Eco-Trauma Cinema

Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental

movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of com-
mercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role
in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm
we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we
sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses
both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological
harm are often related and even symbiotic: The traumas we perpetuate in
an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management
inevitably return to harm us.
Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three
general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural
world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize
the environment or its species and stories that depict the aftermath of eco-
logical catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of
our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on
the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet’s ecosystems and to restructure
the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.

Anil Narine is a junior faculty member in the Department of Visual Studies

and the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology
at the University of Toronto. In 2008 he was a visiting research student in
the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College,
University of London, and in 2011–2012 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in
Film at Columbia University. His research examines network theory and
trauma theory in the context of globalization and thickening global con-
nections. His publications appear in Communication, Culture & Critique,
Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of American Studies,
Americana, Memory Studies and Theory, Culture & Society.
Eco-Trauma Cinema

Edited by Anil Narine

Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: Eco-Trauma Cinema 1

ANIL NARINE

1 Evolution, Extinction and the Eco-Trauma Film: Darwin’s

Nightmare (2004) and A Zed & Two Naughts (1985) 25
BARBARA CREED

2 Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary 46

CHARLES MUSSER

3 Great Southern Wounds: The Trauma of Australian Cinema 72

MARK STEVEN

4 Into the Wilde? Art, Technologically Mediated Kinship,

and the Lethal Indifference of Nature in Werner Herzog’s
Grizzly Man 88
ALF SEEGERT

5 The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host (2006) and the

Geopolitics of Outbreak 113
HSUAN L. HSU

6 Biting Back: America, Nature, and Feminism in Teeth 134

ROLAND FINGER

7 The Spirits of Globalization: Masochistic Ecologies

in Fabrice Du Welz’s Vinyan 146
GEORGIANA BANITA
x Contents
8 Love in the Times of Ecocide: Environmental Trauma
and Comic Relief in Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E 164
ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER

9 Eavesdropping in The Cove: Interspecies Ethics, Public

and Private Space and Trauma under Water 180
JANET WALKER

10 Cooling the Geopolitical to Warm the Ecological: How

Human-Induced Warming Phenomena Transformed
Modern Horror 207
CHRISTOPHER JUSTICE

11 Toxic Media: On the Ecological Impact of Cinema 231

SEAN CUBITT

Contributors 249
Index 253
 Acknowledgements

If this book were a film, there would be no close-ups. There would only
be group shots of an ensemble cast. Academic research projects are collab-
orative efforts, even when the publications have one name above the title.
Anthologies like this one are an intensified form of collective labour. I would
like to thank the contributors to this volume for their inspiring chapters,
which went far beyond my expectations when I proposed the book and have
taught me more than I thought I could know about this topic. Indeed, it is
a remarkable thing that one person can express a term, or concept, or way
of looking at things, and find colleagues across the globe who were thinking
the same thing.
I offer gratitude to our editor at Routledge, Felisa Salvago-Keyes, who
shepherded the book along from its earliest stages. Chuck Wolfe and
Edward Branigan expressed enthusiasm about the book idea early on and
motivated me to pursue it.
I am indebted to Laura Mulvey, who supervised me as a visiting doctoral
student at Birkbeck, University of London; to Douglas Kellner, my external
examiner, who became a great supporter; and to Jane Gaines, who was
my postdoctoral supervisor at Columbia University in New York. A large
proportion of the editing was done in the Butler Library and other inspiring
places around the Big Apple.
My department chairs, Anthony Wensley and Louis Kaplan, have sup-
ported my research, teaching and travel endeavors with vigor, funding and
kind, inspirational words. My colleagues in the Department of Visual Stud-
ies, Alison Syme, Jill Caskey, John Ricco, Kajri Jain, Evonne Levy, Meghan
Sutherland and Brian Price, have all offered wise counsel. In the Institute of
Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, Lisa Peden, Rose
Antonio, Brett Caraway, Divya Maharajh, Rhonda McEwan, Tracy Bowen,
Diane Pracin and Guy Allen have created a workplace and intellectual envi-
ronment anyone would envy.

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Introduction
Eco-Trauma Cinema
Anil Narine

Whether ecological catastrophes confront us directly, as experiences, or

indirectly, as images circulating in the media, these events tend to confound
us, stifle us and even paralyze us politically and psychologically. Nature,
whether it threatens us, we threaten it or we see ourselves as part of it,
remains sublime in this way: something too vast in its beauty and power
to comprehend. This incomprehensibility may cultivate awe, but it may
also hinder pragmatic human responses to ecological crises. In industrial-
ized economies, media reports and documentary footage of diminishing
glaciers, oil spills and deforestation now circulate widely, but they elicit
tentative responses from viewers. Public discussions of environmental issues
are intended to inform us as citizens, and the core of citizenship is the ability
to take political action in the public sphere. But often these media represen-
tations of environmental crises can induce a sense of passive resignation,
a sentiment that seems to be spreading. Recent studies suggest that North
Americans are slightly less concerned about environmental issues than we
were leading up to the founding of Earth Day and the Clean Air Act in
1970 (Tuttle 2012). Such polls are notoriously difficult to interpret in terms
of causality, but two key changes that have taken place in the media dur-
ing the past generation are surely factors. First, we have witnessed the rise
of twenty-four-hour news stations, speciality media such as the Discovery
Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Animal Planet, Disney Nature,
BBC Earth, the globally celebrated Planet Earth (2006) and Blue Planet
(2001) series and the proliferation of natural disaster blockbusters and
ecologically themed fantasy franchises from Hollywood, Asia and Europe
(Cubitt 2005; Murray and Heumann 2009). Second, given the array of
choices they represent, these media compete fervently with one another for
viewers and revenue, conjuring the most sensationalist and even shocking
footage of human-induced ecological crises and people in peril that their
producers can assemble. In sheer amount and tone, the very narratives
about nature that can enliven our best political and social activities, aimed
at protecting our imperilled planet, may also be so blinding in their intensity
that they overwhelm us and prevent any activity whatsoever. This experi-
ence is a facet of eco-trauma, a concept this book investigates.
2 Anil Narine
WHAT IS ECO-TRAUMA?

Eco-trauma results from a paradox that characterizes our age of anxiety. We

know our ecosystem is imperilled, but we respond in contradictory ways.
On the one hand, we want to take action to protect the natural world. Even
though the environment seems to have become less urgent as a political issue,
when compared with contemporary economic woes, people continue to take
action to reduce their ecological footprints. On the other hand, it is also
undeniable that we disavow our knowledge of climate change and dwindling
natural resources in order to function more happily in a global economic
context replete with unsustainable practices. According to this second line of
thinking, we treat ecological harm as a trauma: something acknowledgeable
that we work to repress in order to avoid its painful effects. As psychologist
Tina Amorok theorizes in her study “The Eco-Trauma and Eco-Recovery of
Being,” “We defend ourselves from this fearsome side of inter-connectedness
through separation ideologies and practices (war, religious fanaticism, rac-
ism, and sexism)” in addition to “psychological defense mechanisms (denial,
dissociation, psychic numbing), and an array of debilitating behaviors and
responses that bear the signature of trauma” (29). This psychoanalytic
account of disavowal makes a convincing case for citizens’ widespread
inaction, because it highlights the unconscious and conscious nature of our
paralysis; we are not simply passive, but actively retreat from uncomfortable
realities. Disavowal was perhaps most famously described by Jacques Lacan
as “Je sais bienmaisquandmême [I know very well, but nonetheless . . .]” (see
Mannoni 1969). The paradox of eco-trauma encompasses non-psychological
factors as well, including our physical proximities to imperilled ecosystems
and our widely varying levels of economic influence—issues explored in the
following pages. In seeking meaningful ecological action, and endeavouring
to escape this responsibility, we experience twin desires pulling us in opposite
directions, and disavowal is thus only one element of the wider problematic.
In our quest for a refuge from ecological catastrophes, and our quest to
combat them, we can face a sensory overload—an experience also consis-
tent with psychological trauma. But according to which definition? Trauma,
in its modern theoretical manifestation, has a history reaching back to Vic-
torian medical research on hysteria (Masson 1984). Freud redefined the
concept several times throughout his life, as his research migrated from
melancholic patients to soldiers. He outlined trauma vaguely in his essay
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) as “any excitations from outside
which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” of the
ego (29). And the formation of Trauma Studies in the humanities and social
sciences during the past three decades has only added further, nuanced defi-
nitions of this already difficult category of human experience. Even if they
were to agree on a definition, many commentators still question whether
trauma as a primarily individual experience can describe a society-wide
experience (Radstone 2000; Sturken 1997; Walker 2005). Both issues are
 Introduction 3
important to address here, especially since our collective project throughout
this volume is to add another difficult concept—ecology—to discussions of
trauma in the media.
What is trauma? According to Judith Herman’s widely accepted psychi-
atric definition, “traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily
integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death” (33). These
events are beyond the realm of everyday experience because they overwhelm
our faculties, “call into question basic human relationships” and “shatter
the construction of self that is formed and sustained in relation to others”
(51). Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery (1992), investigates a range
of traumatic experiences, outlining the elements that unite and distinguish
them, and yet trauma remains a difficult concept. The author, who has been
extensively cited and validated for her leading research, has also been cri-
tiqued (Suleiman 2007). A key issue, and site of confusion, is trauma’s ref-
erent: Trauma characterizes, first, the traumatic event; second, the victim’s
response; and third, his or her ensuing condition. Commentators must be
precise, then, when referring to one of these facets of the traumatic experi-
ence. Once the event has taken place, the victim furthermore experiences
trauma as an absence, presumably because the human sensorium protects
itself by attempting to tune out the traumatic stimulus. Nightmares, flash-
backs and phobias are a testament to the inadequacy of these protective
psychic mechanisms; ultimately, the trauma has to be retroactively regis-
tered, in order for the patient to heal. This process is retrospective because,
as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub note in their study Testimony: Crises
of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1991), “trauma
precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the
human mind are temporarily knocked out” (72). Trauma is thus confound-
ing in its definition and its lived experience.
Another site of inquiry is the question of who, exactly, is traumatized
by cataclysmic events. According to Herman’s description, only a victim
who directly experienced the original event would qualify as traumatized.
Indeed, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Men-
tal Disorders (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association 1994) specifies
that “natural disasters” are a common cause of psychological trauma, but
only for those victimized first hand. This definition makes intuitive sense:
Those injured and faced with deadly circumstances themselves can emerge
traumatized. Others who bear witness to the traumatic event, according to
this account, do not undergo its traumatic effects. Still, a range of schol-
ars assert that varieties of trauma exist, challenging the above definition
(Caruth 1995; Felman and Laub 1991; Kaplan 2008). Witnesses and even
media viewers report feeling traumatized after seeing catastrophes unfold in
their midst or on screen. How do we as media scholars address this version
of mediated trauma? And how do these variations of trauma—which circu-
late among masses of viewers and throughout society—differ from descrip-
tions of trauma in the individual?

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