Open AccessThe rhetoric of ecology in the post-apocalyptic cinematic landscape
Author(s) -
Evdokia Stefanopoulou
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
res rhetorica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2392-3113
DOI - 10.29107/rr2021.2.3
Subject(s) - anthropocentrism , rhetoric , anthropocene , aesthetics , rhetorical question , humanity , meaning (existential) , environmental ethics , sense of place , subject (documents) , sociology , history , ecology , art , literature , philosophy , epistemology , social science , linguistics , theology , library science , computer science , biology
Contemporary post-apocalyptic films portray a world ravaged by ecological catastrophes, and humanity on the brink of extinction. Such films echo the urgent environmental discourses of the Anthropocene, while offering instances of a post-anthropocentric perspective and the new subject-formations it engenders. The article argues that the central rhetorical device that generates an ecocritical perspective in such films is the post-apocalyptic landscape. Cinematic space shapes the meaning of all films, and this is even more emphatic when setting is transformed into landscape (Lefebvre 2006). What is more, in the post-apocalyptic films, the landscape becomes the main site of the films’ “rhetorical enviromentality” (McMurry 2017). The article examines the post-apocalyptic landscape in I Am Legend (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and how it articulates the entangled relation between humans and the collapsing world that surrounds them. Using Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) post-human theory, I contend that these cinematic landscapes hint at an “eco-philosophy of multiple belongings” (Braidotti 2013, 49) and enact “a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world” (Braidotti 2013, 2019). Ultimately, I conclude that the affective appeal of these landscapes implicates the viewer in post-anthropocentric perspectives, thus prompting new modes of environmental consciousness.