Hollywood Utopia

To anchor this approach, notions of visual excess specifically drawn from feminist
studies of melodrama illustrating a breakdown in ‘conventional’ patriarchal
readings of film will be applied. By interrogating the over-determination of visual
excess in films by Douglas Sirk from the 1950s, for instance, with their accentuated
use of deep colours, together with heightened styles of acting, critics like Christine
Gledhill (Gledhill 1991) explored how such films helped to sustain a mise-enscène
which stays with the audience long after the ‘tagged-on’ conformist closures.
This critical position articulates how excessive and overdetermined stylistic
devices serve to rupture and critique normative ideological readings, while also
helping to produce a more ‘progressive’ representation of feminist values. This
radical notion of visual excess will be reapplied, through an analysis of the narrative
resolutions of a range of Hollywood blockbuster films, to expose their latent
predisposition to excessively dramatise an ecological agenda.
Apparently unmediated and excessive representations of nature and landscape are
consciously foregrounded in many Hollywood films discussed in this book. In
particular, the film-time and space given over to this explicit form of unmediated
evocations of eco-nature help to dramatise and encourage raw nature to speak
directly to audiences, together with their protagonists, who finally find sanctuary
from particular environmental problems. This expression of therapeutic sanctuary
is often valorised over and above the strict narrative requirements of the text
through, for instance, framing, narrative point-of-view and shot length. Rather
than merely serving as a romantic backdrop or a narrative deus-ex-machina, these
evocations of eco-nature become self-consciously foregrounded and consequently
help to promote an ecological meta-narrative, connecting humans with their
environment.
Together with the visual aesthetic, the protagonists in the films discussed will also
be shown to embody various forms of ecological agency. This can be highlighted
through the evolution within mainstream Hollywood cinema of what can be typified
as a white, liberal-humanist, middle-class, ecological agenda across a range of
genres whose filmic agency in turn serves to reflect mainstream attitudes, values
and beliefs embedded in the ecology movement generally. This positive trajectory
is at odds, however, with the influential criticism of Christopher Lasch, who
notices a similar ‘hunger for a therapeutic sensibility’ but dismisses the impulse
owing to its complicity with the normlessness of ‘narcissistic American culture’
(Lasch 1978: 7).
Titanic
A recent blockbuster success story like Titanic (1998) is helpful in signalling many
of the often abstract preoccupations raised in this study. While Titanic appears, at
the outset at least, to have very little to do with ecology per se, it can nevertheless
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