Hollywood Utopia

20 Hollywood Utopia
Taylor goes on to suggest that this produces several basic rules of conduct:
1) ‘Rule of Non-maleficence’ - prohibits harmful and destructive acts done by
moral agents.
2) ‘Rule of Non-interference’ - to refrain from placing restrictions on the freedom
of individual organisms and requiring a general ‘hands-off’ policy with regard to
whole eco-systems and biotic communities, as well as individual organisms.
3) ‘Rule of Fidelity’ - applies only to human conduct in relation to individual
animals that are in a wild state and are capable of being deceived or betrayed by
moral agents.
4) ‘Rule of Restitutive Justice’ - the duty to restore the balance of justice between
a moral agent and a moral subject when the subject has been wronged by the agent.
The first of these rules is implicit in most Hollywood narratives while the second
is most clearly detected within the science fiction genre. In particular the rule of
non-interference directly supports Roddenberry’s ‘Prime Directive’ in the Star
Trek franchise, to be discussed in Chapter 4. Issues like the rule of fidelity will be
specifically addressed through an analysis of more overtly thematic ‘light’ eco-texts
like John Boorman’s Emerald Forest (1985), while the rule of restitutive justice is
most explicitly discussed in relation to the Disney/Spielberg oeuvre. These
ecological and ethical guidelines remain central to this study and naturally become
more explicit in films when some ethical norm is called into question. These rules
are applied most extensively in later discussions of science fiction where extraterrestrial
ecological systems serve to highlight the uniqueness of the earth’s
symbiotic life forces over and above human dominance.
In many cases, as the Gaia myth affirms, the earth can look after itself in spite of
humanity’s impotence and ignorance. This can, in turn, serve to question the
necessity of an ethical system, since it suggests that human agency is finally
unimportant within the greater macro-system. Within such a green evolutionary
utopianism there are many further anomalies which must be exposed and hopefully
re-evaluated. For instance, must ecologists solve the primary conflict inherent in
most utopian structures, namely the rights of individuals as opposed to the ‘ideal’
communal system? Or put another way, must ecology privilege the (organic, selfregulating)
‘system’ at the expense of, or in opposition to, individual human
agency? The risk of legitimising a potentially totalitarian system, which reduces
individual expression to systematic homogeneity, remains ever present.
Another thorny anomaly linked to the above is the problem of how, if there is no
pre-defined hierarchical order, with ‘man’ at the apex, one can determine ‘human’