Description:
Finding strategies for today's environmental movement in classic science fiction films
What can science fiction film tell us about the course of the modern ecological movement? On Life Support traces how the environmental concerns of the 1970s were embedded in the eco-dystopian cinema of the era--and considers its implications for ecological thought and activism today.
Illuminating the patterns that shape our thinking about nonhuman nature, Matthew I. Thompson pairs iconic films such as Soylent Green and Silent Running with the transformational environmentalist texts that inspired them and kick-started the modern environmental movement, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thompson examines this confluence of literature and cinema to show how, as they translated environmentalism for Hollywood's audiences, these movies distilled the movement's concepts into a form that revealed their inherent contradictions.
A sensitive analysis of the tensions that complicate environmentalist praxis--especially between desire and fear in the activist impulse--On Life Support offers a timely critique of the politics of environmental containment and control, calling instead for a politics of interconnection and contamination. It is, after all, by inviting complexity and chaos that we begin to undermine the myth of human mastery, letting nature flourish on its own terms.
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Review Quotes:
"Urgent and compelling, On Life Support reveals the deep imbrication of 1970s environmental writing with the classic dystopian sci-fi cinema it inspired. Against delusions of control and dreams of life in hermetic space, Matthew I. Thompson argues for an unruly ethics of ecology here on Earth. Or, in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, this book teaches us how to start worrying about the planet and love our impurities."--Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene
"Innovative in approach, On Life Support offers a novel juxtaposition of modern environmentalism and sci-fi cinema. Joining fiction and nonfiction as well as written and visual texts, Matthew I. Thompson's cross-media approach to rhetorical figuration crystallizes the contradictions of late-twentieth-century environmentalism and the limitations they pose for the movement's legacy. A must-read for ecomedia scholars." --Amy Rust, author of Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967-1974