There Will be Blood (2007) and the Power of Spectacle

Oil frontier films equate land acquisition with a sense of progress as a way to tame the frontier, no matter what the consequences for native cultures or the land itself or whether few (from a progressive perspective) or many (from a populist point of view) gain access to its benefits. This focus on property and profit contributes to the battle between “big guys” and “little guys” that inevitably leads to overuse of land. The “land rush” of 1889 and 1892, especially, evolved from a rush for farm and ranch land that culminated in wildcatting, oil booms, busts, and ultimately the spectacular nature of the force of oil gushers and oil field fires in Oklahoma and Indian Territories, Texas, and California. There Will Be Blood (2007) demonstrates filmic spectacle that both reveals and disguises ecodisaster on the oil frontier.  

Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force. Oil well fires and spectacular land runs play on what Nick Browne calls the “rhetoric of the spectacular.” Browne asserts that “formally, the rhetorical parameters of the spectacular work by modulation of cinematic scale, repetition, and perspective.” Here, filmed oil well fires take on spectacular qualities when they assume the large-scale dimensions that such fires produce, when they are shot repeatedly or for a long duration, and when they are shot from an angle that emphasizes the fires’ force.

There Will Be Blood (2007) attests to the continuing power of spectacle in oil frontier Westerns. In spite of its attempts to critique unfettered capitalism and development in oil fields, it is spectacle that underpins both the aesthetics of the film and its melodramatic center. In his Rolling Stone review of the film, Peter Travers highlights the repercussions of Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) greed as a critique of unfettered capitalism, asserting,

This is [Paul Thomas Anderson’s] bloody and brilliant Citizen Kane. … Social history isn't his concern. He's out to show how violence of the flesh and the spirit is hard-wired into the American character…. He rapes and pillages in the name of progress. and winds up estranged from the human species he has long ago forgotten to call his own.

But Travers also notes the spectacle on display in the film that entices the eye when he asserts, “if you want proof that cinematography can be an art form, behold the brute force of the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting who can make visual poetry out of black smoke and an oil well consumed by flame.” He calls There Will Be Blood “a beautiful beast of a film,” perhaps because it rests on spectacular images. 

Roger Ebert claims, however, that “Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away.” From the first oil pipe accident that kills a partner and gives Plainview a son, H.W. (Dillion Freasor) to the spectacular blast that takes H. W.’s hearing, spectacular effects propel the film’s narrative and facilitate its melodramatic center—Plainview’s fight with church and country and mourning for his now deaf (and no longer a commodity) son.  But they also highlight the environmental consequences of the oil frontier. Although There Will be Blood entertains through spectacular effects more than it emphasizes environmental degradation or resource exploitation, it also illustrates illustrates the economic, sociological and ecological repercussions of conquering the oil frontier, perhaps the last frontier in the modern age. Spectacle both reveals and disguises ecodisaster.

Smoke Signals (1998) and Environmental Adaptations

After watching Charlie's Country (2013) about aboriginal journeys,  Smoke Signals came to mind. In Smoke Signals, the so-called ecological Indian faces neither banishment nor annihilation because he adapts the hell of both the reservation and the wider Euro-centric world into a home. By translating four of a series of disjointed and primarily bitter stories from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into a filmic collaborative journey with what he calls “integrity,” Sherman Alexie has constructed a narrative of environmental adaptation with a clear and cohesive structure that follows an evolutionary pattern focused on place. Characters in Smoke Signals embrace a focus on “adapting themselves to their circumstances in every possible way” while the film adds the element of ecology and emphasizes a relationship between human and nonhuman nature through Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams) journey toward Mars, Arizona, where Victor’s father’s ashes remain.

To build this narrative, the film follows a three-act narrative grounded in ecology:

• Establishing the reservation as an inhospitable setting for human and nonhuman nature.
• Leaving the reservation on a journey of landscapes.
• Returning to the reservation able to transform hell into a home.

 
 

The Reservation as Hell on Earth

The reservation’s ecology seems less than life sustaining during the film’s first act. Social images of reservation life highlight some of the real economic, environmental, and social problems still prevalent for American Indians. In one scene, for example, we see a drunken Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer), Victor’s father, who stumbles out of his house, throwing firecrackers to prolong the celebration. Beer cans and fireworks cover the lawn. The party is over, but Arnold fires a roman candle into the house, and the curtains and living room furniture burst into flames. Thomas’ voice tells us that the “fire swallowed up my mother and father,” but Arnold catches an infant thrown from an upper story window, saving it from the raging fire. It is Thomas, and Arnold places him in the arms of his grandmother (Monique Mojica). When the grandmother thanks him, he says he 
“didn’t mean to,” a sign of the guilt he will carry that the father validates when he cuts his hair and, as Thomas states, “practiced vanishing.” Thomas and Victor have almost literally been “born of flame and ash” on a reservation where the only hope seems to be survival. 

A Journey of Landscapes

The opening act closes when Victor and Thomas consult with their mother figures and move closer to their journey to retrieve Victor’s father’s ashes. Although Victor bears his pain in isolation, Thomas helps his grandmother make fry bread, illustrating the communal strength on which environmental adaptation can be built. Victor associates fry bread with relationship building when he hugs his mom and compliments her on her bread, the best on the reservation. As Arlene explains, “I don’t make it by myself,” Arlene tells him. “I got the recipe from my grandmother and she got it from her grandmother, and I listened to people,” she says, showing him how building a new and better life—or fry bread—requires a collective process. When the two arrive in their father’s valley, his friend Suzy Song (Irene Bedard) continues this communal approach by offering Victor his father’s ashes. Thomas amplifies the connection with a story about Victor’s mother feeding a hundred hungry American Indians with fifty pieces of fry bread, a clear reference to the loaves and fishes parable from the Sermon on the Mount and interconnected relationships.

Transforming Hell Into a Home

One last conflict moves Victor and Thomas toward environmental adaptation and serves as the entrance into the third act of the film. While fighting over visions of Victor’s father, Victor and Thomas crash Arnold’s truck, avoiding a car parked in the middle of the highway. They turn what could be a dangerous altercation with police “off the Rez” into a triumph, changing Arnold’s past crimes into communal solutions. Instead of leaving the scene and avoiding a confrontation with police, Victor helps an injured girl from the accident, running all the way to the town hospital for assistance. Even when questioned by the police before leaving the hospital, Thomas and Victor transform an expected altercation into a ride home. The driver of the car responsible for the accident accuses Victor of assaulting him, but before Victor can defend himself, the white police chief (Tom Skerritt) lets them go, saying, “Mr. Johnson’s wife Holly says he’s, and I quote, ‘a complete asshole.’”

In Smoke Signals, Victor and Thomas turn a bleak hell on the reservation into a thriving ecology in a narrative of environmental adaptation that includes collective views of human and nonhuman nature and provides a living community. Victor adapts to his once-bleak environment and finds hope and life. For Victor and Thomas, who have been born of ashes and fire, it is the water of the Spokane River that leads them to love and life, because it is the river that at least metaphorically turns Arnold into a fish, connecting him and the two young men who scatter his ashes with nature and each other. 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). As Meeker concludes, “The lesson of ecology is balance and equilibrium, the lesson of comedy is humility and endurance” (168). Victor and Thomas learn all of these lessons well.

Living with Nature in Rams (2015)

Recently I heard Norse writers and directors discussing how their mythology influenced their views of the natural world. One director mentioned the Norwegian film The Troll Hunter (2010), highlighting how the movie accurately presented their belief that trolls turn to stone under daylight, forming their country's many mountains. What struck me about the conversation was how this example and others pointed to the Norse relationship with nature. According to this director, they treasure and conserve the natural world because even the mountains live. Although The Troll Hunter does raw on Norse mythology and folktales, for me, the Icelandic film Rams (2015) more effectively illustrates the connections with nature exhibited in Norse myths.

In Rams, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) have severed all familial connections between them, even refusing to speak with one another. The only thing they have in common are the ancestral sheep-stock they raise on adjoining ranches.

It is only when a lethal disease infects Kiddi's sheep that the brothers find a way to reconnect. Although authorities order everyone in their secluded Icelandic valley to cull their herds, so the outbreak can be contained, the brothers ultimately join forces to protect a prized ram and a few precious sheep.

The brothers' strong relationship with nature is illustrated by their devotion to their sheep and to the land that sustains them. But the conclusion of the film most powerfully demonstrates the interdependent relationship they share with the natural world. Desperate to save the remaining sheep,   Gummi and Kiddi leave their anger behind them and herd the sheep into the mountains above their ranches. Together they battle snow, wind, and cold and survive only by adapting icy drifts into a shelter and stripping away all that's left of the civilization they left behind. Rams ends with a tableau highlighting the brothers' reentrance into both the natural world and familial relationships they now needed to live.

Bob and the Trees: Netflix, Climate Change, and the Economy in the Berkshires

Screened in notable film festivals around the world including the Maryland Film Festival, Hamburg Int. Short Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Int. Short Film Festival, and the Sundance Film festival, Diego Ongaro’s Bob and the Trees (2015) expands on Bob's compelling narrative, adding environmental themes to its economic message. Set during a winter in rural Massachusetts. Bob and the Trees details the evolution of Bob (Bob Tarasuk), a 50-year-old logger with a soft spot for golf and gangsta rap. Struggling to make ends meet in the merciless logging industry, Bob makes a bad investment that threatens the family business and, according to the production notes, begins to heed the instincts of his ever darkening self. 

Although Bob the Trees does highlight Bob’s journey from hubris in a verité neo-realistic style, for us the low-budget film does more. With its close ups of ants feeding on rotten wood, radio announcements about global warming, and references to rabid skunks attacking livestock, Bob the Trees touches on climate change and environmental destruction caused by habitat collapse.  

Bob’s bad investment underpins much of the film’s narrative and broaches the fragility of both the economy and environment in 21^st century Massachusetts. Instead of taking a share of a client’s trees, Bob pays the owner a lump sum that far surpasses the amount he can earn when he and son Matt (Matt Gallagher) discover many of the trees are rotted and full of ants.

Although Matt blames the ants on the wet landscape, a radio broadcast the family listens to around the dinner table connects this ant infestation with climate change. And a Harvard Forest study confirms this connection, arguing, “Projected atmospheric warming will lead to increases in abundance or range extensions of ant species at the cooler, northern extent of their ranges in the US.”

The reference to rabid skunks also emerges during a dinner conversation, and the solution ends up being slaughtering the livestock, since the farmer cannot afford to sustain them for the six-month quarantine.

These scenes are brief but powerful environmental messages, and they are heightened by the top-notch cinematography using the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. The film left me thinking about these environmental issues. But it also prompted me to look up at the trees with Bob.

Curating a Western Film Series at the Autry

In January and February 2017, we will be curating a film series at The Autry Museum of the American West. "The Autry"—brings together the stories of all peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inspire our shared future. Co-founded in 1988 by Jackie and Gene Autry and Joanne and Monte Hale, the Autry has grown to encompass a broad and inclusive representation of art, artifacts, cultural materials, and library holdings. In 2002, the Autry merged with Women of the West, a nonprofit organization highlighting the impact of diverse women’s experiences on the history of the American West. In 2003, after many years of being on the verge of financial insolvency and with the collection and buildings in need of significant care and investment, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian sought a merger with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and a new organization was formed (now known as the Autry Museum of the American West). The Autry's diverse collections include more than 600,000 artifacts, artworks, and archival materials that reflect the interconnectedness of cultures and histories in the American West.

The Autry currently spans three campuses in Los Angeles: the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, the Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus, and the Resources Center of the Autry (under construction):

Autry Museum in Griffith Park

The Autry Museum in Griffith Park, originally the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, was co-founded by Jackie and Gene Autry and Joanne and Monte Hale. With the opening of the Museum in 1988, Gene Autry realized his dream "to build a museum which would exhibit and interpret the heritage of the West and show how it influenced America and the world." Attracting between 150,000 and 200,000 annual visitors, the Autry in Griffith Park presents a wide range of special exhibitions and public programs that explore the art, history, and cultures of the American West.

Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus

The Historic Southwest Museum Mount Washington Campus is the original location of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, the oldest museum in Los Angeles, and was founded by Charles Fletcher Lummis. In 2015 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the historic site a National Treasure, launching a collaborative process to identify a long-term sustainable future for this Los Angeles landmark.

We'll pass along more information as it is available, but we know for sure we will be curating the film series at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park. 

Monstrous Nature in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art!

Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen: Part of the Museum's "Guillermo del Toro At Home with Monsters" Exhibit 

http://www.thelacmastore.org/collections/books-home-page/products/monstrous-nature-environment-and-horror-on-the-big-screen 

Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen shows how the horror film and its offshoots can often be understood in relation to a monstrous nature that has evolved either deliberately or by accident and that generates fear in humanity as both character and audience. This connection between fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for ecocritical readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the environment, and the horror film. Horror films such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.

Organized in relation to four recurring environmental themes in films that construct nature as a monster—anthropomorphism, human ecology, evolution, and gendered landscapes—the authors apply ecocritical perspectives to reveal the multiple ways nature is constructed as monstrous or in which the natural world itself constructs monsters. This interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, theological, and scientific critiques to explore when and why nature becomes monstrous.

Guillermo del Toro is among the directors discussed by authors Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann.

The River (1938) and the New Deal

My students are watching The River this week in a documentary and society senior seminar, so I'm looking forward to reading their online responses. Here's one we published nearly a decade ago:

In Lorentz’s The River, ecology is foregrounded at the expense of race. This 1937 film provides a clear government-sponsored argument for intervention by programs like the TVA. But it also examines the reasons for wide-spread flooding before offering this solution. The River illustrates the impact of human settlement along the river and efforts to combat flooding that erosion caused by stripping the land for farming encourages, at least from the early nineteenth century. The film illustrates how impoverished the South became after the Civil War not only because of the “tragedy of war,” but because, “already the frenzied cotton cultivation of a quarter of a century had taken toll of the land.” It also demonstrates the ramifications of lumbering in the North, mining in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and urbanization along each river shore, declaring, 

         The water comes downhill, spring and fall;

            Down from the cut-over mountains,

            Down from the plowed-off slopes,

            Down every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,

            Carrying every drop of water that flows down two-thirds the continent.

The River also shows the extent of the battle against the floods and the number of flood victims, 750,000 without “food and water and shelter and clothing,” the cost of exploiting the lands for their resources. To meet these victims’ needs, the narration explains that “We sent armies down to help the engineers fight a battle on a two thousand mile front: The Army and Navy,/ The Coast Guard and Marine Corps,/ The CCC and the WPA,/ The Red Cross and the Health Service,” programs that were part of FDR’s New Deal.

            

And The River offers numbers to support its claims about the cost of exploiting the land: “For fifty years we plowed for corn, and moved on when the land gave out./ Corn and wheat; wheat and cotton—we planted and plowed with no thought for the future—/and four hundred million tons of top soil…have been washed into the Gulf of Mexico every year.”  It also highlights not only the immediate repercussions of flood damage, but also the consequences of losing top soil—“poor land makes poor people.” According to The River, as of 1937, “forty percent of all farmers in the great Valley are tenants./ Ten percent are share croppers …. But a generation facing a life of dirt and poverty, / Disease and drudgery;/ Growing up without proper food, medical care, or schooling,…/And in the greatest river valley in the world.” 

The images that accompany the narrator’s claims about environmental, human, and economic costs, however, point out an important element missing from The River, Blacks bearing the greatest burden of flood-induced poverty and homelessness. In fact, all of the images of tenant farmers impoverished by poor soil and flooding are of Whites. Blacks are only shown in footage where slaves work the fields and load barges with bales of cotton before the Civil War. Only in the Epilogue to The River are Blacks even mentioned—because their labor contributed to the degradation of the land: “We got [B]lacks to plant the cotton and they gouged the top off the valley,” the narrator explains.

The River seeks to valorize the TVA and other New Deal projects, this time from the perspective of the federal government that commissioned the film. And The River ends with a view of a Tennessee Valley dam producing electricity to bring “a Soul”—and progress—to the South, effective when coupled with “soil conservation” and “model agricultural communit[ies]” built by the Farm Security Administration, programs highlighted even further in Power and the Land and The New Frontier, two other New Deal documentaries. The narration ends by arguing that, unlike past attempts, New Deal projects can successfully control rivers and land of the Mississippi delta, “Control enough to put the river together again before it is too late…before it has picked up the heart of a continent and shoved it into the Gulf of Mexico.” The River argues for federal intervention and public control of land and water. The River seeks to sell the TVA and other federal projects to a general (White) public in 1937, when Whites, especially the Southern Whites most affected by the projects, would resist images of Black slaves and sharecroppers carrying the greatest burden in the Southern agrarian economy.