Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary

摘要

Global ecocide is usually envisioned as catastrophe. This is why themes of chaos and disaster dominate most feature films that consider large-scale environmental change and a total or near-total destruction of the biosphere. The only two moving creatures left on the now brown planet are a nameless roach and an endearing, anthropomorphized robot called WALL-E, who passes his days compacting trash and his nights in a truck where he collects memorabilia of human life on earth. According to Carroll, different film genres rely on different combinations of emotional responses in their storytelling, but all of them are tied to the films main characters. William Cronon has famously argued that for many Americans wilderness is imagined as 'an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness'.