Environmental Representation in Popular Culture An Ecocritical Analysis of Film

Popularized at the turn of the century, the coining of the geological epoch of the Anthropocene is intended to recognize the geological period where human activity has a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystem. With the proliferation of the term, there has been a push to re-evaluate humanity’s relationship with the environment, from science to economics. This study evaluates human’s relationship to the environment within film. Specifically, this study is a meta-analysis of environmental representations common throughout popular film. A selection of 55 movies was screened for this study. These films covered a variety of genres, such as Westerns, sci-fi, horror, and documentary, and spanning 93 years, with release dates from 1927 through to 2020. The filmography predominantly features Hollywood films but also includes Japanese, Iranian, Indian, and Indigenous productions. I evaluated these films using an ecocritical approach. Due to ecocriticism's interdisciplinary nature, textual, ideological/theoretical, and genre approaches were also methods used in the meta-analysis. The study also included an outreach component, as twenty-four blog articles and ten podcast episodes were produced reviewing the films from the study's filmography. These media were published on a website created for the project, where analytic data such as site traffic and reader/listener comments were collected. This data, quantitative and qualitative, was part of an assessment of Internet media publication's ability to establish public spaces/dialogue surrounding film. The meta-analysis reveals that depictions of the environment fall into a selection of tropes. These tropes are not unique to film, each originating in older media such as painting and literature and reinforcing longstanding environmental beliefs and opinions. How these beliefs are represented, however, are unique to the medium. Conclude that environmental tropes have remained mostly consistent across time and genre, at least where Hollywood productions are concerned. While optimistic of film's potential to act as a vehicle from which to engage the public on environmental issues, it is yet to be seen how this potential can be realized.