Hollywood Utopia

genre remained preoccupied with mobility and the goal of traversing landscape,
discussion of the western is carried out in the following chapter.
Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, spoke of the common principle
underlying all matter as being endless change and transformation. He is probably
the first western philosopher to appreciate the holistic connections between all the
primary elements, which he reduced to earth, air, fire and water. These elemental
forces infuse and help to structure the comparison of filmic examples used in all
chapters in this study. In many of the films discussed in this chapter, tensions
between the four elements are foregrounded to an almost extreme level,
dramatising the innate symbiotic connectivity between all natural forces in
sustaining an evolutionary ecology which is not always predetermined by human
agency. From the preoccupation with earth and air in The Yearling (1946), to fire
and water in The Emerald Forest (1985) and water alone in Jaws (1975) and
Waterworld (1995), the chapter concludes with an exploration of synthetic special
effects which result from the manipulation of primary elements excavated from the
earth to create a long extinct range of dinosaur species in the Jurassic Park (1993)
phenomenon.
American Romanticism and Nature
When the desire to represent and foreground the countryside as a distinct entity
first manifested itself, this aesthetic interest in the land appeared to run parallel
with its unceasing exploitation for the purposes of agriculture, hunting and travel.
More recently, literary and cultural analysts have drawn on the writings of Lévi-
Strauss and continue to apply rather crude binary oppositions between ‘nature and
culture’ and ‘rural and urban’ as the primary structuring rationale for all art. 4
The dominant ideology, which incorporates a predisposition towards scientific
materialism at the expense of the total environment, can most clearly be traced to
the profound changes initiated by the Industrial Revolution. For instance, the
romantic scientist Jacob Bronowski, in his classic television series The Ascent of
Man (1973), optimistically concluded that while the Renaissance established the
‘dignity of man’, the Industrial Revolution established the ‘unity of nature’
(Bronowski 1973: 260). All of this was promoted, he argued, by scientists and,
equally importantly from a cultural perspective, the romantic poets, who saw that
the wind and the sea and primary sources of power like coal are all created by the
heat of the sun, which is the source of energy (ibid.: 286). Bronowski and others
regarded the pure scientific urge towards invention and knowledge as ennobling
the ‘human spirit’, echoing the utopian agenda of the romantic poets.
Nevertheless, the functional and economic imperative to which such inventions
were used, could not by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as serving the
demands of such utopian idealism. Philanthropic socialist beliefs, as espoused by
2 Nature Film and Ecology 53