Under the Dome and Personal Eco-Trauma

Chai frames Under the Dome with a personal eco-trauma that gains strength when amplified by nostalgia for a less polluted past. Mufson asserts, “Chai combines personal heart-tugging narrative, investigative reporting and explanatory skills to dissect the reasons for the dire air pollution that plagues Chinese cities.” Although much of the film “draws on some aspects of what Bill Nichols calls the ‘expository mode,’” (Edwards) by documenting a slideshow lecture on the stage of a large hall, Chai’s stories transform academic lists of facts into personal portraits. With references to her own personal journey from childhood to motherhood and photographs documenting changes to her own hometown, Chai draws on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia to encourage ecologically sound change.

The most effective example of individual nostalgia revolves around her own pregnancy. By talking about the sore throat she had during her pregnancy, Chai connects pollution with individual trauma. Chai thought nothing of her symptom until her unborn daughter was diagnosed with a benign tumor. The infant had surgery right after her birth, so Chai had to quit her job to take care of her. Because Chai connected the smoke and air pollution with both her cough and her child’s tumor, she only took her daughter outside on clear days, covering her mouth even then. Before her daughter’s birth, Chai had not noticed the toxic air, even though face mask filters looked black after spending only a day outside. Now she yearns for the clean air and water she enjoyed as a child not only for herself, but also for her daughter. To amplify the emotional appeals of such personal nostalgia, the film continually cuts to the audience watching the narrator with grave attention.

            This nostalgic memory ties in with Beijing’s twenty-five days of severe smog alerts in 2013, but her research reveals an ongoing battle with coal smoke from at least the 1970s in China and the 1800s around the world. What make the litany of facts documented by the film palatable are the touches of environmental nostalgia. When discussing the increased amounts of carcinogenic toxins at mining sites, Chai shows us graphs and videos of smog, but these images gain resonance when accompanied by a 2004 portrait of a young child, who had never seen blue sky and white clouds. The girl’s sense of loss broaches the possible future of her own daughter but also draws on both individual and collective environmental nostalgia. We must clean up the air so all of us can see clear blue skies again, Chai asserts through these images.

Chai’s powerful introduction juxtaposes graphs and photographs of cities suffering more polluted days each year with these personal portraits of children unable to remember the clear skies Chai and her audience long for. As in Stephen King’s series, Under the Dome, a series she acknowledges in her film’s title, toxic air has left them feeling trapped and isolated in their homes and businesses, cut off from the outside world of nature.