Hollywood Utopia

Glossary Of Terms
Some framing notions and concepts which are extensively applied to this ecological
reading of film:
Anomie: often becomes a symptom of millennial fears, which like dystopian/ecocidal fears, can
be used to suggest a counter ecological wishful fantasy.
Agency: cross-fertilising social science theorising alongside fictional appreciation of filmic
protagonist’s to explore how representational figures can embody an ecological agenda.
Cyborg: applying extensive new media theorising concerning post-human agency, particularly as
a means of overcoming regressive male/female oppositions.
Deep ecology: goes beyond the transformation of technology and politics to a transformation of
humanity and is continuously contrasted with Light (shallow) ecology.
Discourse analysis: helps to underpin cultural and textual analysis strategies for reading film
and ecology generally.
Ecologism: extending the principle of sustainability to all fields of study including film.
Ethics: evaluating a range of attitudes and values with regards to the treatment of nature and its
inhabitants, which is a central preoccupation of this study.
Feminism: including the central metaphoric importance of ‘mother nature’, together with
marginalisation debates concerning the 'other', are used to focus on how alternative agencies can
be best appropriated for this ecological project. Furthermore, 1970s feminist film analysis,
focusing on ‘excessive’ stylistic expressions within melodrama, for example, to offset the more
obvious patriarchal trajectory of such narratives (Screen Theory), is also re-applied to this
ecological reading of film.
Gaia thesis: how the biosphere together with its atmospheric environment forms a single entity
or natural system. Gaia pushes Darwinian notions to its limit by contending that no matter what
humans do to the planet, it will survive.
Nature: is often closely connected with landscape, alongside cultural debates around space/place
and becomes the means of visually appropriating our environment, often in the service of
promoting a romantic or sublime/deep ecological connection, through the witnessing of human
agents.
Glossary of Terms 269