Hollywood Utopia

Conclusion
Ecology has certainly become a new, all-inclusive, yet often contradictory metanarrative,
1 which this study has shown to be clearly present within Hollywood film.
While Leo Braudy (1998) suggests that this preoccupation with nature is a
relatively recent phenomenon, I have demonstrated how such concerns can be read
through Hollywood film since the 1950s. Recent popular films such as Titanic or
Men in Black at first appear to have little to do with ecology but even here various
metaphors and tropes embedded in the film texts help to signify core ecological
beliefs, attitudes and values.
Chapter 2 focused on explicit explorations of nature and ecology, from The Yearling
in the post-war period to The Emerald Forest, which affirm the potency of such
issues within the ‘public sphere’ of contemporary Hollywood. Surprisingly, the
didactic evocations of ecological awareness in Boorman’s quest appear less
‘progressive’ compared with other less explicitly ecologically framed films. This is
exemplified in the films of Spielberg, who adapts and sometimes transforms a
nascent ecological agency of ‘innocence’ within some of the most successful
blockbusters in recent history. The chapter culminates with a study of more
synthetic (SFX) 2 nature representations in Jurassic Park and its sequel, which
serve to dramatically foreground contemporary ecological debates.
The closely related subsequent chapter explores the roots of road movies in the
western genre, where human agents became defined and individuated by their
relationship with and journey through a landscape. While often remaining
preoccupied with a narcissistic form of ‘adolescent’ agency, the road movie
nevertheless helped to dramatise the quest for ontological knowledge and
contentment, using a range of ecological issues and preoccupations. Through
sublime moments evidenced in the closure of Grand Canyon, or even Thelma and
Louise, space and time are given over to therapeutically promoting the wishful
fantasy for deep ecological harmony. 3 In most of the films discussed, audiences are
presented with an excess of signification through narrative closure, encouraging a
metaphysical engagement with spatial identity, which is posited as co-existing with
more conventional psychological and temporal identity. As a coda, The Straight
Story provides a powerful elegiac evocation of nature and ecology from an old man's
perspective.
Nevertheless, it is within science fiction that many of the debates explored in this
study become most resonant and engaging for mass audiences. Chapter 4 begins
with an exploration of 1950s science fiction B-movies and their preoccupation with
a fear of total destruction by ‘unnatural’ forces like the atom bomb. Such fears are
often lost sight of within more conventional ideological readings, privileging their
Conclusion 233