Hollywood Utopia: Ecology In Contemporary American Cinema

Pat Brereton Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema “...Its clarity, its reach, its honesty and its originality should ensure this book a place on the shelves of any media scholar and many Green activists.” Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite, together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research and is used extensively to examine the most influential global medium of all time. This book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from the 1950s to the present. Such a study has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, Westerns, nature and road movies are extensively analysed, while privileging particular ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. Contents include: • Hollywood Utopia: Ecology and Contempoary American • Cinema Dr. Pat Brereton is Chair of the B.Sc. in Multimedia, and a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Dublin City University. • Nature Film and Ecology: Westerns, Landscape and Road • Movies • Conspiracy Thrillers and Science Fiction: 1950s to1990s • Postmodernist Science Fiction Films and Ecology This book offers an intriguing and ambitious prospect: an attempt to unearth the emergence of an ecologically-based worldview pervading at least Western consciousness. The author adopts a Raymond Williams-style approach to this project, engaging in deep textual analysis of the Hollywood blockbuster with a view to identifying whether those projects are implicitly informed by some kind of subliminal ecoconsciousness. (Dr. Roddy Flynn, Dublin City University) ISBN 1-84150-117-4 intellect PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE United Kingdom www.intellectbooks.com 9 781841 501178 The fruit of years of painstaking study, Pat Brereton's Hollywood Utopia is a landmark in the emerging field of ecological media criticism. The more urban human societies become, the more our media reflect upon the landscapes, the animals and the fragile unities of our planet. Of no media formation is this more true than of Hollywood, as Brereton argues in this meticulously researched and carefully organised work. Far from trashing the planet, Hollywood films have, Brereton claims, a tradition stretching back to the 1950s of care and concern for humanity estranged from its roots, and a world at risk of destruction. Through innovative analyses of Jurassic Park, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, Star Trek, Terminator 2 and Blade Runner among countless older and newer films, Brereton traces a utopianism often overlooked in traditional film criticism. Not only films with explicitly Green agendas like Emerald Forest and Medicine Man, but in films noted for far different qualities exhibit the saving grace of nature. Films like Dances With Wolves or the towering spectacle of the tornado's heart in Twister provide grist for an original and far-reaching account of the place of nature in contemporary popular cinema. Dissent and disorder emerge in science fiction films of the 1950s and blockbusters of the early 21st century. The book traces complex negotiations with the meanings of nature and humananity's place in it through costume dramas and high-tech special effects bonanzas, always with an eye to the telling contradiction and the emergence of a generalised and liberal but nonetheless impressive and perhaps hea