Jana Radošinská, Zuzana Kvetanová, Ján Višňovský, Andrej Brník: ENVIRONMENTAL TOPICS IN GLOBALIZED CINEMA: SOCIAL MEANINGS IN WALL-E, AVATAR AND INTERSTELLAR
Original Paper
Jana Radošinská, Faculty of Mass Media Communication, Slovak Republic
Zuzana Kvetanová, Faculty of Mass Media Communication, Slovak Republic
Ján Višňovský, Faculty of Mass Media Communication, Slovak Republic
Andrej Brník, Faculty of Mass Media Communication, Slovak Republic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59014/OCFZ1613
Keywords:
Avatar, climate fiction, environment, globalized cinema, Interstellar, WALL-E
Abstract
In globalized cinema, portrayals of polluted Earth and critical remarks associated
with lack of people’s environmental responsibility are rather scarce, but they do exist.
The paper explains how and why such motifs are incorporated into mainstream film
production. The main aim of the text is to identify key popular film stories able to
offer spectacular as well as meaningful images of environmentalism and implicit
critique of people’s indifference toward protecting the nature. The paper works with
the assumption that while most Hollywood feature films representing the so-called
climate fiction tend to focus on natural disasters and grim images of the future that
involve humankind struggling to survive, we are still able to identify a range of film
projects which explore new variations of this topic and/or further develop the cinematic
social meaning bound to the “man against the nature” trope. Three different
popular feature films – WALL-E, Avatar, and Interstellar – are examined in more
detail through discourse analysis. Our results suggest that some of the most popular
feature-length films focused on environmental topics tend to offer pessimistic,
dystopian visions of humankind’s future and promote the strangely appealing idea
of humans giving up on the nature they have destroyed and actually leaving the
unhabitable Earth.
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