Hollywood Utopia

18 Hollywood Utopia
films and concluding with recent commercially successful science fiction texts
which explicitly focus on a range of global ecological fears.
As a new millennium approached, many critics pointed out that globally inclusive
myths became even more necessary, whereas others suggested that ‘the psychic
and social structures in which we live, have become profoundly anti-ecological,
unhealthy and destructive’. Consequently, there appears to be a need for ‘new
forms, (re)emphasising our essential interconnectedness rather than our
separateness, evoking the feeling of belonging to each other’ (Gablik 1991: 5).
‘Man lives in a progressive, expressive, non-repetitive time; [whereas] ecology is
the science of cyclical repetition’ (Gunter in Glotfelty 1996: 54). Hollywood mythic
texts serve to connect these contrasting time frameworks. The British philosopher
Kate Soper (Soper 1995) reiterates how even Marx recognised the civilising
impulse implicit in mythic expression and its ‘escape’ from encrusted modes of
rationalisation. The central problem for modern-day human agency remains how
to avoid putting too much stress on the environment from an apparently
unreconcilable desire for fulfilled individual lives.
Soper concludes her polemic:
Rather than becoming more awe-struck by nature, we need perhaps to become more
stricken by the ways in which our dependency upon its resources involves us irredeemably
in certain forms of detachment from it. To get ‘closer’ to nature, in a sense
[is] to experience more anxiety about all those ways in which we cannot finally identify
with it, not it with us. But in that very process, of course, we could also be transforming
our sense of human identity
(Soper 1995: 278).
One of the ways of trying to understand this ethical relationship with nature has
been through ecological frameworks and most notably through the application of
the Gaia thesis.
Gaia and Eco-ethics
The Gaia thesis, like Aldo Leopold's seminal ‘land ethic’, affirms that the
biosphere 8 together with its atmospheric environment forms a single entity or
natural system. Gaia is regarded not only as an entity but a process which, like
evolution, can be regarded as a goal directed one. Nature, therefore, is seen as
neither ‘omniscient nor omnipotent’ (Goldsmith in Jencks 1992: 399-408) since
life processes can go wrong, a scenario depicted in Jurassic Park, which will be
discussed in detail in the following chapter.