Landscape and the Environment in Hollywood Film

This book systematically explores how popular Hollywood film portrays environmental issues through various genres. In so doing, it reveals the influence exerted by media consolidation and the drive for profit on Hollywood's portrayal of the natural landscape, which ultimately shapes how environmental problems and their solutions are presented to audiences. Analysis is framed by a consideration of how cultural studies can make more theoretical and practical room for environmental concern, thereby expanding its capacity for critical examination. The book begins by introducing the theoretical underpinning of the research as it relates to cultural studies, landscape, and genre. In the chapters that follow, each genre is taken in turn, starting with popular animated family films and progressing through spy thrillers, eco-thrillers, science fiction, Westerns, superhero films, and drama. This book is ideal for students and scholars in a variety of disciplines, including film, environmentalstudies, communication, political economy, and cultural studies.

An active and compelling scholarly effort to carve out a clear space for environmental concern in cultural studies Examination of the intersection of the environment and media remains an understudied area to date, and while this book engages with similar topics and themes in previously-published work, currently there is no existing scholarship that uses genre as a systematic, comparative method and theoretical frame to examine filmic portrayals of the environment Offers a fresh and updated academic work on Hollywood's portrayal of contemporary environmental issues by including many recent Hollywood texts (including global blockbusters like Disney's Frozen) Firmly located within a cultural studies perspective, Moore's examination reveals that Hollywood consistently flattens environmental messages in order to quell viewers' concerns, encouraging inaction instead of action a trend that is both unsurprising given the profit-driven nature of conglomerates and also striking given the increasingly dire environmental news around the globe Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Ellen Moore is a Senior Lecturer at University of Washington Tacoma. She conducts research on racial representations in Hollywood and news media coverage of environmental justice. She lives in Tacoma, Washington with her family and two St Bernards.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Cradle to Crave: The Commodification of the Environment in Family Films.- 3. The Spy Who Saved Me.- 4. Imagining Disaster in the Eco Thriller.- 5. Stranger than (Science) Fiction: Environmental Dystopia in Hollywood Sci Fi.- 6. The Lone Danger: Resource Scarcity in the Western.- 7. Super Green: Sustainable Superheroes Tackle the Environment.- 8. The World Slowly Dies for Profit: the Portrayal of Environmental Issues in Drama.- 9. Conclusion.