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).
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