Hollywood Utopia

questions a number of modernist/postmodernist attitudes and value systems
concerning counter-cultural evocations of human identity and fulfilment within a
growing ecologically fractured and risk based western society. Safe most notably
uses the idea of environmental illness to help illustrate the changing agency of
human nature in the lead character’s unpredictable quest to find some form of
harmony with nature.
While outside the scope of this study, the inherent difficulties of promoting a
utopic reading of film could be offset by extensive audience research to help
underpin and critique Hollywood’s mapping of ecological metaphors and their
aesthetic articulation in film. Martin Barker, for instance, insists that all film
analyses make claims about the audience but seldom make this explicit. While not
wanting audience studies to replace textual analysis, few critical theories, he
suggests in From Ants to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis (2000),actually seek
evidence to explain audience pleasures, which could underpin an investigation of
film. Yet an assumption that empirical audience research would necessarily anchor,
much less determine film analysis is, I argue in a review, open to question. 4
Nevertheless, as Kristin Thompson cogently affirms, if there is no connection with
actual audiences, film criticism remains a ‘barren venture’ (in Barker 2000: 41).
Barker embraces the strategy that ‘all story telling involves ”audience
responsiveness” because all stories activate us, by the manner of their
organisation’. Cued responses by an implied audience include ‘guessing ahead’,
‘taking sides’ as well as ‘assembling a construct of the ”whole film” from which it
becomes possible to ask the question: what is this story ”about”’ (Barker 2000: 48).
The strongest antidote to overcome such dangers in this study is extensive use of
close textual analysis using interpretations and readings from a wide range of
academics and film reviews. So often essential formal cues are omitted from
narrative analysis, even by canonical gurus like David Bordwell. A recent study by
Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland (2002) affirms this need for a
comprehensive textual analysis approach and further grapples with tensions
between ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation’. From an educational perspective there is
need for further research to differentiate and co-ordinate effective strategies for
‘bottom up’ textual analysis alongside ‘top down’ theorising. Hopefully, the detailed
contextual and critical reading of the films cited in the filmography help to posit a
prototypical and potentially progressive expression of ecological debates and issues.
Clarifying and outlining new representational relationships between humans and
their environment has been couched within terms like 'radical otherness'
(Levinas), 'partnership ethics' 5 (Merchant) and other related deep/shallow
theories. The previous chapter illustrates how these concepts and various
‘breakdowns’ implicit in postmodernism can be used to crack open crude divisions
between ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ sensibilities as expressed in popular
Conclusion 235