Spielberg’s Lilly Pond
SKG Dreamworks, unsatisfied tormenting viewers with innocuous movies like Mouse Hunt and the Peacemaker (okay, they’ve made a couple good ones too), is currently destroying one of the last remaining wetlands in Los Angeles County with its new studio development.
How a company spearheaded by an oftentimes moralistic director like Steven Spielberg can fill with dirt and cement a rare natural resource like the Ballona Wetlands is almost beyond understanding. Of course, if you use Spielberg’s films as a measuring stick, the director has always been more than a little hostile in regard to marine life. Consider the fate of the hungry shark in Jaws — imbued with infernal strength and an almost human appetite for destruction, Jaws the Shark is blown to smithereens by the local cop who speaks a final “take this you sonofabitch” salutation. In terms of worthy lifeforms, the alien in ET was good enough to save from destruction, but he came from another planet, could levitate bicycles, and had googly eyes.
Spielberg, as a director, has always painted with broad, emotional strokes, rarely delving beneath the surface of an issue: alien good, scientist bad; human good, shark bad. His films don’t inform so much as confirm the already known, even if the already known is sometimes false (as in the demonic nature of sharks in Jaws).
The simplistic mechanism in Spielberg’s cinema apparently infects his personal philosophy as well, at least in regard to the environment. To Spielberg, a flood control zone is an ecosystem. When asked about the Ballona development at a press conference, a snide Spielberg invited all of the local frogs to come live in his lilly pond, since a parcel of Ballona is to be set aside for restoration. The anticipated lilly pond, to make matters worse, has been declared by the developers’ own biologist as environmentally unsound, nothing more than a flood control pool for urban runoff. Anyone already familiar with such areas in Los Angeles recognizes them as breeding grounds for bacteria and collection zones for trash washed from city streets.
Spielberg needs to seperate his filmic fantasy from physical reality and place his Dreamworks studio in an area that could benefit from a large commercial development (like South Central or Pico Union). Find out more about this issue and what you can do to stop the destruction of this valuable habitat.
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- Inglourious Basterds
- Stanley Kubrick and the Death of Cinema
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