Awakening from Neoliberal Rationalities: The Ecological Conversion of Brit Marling's Protagonist in The East

Abstract

in the east (2013), actor Brit Marling plays Jane Owen, a young and ambitious private intelligence operative who has infiltrated an underground environmentalist organization that threatens the interests of polluting corporations. As Sarah Moss—the drifter alter ego Jane plays to get access to the eco-activists’ hideout—the protagonist will embark on an eye-opening doppelganger experience that shakes her ideological principles. Her eco-utopian conversion can be read under the light of the rising discredit of a “neoliberal rationality” that economized existence and democracy (Brown 10)—a demystification of individualist, exploitative, and competitive “hunter” logics (Bauman, Liquid Times 100–03) that runs parallel to a paradigm shift “from an unquestioned anthropocentric perspective to an ecocentric one” (Willoquet-Maricondi 5).The following pages examine the three stages of Jane's ontological transformation in the movie: first, her everyday life as a workaholic citizen comfortably settled in the neoliberal status quo; then her undercover time with eco-activists in the underground organization The East, when she learns about the art of cooperation and develops an environmental consciousness; and last, Jane's eco-utopian turn after breaking with her former lifestyle and committing to a sustainable future. As will be argued, the film formally supports Jane's post-neoliberal eco-utopian turn, holding that green transformative agendas require the integrating and nurturing methodological perspectives of ecology rather than utilitarian violence and counter-power dialectics.The East sets out a dialectical opposition between pro- and anti-establishment modes of living from its opening scene. The film starts with a promotional video by The East that puts together images of contaminated seas and wildlife with a recording in which hooded activists are sneaking into a CEO's mansion. Inside the house, security cameras record how they “poison” everything inside with the same crude that the executive's oil corporation dumps into the ocean. A voice-over speech accompanies the images: “It's easy when it's not your home—easy when it's not your life, the place where you sleep, your kids, your wife. But when it's your fault, it shouldn't be so easy to sleep at night.” Right after the video and the film's title shot, Jane, the protagonist, is introduced to viewers in a close-up. She is a young woman in her mid-twenties, lying on her bed, her gaze aimed at a distant spot, and biting her nails as she waits for the alarm clock to beep—an image that resonates with the reference to sleep troubles mentioned in the opening video. The following shot shows a man hugging her as he says, “No matter what happens today, you're still a winner for me.” “I'm only a winner if I get it,” she replies with a nervous smile, turning to face him as he jokes about her “mysterious assignment” and how he knew more about her when she worked for the FBI. With a serious expression that rapidly turns into a playful smile, she suggests meeting in a pub later, asks him to wish her luck, and kisses him. Comfortably settled in her bed, Jane's competitive mindset and FBI curriculum posit her as a pro-establishment ideological antithesis to The East's anti-establishment activism in the former video.Remarkably, although Jane's focalization is privileged in the film from this early point onward (mainly via close-ups and point-of-view shots), the mise-en-scène and the actor's performance in the first scenes prompt spectators to keep an ethical distance from the individualist competitive values she embodies. After the introductory scene just described, a cut to a wall full of academic diplomas and medals follows, one of them visibly stating, “Jane Owen, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Advanced Training in Counter Terrorism.” Then Jane enters the frame, moving toward her wardrobe with her dark brown hair tied up over her naked shoulders and sliding a door. An eyeline match cut shows a point-of-view shot of an extremely organized wardrobe with hangers and shelf boxes evenly distributed and plastic laundry wrappings covering shirts and suits of a strikingly sober white, black, and ochre palette. The slight but noticeable handheld camera movements of the point-of-view shot convey her tension, which is confirmed by a frontal close-up that shows her sighing while she analyzes her outfit options for what seems a very important occasion for her. From behind her neck then, we see her pick a suit and inspect it briefly with a rapid look. In one single scene, the film provides intimate access to the protagonist's key personality traits: her anxiety (biting nails in silence before her boyfriend gets up); her determination (she is awake before the alarm clock goes off); her reclusive character (she does not tell her boyfriend what the assignment is about); her performance skills (engaging in a rapid mood change to shift his attention to something else); her efficiency (conveyed by her wall diplomas); and her methodical work-centered personality (disclosed by her neat wardrobe and sober professional clothes). Jane is presented as a woman who wants to fit in the status quo, follow its rules, and thrive in her career as much as possible. According to her own words, she can be a winner only if she gets the assignment—a productivity-driven philosophy that her lost gaze in bed and her sober closet depict as alienating.Still, a shot of a herd of horses racing freely in a green valley, seen from Jane's perspective while she drives her car in the following scene, implies that there is a softer emotional side hidden beneath her tough and spotless professional cover. A slow-paced opera music score highlights the metaphorical meaning of the horses shot, which will appear twice more throughout the movie, punctuating Jane's transition from neoliberal dogmas into ecological awareness. “Serving the nation's capital, you're listening to Washington, DC's premier Christian radio,” a male voice announces, clarifying at once the intra-diegetic origin of the music, Jane's city of residence, and her religious beliefs. Her gray suit and sober expression while driving match the diffused lighting coming from a cloudy sky outside. As she fixes her eyes back on the road ahead, and on a high office building in the distance after the horses’ transcendental parenthesis, the actor's determined expression states that duty and professional goals come first and leave little room for any philosophical digressions that she is not willing to give voice or name at this point.The following scene at Hiller Brood's, the private intelligence firm at which Jane works, reveals the highly competitive neoliberal context where she intends to thrive and the amoral professional referent she looks up to—her boss Sharon (Patricia Clarkson). Looking at herself in a graduation poster while she patiently waits to be called in by her boss, Jane comes across as an obedient disciple willing to follow her mentor's commands. Inside the office, Sharon, a middle-aged, smartly dressed woman, stands by a desk while comparing several candidates’ profiles on a screen. Without looking at her employee or saying hello, though very much aware of her presence, Sharon observes Jane's profile onscreen, which includes private details such as her cover name (Sarah Moss), her specialty (green terrorism), her family background, and a GPS map indicating her location. A big picture of a shipwreck violently sketched in red and black tones on the wall conveys Sharon's proficiency at dealing with risky hostile situations. The sober brownish tones of the decor, international sculptures, and fine furniture give an elegant yet sterile look to an office that, like its owner, seeks to make a power statement rather than make guests feel cozy. Once Sharon decides to turn toward Jane for the first time to ask her, “Who would you choose?” the boss's arrogant expression and emotional detachment epitomize the uncaring elite of a neoliberal establishment that very much enjoys its dominant position over others. Ironically enough, in the shot-reverse-shot sequence that follows, Sharon stands in front of a seated Jane and, looking down at her in a low angle that reinforces her patronizing attitude, warns that her ego could kill her out there while she's working undercover. Then, giving Jane a wrapped box containing a pair of Birkenstock sandals, Sharon confirms that Jane has been selected for the assignment. The brown sandals stand for the counterculture values, ecological ethics, and community ideals Jane will have to perform in her mission. At odds with the spotless high heels both are wearing—evocative of a self-absorbed “postfeminist neoliberal culture” impervious “to the decline of social health, democratic institutions, and meaningful manifestations of citizenship” (Negra and Tasker 25)—the new shoes represent Jane's opportunity to try out an ideological framework frontally opposed to Sharon's Darwinian logics.At this early point in the film, though, Birkenstock sandals and “eco-terrorist” groups simply belong in the realm of an anarchist Other that endangers the status quo Jane has worked so hard to thrive in. She has no moral reservations about the social order in which she has comfortably settled: she follows Sharon's orders, competes against her colleagues for the assignments, accepts having her private life monitored, and takes part in the surveillance of others. Playing by the system's rules, she also believes and trusts its governing religious and political discourses: she listens to a Christian radio station on the road and watches Fox News at home. Point-of-view shots, close-ups, and eyeline matches give viewers access to her “settled” lifestyle and environment. However, the fact that her first appearance in the film is preceded by the promotional video of The East implies that her pro-establishment worldview is challenged from the start, as explained previously. The way The East employs the term “terrorism” to refer to corporations’ polluting activities conflicts with Fox News's and Jane's understanding of the concept. After the sight of agonizing animals covered in crude oil in the opening video, Sharon and Jane's pristine looks come across as an attractive facade that spectators should remain wary of. This way, from the very beginning of the film, the editing prompts viewers to develop the moral reservations that Jane lacks about her neoliberal work ethics and worldview.In this respect, The East can be situated within an international post-recession film corpus critical of self-absorbed and profit-centered lifestyles, along with contemporary movies Shame (2011), Toni Erdmann (2016), The Square (2017), mother! (2017), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Loveless (2017), and Parasite (2019). Workaholic characters and dysfunctional families in these 2010s films illustrate that neoliberal paradigms of progress imply no real development—ontologically, socially, and environmentally speaking. As conveyed by the treadmill on which a childless mother runs at the end of Loveless and The East's title, post-recession cinema often exposes the need to recalibrate a neoliberal socioeconomic compass that actually involves a “permanent threat of extinction” (Beck, Ecological Politics 4–5). In the words of David Harvey, the many “contradictions of capitalism” displayed in the former films can be said to spark hope for an “unalienated” post-neoliberal “relation to nature, to each other, to the work we do and to the way we live and love” (264–69)—a liberating move from the ideological traps and fictions that keep the destitute father in Parasite confined in a mansion's basement. Unlike the latter protagonist, Jane will manage to free herself from such a horizonless dogma.As soon as Jane embarks on her undercover mission, her transformation process begins—a conversion that is purely external at first (blond hair, casual clothing, Birkenstock sandals, bike, and backpack) but soon involves a profound moral makeover. While Jane is dyeing her hair in a motel room to impersonate Sarah (her fake activist identity), the editing still prompts viewers to remain ethically distant from the protagonist by crosscutting her images with another scene in which her boss Sharon is having an elegant dinner with potential clients. Intertwined with Sharon's speech on how her undercover operatives protect polluting corporations’ “good names,” Jane's dyeing process conveys her capacity for deceit and the way both boss and disciple are drawn by profitable amoral assignments. Yet Jane's contented expression when observing her new blond hair in the mirror—a pale yellow tone that suits her blue eyes more than her brown, polished, brushed hair does in the first scenes—points at the positive transformative process she is about to undertake. Lying on the motel bed, Jane removes a golden cross necklace from around her neck and holds it in her hands while praying: “Please give me the strength to do well. To not be arrogant, but to not be weak. Amen.” In a close-up, her head rests on the left side of the bed, contrary to the first time she appears in the film. Her change of perspective, together with the golden cross she takes off and her new hair color, suggests her incipient distancing from what Jane is and stands for—externally speaking now, emotionally and ideologically later.The film aesthetics formally support Jane's makeover into Sarah as soon as she starts building confidence with dropouts and counterculture movements. Open natural settings like the beach where she parties with a group around a fire in the moonlight contrast with the grayish indoor spaces of her home. Her smiley face and freely moving hair while she rides next to others under the sun or listens to banjo music on a train differ from the tense expressions, immaculate makeup, and polished hairdo at the film's beginning. As with her new blond hair, the unregulated rider lifestyle of her undercover mission seems to suit her better than the competitive high-heeled routine at the office. The independent and enigmatic roles Brit Marling plays in Sound of My Voice (2011), Another Earth (2011), I Origins (2014), and The OA series (2016–19) also make Sarah's looks feel more natural than Jane's. Compared to her alter ego's open-air ventures and casual outfits, Jane's immaculate aspect and seriousness seem rigidly imposed—an alienating neoliberal pose to be replaced for her own emotional well-being, according to the film's mise-en-scène and the actor's performance.Once Jane manages to access The East's hideout to get stitches on an arm injury she has self-inflicted for that purpose, the piece of cloth covering her eyes until she arrives at the secret location evokes the eye-opening experience she is about to undergo. In the middle of a forest at night, a lightly lit front door stands for the threshold into a world still unknown. Right after her arrival, Jane gets firsthand access to personal stories like that of Doc (Toby Kebbell): a young doctor who suffers terrible side effects from “Denoxin,” an anti-malaria medicine he prescribed to himself while working as a volunteer in Africa. Listed on the side of the box and therefore legal, those side effects made Doc's sister commit suicide. Still, the pharmaceutical company that produces the drug—a potential client of Sharon's firm—continues to sell it because of the profits they make. “That's how they rape you in broad daylight,” Doc explains to a worried Jane, whose fake identity does not prevent her from feeling a genuine empathy for his distress.In the days that follow, she develops an unexpected emotional attachment to the group and the causes they fight for despite a tense first encounter with Benji (Alex Skarsgård), a long-haired young man whose sect leader aesthetics, enigmatic speech, and initiation rituals Jane dislikes at first. Unusual experiences such as a communal dinner with straitjackets (where the best way to eat is to let others feed you), the evisceration of a deer (who was abandoned in the woods after a “thrill hunt” and whom the group honors by using the animal's meat), and “freeganism” (eating wasted food to avoid unnecessary consumption) make Jane adopt environmental and cooperative prisms alien to her capitalist background. Moreover, the racial, gender, class, and sexual diversity of the activist group—including cross-gender aesthetics in the case of Luca (Shiloh Fernandez) and homosexuality as in the character of Izzy (Elliot Page)—challenge Jane's conservative values. Those imagined as a deviant eco-terrorist threat turn out to be congenial ecological activists with noble principles: eco-utopian youngsters who care for each other and try to repair the damaging effects of an ecocidal status quo.The protagonist's doppelganger game—a fictional figure with utopian potential given the “cognitive and affective displacement” it entails (Levitas 123)—allows Jane to rehearse a lifestyle whose everyday politics are contrary to her own. She participates in a “jam” against the pharmaceutical company that sells Denoxin, which consists in poisoning the champagne of the corporation's executive board with its own unsafe drug. Against Sharon's lack of concern for non-clients (she forbids Jane to warn the board since its firm does not pay for her intelligence services), Doc, Benji, and Izzy's vengeance at least has an ethical objective: the medicine's dropout from the market. Driving back to the hideout after the jam, the three simultaneously repeat one of the promotional mottos The East uses in its YouTube videos to gain public sympathy for its activism: “We are your wake-up call.” Jane's sorrowful expression when she hears these words in the car suggests that the causes the group defends, her friendship with Doc, and the attraction she feels for Benji are making her “soft,” against Sharon's advice. During a break from the assignment, while Jane sits again in front of the television with her boyfriend, she explains that she has been in an unfamiliar country for so long—Dubai, she told him—that home now “feels like a foreign country.” Right after she says so, Paige Williams (Julia Ormond), the vice president of the pharmaceutical firm targeted in the last jam, appears on the news explaining the side effects she is suffering after drinking from a glass poisoned with Denoxin. Williams relates the symptoms of “prosopagnosia,” the same mental illness that made Doc's sister kill herself. Unable to recognize her face in the mirror, Williams feels her mind and body have been “taken hostage”—a self-estrangement that resonates with Jane's foreigner feeling back home. Both Jane and Williams used to be active promoters of a neoliberal establishment that felt secure and prosperous. Now, however, they are well aware of its concealed eco-social side effects thanks to their forced displacement ventures as ecological activist and drug user, respectively.Shortly after, as the Denoxin case media coverage makes Jane's mission more valuable, Sharon sends her back to The East's hideout. The secret place has now turned into a “heterotopia”—an exploratory space that escapes the rules of the status quo and therefore holds a liberating potential, drawing on Foucault's use of the term, where the dividing line between Jane's two identities starts to blur. During her second stay with the group, a communal bathing ritual illustrates Jane's ontological rebirth: her conversion into the environmental values that The East believes in and which the mise-en-scène formally endorses. While Benji, Luca, and Tess (Danielle Macdonald) wash Jane's naked body in a lake surrounded by trees, a close-up of her face looking up into the sunlight while Benji pours water over her head represents a secular baptism into a community guided by ecology and cooperation. Following a conversation with Benji on how “money corrupts everything”—a lesson Benji learned after his rich parents died and he inherited a mansion, which he burned down and which now serves as The East's hideout—Jane's nakedness conveys her detachment from material philosophies like Sharon's. Her physical intimacy with the others inside the water and the clip hanging from her necklace, where a golden Christian cross used to hang, underpin the down-to-earth nature of her rite of passage. This bathing ritual is followed by video footage of an ill boy who died due to high arsenic levels in his home water, after the town river was poisoned by the illegal dumping of Izzy's father's petrochemical company. There are sound environmental and social reasons, the editing suggests, for a systemic cleansing process like the one Jane is undergoing.Nevertheless, the members of The East have different opinions on how to awaken people from their moral lethargy and provide justice for innocent victims like the deceased boy in the video—“collateral damage” in a neoliberal global society of rising inequalities (Bauman, Collateral Damage 1–9). While Jane (playing Sarah) argues for a nonviolent public denouncement of the petrochemical company's illicit activities, Izzy defends an “eye-for-an-eye” strategy that holds individuals—that is, her father—“accountable” for their actions. The next jam finally involves drugging Izzy's father and forcing him and his company's vice president inside the lake where the illegal dumping takes place every night. “You make your living poisoning the habitat and then separate yourselves in gated communities,” Izzy shouts at her father, who eventually accepts his guilt and gets in the toxic water. Then, as shots from the company's guards make the group abandon the place, one of the bullets hits Izzy in the stomach. This turn of events underlines the way ecocidal paradigms of progress threaten the survival of future generations, including the elites’ offspring, as denounced by young ecological activist Greta Thunberg at the 2019 UN's Climate Action Summit (UN News).Back in the forest hideout, while Jane tries to remove the bullet from Izzy's stomach following Doc's instructions, the whole group, standing around the operation table, confronts the dead-end results of their eye-for-an-eye policy. Close-ups of Jane's hands covered in Izzy's blood put across the undercover agent's involvement with the activists and their causes, which is stressed by her sexual encounter with Benji in the forest the morning after. Right after the sex scene, though, Izzy's burial cools down Jane's connection to Benji and his belligerent dialectical worldview. Surrounded by flowers deep in the ground while her mates cover her face in soil, Izzy's naked lifeless body silently disputes Benji's end-over-means revolutionary politics and backs, instead, the nonviolent strategies that Jane advocated for at the meeting prior to the tragic jam.After Izzy's burial, Jane becomes a drifter between two foreign worlds: the neoliberal status quo that her boss Sharon epitomizes, on the one hand, and the anarchist counterculture that Benji embodies, on the other. Her time in The East has thoroughly altered her life aims: she is no longer interested in her boyfriend (who leaves her because he cannot cope with her secrecy), in a comfortable life (she sleeps on the floor rather than on her bed at home), or in becoming a winner in the professional realm, as she was at the beginning. But Benji's eye-for-an-eye utilitarian philosophy does not satisfy her either, especially after she realizes what his final jam is about: the publication of the undercover identities of all the agents working in Sharon's firm except for Jane's, whose surveillance Benji knew about from the start of her mission. “Spy on us, we'll spy on you,” Benji reminds Jane, recalling a motto used in The East's online videos. As Jane reaches the last stage of her doppelganger mission, the sudden reversal of spying roles makes her wonder, once again, what her place is in the us/them dialectical game that both Sharon and Benji call her to play from opposite sides of the ideological board.Jane resolves to take sides with Benji this time and sneak into Sharon's office to get the list of agents’ names. A profile long shot of the protagonist looking again at her promotion picture in the corridor leading to Sharon's office is an inverted replica of an earlier shot in the movie, previous to her first meeting with Sharon. With the shot taken from her left-hand side this time (the previous displayed her right profile), while her distorted image is reflected in a wavy glass surface at her back, the change in the angle suggests that the high-heeled agent is the fake identity at this moment. Inside Sharon's office, Jane gathers the operatives’ data while the editing crosscuts to another scene in which Doc is writing an apology letter to the CEO he poisoned with Denoxin, moments before FBI agents raid The East's hideout and arrest him. Jane's and Doc's dialogical compromise of their initial ideological positions are equated by the parallel editing and are contrasted, in turn, to Benji's unbending dialectics.The film's final scene and end credits support the dialogical ethics and care-driven eco-utopian philosophy that Jane eventually opts for. After Benji refuses to seek Jane's colleagues’ ethical turn (she wants to inform them of the eco-social damages their work helps to hide), she chooses to step out of Benji's plan to publish undercover agents’ identities regardless of the grave consequences they might suffer. To protect her colleagues’ lives, Jane lies to Benji, saying she failed to get their personal data from Sharon's office, and then refuses to get in a truck with him to leave the country together—even if that means she could be arrested for stealing secret information from her firm. Taking off her high heels in the middle of a truck parking site, she walks toward the camera with a resolute pace, away from Benji's side. As he sits inside one of the colossal trucks at her back, Jane's barefoot march on the pavement can be read as an ecofeminist statement against the pairing of patriarchy (represented by Benji's leadership) and economized visions of progress (the fuel capitalism the lorry evokes). Opting out of Benji's utilitarian dialectics, Jane evidences that, as Mary Beard argues, “you cannot easily fit women into a structure that is coded as male; you have to change the structure” through horizontal and collaborative conceptions of power (86).In the parking site's restroom, Jane throws up the memory card containing the operatives’ identities that she swallowed in Sharon's office and raises her head to smile at herself in the mirror. A cut to a frontal close-up of Jane simulating the mirror's viewpoint follows. Her humid eyes and transcendental expression project a self-reflective, non-narcissistic self that is proud of her decision to care about others’ welfare beyond her own personal desires (she felt attracted to Benji) and professional aspirations (she is quitting her job at Hiller Brood's). The whispered words she prayed in the motel scene at the beginning of the movie are heard again over her close-up: “Please give me the strength to do well, to not be arrogant, but to not be weak. Amen.” This time, however, with no Christian cross or countercultural clip hanging from her bare necklace and with Jane looking at herself in the mirror rather than talking to a distant god, her words sound like a self-encouraging mantra to consolidate her eco-social commitment. After the close-up, a final montage sequence intertwined with the end credits shows how Jane reaches out to other undercover agents and tries to “awaken” them too.The film's closure portrays the political efficiency of Jane's nonviolent activism. By so doing, it vindicates the integrating and nurturing methodology of ecology, which “does not dissect anything: it associates, allies, and federates” (Serres 61). Like Marling's Jane, other contemporary post-recession protagonists embody ecological reactions to an unsustainable neoliberal framework. Matt Damon's gas company salesman in Promised Land (2012) and Ethan Hawke's priest in First Reformed (2017) make life-changing decisions in response to fracking and global warming, respectively, at the expense of their own economic interests and social prestige. Viggo Mortensen's and Ben Foster's eco-fathers in Captain Fantastic (2016) and Leave No Trace (2018), Salma Hayek's eco-conscious practitioner in Beatriz at Dinner (2017), and Seo-hyun Ahn's beast caretaker in Okja (2017) also illustrate nurturing models of conduct informed by ecology that discard “growth” parameters oblivious of eco-social welfare (Giddens 8–9). These characters’ inclination for pacific environmental engagement stresses the emancipatory potential of utopian approaches to the given order of things that not only criticize what is but also move toward a better “not yet” (Bloch), informed, in this case, by environmental ethics and dialogical social relations.Following the rising international awareness of global warming boosted by NGOs such as Greenpeace and documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006) in the 2000s, Marling's Jane epitomizes the eco-utopian turn that global social movements Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion have evidenced more recently. Rather than adapting to a “negatively globalized planet” of widening inequalities or seeking “retrotopian” escapes from global risks in “tribal” identities such as nationalisms (Bauman, Retrotopia 51, 147–51), Jane's “dialogic imagination” looks forward to “alternative ways of life and rationalities” (Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society” 18). At the crossroads between economic and ecological reasoning, Jane's doppelganger experience articulates what might be the most pressing political pronouncement of our day. As a response to the needs of “planet-wide” interdependent humans (Bauman, Retrotopia 153–67) and their shared natural habitat (Serres 30–36), ecology is presented in The East as a compelling transformative engine toward inclusive societies and sustainable futures. Jane's ecological conversion ultimately puts forward an integrating “shared vision of change,” as Extinction Rebellion's values statement puts it: “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”—north and south, to the east and west.Research toward this article was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (research project no. FFI2017–83606).