Interdependence as Necessity in *Bee Movie*

Bee Movie at first seems to illustrate a real need for bifurcation, with any interaction between humans and nonhuman nature—in this case bees—not only advised against but outlawed. Jane Lamacraft notes that “the contrast between the hive, humming with contented collaborative endeavor, and the competitive, stressed-out human world, makes you agree with Barry (Jerry Seinfeld): ‘No wonder we’re not supposed to talk to them. They’re insane’”(60). And Barry’s interaction with humans reveals a shocking revelation: humans are stealing honey from bees for a profit, so Barry takes them to court, suing the human race for their exploitation of all bees. With this premise in place, the film seems geared toward advising the same kind of separation advocated by films such as Bambi. For us, the film offers a complex solution to questions broached in Bambi. Although Bambianswers “no” to questions regarding human and nonhuman nature’s ability to peacefully coexist, Bee Movie asserts that bees and humans must live and work together for both species to survive, either individually as represented by Barry’s relationship with Vanessa, or collectively, as illustrated by the drastic loss of plant life when bees go on strike, refusing to pollinate and thus regenerate flowers and other plants around the world.

There is no doubt that bee populations are decreasing rapidly and that their annihilation would have a devastating effect on agriculture. According to Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEnglesdorp’s March 31, 2009 article in Scientific America, in 2007, due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), “a fourth of U.S. beekeepers had suffered … losses and … more than 30 percent of all colonies had died. The next winter the die-off resumed and expanded, hitting 36 percent of U.S. beekeepers. Reports of large losses also surfaced from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe and other regions.” These losses may be catastrophic for farmers, Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp explain, “because one third of the world's agricultural production depends on the European honeybee, Apis mellifera,the kind universally adopted by beekeepers in Western countries.” Loss of bees, then, would deplete agricultural products that benefit humans. But because these bees also pollinate other plant species, their depletion could have widespread effects on a biotic community, destroying whole species of flowers and trees.

Researchers see human factors contributing to this loss of bees. Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp cite poor nutrition, pesticide exposure, stress-related viruses, and fungicides as factors influencing colony collapse. In order to slow the collapse of bee colonies and ensure agricultural pollinization, Cox-Foster and VanEnglesdorp assert that beekeepers need to act quickly to minimize disease and ensure good nutrition and less exposure to pesticides for their bee colonies. Farmers too should decrease their use of harmful pesticides and herbicides, so bees can survive and help maintain a food supply for both humans and bees.

            Bee Movie illustrates the catastrophic losses such a lack of pollinization might cause, not because bee colonies have been destroyed by human farming techniques but because bees go on strike. By elucidating this connection between bees and human production, the film also reinforces the need for interdependent relationships between humans and bees, relationships that also draw on both organismic and chaotic approaches to ecology. The film tells this tale of interconnection between human and nonhuman nature through the eyes of Barry, a bumblebee who has just graduated from the equivalent of high school and must choose his job to help keep the hive going. The conceptualization of the process of producing honey works well, with intricate detail, but Barry rebels and joins the pollen jocks instead, leaving the hive to collect pollen for honey processing.

            Humorous elements of his first journey out with the pollen jocks show the dangers of connecting personally with the human world and contending with human civilization. The pollen jocks pollinate flowers with pollen power all over New York City but mistake a tennis ball for a flower. Barry rides on a car window with other bugs toward home, flies into a rainstorm and escapes into an apartment window, entering the apartment where he is nearly killed by a tennis player, Ken (Patrick Warburton) until  his friend, Vanessa, saves the bee because, as she puts it, all life has value to her. Despite a bee law against talking with humans, Barry thanks Vanessa, and they become friends. Dangers of the human world are countered by this personal connection, facilitating a move toward explicit interdependence.That connection is nearly shattered, however, when Barry learns about humans’ exploitation of bees by stealing their honey and works to legally separate bees from the human world. With Vanessa’s help, Barry takes the Ray Liotta Private Select Honey company to court and wins, shutting down honey production and sending all honey back to the bees. All honey production stops, and bees lie back and grow fat, but without pollination, all flowering plants begin to die.

Once Vanessa points out the dead trees and flowers everywhere, including her flower shop, Barry responds, realizing that humans and bees must work together interdependently for both species to survive. He must get the hive working again to save the flowers. With Vanessa’s help, they hijack a flower-covered float from the Tournament of Roses Parade and take it to the bee community and their pollen jockeys. Once the flowers are pollinated, other plants and flowers respond, demonstrating the symbiotic relationship they share. And that relationship is extended to the human world in Bee Movie, not only because Barry and Vanessa set up shop together, but also because bees’ pollination sustains plants that sustain both human and nonhuman nature. The chaos of bee colony collapse is now under control in a biotic community grounded in organismic approaches to ecology.

Science Fiction Film and the Battle for Resources

Most would agree that many science fiction films highlight a variety of environmental concerns, often drawing on environmental disaster as a source for conflict or a post-apocalyptic setting. Other science fiction films, however, center exclusively on natural resource exploitation. Tank Girl (1995) and Total Recall (1990), for example highlight how necessary natural resources are for human survival. In Tank Girl, the conflict in this post-apocalyptic world is over water. In Total Recall, a battle for oxygen is fought on a futuristic Martian landscape broken by mines. In these futuristic sci fi film, the battle is between humans of different classes rather than humans and extraterrestrial aliens.

When humanity fights against alien invasions, however, elements of Earth’s environment may become either a weapon or natural resources to exploit. In The War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005), for instance, Martian invaders seem indestructible until they are exposed to Earth’s viruses and bacteria and die immediately. And in Signs (2002), alien invaders “melt” when exposed to water, just like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  Films like these begin to illustrate to power of nature as an accidental defensive tool.

Alien invaders who seek to exploit human resources in science fiction films, on the other hand, broach a variety of environmental issues that draw on environmental history. Cowboys and Aliens(2011) centers on aliens’ attempts to mine Earth’s gold as fuel for their spaceships. Set in the late 19^th Century American West, the film brings to mind the General Mining Law of 1972, which stated,

all valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, are hereby declared to be free and open to exploration and purchase, and the lands in which they are found to occupation and purchase, by citizens of the United States and those who have declared their intention to become such, under regulations prescribed by law, and according to the local customs or rules of miners, in the several mining-districts, so far as the same are applicable and not inconsistent with the laws of the United States.

Because these aliens were not citizens of the United States, the film suggests, they do not have the right to this gold.  Although the battle in Cowboys and Aliens is  primarily over the lives of Absolution townspeople in the old West,  the fight for gold serves as the motivation for the aliens invasion.

Contemporary science fiction films may also reflect the ongoing influence of the doctrine of prior appropriation, water rights doctrine adopted by most western states, giving the first person to use water from a stream the first right to such water. If the first user does not consume all of the water, then the second and later users can appropriate water for their needs. The water right is not necessarily tied to land ownership. Battle: Los Angeles demonstrates the doctrine’s continuing influence. According to the film’s production notes, in Battle: Los Angeles, Earth is under attack from unknown forces. As people everywhere watch the world's great cities fall, Los Angeles represents the last stand for mankind in a battle no one expected. As original screenwriter Chris Bertolini explains, in Battle: Los Angeles, he sought to merge two of his favorite kinds of stories: “I wanted to take a story in which otherworldly beings are here on Earth, but tell it as a war story - a story about individuals, where you're seeing the battle from the POV of the guys on the ground,” he says. “I got into the idea that the story would follow a small group of guys and the audience would experience everything as they experience it.”

            When Scott Silver rewrote the script, however, he provided these aliens with a reason for their choice to invade Earth: water, the aliens’ source of energy. Although other planets could be mined for water, a television analyst in the film explains, Earth’s water supply was readily available in its large surface oceans. After its rewrite, then, Battle: Los Angeles becomes not only a battle for the human race and its planet, but a water war, a war for our most abundant and most coveted resource. All these films demonstrate the power of nature and its resources.

Mesa of Lost Women: Big Bug meets Sexploitation

Mesa of Lost Women (1953) is an odd film that incorporates a mad scientist into a new setting: a Southwest desert that may broach other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploitation but falls short. To underpin these possible themes, the film opens on a couple seemingly lost in a large Mexican desert. An oil surveyor watches them with binoculars and declares that in this desert of death, “produced by roasting the human eye” they will not be living things for long. The desert will convert them into dead things. They are taken to the AmerMexico Hospital. The man wakes up in the oil company office and tells them to blow them up before they scatter without explaining what “they” are. Firebombs are the only things that scare them, he claims as he mutters about super monsters or bugs as big as we are and bite, and claims they come from an underground lab where Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) does something to their glands. Only the Mexican assistant Pepe (Chris Pin-Martin) believes him when he talks about the misshapen women that do not die.

The film flashes back a year before to fill in the gaps. Women and a male assistant are in an underground lab. Another scientist, Dr. Masterson (Harmon Stevens) is visiting Dr. Aranya, who is studying the arterial lobe of the pituitary gland and producing “things” through experimental transplants. The women in the lab have braided hair, suggesting a change, and another woman is lying on a lab table, presumably ready for an experiment. Aranya explains that he has isolated the growth hormone of the pituitary and will transfer it into the body of another creature, a hexapod, a tarantula, and transfer the glands from the insect back into the human body, so the woman is indestructible. According to Aranya, they can grow a new limb if lost. Only women are chosen because, as Aranya declares, “in the insect world the male is puny is insignificant,” as is the doctor’s male assistant. The women are spiders with thinking brains subject to the doctor’s will, we are told.

Masterson is disturbed by the doctor’s plans, but Aranya now cannot let him leave. Instead, Masterson becomes another experimental subject. He looks around in  a montage of memories. Eventually Masterson escapes from the hospital and ends up at a bar near the old lab where Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), one of the spider women, dances. Masterson shoots Tarantella, but because she is now “indestructible” she recovers quickly. Masterson and his tablemates end up near the underground lab when their plane flies off course, and only the pilot and a woman with a weak fiancé escape. They are the couple picked up by the oil surveyor. The pilot is telling the story, and the woman awakes. Only Pepe believes the story. He wants to burn them because nothing will survive fire, but the film ends with ambiguity, since the man may be an unreliable narrator.

Ultimately, Mesa of Lost Women argues against the genetic transformation Aranya successfully attempts in his lab, but it leaves the resolution to the conflicts such transformation provides unresolved. Other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploration, become mere setting and plot devices in this peculiar mixed genre film. By combining a big bug movie with a sexploitation theme and dropping it into a Mexican setting, however, Mesa of Lost Women stands out. Eric Kurerston perhaps puts it best:

The "music" is so pervasive, so repetitive, and so grating, it becomes good enough that Ed Wood re-used it for Jail Bait. Is Mesa bad-brilliant or just bad? What would Warhol say? What would Godard say? They'd just shake their heads at you contemptuously for not getting the modernist cosmic joke. Mesa of Lost Women needs no justification! C'est un meisterwerke!

Film Is Dead?

 In the Sept. 9, 2012 issue of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, an essay co-written by the papers two primary film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O.Scott, riff off the title Film Is Dead? Their concern is over the rapid technological and economic change from the photo chemical process of creating and projecting moving images to a computer generated/digital process.

Their cultural/aesthetic concerns focus on how this overwhelming change will affect the quality of the screened image, and while championing the look of celluloid, the critics are careful to explain that the switch to digital is here and has particular advantages, along with a host of problems. This new wave will transform both economic and aesthetic practices within the industry and influence film/digital audiences around the world.

While the critics thoughtfully examine the potential aesthetic changes that they see occurring they never once consider the enormous positive change that will take place in the "deep ontological and phenomenological shifts that are transforming a medium." That change involves the enormously reduced environmental and ecological impact produced by the 19th and 20th century industrial practices of the photo chemical process of creating celluloid and the finished film product and the energy required to deliver such a product to world wide audiences. From this perspective digital production, distribution and exhibition is a quantum leap in reducing the destructive chemical/carbon  footprint that has dominated the film industry since the 1890's. What is reduced in this switch from the film process to the digital process that an overwhelmingly majority of film critics refuse to analyze and write about?

The production process of celluloid itself involves the enormous use of water, chemicals and energy. The process of turning celluloid into "film" involves more of the same. Many of these chemicals turn into waste products that have been polluting the environment for over a 100 years. The eco-damage caused by the total film production process is hard to calculate but studies done examining the effects of  Kodak's film production processing in Rochester has been well documented by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell. The creation and ultimate processing of celluloid around the world has contributed to many pollution problems which will be eliminated  by the digital takeover. Chemicals, of course, are involved with the process of film making from the initial creation of celluloid, to the processing of the negative, to the work prints and ultimately the finished prints that are shown in theaters. The final destruction of millions of film prints over the century has also produced a variety of enviro/eco disasters. All this disappears with the introduction of digital. For example, despite the environmental costs of hardware and servers, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows diverted 756 tons of film waste from landfill with a recovery rate of 98.4 percent and saved 2500 tons of C02 from being emitted by using Greenshoot and adopting green practices throughout the production, and saved money through Greenshoot's services into the production.

The distribution process which requires enormous carbon expenditures to deliver thousands of bulky prints to theaters all over the world also is eliminated by digital. Digital "films" are now delivered by dvd's, or hard drives or by transmitting signals by satellite. It is hard to calculate the final reduction of carbon by eliminating delivering celluloid, but the film industry which sometimes spend 3 million dollars for the physical production and physical delivery of the prints for just one film, is seeing an enormous decrease in the costs of distribution. This inspires the industry to move more quickly to digital since they readily see the new profits to be made by no longer having to pay for the creation of film prints and the enormous costs of delivering them and eliminating them after their value has ended. The final area of exhibition is also influenced by digital. With the removal of bulky film, new projectors and new means of transmitting images to audiences have reduced the costs of theater owners who, of course, share in distribution expenses.

The rise of digital may produce a flood of aesthetic questions, but from the perspective of the ecofilm critic, it is a new age that reveals a potential reduction in pollution and environmental damage that makes it well worth any anxiety over the new viewing experience that vexes so many mainstream film critics today.

Rango beginning

Current Westerns continue to draw on the drive for resources that is at the center of many earlier western films. A truly American film genre, the Western is regaining its status. The popular and critical success of the True Grit (2010) remake demonstrates the resurgence of this genre that builds on Americans’ hunger for their history and the promise of progress provided there. Although the narrative of True Grit focuses primarily on a revenge plot, it also highlights both a savage landscape that invites the “taming” civilization can provide and, in the characters of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), illustrates the pioneer spirits necessary to settle a Wild West.

Rango (2011), however, most deliberately addresses environmental issues as it both elucidates the environmental history surrounding water rights in the American desert and critiques current water rights practices in the Las Vegas area. In an obvious homage to Chinatown noted by critics from Time Magazine to Salon.Com, Rango explores a hero’s attempts to “save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers” (O’Hehir “Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation”). With help from a variety of anthropomorphized western characters, Rango (Johnny Depp) successfully returns water to the desert, defeating the water baron mayor (Ned Beatty) and rehabilitating his henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy).

Rango illustrates the continuing influence of the western genre and its environmental underpinnings. The film’s historical narrative, however, is also connected with the contemporary world Rango seems to leave behind when he is thrown out of his human family’s car because the mayor seeks to recreate a desert paradise similar to Las Vegas and its surrounding golf courses, a connection that reinforces the enduring effects of both the western genre and the environmental history that grounds it. By both integrating innovative CGI and animation techniques from Industrial Light and Magic and translating the film’s narrative to a videogame format, Rango  also  effectively demonstrates the ongoing effects of the Desert Land Act and the exploitation of water rights it sometimes encouraged.