The Comic Eco-Hero Across Sub-Genres

Comic Eco-Disaster films sometimes highlight comic eco-heroes that respond to the heroic motifs of tragedy by comically constructing the characters of drama to serve both a comic purpose and a satirical premise and plot. In an eco-comedy, heroes with more than one tragic flaw are fore-grounded. According to Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, heroes in comedies tend to bumble and require a community of allies to succeed. Eco-comedies as diverse as Tank Girl (1995), Rango (2010), and the current Attack the Block (2011) demonstrate this move from tragedy to comic hero in the eco-disaster genre.  

Directed by Rachel Talalay, Tank Girl centers on a comic and communal fight against the tyranny of a mega-corporation Water and Power that dominates future Earth’s remaining drinkable water supply. In the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, water is under the thumb of Water and Power’s CEO Kesslee (played by Malcolm McDowell,) the over the top villain at its head. 

His demise is only possible when comic eco-hero Rebecca (Lori Petty), aka "Tank Girl” joins forces with a ragtag team that includes ill-treated pilot Jet Girl (played by Naomi Watts) and a band of genetically modified “Rippers” led by T-Saint (played by Ice-T). Together they defeat" Kesslee and distribute water equally among Earth’s survivors. Reviewer James Berardinelli calls Tank Girl “a high-spirited, madcap example of film making run amok.” Despite its many weaknesses, Tank Girl highlights the strengths of a comic eco-hero, who places the good of the community above the individual.

In an obvious homage to Chinatown noted by critics from Time Magazine to Salon.Com, Rango (directed by Gore Verbinski) also explores water rights issues. In Rango comic eco-hero (and chameleon played by Johnny Depp) attempts to “save a parched Old West-style town [of Dirt] from the depredations of water barons and developers” (O’Hehir “Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation”). In fact, the mayor of Dirt (Ned Beatty), the Western town Rango must civilize, modeled his performance on that of John Huston in Chinatown. With help from a variety of anthropomorphized western characters, Rango (Johnny Depp) successfully returns water to the desert, defeating the water baron mayor (Ned Beatty) and rehabilitating his henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), an obvious homage to Lee Van Cleef’s characters in his Western Films.      

 

The film’s homage to the Western and its typically desert-like setting amplify Rango as satire, parody, and platform for a comic eco-hero. As Roger Ebert asserts, “Beneath its comic level is a sound foundation based on innumerable classic Westerns, in which (a) the new man arrives in town, (2) he confronts the local villain, and (3) he faces a test of his heroism. Dirt has not only snakes but also vultures to contend with, so Rango's hands are full. And then there's the matter of the water crisis. For some reason, reaching back to the ancient tradition of cartoons about people crawling through the desert, thirst is always a successful subject for animation.” Homages to a variety of Westerns reinforce this connection, but the references to Spaghetti Westerns, especially, amplify Rango’s unlikely comic eco-heroic persona. The Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant) character, for example, is modeled after Clint Eastwood’s Western roles. Rango’s historical narrative, however, is also connected with the contemporary world and highlights more current issues surrounding water rights.

Directed by Joe Cornish, Attack the Block (2011) follows a teen gang and its comic eco-hero Moses (played by John Boyega, who later played Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as they defend their South London housing project “block” from an alien invasion on Guy Fawkes bonfire night. But the film takes this genre further by including a focus on comic eco-heroes and at least two intersections between humans and the urban environment in which they live: an exploration of the impact of a “lifeless” urban environment on children and young adults, and an alien attack explicitly connected with the natural world that motivates them to take communal and comic action. Attack the Block begins to interrogate these issues by setting a typical science fiction narrative in a low-income urban housing project.

Moses and his unlikely gang that includes nurse Sam, teens on the block with names like Pest, and Dimples, and pot growers Brewis (played by Luke Treadaway) and Ron (played by Nick Frost) have a fierce loyalty for their “block” and wish to defend it. As a comic eco-hero, Moses must lead the fight based on a second connection with the natural world explored in the film:  feminine pheromones as a motivation for the aliens’ attack. Pheromones are introduced in the film when nerdish pot smoker, Brewis watches a nature program that explains how moths are drawn to their future mates’ pheromones. The message makes sense later, when Brewis notices a luminescent liquid on Moses’ jacket and connects it with the program According to Brewis, “whatever it is, you're covered in it and it seems to be piquing the interest of a rather hostile alien species. I'm just saying... maybe if you took those clothes off, they wouldn't know we're here.” And, Moses, true to his name, leads the aliens away from his friends. As an urban comic eco-film, Attack the Block also illustrates the power of the comic eco-hero, who uses community as a tool to overcome environmental racism and injustice.

This year’s comic-horror hit Get Out from Jordan Peele continues this tradition, with comic hero Chris Washington (played by Daniel Kaluuya) foiling a racist mad scientist plot with help from buddy Rod (played by LilRel Howery). Get Out powerfully interrogates race relations satirically. But it also condemns the Armitage family’s attempts to mess with nature. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I did hear an Italian neuro-surgeon plans to perform the first head transplant (Newsweek).

Science Fest for Earth Day!

What's so Funny about Eco-Diasters Part I

What's so Funny about Eco-Diasters Part I

Deep in Eight Legged Freaks, an ecological comedy from 2002, images from the 1954 film Them! appear briefly on a television screen, reinforcing the mutation of bug-like creatures that serves as the catalyst for the action in both films—ants in the earlier Them! and spiders in Eight Legged Freaks. The homage is direct and loving, but it is 2002, and mutation is now a source of comedy as well as fear. This juxtaposition of the 1950s film footage from Them! with its more recent version, Eight Legged Freaks, also points out the mutation of an older genre—the science fiction warning film—to its comic and, perhaps, less heroic form, from the late1980s until today. 

Films dealing with eco-disasters in the 1950s through the 1970s and early 1980s were a serious affair: See in addition to Them! (1954), Godzilla (1956), The Birds (1963), Frogs (1972), The Swarm (1978), and Silkwood (1983). But later films highlighting similar eco-disasters—beginning with the late 1980s Toxic Avenger series (1985 and 1989) and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and its sequels (1986-1989), and including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Naked Gun 2 ½ (1990)—look at toxic waste dumping, energy overconsumption, and radiation poisoning from a more comic perspective. More recent eco-comedies from Smoke Signals (1999) and Eight Legged Freaks (2002) to Enchanted (2007) and Warm Bodies (2013) continue this move toward comedic eco-disaster. 

These films beg the question, what’s so funny about environmental disasters? But they also point out a change of strategy—laughing about the environment and its degradation may not only stimulate awareness; that laughter might also point out a path toward change, perhaps even showing the consequences of disturbing a pristine ecosystem and offering viable solutions to greedy humans’ exploitation of the natural world. These films suggest, first, that the eco-disaster genre has come of age and can now be satirized through comic versions. They also point to a movement from rugged individualism to a more communal approach to solving ecological problems, producing comic eco-heroes and comic evolutionary narratives. Ultimately, these comic eco-disaster films all exploit historical and current events, either explicitly or implicitly, to make us laugh. 

As comic eco-disaster films, Eight Legged Freaks and WALL-E help illustrate the shift toward satire and parody. Ecological disaster—in the form of toxic waste dumping and its consequences—and a comic plot and characters meld well in Eight Legged Freaks encouraging a call to dispose of toxic waste in environmentally safe ways. Geoff King explains how satire is comedy with a “political edge” (18). Parody, on the other hand, shifts comic motivation from “the social-political arena to that of film forms and conventions, although this distinction is far from always entirely clear” (King 18). 

Eight Legged Freaks includes elements grounded in both satire and parody. When reviewer Rebecca Murray asks director Ellory Elkayem what “the mutant bugs [were] a metaphor for now,” he replies, “If you want to take anything away from [the film], it would be don’t pollute the environment and be careful with toxic waste.” Elkayem also talks about the B-movies from the 1950s he most responds to in his work: Tarantula, Them!, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). For Elkayem, the tribute he plays to these films in Eight Legged Freaks is meant to tell viewers, “Okay, we know what kind of movie we’re in for. Just go with it and have fun and escape for a couple of hours.” 

WALL-E also includes elements of satire and parody. It argues against the overconsumption and waste that (ironically, coming from Disney) destroys our planet’s ecosystem. But it also parodies multiple films in various scenes, from Star Trek in a “Space the final fun-tier” ad and Silent Running (which influenced Director Andrew Stanton) to Blade Runner (1982—and ads encouraging people to leave an overcrowded earth) and RobocCop (1987—as when Eve re-holsters her blaster arm, closely resembling the look and sound of RoboCop stowing away his pistol, including the twirl.