A Monster of a Crisis: Creature Features and Capitalism’s Monstrous Ecological Effects

• In Event: 228 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 05. Cultural Sociology and Politics

Abstract

Central to Gramscian cultural analysis is the notion that culture is a site of struggle against dominant power relations and their consequences, and this is no less true of film. Films are a key contemporary venue for the transmission of social meaning, and can serve to reinforce dominant logics of power just as they can be used to call them to question. Simultaneously, speculative fiction and horror are often mediums to explore our public fears—horror "goes straight to the deepest unease at the core of human existence”. While the specter of environmental ills are constant features of contemporary academic and popular discourse, and significant recent work has focused on monster films and topics such as gender (Clover 2015), capitalism (McNally 2012; Newitz 2006), or war (Skal 2001), less attention has been paid to the role of the monstrous in exploring our current environmental crises. Moreover, while significant scholarship analyzes ‘the monstrous’ in earlier periods of cinema, far fewer pay extended attention to these themes in recent monster films of the last decade, despite the growing abundance of critically and commercially successful monster cinema therein. In this article, I will use a Gramscian approach to cultural analysis to show that as our environmental crises have worsened (and knowledge of those crises and their connections to capitalism have grown), fears of climate change and other environmental ills have become an increasingly important theme in contemporary monster films, each using the monstrous to explore potential environmental consequences of capitalism.

Author

• Jeffrey A. Ewing, University of Oregon