Film Ecology 2: Hooper and Human Costs

As with the burning of Atlanta scene in Gone with the Wind, construction and destruction also highlights how Hollywood represents stunt artists and ecology as expendable, an attitude most evident in films like Hooper (1978). In Hooper, the impact of stunts on the stunt artists who perform them is both made transparent and critiqued. The film also shows us the environmental impact of the special effects that accompany each of those stunts, occasionally commenting on their negative effects on ecology. Hooper interrogates the consequences of attitudes that construct human life and the environment as expendable, even as it climaxes with a spectacular and awe-inspiring scene meant to capture audiences: a representation of the destruction of Los Angeles that is parallel to the Atlanta fire scene and residents’ reactions to it in the production of Gone With the Wind. With this special effects-driven scene and others, Hooper shows us how complicated critiques of film production practices become in an industry where entertainment is the goal. Yet, in spite of this conflict between spectacle and critique, Hooper stands out as a film that exposes how dangerous film productions can be to both stunt artists and the environment.

Hooper highlights the impact stunt work has on the stunt men’s bodies while foregrounding the insensitivity of directors willing to sacrifice human lives for spectacular effects in most of the “gags” on display in the film. But the last “gag” in Hooper (and “The Spy Who Laughed at Danger”) most powerfully illustrates how both human lives and ecology are seen as expendable in this filmic world, as long as movies make enough money. Ski’s ideas have inspired the director, according to the film’s producer, Max Burns (John Marley), so he rewrites the script’s ending and adds lots of stunts culminating in the destruction of L.A. on screen. The stunts Roger constructs to end the film seem outlandishly impossible in a 1978 film without access to computer-generated graphics. When Roger explains the new ending to Hooper and Ski, it sounds like a nightmare on screen. According to Roger, Hooper and Ski will drive through “the biggest earthquake ever,” but a bridge will blow up, so Hooper and Ski will need to rappel down the mountain to escape—and Roger will capture this stunt in one shot. The ending stunt sounds spectacular enough, but Ski, the young “immortal,” wants more and suggests, “Why not jump a car across the gorge.” After speculating about the distance a rocket car might jump, even Max thinks this stunt is too risky. But Hooper sees the stunt as a way out of the stunt business: They can do this last stunt for $50,000 each, and then quit.

The big stunt goes as planned: Roger watches from a helicopter and yells, “Action.” Then we hear and see an explosion, and a building collapses. Crashing cars are everywhere. Hooper and Ski keep driving past exploding gas stations and a series of explosions on the road. Cars overturn and collide with one another. Then another series of explosions pours out spectacular fumes of fire and smoke. A tanker goes through a building and another set of explosions cracks open the other side of the road. Hooper and Ski continue driving their rocket car, now racing through a line of collapsing smokestacks that nearly hit their car. They’re almost to the bridge and watch as a truck full of explosives blows it “to shit.” The pressure in their nitrous-powered rocket car seems too low for the jump, but Hooper demands they continue, and they fly across the ravine, landing safely on the other side. This spectacular filmic event destroys the set and looks like it destroys the city of Los Angeles. It nearly kills two stunt men, who barely make it across a ravine in a car built to fly half the distance across. Max fires Tony, the assistant. And Ski and Hooper look at the fallen bridge at the bottom of the ravine in awe. Yet Roger, the director, merely exclaims, “Spectacular, wonderful. I knew you could do it!” As Roger sees it, they have captured a “tiny piece of time” on film, so the stunt, no matter how dangerous or destructive, was worth that strip of film.

Hooper at least marginally critiques the exploitation of human flesh for effect, since it shows us the injuries and chronic physical damage Hooper and Jocko endure after performing risky stunt work. The film’s narrative sets up Roger as a villain willing to sacrifice stunt men for a good show and the film industry as an economy where greed runs rampant. The film gives a nod to both nonhuman nature (a dog with a Humane Society advocate is saved by Hooper) and to the environment (Tony mentions pollution and smog in L.A. as a reason to quickly extinguish a fire). But ultimately, the stunts themselves capture our attention, just as Roger suggests when ruminating on the power of film as a medium that can capture time. In the context of the film, the last, most dangerous, and (consequently) most spectacular stunt also “saves” Hooper, since it provides him with the funds he needs to buy his ranch. The effects in Hooper are not only critiqued in the film’s construction of “The Spy Who Laughed at Danger” but also valorized in their own right. Hooper was nominated for an Academy Award in the sound category. Walter Frith calls the movie “action on laughing gas.” In “Excessive Disclosure in Burt Reynolds’ Star Image,” Jacob Smith sees drunk scenes as “prolonged excuse[s]” for laughter (29). Smith highlights the promotional image for Hooper, an “iconic cowboy with mustache, squinting eyes, and cowboy hat, but with mouth obscured by a pink balloon of bubble gum,” (30) to support his claims about Reynolds’ image as an actor seeking fun, not work, in both film and life.

But the image also showcases the stunt man’s roots in Western lore—cowboys willing to take risks and live isolated lives on the range just like stunt artists sacrificing themselves for spectacular effects on the screen. The film seems to validate that individualist image rather than a communal one connecting humans and nature. Smith asserts that Hooper “ridicules environmental activist and humane society representatives,” those advocates working for nonhuman nature. The film praises the work of individual stunt men willing to take risks, overcome obstacles, and provide awe-inspiring spectacle on the screen. Hooper critiques “the conceited dramatic actor and pretentious director,” according to Smith. It does not seem to critique the work of stunt men. Instead, it valorizes the spectacular results of their stunts. Still Hooper examines the filmmaking process in a unique way, since it highlights stunt men and their work, showing us a behind-the-scenes view of the effects these stunts have on both the stunt artists and the environment. By making the consequences of stunt “gags” transparent, Hooper provides a critical reading of the filmmaking process and its negative effects on its stunt men and the environment their stunts destroy. Even though the critique is couched in the film’s own rhetoric about the entertainment value of spectacle, it provides a space in which we can begin to discuss the impact of filmmaking on both human and nonhuman nature.

Film Ecology Opening from Ecology and Popular Film (2009)

Film Ecology: Simulated Construction and Destruction in Hooper

The idea of film ecology raises issues related to environmentally friendly approaches to filmmaking 

like carbon-neutral production, as with The Day After Tomorrow, or set recycling, as with The Matrix 2 and 3. 

Yet films and filmmaking have impacted on the environment since at least 1896 when Oil Wells of Baku 

was shot. Deliberate manipulation of the environment during the filmmaking process has also been a part of 

film history since the inception of the film industry, as in The Life of an American Fireman (1903), 

directed by Edwin S. Porter, where a fireman, played by Arthur White, battles flames and saves a girl 

from a burning building. The fury of fires on-screen entertains audiences in films from 

San Francisco (1936) and In Old Chicago (1938) to City on Fire (1979), Daylight(1996), and Wild Hogs (2007).

Such spectacular effects have their own impact on the screen, but they also damage the ecology involved in 

each film’s production, causing environmental destruction with spectacular effects that is sometimes used 

to publicize the film. Gone With the Wind(1939), for example, was promoted before and during its production 

before the epic spectacle made it to the screen. The success of the novel, Gone With the Wind,a highly 

publicized talent search for the film’s stars, and the burning of the Atlanta Depot scene as the first scene 

shot in the film, were meant to impress potential audiences. The film gained notoriety in part because it 

resulted in so much actual ecological destruction, destruction used as part of the promotion package 

for the film. The Atlanta Constitution, for example, states, “Ranking with the greatest spectacle scenes in

 motion picture history is the burning of the ammunition trains” (quoted in Haver 303). 

The New York Times asserts that “the siege of Atlanta was splendid and the fire that followed 

magnificently pyrotechnic” (quoted in Haver 305). The destruction was massive, with the burning of the 

Atlanta Depot standing out as the most integral and damaging scene in the film. This was the first scene 

to be shot, a scene in which scores of old sets on the studio backlot were burned, including the “Great Gate” 

from King Kong(1933). For this scene, 113 minutes of footage were shot, with costs of less than $25,000 

accumulated, “just $323 more than the allotted budget” according to David Selznick’s Hollywood (Haver 258).  

During filming of the scene, all seven of the Technicolor cameras in Hollywood were used to capture flames 

that shot up 500 feet from a set that covered forty acres. To protect the studio and its stars, production 

manager Raymond Klune made sure the area was ringed with fire trucks from both the Culver City Fire 

Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department (Haver 254).

Yet, according to Haver, the fire was seen as a real eco-disaster by the residents in the area: “As the inferno raged, the low-hanging clouds spread the reflection of the flames over most of Culver City, and for the hour and a half that the fire continued, the phone lines in Los Angeles were jammed with anxious callers, all of whom seemed convinced that MGM was on fire” (258). To one witness, “it was just suddenly the holocaust…it scared all of us…it was like a whole town suddenly going up in flames…. Just as this ferocious thing happened, up comes Myron with these two people… all three seemed to be a few sheets to the wind and Myron said something to Mr. Selznick but he just shook him off, he was so engrossed in the fire” (257-8). Such destruction was meant to heighten audience interest, but its potential for damage to the film’s stars meant that stunt men and women doubled for the stars. Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) was doubled by Aileen Goodwin, Dorothy Fargo, and Lila Finn, and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) was doubled by Yakima Canutt (arguably the greatest stuntman that ever lived) and Jay Wilsey. Canutt (one of Butler’s doubles) led the wagon carrying Dorothy Fargo (one of O’Hara’s doubles) through the fire, for example. Construction and destruction of both the stunt men and women, who serve as “doubles” to the star, and of the environment provide spectacle on the screen and in the tabloids of the time.

Toy Story 4 and the Rom Com, Part I

Toy Story 4 made me cry tonight, but most emotional films do, sometimes even after the fifth viewing. What struck us, though, was how well it aligned with romantic comedies we’ve been watching for work—especially the teen films following a Superbad move from homosocial to heteronormative relationships. In Toy Story 4, though, Woody’s (Tom Hanks) move away from Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) isn’t the problem. It’s Woody’s move away from Andy’s replacement child, Bonnie. If I were to make a psychological reading of the film, I might have more to say. But as a romantic comedy, it just hit all the right tropes and themes with the twists Pixar includes that garner laughs. Here are some of the rom com conventions either included or varied in Toy Story 4: 

• Frequently hinge on role-playing and deception​
• Twentieth and Twenty-First C romantic comedies promote a therapeutic ethos—they believe that people can grow and repair their character defects when the pain, humiliation, and thrill of love makes them reexamine traits they hold on to. ​
• Lesson focused on consumerism—win love by going shopping (consumption and courtship)​

·      Distinctive aesthetics come from dialogue, not images: combative, insults as part of mating ritual, deflates serious subjects​

·      Slapstick action like pratfalls​

·      Set in New York City--Manhattan (or more recently, other cities like London): center of screenwriters, money, fashion, and culture—sophisticates, not hicks​

·      True feelings found in the "green world" to which they travel—a pastoral setting as in Midsummer Night's Dream ​

·      Dogs play a pivotal role in many romantic comedies: Must Love Dogs, As Good as it Gets​

·      Music provides the food of love with popular songs associated with the films ​

·      Signal appearance of a new society with a festive ritual—weddings​

·      Communal—ask audiences to join in the imaginary wholeness and satisfaction of misunderstandings resolved​

Nature on the Inside, Part I: Dogs

Dogs on the Inside (2014) demonstrates the special bonds humans sometimes build with their dogs. Because the documentary focuses on prison inmates in a canine training program for neglected strays, however, its construction of dogs not only shows how relationships between dogs and people transcend class, race, and profession, but also illustrates how animal companions may transform into what Haraway calls companion species. The film emphasizes how both dogs and inmates benefit from the connections between them. Here the dogs are neglected or abused strays adopted from overcrowded shelters across the nation where 3 million dogs are euthanized each year. 

Instead, the dogs and the inmates who train them get a second chance in this Massachusetts correctional facility. Both the dogs and their inmate trainers benefit from this process. After months of bonding with inmates and learning the skills they need to thrive in a traditional home, the dogs are adopted by area families. The inmates also gain social skills but more importantly find hope for a future outside the prison walls. According to the documentary press release, “Connected by their troubled pasts, the dogs learn to have faith in people again while the inmates are reminded of their own humanity and capacity for love and empathy.”

The Incredible Mr. Limpet and Interdependence

The Incredible Mr. Limpet reinforces interdependent relationships between live action and animation, since in the film an animated fish, Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) helps the live action United States Navy destroy Nazi U-Boats during WWII. Limpet, however, becomes a fish when he falls in the Coney Island Bay because he values fish and their lifestyle more than the human life he leads with his wife Bessie (Carole Cook) and best friend and rival George Stickel (Jack Weston). The film, then, both valorizes “peaceful” aquatic life and reinforces the need for an interdependent relationship between human and nonhuman nature.

As an adaptation of a Theodore Pratt novel of the same name, “One of the strangest films ever made that didn’t involve David Lynch” (Null) opens with a Navy message of approval. The film is framed by a scene in the film’s present that demonstrates Henry Limpet’s continuing value as a connection between human and nonhuman nature. Navy sailors march to an office that says “Top Secret.” Something was locked in a file back in 1945, and it was hoped they would not need to open it. But porpoises have brain cavities greater than man’s and they think “he’s” teaching them.

The reason behind the top secret designation is revealed when the Navy officers open a file that begins in September 1941. “That’s when it first started,” the officer, Adm. P.P. Spewter (Larry Keating) explains, “I never knew him before,” and the film flashes back to 1941 where a still-human Henry is working as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn at the Atlantic and Gulf Line Shipping Office. His eyesight prevented him from joining the Navy, but his connection with water and fish is clear, since he has a fish bowl on his desk and fish in the water cooler to take home with him in a jar with holes in the lid because, Henry exclaims, “Fish are so bright and cheerful. So beautiful.” He even has a popular guide to science window blind at home that describes different eras, including the Devonian era. “Our ancestors were fish,” Henry says. He even sees fish as the salvation for this violent planet: “Hope in the war of Europe comes from thinking of fish turning into men, so they might turn out even better.” 

Limpet wishes he were a fish, but his wife, Bessie, and friend and rival for his wife’s love, George, want him to give them up, get rid of his fish tank and go to Coney Island instead of a lecture on the mating habits of shellfish. Yet on their way to Coney Island, Limpet’s service to the Navy as a source of an interconnected relationship between human and nonhuman nature is foreshadowed when a newspaper headline on the train reads, “Nazi subs infest waters.” And, when they arrive, Limpet sits on the boardwalk and talks to the fish below, explaining that he has read the Theory of Reverse Evolution by Radcliff and hopes he can devolve just as Radcliff explained it: “More than anything I wish I could be one of you right now. I wish, I wish, I was a fish,” he says, and jumps in. 

Now the underwater scene is animated, and before our eyes, Limpet changes into an animated fish with glasses, connecting live action and animation, as well as human and nonhuman nature. He fits this aquatic role more than he ever fit in as a human. Bessie keeps saying, “He doesn’t know how to swim.” But he does, even swimming up to George who just sees a fish. “Bessie. What’s going to happen to poor Bessie, George?” Limpet asks, but George doesn’t hear him. “I saw a fish wearing his glasses,” George tells Bessie and takes Bessie home. 

The animation from here on effectively ties Limpet’s character to the sea, and human characters to cities and ships. The film fluidly integrates animation in the primarily live-action film with the help of animators from Disney. According to Ben Simon, “the animation director is none other than Bill Tytla, who created and executed the magnificent Night On Bald Mountain sequence for Fantasia. Simon explains that “other directorial tasks [were] undertaken by famed Warner Brothers director Robert McKimson.” He also asserts that “an uncredited Art Babbit (who brought Fantasia’s Chinese Mushrooms to life, and is mostly responsible for the evolution of Goofy’s character) was an animation contributor to the film.” Other Disney artists contributed to the animation sequences. 

The film moves beyond bifurcating animation and live-action, however, and demonstrates contrasts between human and nonhuman nature when Limpet literally swims away from the human world. As a way to highlight his difference from humans as an animated fish, the further Limpet swims, the more assimilated he becomes. Even colors become more brilliant, for Limpet, and he discovers he has a powerful roar or “thrumb” that becomes an effective secret weapon against the Nazis. By scouting U-Boats and thrumbing to highlight their location, Limpet tells the Navy when to drop charges and destroy the subs. 

In The Incredible Mr. Limpet, Limpet helps make a better world by reversing evolution, a valorization of the more peaceful life of fish. But that reversal allows him to move human and nonhuman nature closer toward an effective interdependent relationship in which Limpit’s thrumb can help win a war and his knowledge can educate porpoises to serve the Navy, possibilities only imaginable in animated portions of a fictional film but illustrations of an effective way to bridge the gap between human culture and the natural world, a bridge that may draw on organismic approaches to ecology. 

Orthodox Nature in Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Whereas studios like UPA and Rankin/Bass embraced modernism, thematically, aesthetically, or both, Disney Studios maintained its conflict with modernism, even while engaging the technology of the modern age. Steven Watts described Walt Disney as “a sentimental modernist” (87). Although he experimented “with the forms and techniques” of modernist art, “[h]is true aesthetic heart… continued to beat to an internal rhythm of nineteenth-century sentimental realism,” a realism Watts equates with the Victorian age. According to Watts, “modernism emerged in direct opposition to the principles and sensibilities of nineteenth-century Victorianism,” seeking to reconcile dichotomies perpetuated by Victorianism: “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious” (87). Disney both embraced and resisted this modernist move, blurring boundaries based on the separation of reality and fantasy in his aesthetic while valorizing Victorian binaries that perpetuated a bourgeois status quo. Disney counters a sometimes modernist aesthetic with “flourishes of sentiment and naturalism” (Watts 92) in many of his films, highlighting an orthodox domesticity that conflicts with modernist ideals.

Adherence to “orthodoxy” continued in most of the Disney films from the 1960s forward, but in several films both before and after Walt Disney’s death, Disney blurs boundaries between “human and animal, civilized and savage, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct, conscious and unconscious.” Because of such blurring, the binary between human and nonhuman nature breaks down, and borders become more permeable while still adhering to the ideas of sentimental populism Watts describes. According to Watts, Disney “carried into adulthood an ideology—like his aesthetics, it was instinctive and emotional rather than systematic and articulate—that glorified ordinary Americans, blended democratic sympathies and cultural conservatism, and flowered from the roots in his rural, Midwestern background” (96).

In Sleeping Beauty (1959), for example, the Russian ballet is transformed into a fairy tale story like Snow White and Cinderella in which domestic bliss is achieved with the help of woodland creatures like birds and rabbits. Aurora (the Princess in Sleeping Beauty) and nature are one in a rural cottage and meadows where she hides from an evil curse. As Aurora sings, an owl dons a prince’s cape to dance with her, and birds hold up the sleeves as they join in. All the animals support her in the meadow. And the three fairies who save her each represent a natural element. 

Here nature and the supernatural are one, with Maleficent, the evil fairy who cast the spell to place Aurora into an eternal sleep, turning a forest into a briar patch that looks as mean as she is. She even turns into a dragon to fight Prince Philip and keep him from kissing and awakening Aurora. The two sides of nature reside in the two extremes of supernatural, but the “good” side wins, and domestic bliss is restored. In Sleeping Beautydomesticity is seen as a force as natural as the creatures that help Aurora attain her dream of marriage to a prince and a happily ever after ending.

The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Animal Rights

Disney films from the 1940s and 1950s that grapple with animal treatment may range from those advocating animal rights, sometimes at the expense of other species, to those that rest on a biosocial moral paradigm that provides a space for interdependence in service to the community. But they all demonstrate that the animal rights/animal welfare debate was well under way before Peter Singer’s animal liberation movement gained force. These films also served as grounding for films with more explicit animal rights messages. 

These Disney films lay the groundwork for a later film with a more explicitly forceful animal-rights message like that found in The Secret of NIMH (1982). The film is the first feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney Studios to join an independent animation team, a connection that aligns the film further with the earlier Disney animated features. According to Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times, The Secret of NIMH  "is an attempt to return to the rich, fully detailed animation that is known as ‘classic’ Disney animation” (C17), a goal that, according to Roger Ebert, Don Bluth and his team successfully executed. Ebert asserts regarding the film: “they have succeeded in reproducing the marvelous detail and depth of the Disney classics. This is a good-looking, interesting movie that creates a little rodent world right under the noses of the indifferent local humans“ (“The Secret”).

Ebert also likes the film’s premise: In a seemingly direct reaction to both Disney and Singer’s text, the film argues vehemently against animal testing and experimentation and, according to Ebert, asks the question: “What if a group of laboratory animals were injected with an experimental drug that made them as intelligent as humans?” (“The Secret”). As Nicodemus, the rat narrator, reveals, scientists from NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, captured and performed dangerous experiments on mice and rats that ultimately increased their intelligence. Nicodemus explains the plight of the rat community to Mrs. Brisby, a mouse who comes to the rats for help, telling her that her husband, Jonathan “made possible the rats’ escape from the terrible … NIMH.” 

Jonathan’s matronly wife, Mrs. Brisby, helps them outsmart human farmers and the NIMH Institute, ensuring a move to Thorn Valley away from the bulldozers meant to destroy them. In The Secret of NIMHthe rights of animals overshadow those of humans, not only because human characters serve only minor roles in the film but also because humans mistreat animals both in the laboratories of NIMH and on the farm. The Secret of NIMH, then, explicitly argues against cruel mistreatment of animals both in laboratories and in “the field,” while demonstrating that animals deserve rights because they so resemble us. Together these films also paved the way for environmentally conscious animal welfare films like Bee Movie. For us they also highlight that the roots of both the environmental and animal rights movements were well in place before either Singer’s animal liberation or the contemporary environmental movement.