Abstract
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.
Highlights
In an article circulated in December 2020 on the RT news website, entitled “There will be no return to normality after COVID-19”, cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the way that we exist
Carmichael (2006, 2-3) argues, “[i]n the stories of settlement on a new continent [...] the natural world posed the possibility of both danger and profit... [and this depiction] changed the American relationship with the environment.”. This association between the western genre, landscape, and environmental issues is foregrounded in Fury Road not in a nostalgic tone, but in a prescient manner that firmly connects us with the present historic moment
In this essay I have argued that the post-apocalyptic landscapes in I Am Legend and Mad Max: Fury Road are the main sites of the films’ “rhetorical environmentality” (McMurry 2017)
Summary
In an article circulated in December 2020 on the RT news website, entitled “There will be no return to normality after COVID-19”, cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the way that we exist. Through this lens of post-human theory, I will turn to examine how the post-apocalyptic landscapes in I Am Legend (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) perform a “rhetorical environmentality” (McMurry 2017) that foreground and foster identification with the non-human world. In this way, I argue, the films encourage a post-human expansion of subjectivity
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