Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo and the Power of Anthropomorphism

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo examines the insect world from humanity’s point of view, focusing specifically on the world-view and behaviors of insect collectors in Tokyo. Jason Solomon of The Observer states, “It speaks of harmony, nature and the national culture, touching on the quintessentially Japanese philosophical notion of Mono no aware (and I hope I’ve got this right): a feeling of gentle sadness experienced at the inevitable fading of transient beauty.” In Beetle Queen various experts commenting on Japanese culture make specific comparisons between insects and human characteristics on multiple levels.

Despite references to the monster movie Mothra (1961), Beetle Queen goes beyond merely evoking emotions by humanizing insects of various species. The unequivocal comparison between the human and insect worlds promotes positive results in the film, encouraging a more interconnected relationship between humans and their environment that may manifest in real environmental preservation and restoration for both humans’ and nature’s benefit, at least within the parameters of the film. As Beetle Queen’s director, Jessica Oreck explains in Don’t Panic Magazine, “I want to share the immediacy of nature––not the idealized, simplified, and anonymous version we see in nature programs on TV, but a nature populated with human characters and personal connections” (Mokoena).

The presentation of Japanese philosophy and aesthetics highlights the interaction between culture and nature signified by this love of insects. It also demonstrates anthropomorphism on the level of traits and dispositions, emotions and social roles. According to the film, Haiku from the seventeenth century highlights a Japanese aesthetic of nature that encourages this love of captive beetles and crickets. A poem about dragonflies accompanying an image of a mechanized dragonfly reinforces the narrator’s claim: “Poetry eternally captures mundane reality. Haiku, like nature, is about transience, creating an intimate relationship with nature without intermediaries. Man is nature.” Night views of the city look like poetry. We see fighting beetles in a video game, on a crowded street, and in a mall. The narrator even assigns specific human traits to the insects to emphasize humanity’s connection with the natural world: “A dragonfly is the emblem of strength, courage, and bravery …. Fireflies are unrequited love.” Workers wearing illuminated vests look like fireflies and underline the message.

As the film portrays it, the devotion to nature inspired by Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and connection to insects moves beyond a surface belief system to actions that conserve and replenish the natural environment. Because, as narrator Takeshi Yoro tells us, rice paddies are good for dragonflies, their disappearance was detrimental to both dragonflies and human culture. With less need for rice fields to feed people, rice paddies turned into cities, but the narrator explains, this loss motivated the Japanese to begin preserving streams and ponds around the city, rejuvenating the environment and community for national pride. “We learn from insects,” he explains. “If we open our minds to the insects, they will teach us. To learn is to change, so insects are more than pets. They represent an entire culture.” 

As the sun rises over the water, Takeshi Yorro highlights the interconnected relationship humans share with the insects and their natural world: “Observing change in insects connects with changes in nature. Their numbers are much fewer now, because the world is being destroyed.” By illuminating connections between humans and nature based on dispositions, emotions, roles, and philosophies of Buddhism and Shintoism, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo seeks to demonstrate how anthropomorphism may have positive results for both human and nonhuman nature.

New Book Forthcoming from Routledge: Ecocinema in the City

Ecocinema in the City

By Robin L. Murray, Joseph K. Heumann

© 2017 – Routledge

208 pages | 20 B/W Illus.

• Description
• Reviews
• Contents
• Authors
• Series
• Subjects

Description

In Ecocinema in the City, Murray and Heumann argue that urban ecocinema both reveals and critiques visions of urban environmentalism. The book emphasizes the increasingly transformative power of nature in urban settings, explored in both documentaries and fictional films such as Children Underground, White God, Hatari! and Lives Worth Living. The first two sections—"Evolutionary Myths Under the City" and "Urban Eco-trauma"—take more traditional ecocinema approaches and emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. The last two sections—"Urban Nature and Interdependence" and "The Sustainable City"—however, bring to life the vibrant relationships between human and nonhuman nature. Ecocinema in the City provides a space to explore these relationships, revealing how ecocinema shows that both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive.

Reviews

"In an era of increasing dispute about the effects of climate and science in our daily lives, Murray and Heumann offer a carefully nuanced addition to the field of ecocinema studies. The city, for them, is not just a dangerous space, but also a site of possible relationships between humans and nonhuman nature. Few scholars have the record of Murray and Heumann for serious engagement with the topic of ecology in cinema over such a broad range of critical works." – Charles J. Stivale, Wayne State University, USA

"Our environmental imagination often frames cities as doomed spaces, removed from nonhuman nature. Instead of replicating this view, Ecocinema and the City reverses the perspective: highlighting the transformative power of nature in urban settings explored in film, it offers a timely and innovative take on urban environments. With engaging close readings and cultural examples off the beaten path, the book addresses a whole array of relevant themes, from urban biodiversity to urban farming to questions of sustainability, and is required reading for environmentalists across disciplines." – Christopher Schliephake, University of Augsburg, Germany

Vampires and Home Part II: Strigoi

Like The Pack, Strigoi also connects vampirism and its desire for blood with humanity’s mistreatment of the natural world, but this time war and its violent repercussions initiate a monstrous response. In Strigoi, young medical school dropout, Vlad (Catalin Paraschiv), returns to Romania from Italy and, after discovering town drunk Florin’s mysterious death, investigates secret post-Communism land deals, forgery and corruption. This conspiracy of silence has led to the presence of strigoi. According to The Vampire Book, the Strigoi of the film is closely related to the Romanian word striga (a witch), which in turn was derived from the Latin strix, the word for screech owl that was extended to refer to “a demon that attacked children at night” (586) and drank their blood. In Strigoi, vampirism has its origin in blood, but it is the blood of war over land rather than romantic or sexual desire that transforms some citizens into strigoi mort.

Although Dracula typically survives only in his native soil, Strigoi amplifies this connection between the earth and humanity, demonstrating powerfully the ecological roots of home. As Andrew Dowler of Now Magazine suggests, “This is a serious and seriously black comedy about land, heritage in the blood and the rape of the country and people from the Nazis onward.” With a comic tone that comes close to satire, Strigoi draws parallels between literal vampirism and struggles for land, struggles, which comment on the greed of dictators such as Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu that destroys both human and nonhuman nature.

The blood of war is manifested in several ways in the film. Most obviously, the violent murders of the Tirescus that opens the film transform them into strigoi, a transformation that further connects them with Ceausescu. The villagers watching Florin’s body offer a different perspective on stolen land and home when Vlad asks them about the deed to Florin’s land, reasserting the battle between rich and poor on which the 1989 Revolution was built. In this post-Communist village, community members must fight to keep their homes, even hiding the deeds to their property to counter corrupt government officials and avaricious capitalists like the Tirescus, a point made concrete by Florin’s murder.

This fight over property even extends to blood relatives, including Vlad’s relationship with his grandfather Nicolae (Rudy Rosefeld). Nicolae shows Vlad the papers he has hidden, saying, “It’s my land. Mine!” Ultimately Vlad discovers that Constantin Tirescu and Tudor, the priest, have been working together to acquire deeds to the villagers’ property. Constantin wants the land for money and power. Tudor wants a new tower for his church. They both demonstrate greed and gluttony like that of the strigoi mort, vampires born out of the bloodied Earth around them.

The desecrated home has also transformed Vlad’s grandfather into strigoi, as Vlad discovers when he awakens from a nightmare to find his grandfather drinking his blood. “It’s my blood. I gave it to you,” Nicolae explains ominously. His grandfather’s struggles through multiple wars and across war-torn lands have transformed him into a vampire. He is a living strigoi. 

“I went to Russia, to Stalingrad. I had to fight for the Germans. When the Russians won, I had to walk all the way home. Then the Russians occupied Romania. They were even worse than the Germans. And there was a terrible famine. I lost my son… Then the Communists took my land. I still had to work on it. I still had to work on the same land with the same horses, but it wasn’t mine anymore. I was born on this land. My father was born here. My children were born here. I died here.” 

In Strigoi, the battle for land and home turns violent, with the blood of what Constantine calls “peasants” transforming villagers into vengeful living strigoi who fight back, reclaiming their land and their heritage from dead strigoi like the Tirescus. Strigoi offers a different take on the vampire, offering a horrific version of humanity’s response to a war-ravaged land. In Strigoi, vampires’ greed for blood turns into war.

The Earth Bites Back Part I: The Pack (2010)

An August 2013 National Geographic article “Sugar Love” begins to demonstrate how our exploitation of the natural world may come back to bite us in unexpected but direct ways. An addiction to sugar spread by Western imperialism from the nineteenth century on has destroyed natural environments and enslaved indigenous populations from Hispaniola to Barbados, where, “you can see the legacies of sugar: the ruined mills, their wooden blades turning in the wind, marking time” (“Sugar Love” 87). According to the article, however, that destruction of environments and their people led to a sugar diet that destroys consumers. As Dr. Richard Johnson explains, 

“It seems every time I study an illness and trace a path to the first cause, I find my way back to sugar” (87). 

This same damaging connection of environmental degradation coming back to harm humans is explored in films from Mountaintop Removal Mining documentaries such as The Last Mountain (2012) to Post-Apocalyptic science fiction films like Tank Girl (1995), but it reaches terrifying levels in the horror genre.

In the horror genre, a direct relation between environmental exploitation and destructive nature comes to the fore in the vampire film, when the living dead literally arise from the grave. In at least a few horror films, human desecration of the earth may create the very monsters that drink their blood. For example, the French black-comedy horror movie The Pack (2010) and the British/Romanian satire film Strigoi (2009) explicitly illustrate what might happen when an environment “bites back.” Although vampires have typically been associated with sexuality, power, evil and the Anti-Christ, fluid boundaries between humanity and the monstrous, and intimacy as conquest, in these two comic-horror films, The Pack and Strigoi, vampirism most readily matches consumption. A greed for resources, land, and blood separates humans from the natural world that provides their home. 

This separation from earth’s ecology and the home it represents has monstrous repercussions in these two films, transforming into horror the eco-trauma associated with a lost connection with nature and a shattered human ecology. Drawing on the work of early twentieth century human ecologist Ellen Swallow Richards and environmental psychologist Tina Amorok, we argue that these films amplify the real trauma humans experience when their earthly home is destroyed, illustrating the sometimes horrific effects environmental degradation may have on humanity. In The Pack and Strigoi, however, a damaged earth fights back, turning humans into vampires and ghouls, literal monsters who concretize monstrous treatment of the natural world and magnify the actual consequences of environmental exploitation. 

Unlike most vampire films with environmental leanings, the comic-horror The Pack explicitly connects vampirism and its desire for blood with humanity’s exploitation of the natural world. The Pack highlights the sometimes horrific and blood-sucking consequences of mistreating the Earth in relation to exploitative mining techniques, which destroy both the land and its human laborers. Although the film begins as a road movie with illusory romantic possibilities between a lone driver, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne) and a hitchhiker, Max (Benjamin Biolay), both genre and mood change when a drive ends at a café owned by Max’s mother, La Spack (Yolande Moreau), who hides a deadly secret that connects human and nonhuman nature. In The Pack, vampire miners and the slagheap that transformed them seek revenge.

Set around an abandoned post-industrial mine similar to the Lorraine mines of filmmaker Franck Richard’s childhood, The Pack connects vampirism to a ravaged Earth and a desecrated home. In The Pack, vampire-like ghouls are not only produced from a mine’s slagheap but also become an integral part of its byproducts, illustrating the interconnection between human and nonhuman ecologies. The specters arise only when they and the earth they inhabit are fed human blood. Unlike Strigoi, however, The Pack’s attempts at comedy conflict with any serious message the film may be making about mining, miners, and the environment they exploited.

Despite its weak ending and lack of originality, The Pack highlights the terrible consequences of eco-disasters associated with mining. The slagheap broaches not only the filmmaker’s childhood memories but also the real horrors of the mining industry and its exploitation of resources and labor. In Franck Richard’s own region of Lorraine, industrial medicine studies found an increased mortality from lung and stomach cancer in Lorraine iron miners (N. Chou, et al 1017). Coal mining in the region also had disastrous repercussions. According to a 1985 Los Angeles Times article, “an explosion [in February 1985] in a coal mine in France's eastern region of Lorraine killed 22 miners and injured about 100.” The article explains, 

“The blast, 3,450 feet underground in the Forbach mine near the West German border, was thought to have been caused by fire damp, a gas given off by coal and constituted largely of methane. When it explodes, it immediately ignites coal dust nearby.” 

The Pack turns these real instances of “monstrous nature” into biting horror.

My Mother Tells Stories SD 480p 2

Troma and The Comic Eco-Hero

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