfunctional with the teen children trying to stay afloat while their parents go through a number of confusing and explosive relationship gyrations.

One family's father figure, Charlie Bragg (Timothy Hutton), is attempting to recover from a full blown case of Lyme Disease that he believes was caused by one of his deer hunting expeditions. He wanders through the back woods near his home with a high powered rifle looking for the deer that gave him the disease and aimlessly firing at paper targets stuck to trees oblivious to the fact that he could be shooting an innocent bystander meandering through the forest. Ultimately, this Lyme Disease becomes emblematic of the deterioration of the ideal suburban life both families attempt to build. In Lymelife, nature fights back.

The disease, a product of deer ticks from a deer population that now migrates through suburban developments like large squirrels, has ended Charlie's interest in work, his wife and his family. He veers between feeling laid low by the flu, wracked by headaches and anger from medical misdiagnosis that has allowed the disease to fully develop in his system and now is almost impossible to eradicate through the ingestion of numerous prescription drugs.

His emotional and physical condition has left his wife Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) at loose ends and his daughter ( Emma Roberts) an emotional victim of the family disintegration. Melissa works for Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin) an up and coming contractor and is deep in an affair with him. Brenda (Jill Hennessey) is married to Mickey, knows of all his affairs, and has decided to continue their marriage, because she is a devout Catholic and frozen in despair about making any concrete moves that might disrupt her home.

The older Bartlett son Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) has solved his problem with the family disasters by joining the Army. His younger brother Scott (Rory Culkin) is 15 and while bearing the brunt of the home front troubles can't seem to connect the dots that everyone else in this universe has completed. This includes the Bragg daughter Adrianna (Emma Roberts) who likes Scott while he adores her, but prefers, since they are age compatible, to bury her sorrows with the Bragg disaster by chasing "older" boys. While the friendship between Scott and Emma will grow with all the appropriate complications and the adults will be forced to admit to some of their problems and attempt to work them out, the looming fear of disease and of invading nature still confronts al the principals in a variety of ways.

Brenda's fear of the tick borne disaster has led her to duct tape. She attempts to seal off Scott's arms, legs, neck and head with the all purpose tape. No ticks will work their way into her son's body if she has her way. Everyone one else is oblivious to the "dangers" of the natural world and even Brenda walks through it without taking the very precautions that humiliates her son on a daily basis. Her problems can only be solved by religion, confession and contrition, none of which interests her husband or her children.

Mickey is near his dream of a large development that will make him rich, leave his problems behind and cause his family to reconnect in the new home he has built on the edge of the woods near their present home. Jimmy's return to visit is a reason for him to straighten out Scott about every aspect of his life, including an introduction to violent reactions to anyone who has bullied his baby brother while he was away. Scott lets his brother's new found confidence rub off on him and now is able to respond physically and sexually to those he finds repellent and attractive.

While all the principals finally admit to acknowledging the endless and emotionally dangerous changes that have occured to them, Scott and Adrianna have tentatively decided to see if they can begin a relationship that will be free of such disease and lunacy. But everywhere they go, they are still wedded to the strange combination of developed landscape that is still bordered to the wild and many of their deepest discusssions occur along the railroad tracks that pierce the center of their world. The duct tape that Scott's mom has desperately wrapped around him still lingers, but its slow disapperance also means that the fear of disease has not yet paralyzed him or Adrianna, perhaps suggesting a connection with the wild world of nature can help redeem suburbia.

What is *La Cienega* (The Swamp, 2001)?

In La Cienega (The Swamp, 2001), first-time filmmaker Lucrecia Martel tells the story of two families: the once-rich pepper farm owners led by Mecha (Graciela Borges), a middle-aged and alcoholic mother of four, and the middle-class city dwellers led by her cousin Tali (Mercedes Morán), also a mother with four children. The film intertwines each family’s narrative, examining the roots and consequences of the choices each protagonist makes.  Ultimately, within the family conflicts explored in the film, the bifurcation between rural and urban and the nature and culture associated with them become blurred, revealing the power of “nature” in both worlds.

The title of the film, The Swamp, establishes its connection with nature, not only as a setting but also as a catalyst for characters’ actions. The title is the name of the town near the Bolivian border where Tali and her family lives, but it also describes the mud in the mountains in which animals become trapped and die as well as a life that has become paralyzing for people who are now resigned to eke out an existence in the foul and putrid atmosphere of a literal and figurative swamp.

In the film’s opening sequence, for example, images of drunken adults sitting motionless around a stagnant filthy swimming pool are juxtaposed with shots of an ox stuck in the deep mud of a literal swamp and unable to move. Pool and swamp become one here, a trope that is reinforced when Mecha falls while attempting to collect wine glasses, and no one comes to her assistance except Momi (Sofia Bertolotto), Mecha’s daughter, and Isabella (Andrea López), her maid.  The adults look on without emotion, just as Mecha’s son Joaquín (Diego Baenas) and his friends watch the ox. The boys in the mountains hold guns, while the adults at the pool hold wine glasses. The sultry heat of "the swamp" connects with the sensual siesta and shower scenes interspersed throughout the film, as well. 

The name of Mecha’s hacienda, La Mandragora, also connects the film and its intertwining families with the natural world. Mandragora is a red pepper farm and decaying mansion owned by the protagonist and her husband, Gregorio (Martín Adjemián), but it is also the name of a plant, the mandrake, a member of the nightshades family with hallucinogenic and sedative qualities, an explicit connection with the sedated figures of decadence around the pool. In fact, when Mecha goes to the Gringo doctor in town after her fall, they must pump her stomach in order to give her needed tranquilizers. This connection between humans and nature embodied in the mandrake is taken further by the shape of the plant, as well. The roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures.

The trip to the clinic not only connects the nature of the mandrake with the culture of a Gringo doctor’s sedatives. It also explicitly connects Mecha with Tali, highlighting their parallel family lives that also mirror the threatening natural world around them. Tali has also brought her son, Luciano (Sebastian Montagna), into the clinic for stitches, illustrating his connection with Mecha and foreshadowing his fall at the end of the film. According to Martel, “Family is a living and self-sufficient organism where the bodies, apart from their ties to blood, are linked in time, weariness, lunch time, bathrooms, in situations where the body is less exposed to social convention.” This reading of “family” ties it with both the natural world and a human nature that may mean consequences become fated rather than a product of free will.

Connections with the natural world are also embodied in the soundtrack of The Swamp. The almost constant sound of thunder announcing a storm parallels Mecha’s fall onto wine glasses and the light bulb explosion in Tali’s house, for example. In both Mecha’s and Tali’s households, a storm is threatened by the hidden conflicts between spouses, as well. Mecha’s husband, Gregorio, tries to recapture his lost youth both by dying his hair and, it is suggested, pursuing extramarital affairs. Tali, for example, reveals that Gregorio formerly had a sexual relationship with Mercedes (Silvia Baylé ), Mecha’s oldest son Jose’s (Juan Cruz Bordeu) current roommate and lover. Both Mecha and Gregorio drink excessively throughout the day, seemingly to cope with lost power and wealth. In Mecha’s household, “La Mandragora,” Mecha controls her husband, with whom she has lost respect, and daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) and servant Isabel (Andrea López) serve as rational strongholds, maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic drunken adult world.

Tali’s husband, Rafael (Daniel Valenzuela), on the other hand, counters any attempts by Tali to extend her power outside the home. Tali’s plan to travel to Bolivia to buy more inexpensive school supplies is quietly usurped by her husband when he secretly buys them himself. In a scene near the end of the film, Rafael ignores Tali’s questions about papers to cross the Argentine border, and Tali’s internal turmoil is illustrated only by the crash of an exploding light bulb. Rafael’s dominance is established as the norm, then, by Tali’s reactions to his quiet authority. All of these conflicts seem fated in the context of the film, especially since the “fall” that opens the film is repeated several times by different figures, highlighting the inevitable of a loss of innocence or grace.

As reviewer B. Ruby Rich declares, "In La Cienaga, Lucrecia Martel melds personality and geography, performance and mise-en-scene` into a singular whole, fused by a unity that uses camerawork and editing rhythms to incorporate the audience into the world of the film with visceral precision and physical acuity. The routines of daily life are condensed into stencils of behavior and the essence of human nature distilled into a toxic elixir: a life-and-death struggle that emerges, as nature and nurture slug it out, storm clouds mass, and disaster endlessly threatens. Viewers cannot watch the film without feeling the heat or checking the sky for rain"

The film’s last line emphasizes the inevitability of this threatened disaster: “I didn’t see anything,” Momi tells her sister, words that refer not only the image of the Holy Virgin but of life and death itself.