Hollywood Utopia

their dystopian gloom or utopian optimism, these films similarly assert the need for
a reconnection to what is vital in nature in order that we might escape from the
dilemmas history has forced upon us. Whether their settings are the primitive world
of the past, the natural world of the present, or the unexplored world of the future,
their common impulse is to begin again, to have a second chance at creation
(ibid.: 305).
While Hollywood could never be accused of suffering from ‘bibliomania’, to all
appearances ‘nature’ remains remarkably potent and evocative within both the
form and content of film history. ‘Nature’ is most certainly central to the aesthetic
vocabulary of western culture, with most audiences having tangible knowledge and
experience, and a few even moved to defend its sanctity at great personal risk. Yet
while nature is very much a part of popular culture, a difficult question remains -
which ‘nature’? Ulrich Beck agrees that the term ‘nature’ can mean almost
anything you want, which can be extremely dangerous when co-opted for
pernicious political use as in Germany and Russia in the twentieth century.
A framing structure, which is useful for schematising the evolution of various,
often competing, notions of nature as Beck suggests, is posited by Val Plumwood.
The first step in the evolution of human/nature dualism is the construction of the
normative (the best or ideal) human identity as mind or reason, excluding or inferiorizing
the whole rich range of other human and non-human characteristics or construing
them as inessential. The construction of mind or reason in terms exclusive
of and oppositional to nature is the second step. The construction of nature itself as
mindless is the third step, one which both reinforces the opposition and constructs
nature as ineluctably alien, disposing of an important area of continuity and overlap
between humans and animals and non-human nature
(Plumwood 1993: 107).
Plumwood pessimistically concludes that in many ways this ‘removes the basis for
an ethical response to the world’ (ibid.: 118). More constructively however, from a
cultural analysis perspective, Ronnie Zoe Hawkins asserts that an ecological
framework ‘provides a snapshot, a temporal cross-section of current relationships
among different kinds of organisms’ (Hawkins 1998: 165). Donna Haraway, in a
1995 essay ‘Otherwordly Conversations, Terrain, Topics, Local Terms’, also affirms
‘we must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession,
appropriation and nostalgia’ (cited in Shiva and Moser 1995: 70). Before dealing
with more contemporary films, it is necessary to clarify the normative baseline for
post-war representations of nature in Hollywood cinema.
2 Nature Film and Ecology 55