Hollywood Utopia

234 Hollywood Utopia
allegorical articulation of Communist fears, which permeated the American body
politic at the time. These films also helped to foreground deep ecological questions
regarding humans’ relationship with their planet. Continuing this form of
historical revisionism, it is suggested that there was a profound paradigm shift,
when science fiction became actualised for the first time and space travel enabled
humans to observe and appreciate the planet as a total unifying eco-system.
Extensive application of universal notions like ‘sublime’ and popular ones like
‘excess’ and ‘transgression’ to make textual analysis more aesthetically
understandable and perceptually accurate has remained a feature of this study. The
potency of sublime representations of the planet together with identifiable natural
features like the Grand Canyon, as excessively represented in a range of film
closures, should not be so easily dismissed by critics. Suspect intentions, like those
exposed in the so-called Spielbergisation or Disneyfication of popular culture, do
not necessarily invalidate or negate the positive and productive utopic potentialities
within these dramatic visualisations of nature and landscape, as they continue to
frame and reflect on human consciousness.
The broad science fiction genre helped to create new narratives and metaphors for
coping with futuristic ecological dystopias. This can be exemplified using paranoia,
as in Soylent Green or Logan's Run, or more recently through the promotion of a
‘postmodernist’ aesthetic, which helped to ‘playfully construct’ new ways of looking
at life and nature, aided by the creation of revitalising forms of cyborg agency.
Parallels can be drawn with the representation of native American Indians for
example; who became emblematic within American consciousness of a deep form
of ecological agency. Similarly futuristic cyborgs help to produce radical new
frames of reference and identification within popular culture. Metaphorically, at
least, the cyborg embraces the fractured identity of the postmodern world and
symbolises the post-gender articulation of ecological consciousness, while also
serving to promote a powerful humane expression of responsible agency.
Central to this preoccupation with representation of self and human agency is the
feeling of ‘loss and the desire for unity that is born of (such) loss’ (Campbell in
Glotfelty 1996: 134-5). Ecologists often highlight this experience of lost unity, even
separation from the rest of the natural world and a desire to regain it, as central to
the core meaning of human nature. Such utopian desire as expressed in various
Hollywood films helps promote a form of deep ecological affirmation above and
beyond the ideological mapping of human nature predicated on more recognisable
parameters of race, class and gender differences.
But the dangers of endorsing utopic fantasies and essentialising around varying
ontological notions of human and posthuman ecological agency has remained a
cautionary principle throughout the study. The final reading of Chapter 4