Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge Book

List of Illustrations

Introduction Reading the Environment in Popular Cinema 1

1 Ecology and Spectacle in Oil Wells of Baku: Close View: The First Eco-Disaster Film? 19

2 Environmental Politics: Pare Lorentz's The River and the Tennessee Valley Authority 37

3 Reconstructing Underground Urban Space in Dark Days 57

4 Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark? 73

5 Environmental Nostalgia and The Tragic Eco-Hero: The Case of Soylent Green and the 1970s Eco-Disaster Film 91

6 The Comic Eco-Hero: Spoofing Eco-Disaster in Eight Legged Freaks 109

7 Eco-Terrorism in Film: Pale Rider and the Revenge Cycle 127

8 Car Culture and the Transformation of the American Landscape in The Fast and the Furious 143

9 Film Ecology: Simulated Construction and Destruction in Hooper 165

10 Apocalypse as a "Return to Normality" in 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later 181

Conclusion: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and its Skeptics: A Case of Environmental Nostalgia 195

Filmography 207

Works Cited 215

Index 223