Surrealism and the Environment: movies

This post looks at three films that hold cleverly delivered environmental messages once you plough through their surreal exterior.

Eraserhead

Just thinking about this movie again creeps me out, at the time I watched it I was too busy clinging to some shred of reality to think about environmental themes, but they are in there.

This highly surreal black and white horror movie from odd-ball David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man) depicts a desolate industrial world where a man with massive hair is forced to live with his girlfriend as she gives birth to a child. The weird thing is that the premature baby isn't human. It's a giant pale tadpole, that cries incessantly and refuses to eat. 

There is constant industrial noise providing the ambiance and on the protagonist's bedside table (Henry Spencer: pictured left)  is a dead sapling in a pile of dirt.

These are two of the indications that this film is about environmental degradation. The other major message is delivered during the vision, observation or hallucination of the woman behind the radiator. 

In this scene a disfigured, but smiling woman, sings and dances on stage (her song 'In Heaven' is covered by the Pixies when they play live) as what appear to be giant sperms fall lifelessly from the ceiling. As she approaches them she squishes each in turn. 

This film is massively open to interpretation, but I would argue that it is about the effects of pollution on fertility, and children born into that environment. Then again it might just be the one-off-brain-wrong-of-a-man-mental. 

Eden Log

A few years ago I saw a really weird French science fiction horror movie called Eden Log. If anyone has had the chance to watch a Tool music video, it was like that but for an hour and a half. It’s a cold and hostile subterranean world. The protagonist, Tobiac, wakes up in a cave in the mud, with infrequent strobes of artificial light illuminating a corpse next to him wearing a gas-mask.
If you follow the link you will see that most people don’t think much of this 

film, but I reckon for those like me who are interested in weird stuff, it’s an intriguing set up.

Basically the underground, semi-organic complex where this guy wakes up is called Eden Log, and it is somehow powering the world above. Workers are given the promise of a passport to the surface world through their contributions. We find this out through an automated video as most of the workers are gone. Gone where? Well, as the roots of the tree that Eden Log exploits are tapped into, the plant starts to defend itself by releasing toxin. This toxin has mutated the workers into, creepy pale hyper-aggressive monsters. These fight against the security forces wearing haz-mat suits (one of whom was dead next to the Tobiac when he woke up).

Spoiler alert: After making his way up through the complex, Tobiac finds out that prior to his amnesia he was actually head of security. A disembodied voice congratulates him for protecting the secrets of ‘Eden Log’. The secret is that after workers work themselves to death (provided they don’t mutate), having fed on the plant’s sap for unnatural energy, their corpses are used to feed the tree.

The tree is a power source for the world on the surface. Tobiac is disgusted with this situation. He sees that the tree must return to a natural cycle to end the slaughter, and uses his own body to feed explosive growth of the plant. The movie finishes with the tree braking out of its glass house and covering the city in greenery.

There are a few metaphors here. Some are more political, looking at disparity between people working in the worst conditions and those living above the dirt, oblivious. But the environmental theme here carries a warning, not to bastardize natural systems for human benefit, or things start to go wrong.

The over exploitation of rare and valuable natural resources is partially what this is about, which brings me nicely onto the next film.

The Fountain

Originally produced as a visually epic, wordless graphic novel, the Fountain was soon after made into a visually epic psychological-sci-fi movie.*

As this was the brainchild of Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, the Wrestler), it was probably going to be weird, likely to be confusing and certain to be emotionally painful. 

This movie is essentially about life (as vague as that sounds), and the organic
 themes that run through the story, run into the cinematography too. Arronofsky used minimal computer generated effects, relying instead on filming microscopic chemical reactions to create nebulas and other space phenomena in a more ‘organic’ way.

The non-liner narrative goes from Spain in the time of the inquisition (500 years ago), to the present, to the weird and distant future where Hugh Jackman is the only man alive traveling through space towards a dying star inside a bubble with only the Tree of Life for company.

All three narratives star Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as lovers. The plot is complex so I won’t lay it out in detail, but in all instances Hugh Jackman’s character searchers for eternal life through the Tree of Life. In the ‘past’ narrative this is to save the queen of Spain (Weisz) from the inquisition, in the ‘present’ narrative this is to save his dying wife (Weisz) from cancer and in the future it is just to save any life at all.

Spoiler Alert: This movie feels interpretive like Donnie Darko or the end of the Graduate, so I might be getting the wrong end of the stick, but it seems to me that Aronofsky is trying to illustrate the futility of clinging to life, and the danger of pursuing it till it warps nature.

When Hugh Jackman in the ‘past’ finds the Tree of Life in the jungle he uses its sap to heal his wound, that’s fine, but when he gorges himself on it plants burst from his body and he dies. The ‘present’ narrative sees Hugh Jackman’s character in despair as he finds out just too late that a mysterious ‘organic sample’ (from the Tree) could have saved his wife. Determined that “death is a disease”, he endeavors to stop people from dying. In the ‘future’ we wonder if he has succeeded as he is taunted by memories of his dead wife and clings to the dying Tree of Life hoping to revive it in the place that is his destination, the dying star.

Ultimately Jackman’s character learns that his fight against death is futile and finds peace in the acceptance of his fate. The finale is visually stunning, even if Jackman’s lotus position looks a little dodge.

*I also just wanted to mention the score, as it's a massive part in the movie’s impact. It was written by his old buddy Clint Mansell collaborating with one of my favorite bands Mogwai. It’s quite possibly the most gut wrenchingly sad music I have ever heard.