Hollywood Utopia

30 Hollywood Utopia
Philosophical theories of the value of nature most specifically address these light
and dark gradations of ecology and help provide an effective starting point to
position a reading of Hollywood films. These can be grouped into the following
broad categories.
a) Anthropocentrism. This position recognises nature primarily as a resource,
which contributes to human value. This pervasive notion will be explored in detail,
especially through the exposition of animism in the Spielberg oeuvre as providing
a fruitful site of light eco-utopianism.
Many ecological critics of anthropocentrism have argued that the dominant
tendency in western culture (for instance Christianity) has been to construe
difference in terms of hierarchy and that a less colonising approach to nature does
not involve denying human reason or human difference but rather ceasing to treat
reason as the basis of superiority and domination. An ecological ethic must,
according to Val Plumwood, always be an ‘ethic of eco-justice that recognises the
interconnection of social domination and the domination of nature’ (Plumwood
1993: 20).
However, the social ecologist Murray Bookchin asserts that the denial of hierarchy
over nature results in a form of essentialism which accepts the denial of human
distinctness and the rejection of ‘colonising forms of reason’, even the rejection of
all rationality. He believes that current ecological crises are a direct result of the
failure of human society to recognise and value the continuity, rather than the
divisions, between nature and culture (cited in Gruen et al. 1994: 112). Bookchin
affirms that human beings have a vital role to play as ‘ecological stewards’ in the
evolutionary process, consciously engaged in the negotiated relationship between
society and nature which is echoed in the other major philosophical theory of
inherentism.
b) Inherentism. This position recognises that the very concept of value is innately
human. This philosophical notion appears to be at odds with deep ecology and so
any attribution of such ecology to nature is dependent upon human consciousness
and the constructions which that makes. Apparent contradictions within ecological
values in general demand careful negotiation, especially warning against human
complicity in eco-narratives which are often seen ‘not as liberating but as a call to
caution’ (Campbell in Glotfelty 1996: 131). Consequently, a historical study of the
evolution of these ecological precepts exposes the changing wishes, fears and
desires of the human organism as part of a planetary eco-system.
In this study human agency as depicted in Hollywood film will serve to illustrate
how some of the ecological values promoted evolve more specifically from a holistic
notion of nature itself rather than affirming a conventional belief in inherentism.