An Ecological Approach to the Cinema of Peter Weir

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Acknowledgment

The author wishes to acknowledge the timely assistance of Paula Willoquet-Maricondi in completing the final draft of this essay.

Pat Brereton is the Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at Dublin City University. His books include Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2005); Continuum Guide to Media Education (2001) and the Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema (2007) with Roddy Flynn. He has also edited a special issue of Convergence: The Journal of New Media on the subject of DVD add-ons, and is committed to a broad range of interdisciplinary study and research.

Notes

1. Taylor goes on to suggest that such an ethic produces several basic rules of conduct: the “Rule of Non-maleficence” prohibiting harmful and destructive acts done by moral agents; the “Rule of Non-interference” which refrains from placing restrictions on the freedom of individual organisms and requires a general “hands-off” policy with regard to whole eco-systems and biotic communities, as well as individual organisms; the “Rule of Fidelity,” applying only to human conduct in relation to individual animals that are in a wild state and are capable of being deceived or betrayed by moral agents; and the “Rule of Restitutive Justice,” that is, the duty to restore the balance of justice between a moral agent and a moral subject when the subject has been wronged by the agent.

2. For a distinction between light and dark ecology, see Jonathan Porritt's Seeing Green (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Arne Naess's formulation of the distinction between a shallow and a deep ecology movement first appeared in 1973 in Inquiry (Oslo). It is reprinted in George Sessions, ed. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (Boston, London: Shambala, 1995. 151–55). According to Naess's definition, shallow ecology is characterized by a “fight against pollution and resource depletion.” Its main objective is “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The deep ecology movement is a “rejection of the man-in environment image [in] favor of the relational total-field image.” Naess outlines six other characteristics of deep ecology: biospherical egalitarianism; diversity and symbiosis; anti-class posture; fight against pollution and resource depletion; complexity, not complication; and local autonomy and decentralization. Through this distinction Naess advances the notion of ecosophy, an ecological movement informed by the science of ecology and by “a philosophy of ecological harmony and equilibrium” (emphasis in the original, 155).

3. Like other filmmakers who foreground landscape in their films, Weir epitomizes the ability to use the “therapeutic romantic power of nature” (Brereton Hollywood Utopia 17) to help audiences overcome the distresses of modern living, often using a sense of irony and even critical distance that avoid degeneration into didactic ecological expression.

4. For example, see my paper “Nature Tourism and Irish Film” in Irish Studies Review 14. 4 (2006): 407–20.

5. There was strong opposition from the Amish community during the making of this film. For instance, it was claimed that elders would never have allowed the McGillis and the Ford characters to “live” together and adopt “western values.” This necessary ambiguity reinforces the belief that popular cultural texts, to become commercially successful, must accommodate sometimes mutually exclusive and even opposing readings.

6. But as Rayner correctly points out, the Amish “primitives” embody a communal form of violence by the way they endorse a “restrictive bible-based patriarchy” (165).

7. Harking back to a Griersonian form of documentary “direct address,” this eco-story is topped and tailed by a poetic evocation of the pleasures of communion with and in nature.

8. See www.spiritualityandpractice.com.

9. Gardeners have often been eulogized within Hollywood, from romantic outsiders like Rock Hudson in Douglas Sirk's 1955 classic All that Heaven Allows to the innocence of Peter Sellers in Hal Ashby's Being There (1979).

10. See for example David Justin Hodge's “A Desperate Education: Reading Walden in All that Heaven Allows,” in Film/Philosophy 8 (2006): 1–15 for an insightful study of the explicit foregrounding of this book in the film while quoting passages aloud by Cary Scott (Jane Wyman). Far from being simply “a nostalgic nod to a great ecological thinker,” the book's solution to 1950s pressure towards conformity is the need for “patience” as a necessary precondition for nurturing any life form.

11. The script is based on two of the massive 20 volume series of novels by Patrick O’Brien about Navy Captain Jack Aubery (Russell Crowe) and ship surgeon and naturalist Dr. Stephen Marurin (Paul Bettany). The story involves the sailing out on British Frigate HMS Surprise in 1805 to see the richness and strangeness of life on the far side of the world. The film is set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and involves stalking a much larger French warship, the Acheron, near the coast of South America. The narrative trajectory contrasts Aubery, who represents military necessity and rigid discipline, and his best friend and surgeon, who stands for humanist values and the demands of science.

12. “England is under threat of invasion, and though we are on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This is England.” The captain affirms not just in allegorical terms that “this ship is Britain.” The enemy in the original novel was an American ship and Weir and his screenwriters apparently felt it necessary to change this in the interests of narrative cohesiveness. One could suggest that, particularly post 9/11, such transference has important ideological implications. Bryan Appleyard, a columnist in the Sunday Times (December 21, 2003) suggests that the “theme of nationhood was the most important in 2003” with sub-themes including “the condition of America and the nature of leadership.” As Benedict Anderson and others theorize, nations are “imaginative constructs” that have ostensibly become less relevant within a post-colonialist and globalized world. Maybe in this new century, however, old nationalist (imperialist) narratives underpinning the American dream are re-asserting themselves, particularly with the paranoid growth of world insecurity and fears. Many would argue that older more patriotic notions of nationalistic fervor are again becoming culturally relevant and politically meaningful. Postmodern playfulness and the valorizing of “marginalized otherness” as representative of progressive human representation appears to have waned with the reaffirmation of polarizing orthodoxies. War films in particular serve this ideological project and this film appears to promote this regressive agenda with the enemy remaining undifferentiated.

13. For example, such a discipline seeks to examine environmentalism and the nature of human-environment interaction using a number of useful cognitive theories including “Arousal, Load and Adaptation” (See Kremer et al. 23–25) which have not to my knowledge been applied in film studies, yet could present useful strategies for deepening our understanding of how film can function as teacherly texts for its audiences.