One of the few cli-fi films directed by a woman, Jennifer
Phang’s Half-Life (2008), focuses less on monstrous nature than family
drama. But by connecting eco-disasters caused by climate change with the
destruction of the family unit, the film provides a way to personalize these
issues, adding relevance to destruction caused by Anthropogenic climate change.
The film centers on the coming-of-age stories of a
precocious boy Timothy (Alexander Agate) and his jaded sister Saura (Julia
Nickson).Timothy’s drawings and Saura’s
imaginative powers provide them with an escape from a confining home-life.
Together they save their self-destructive mother (Sanoe Lake) from her
charmingly manipulative boyfriend (Leonardo Nam) and finally reinvent their
world in a spectacular conclusion.
Half-Life draws on multiple genres to
fulfill this challenging conclusion, integrating animation and supernatural
elements with generic expectations of the typical family melodrama. This story,
however, literally parallels the troubling consequences of climate change
surrounding them, amplifying global cataclysms from species extinction to
tsunamis by associating them with their personal traumas in the home. In many
scenes, a television in the background shows these scenes of destruction, clearly associating coastal flooding with global warming as the tension in the household
“warms up.”
In Half-Life,
the destruction of the natural world is in direct relationship with the
destruction of the family. The only escape is the creation of a new world that
hybridizes approaches, a point illustrated by the ethnically ambiguous family
members and their friends.
After reading and watching Winter’s Bone for perhaps
the fifth time, I’m struck by the works’ connections with early 20th
Century American women regionalist literature. In Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground,
for example, the protagonist Dorinda first chooses what Gayatri Spivak calls
"soul making" over "child bearing" and desire for land over
desire for man in order to gain an individuality, a role which at first seems
to implicate her in the "imperialistic project" she seeks to evade.
Yet by cultivating land in order to make it more fertile, I contend that
Dorinda transcends the exploitative potential of the Victorian patriarchal
family and the implications of an "individualism" that exists only in
conflict with an "other."
Dorinda transcends the imperialism of the patriarchal family
and of an individualism that subjugates others only when she sees the land not
as an enemy but as a provider with which she has a symbiotic relationship:
"Only when she saw victory in terms of crops, not battles, could she feel
that she was part of it That men should destroy one another appeared to her
less incredible than that they should deliberately destroy the resources which
made life endurable" (357). Dorinda's acknowledgment of the land's gifts
and her willingness to receive them at first seem to align her with Spivak's
"subject" who acts as "recipient." But Dorinda not only
receives from but gives back to the land she eventually joins. When scanning
Old Farm's acres, Dorinda acknowledges the interdependent relationship she
shares with the land: She "felt the quickening of that sympathy which was
deeper than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for
an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end,—the living communion
with the earth under her feet" (Barren 408).
Ultimately, because she blurs the boundaries between herself
and the land she seeks to cultivate, Dorinda joins "the whole movement of
life" (Barren xii) and redeems herself without exploiting others:
"Tut your heart in the land,' old Matthew had said to her. "The land
is the only thing that will stay by you'.... While the soil endured, while the
seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of sowing and
reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never despair of
contentment" (408). By putting her heart into the land, Dorinda does not
disembody or eviscerate herself. She is not consumed by the property she owns.
Instead, by blurring boundaries between herself and the land, she obfuscates
mind/body and reason/emotion distinctions her apparent adherence to Calvinism
and Cartesian mathematics would uphold, because for her the heart ultimately
serves not only as the center of emotion but also of reason, life, and the
soul. By putting a heart that contains thought, the reason to which the land as
metaphorical seat of emotion is traditionally opposed, Dorinda narrows the
separation between herself, nature and her land. So, by putting her heart into
the land, Dorinda gains a "serenity of mind" (408) that surpasses any
romantic love she may once have felt.
The heart Dorinda puts into the land combines thought,
emotion, and the spirit. Even though Dorinda does first participate in a
project that oppresses "others," her choice to offer her heart to the
land and accept its heart in return, allows her to fully recover "her
girlhood capacity to experience joy and beauty" (Winniford 151), her own
soul and emotions. "She saw the rim of the harvest moon shining
orangeyellow through the boughs of the harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered
the time when loveliness was like a sword in her heart, she knew that where
beauty exists the understanding soul can never remain desolate" (Barren
409).
Instead of child-bearing, Dorinda first chooses soul-making,
but she declines participation in much of the social mission associated with
making souls when she rejects racism and heterosexism through her relationship
with Fluvanna and spurns traditions that make the ground and its
"owners" barren rather than fertile. Finally, Dorinda becomes more
than what Spivak calls "the feminine subject rather than the female
individualist" (811). When Dorinda acts as recipient to the contentment
the land provides, while providing the land with "Endurance [and]
Fortitude" {Barren 408), she transcends "the irreducible
recipient-function" (Spivak 811).7 By giving her heart away to that which
so willingly gives its own, Dorinda re-covers thought, spirit, and emotion, all
that her heart represents.
Gender
sometimes plays a complex role in contemporary cli-fi films. In The Colony (2013) directed by Jeff
Renroe, masculinity takes center stage for the few human survivors forced
underground by a sudden ice age caused by global warming. Colony 7, one of
these outposts, receives a distress signal from another, Colony 5.
Masculine
bodies rule in this post-climate apocalyptic world where its heroes and
villains are all male. The leader of Colony 7, Briggs ((Laurence Fishburne),
organizes an expedition with his assistant Sam (Kevin Zegers) and young recruit
Graydon (Atticus Dean Mitchell) to investigate, leaving one of the few women,
biologist Kai (Charlotte Sullivan) in charge.
But
Briggs’ former military partner Mason (Bill Paxton) quickly seizes control.
After a two-day walk, Briggs, Sam, and Graydon reach Colony 5 and discover the
reason for the signal: a savage group of male cannibals has slaughtered all but
one of the colonists. In The Colony,
men (Briggs and Sam) must save humanity from other savage men (Mason and the
cannibals).
The
cli-fi message comes through mainly in the frozen landscape and a message
showing that another colony has successfully manipulated the weather to reveal
the sun and the fertile soil beneath the ice. Kai’s role connects to this
message, since as a biologist, she has gathered and preserved the seeds they
will need to survive in “the warm place” where Sam leads them.
