Media Mindfulness

Environment - Movies - New York Times:

Dumping Hollywood villains of the past — drug lords, aliens, North Korean dictators, even the news media — for an environmental bête noire carries risks for studios that don’t mind frightening viewers, as long as it’s all in fun. But it also hints at the possibility of more sophisticated entertainment, and perhaps even the kind of impact that “The China Syndrome,” with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, exerted on the nuclear power industry when it came out in 1979.
That an environmental consciousness should be slipping into the film industry’s prospective blockbusters is not surprising in an era when Al Gore and friends have picked up an Oscar (and hefty box-office returns) for their global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and when the debate it fed has largely slipped its partisan moorings.

This is an interesting article from the Times about the trend of “earth revenge” movies. I’m all for our planet reclaiming its health, but I hope these Hollywood films don’t fall back on the same old tropes that it takes one heroic figure to save the world (i.e The Matrix) or that violence by the hero will solve the problem. These are metaphors that are reminiscent of the doctor administrating deadly cancer therapy to a sick patient. Healing is a collaborative process. The collective intelligence emerging from the Web 2.0 is probably a better model. Two books that are very helpful on these subjects:

“EcoMedia”

and

“Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software”

I recommend EcoMedia as an erudite (it’s somewhat theoretical) explanation of environmental themes in film, and Emergence (very accessible) as an amazing exploration of the concepts of emergence– the rise of collective intelligence.

Technorati Tags: ecology, ecomedia, emergence, movies