Movie 666

By Demon

We live in it, we breath it, we drink it, and we destroy it, but where is it cinema? It fair to say that movies dealing with the natural environment are rare in today’s theaters.

Movies, almost universally, deal with interpersonal relationships and the struggles of goal seeking humans. Rarely do these goals involve the natural environment in any direct sense. Indirectly, the natural environment is always present through its absence: it is profoundly ignored as a topic in cinema.

A modern day Sarnon? Colorado representative Scott McInnis

Ignored, despite dire warnings of global meltdown, vanishing wilderness, extinction of species, overpopulation. Despite the proof in all our lives — whether it be the quality of the air we breath, the evermore crowded and expanding freeways, or the continued disappearance of open wild space and competition amongst ourselves to lay claim to what is left. While this apocalypse of Biblical proportions unfolds in our surrounding world, we gather in dark theaters to drown ourselves in urban fantasies and interior dramas.

To be sure, nature has made its appearance in cinema over the years, and this appearance has taken myriad forms. Nature has torn apart man in disaster movies, man has torn apart nature in war movies, man has homesteaded nature in early westerns and become one with nature in later ones. But little has been said in cinema of the hyperactive rate at which current nature is vanishing. Even less has been said about the solution to this problem.

Which makes Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers somewhat unique in mainstream cinema. Not only do we witness the wonton destruction of the forest by Sarnon the evil magician, but we actually see the forest take up arms against the evildoers. Sarnon rips massive oaks from their foundations with the gusto spirit of any greedy land developer and uses them to build his war machine. Eventually, the animate elder trees of the forest grow wise to his ways and decide to take the factory down. They march from the forest, battle an army of axe and fire wielding orcs, and finally blow up the dam that powers the factory.

With its portrait of vengeful trees and collapsing dams, Two Towers has presented us with some of the most overt and radically subversive images in regard to the natural environment ever seen in the mainstream multiplex. The message is clear: fight back.

It is ironic, of course, that in today’s world, the efforts of the pissed off trees and hobbits would quickly be branded as the work of ecoterrorists standing in the way of progress. Because although in cinema talking trees and hobbits are heroes, in real life silent trees and environmentalists mostly just stand in the way of new ski areas and timber sales and housing developments.

Indeed, the hobbits that rallyed the forest would certainly be jailed by some outspoken Sarnon figure - George Bush, Gale Norton, Scott McInnis… the list of corporate politicians with a stake in exploiting what remains of the natural world is as thick as the bark of a giant sequoia. So the action of the trees in Two Towers leaves us with the question: who are the true ecoterrorists - the forest and its allies or those destroying the landscape with their pulleys and bulldozers and condos and orc factories?

The Two Towers answers the question in its own way. Towers not only depicts the destruction of nature by man as an act of evil that must be challenged, but calls for a new perspective on the relation between man and the world as a whole. For man is only one of the cast of characters in Middle Earth, a land of dwarves, orcs, elves, and hobbits with the latter race serving as the locus of the story. Although man figures heavily in the series, man is not privileged in regard to other lifeforms.

Ultimately, it is the mild living hobbits who live simple lives amidst the greenery of nature who present us with an alternative lifestyle and perspective to our own. The meek hobbits, with their simple pleasures amidst the greenery of nature present us with an alternative to the polluted and gloomy war torn cities and keeps of the humans. They live amongst nature, not on top of it, and are but one of many lifeforms that share the planet, forests and trees included.

Related posts:

1. Film and the Future: Media After September 11
2. Blood and Animation: Princess Mononoke
3. Lost in the Woods: The Blair Witch Project
4. Psychos in the Muck: The Hunted
5. Spielberg’s Lilly Pond

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