Humor as Hope?: On Critique and Affirmation in Ecological Parody and Satire

Abstract

This article examines the use of humor in contemporary environmental short films, centering on the alleviating power of humor and its capacity to challenge conventional modes of perception. It argues that humor constitutes an important narrative device in the stories of critical hope that scholars claim are necessary in moving beyond the debilitating registers of apocalyptic rhetoric and crisis discourse. By comparing two short films—the Indian satire Finding Beauty in Garbage, and the American mockumentary The Majestic Plastic Bag—the article examines the affordance of irony, parody, and satire to model alternative and hopeful ways of interacting with contemporary toxic landscapes. The article demonstrates that while genres and devices such as satire, irony, and parody all trouble anthropocentric paradigms of human mastery, they do so in different ways and with different implications. Whereas satire offers an effective vehicle for lamenting the proliferation of waste, the critical mood that defines the genre also restricts its capacity for generating meanings and sensibilities outside conventional environmental discourse. By contrast, parody and irony appear more suited to mobilize such changes, as their playful estrangements model innovative and self-reflexive ways of perceiving waste as a source of beauty, a site of agency, and an object of guilt.

In recent years, the topic of humor has gained traction within the environmental humanities. Concerned with the increasing outpour of despair and exhaustion, scholars have begun to question the efficacy of conventional environmentalist discourse, lamenting its tendency to represent ecological crisis through “a doleful narrative of decline.”¹ Not to be mistaken, there are plenty of reasons to despair: anthropogenic climate change, oceanic pollution, and mass extinction events all contribute to the sense of doom and gloom that dominate collective feelings about the future of the planet. The problem, scholars argue, is that current ways of representing crisis appear to do less in terms of mitigating the catastrophe than they do to exacerbate feelings of powerlessness and apathy in the face of it. As Simon Estok asks in a recent essay, why is it that “despite the saturation of filmic media with progressive messages about the environment, things continue to get worse?”² One answer to this question seems straightforward: the cultural products that aim to raise concern about environmental issues no longer move us.

This issue has led some scholars to look for alternative modes of representation that might circumvent the affectively negative registers of environmental crisis.³ Notably, Nicole Seymour’s call for an “irreverent ecocriticism” suggests opening avenues of inquiry into “the absurd, perverse, and humorous as they arise in relationship to ecology and representations thereof.”⁴ A comedic stance, she suggests, “might be the best stance at a point when humans suffer from doomsday fatigue, or an overload of tragedy.”⁵ Across the various subfields within the environmental humanities, a growing body of work can be seen to echo this contention, as scholars have drawn attention to the productive potential of a number of comedic genres and strategies, including satire, irony, parody, humorous environmental writing, and even stand-up comedy.⁶ These critical studies have documented how comedic modes of representation can serve to engage audiences in narratives of environmental risk, arguing that humor presents a promising avenue for moving scholarship on environmental representation beyond the confining strictures of apocalyptic thinking and didactic-moralist forms of address.

However, despite this growing interest, the use of humor in environmental art remains understudied. Most scholarship on the topic tends to approach the comedic genre in terms of its pragmatic appeal, that is, its capacity to convey otherwise negative messages in a lighter, more positive register. In this article I demonstrate that the potential of humor is not limited to this affective balancing act alone. Importantly, I claim that its strength also lies in its ability to trouble anthropocentric paradigms of thought and to offer new models of future modes of coexistence. Humor, I argue, should be understood not only as an efficient mode of communication but as an ontologically formative practice that produces spaces of ambiguity from which new relations—whether perceptual, ethical, or affective—might emerge. The possibility of such relations can be understood as providing one way of accommodating the need identified by environmental historians and philosophers for alternative, more hopeful modes of engagement with the hazardous realities of the contemporary ecological crisis. Discussing his notion of “slow hope” Christof Mauch, for instance, argues that “what we need . . . is not only an acknowledgement of our present ecological predicament but also a language of positive change, visions of a better future—in other words, hope.”⁷ Expressing a similar contention, Graeme Wynn maintains that we are in dire need of new narratives that can “expand the range of existential possibilities by calling into question the conceited convictions, tired mantras, and blithe assumptions of contemporary economic and political discourse.”⁸ Providing such narratives of hope is precisely what I suggest an environmental humor might do.

In what follows, I engage two short films that each exemplify the ability of humor to challenge conventional modes of perception, to mobilize spaces of ambivalence, and to make possible new modes of relation: the satirical short film Finding Beauty in Garbage,⁹ which employs sarcasm to criticize the practice of littering in the city of Dibrugarh in India, and the American mockumentary The Majestic Plastic Bag,¹⁰ an environmental campaign video that features a migrating plastic bag as the unusual protagonist in a story about plastic pollution. By comparing the comedic strategies employed in these two films, I show how these two films engage with the hazardous reality of waste pollution in ways that are both critical and affirmative. I suggest that these films can be seen to actively perform what the editors of this special section describe as “hazardous hope,” understood as those “critically hopeful visions [that] might have the potential to promote agency and emotional health for affected communities, activists, and engaged scholars.”¹¹ In doing so, the films demonstrate how the turn toward humor can be read in ways that reflect a desire to not just be funny but to propose new ways of interacting with waste.

Apocalypticism and Its Discontents

As I write this article, it has been almost two decades since the publication of Frederick Buell’s From Apocalypse to Way of Life, which offers an insightful analysis of the profound ways in which environmental crisis has become part and parcel of everyday life across the globe. Using the metaphor of “apocalypse as a way of life,” Buell suggested that what distinguished his time from other periods of history was that “crisis” could no longer be conceived as a future event but as the backdrop of contemporary existence: “Environmental crisis seems increasingly a feature of the present normality, not an imminent, radical rupture of it.”¹² Today the idea that we live and breathe crisis rings truer than ever. The salience of phenomena such as plastic pollution, species extinction, and climate change bears testimony to the fact that our collective sense of environmental crisis has intensified. As Timothy Morton poignantly observes, “Now every time I so much as change a confounded light bulb, I have to think about global warming. . . . Global warming reaches into ‘my world’ and forces me to use LEDs instead of bulbs with filaments.”¹³ In turn, we see this awareness reflected in the cultural products of our time: whether it be in literature, film, or television, environmental disaster seems to be everywhere, permeating cultural imaginaries with unpleasant reminders about the consequences, both present and future, of anthropogenic activities.

Within the field of ecocriticism, the idea that our time is one of crisis is a topic that has been discussed widely among literary and cultural studies scholars who have explored the significance of apocalyptic rhetoric in relation to environmental narratives and their capacity to foster ecological thinking and political change.¹⁴ Buell’s often-cited claim that the apocalypse is “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal”¹⁵ bears testimony to the view that the representation of the apocalypse constitutes one of the most effective vehicles for challenging the status quo. However, not everybody shares Buell’s optimism about the mobilizing power of crisis discourse. In fact, when surveying much of the scholarship coming from within the environmental humanities today, there appears to be a growing apprehension toward the doom-and-gloom rhetoric that is associated with the metaphor of the apocalypse.¹⁶ According to a number of scholars, including Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Rosi Braidotti, Cristoph Mauch, and Graeme Wynn, the ubiquity of crisis discourse and narratives about the end of the world is highly problematic because it restricts our ability to imagine alternative, more livable futures. In her recent work, Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti, for instance, writes that “this necrophilic obsession with one’s own death is conceptually shortsighted as it denies the force of the virtual. Such an apocalyptic scenario is politically counterproductive because it spreads the sense of impotence, while it perpetuates Eurocentric habits of thought. It is ethically unsound because it cultivates a black hole of individual despair instead of labouring towards community.”¹⁷

Though Braidotti is far from the only scholar to voice reservations about the political and affective affordances of apocalyptic imagining, her focus on despair is indicative of this emerging concern, because it emphasizes the importance of affect and emotion in mobilizing productive forms of ethical response-ability. As Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow argue, “Affects are at the center of contemporary biopolitics and are more public, more powerful, and more pertinent than ever.”¹⁸ The same, I would add, goes for contemporary environmental politics and the inability to respond to the socioecological issues of today. Indeed, the emerging vocabulary of Anthropocene disorders points exactly in this direction, as the ongoing proliferation of psychological neologisms such as climate anxiety, compassion fatigue, psychic numbing, and solastalgia convey a sense of powerlessness, melancholy, and apathy.¹⁹ Thus it would appear that Mauch is exactly right in his observation that “burnout of the Earth’s resources and emotional burnout are related to one another. In a world of accelerated consumption, resource exhaustion reveals itself to be not only a physical but also a sociological and psychological phenomenon.”²⁰ Simply put, if the apocalypse, as Buell claims, has indeed become our way of life, then the consequence is that it depletes us, divesting us of our capacity to work toward (or even imagine) something better.

Humor as Antidote?

The growing interest in humor among environmentalist scholars, I argue, can be read as a response to this affective backdrop. Faced with the seemingly debilitating effects of despair and mourning, researchers, activists, writers, and filmmakers have begun looking toward humor in hope that its playful registers might offer an escape from—or, at best, an alternative to—the paralyzing narratives of crisis. Discussing the novels of Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, Courtney Traub, for instance, observes how,

Other scholars working with humor have emphasized the related (though not entirely synonymous) benefits of abandoning the didacticism that tends to accompany doom-and-gloom rhetoric. In Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, Nicole Seymour critiques this register, warning that its “didactic, prescriptive, and demanding” register may ultimately do more to exacerbate the forms of affective disavowal that it intends to undo.²² Echoing this concern, Michael Branch argues that the two dominant modes of environmental rhetoric—the jeremiad and the elegy—not only “have inherent limitations that compromise their effectiveness, but . . . much of the efficacy they once possessed has been exhausted through overuse.”²³ By contrast, the turn to comedic genres, Branch suggests, might “permit us to return some of the pleasure to our project, without compromising the fierce moral seriousness of its aims.”²⁴

However, as promising as humor might seem in this regard, it is crucial not to lose sight of the fact that not all humor is liberating. As Simon Critchley reminds us, many comedic practices are “fairly reactionary,”²⁵ as seen, for instance, in the cases of racist or sexist humor, which mainly serves to reproduce social hierarchies and consensus. In environmental discourse, too, one finds several reasons to exhibit caution toward humoristic practices. Discussing the use of irony, Seymour points to the risk that humor, as a form of distancing, may contribute to the sense of “self-righteousness” and “sanctimony” with which environmentalists are so frequently associated.²⁶ In her article “Theorizing the Gay Frog,” Hannah Boast calls attention to the role played by humor in consolidating alt-right beliefs around environmental pollution, as seen in the bizarre proliferation of gay frog memes on digital media platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, and 4chan.²⁷ To this, we might add the risk that humor can lead some audiences to form the belief that ecological issues are unworthy of serious attention, thereby potentially trivializing the hazardous reality that makes up the ecological crisis. Finally, in reading humoristic texts as reflecting a practice of hope, it is equally important to be wary of narratives that promote false forms of hope, as seen, for instance, in acts of greenwashing that merely reproduce existing social orders under the deceptive banner of positive change. Such concerns testify to the fact that humor—like any other rhetorical form—is indeed a double-edged sword. Consequently, any attempt to gauge the potential of humor in environmental discourse demands that critical attention be paid to the varied effects that humor might have.

In an attempt to consolidate these two approaches to humor as either an antidote to despair or a vehicle for maintaining consensus, I wish to propose a third perspective that emphasizes the potential of humor to unsettle the conventions that structure our perception of the natural world, along with its varied socioecological issues. Specifically, I argue—following Braidotti’s lament of the denial of the virtual—that humoristic practices may provide openings into an indeterminate field of radical meanings, relations, and affects because they break with our expectations, norms, and habits. This productive capacity of humor is in large part owed to the ambiguity that results from humor’s insistence to engage with the hazardous realities of ecological crisis through a mode of play. Discussing this impulse of humor toward the incongruous—the weird, the strange, and the unexpected—Critchley argues that “jokes tear holes in our usual predictions about the empirical world. . . . Humour is produced by a disjunction between the way things are and the way they are represented in the joke, between expectation and actuality. Humour defeats our expectations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which we find ourselves.”²⁸ It is precisely this notion of “producing a novel actuality” that I think is important to highlight when considering humorous texts as reflecting a practice of hope. In this respect humor, much like utopian dreaming, is in the business of imagining otherwise.

In his essay “Ironic Ecology,” Joshua DiCaglio suggests that the turn toward irony in recent nature writing should be read precisely in this way. Reading David Gessner’s My Green Manifesto, which presents a series of comedic musings on the figure of the contemporary environmentalist, DiCaglio shows how ironic reversals constitute an effective tool for breaking down dualistic divides (as seen in Gessner’s playful juxtapositions of wilderness and urban areas). DiCaglio’s contention, in turn, is that the ironizing impulse characterizing such humorous texts may ultimately move toward their own dissolution: “Irony can thus act as a kind of litmus test for our ability to comprehend the implications of ecology. If we continue to view works containing this doubled irony as ironic, then we are still functioning within the principles that provide resistance to the dispersing implications of ecology.”²⁹ By contrast, if the works no longer strike us as ironic, they will have successfully destabilized the underlying conventions that structure our perception of the text’s subject matter. In what follows, I extend DiCaglio’s reading of irony into the context of environmental campaign videos where I explore how filmmakers have started to make use of satire and parody to call attention to the issues of waste and plastic pollution. I argue that these films exhibit the potential described by DiCaglio but that their attention to the hazardous reality of pollution and toxicity also results in a tension that may not be dissolved as readily as the dualisms (urban/wilderness) that DiCaglio examines. In the end, this inherent ambiguity or unresolved tension reflects the contradictory ways in which humor might instantiate a form of hazardous hope, which, on the one hand, is motivated by an affirmative desire to locate and harness the force of hopeful visions while, on the other hand, it remains committed to the effort of critiquing the systems of power that produce the toxic reality that defines contemporary waste relations.

Finding Beauty in Garbage: Militant Irony as Environmental Satire

Finding Beauty in Garbage is a short film from 2019 by the independent Indian filmmaker Satyakam Dutta, who has described the film as “a satire on the menace of garbage pollution in general and in the city of Dibrugarh,” located in the state of Assam in Northeast India.³⁰ The film opens with a series of extreme long shots of lush green tea fields, vast rivers, and idyllic heritage buildings that together establish the cinematic environment of the film (fig. 1). “The beauty of Dibrugarh,” a voice-over then tells us, “lies in its vast Tea Gardens and the beautiful riverside of the mighty Brahmaputra”—a large river that runs through Tibet, India, and Bangladesh and is known to be sacred to Hindus. Taken together, the picturesque images and the venerating voice-over establish the film’s mise-en-scène through the trope of the pastoral, conveying a sense of harmonious coexistence between the local population and their surrounding environment. However, this sense of harmony is soon disrupted as the film cuts to a medium long shot of a bustling city street that shows copious amounts of trash, which has been carelessly thrown on the side of the road (fig. 1). Crucially, this visual contrast between the lush natural surroundings and the waste-ridden city is not recognized by the voice-over, which extends the superlatives of the opening sequence to the images of the polluted cityscape, explaining that “the citizens here have also found a unique way to make their city further beautiful by littering waste and garbage all over the town.” “The people,” the voice-over continues, “are of the belief that the colorful garbage has added more colors to the otherwise vibrant city. . . . Now they say that only garbage can make their city ‘The Most Beautiful City of India!’”

At work in this striking contrast between the praising voice-over and the images of littered streets is a well-known subtype of verbal irony known as sarcasm. What characterizes this form of militant irony is the recognizable tension that exists between the ironic surface level—the voice-over’s explanation that the dumping of waste is not only intentional but something that contributes to the cultural and economic wealth of the city—and the actual intended meaning, which is to critique the civic amenities in the city and the careless ways of its citizens.

In turn, this use of irony opens a space of ambiguity that alludes to other modes of seeing and living with the discards of the city. Its explicit aestheticization of roadside litter invites viewers to entertain the idea that waste might constitute a source of beauty and pleasure. Likewise, its playful interpretation that the litter-ridden city bears testimony to the fact that “the citizens of Dibrugarh have learned to coexist with garbage on the roads” suggests the possibility that garbage might somehow turn into a more accepted—rather than neglected—part of everyday life. Simply put, these incongruous propositions present, at first glance at least, an ecological vision that moves beyond conventional ways of depicting and thinking about waste.

And yet this alternative perception is only taken to a certain point, as the sarcasm that infuses the film reminds viewers not to mistake what is said for what is really meant. After all, the film is a satire; its primary aim is to critique and ridicule. This critical dimension is made evident through the film’s visual side, which presents close-ups of pedestrians whose facial expressions highlight their dislike of the odor produced by the garbage. Other scenes reveal cows, birds, and other nonhuman animals scavenging through the trash heaps in search of food. Through these highly suggestive images, the film stresses the negative social and environmental implications that garbage holds for the local community—both human and nonhuman—effectively making a plea for politicians and citizens to clean up the city so that it may once again become a place of harmonious coexistence like the one seen in the opening sequence. However, the film never reaches the moment of resolution described by DiCaglio in which the complex ecological irony resolves its own tension through the arrival of a unifying paradigm, which, in this case, would situate waste as a “natural” part of the city and the human activities that take place within it. Quite the contrary, waste remains—despite the film’s inclination to play with our conventional ways of seeing waste—an element that is unwanted within the idealized cityscape.

This tension, I believe, speaks directly to one of the fundamental conflicts that characterize hazardous hope as a practice: How can one locate affirmative pathways toward more livable futures without losing sight of the critical issues that characterize the present? Or, as Tina Adcock asks: What might “critical, hopeful environmental histories” look like?³¹ Dutta’s film offers one example of precisely this. Its satirical portrayal highlights the negative environmental implications of waste, yet it couples this portrayal with a vision of its potential integration within the urban ecology. The film calls attention to a hazardous situation but refuses to engage with this reality in a negative register of decline. Instead it presents playful visions of what Seymour refers to as bad environmentalism, defined as “environmental thought that employs dissident, often-denigrated affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on both our current moment and mainstream environmental art, activism, and discourse.”³² In turn, we see this sensibility unfold not only in the estrangements of its sarcastic voice-over but also in the aestheticizing visuals, which present waste as both part of the natural environment in the city and as a contaminating pollutant within this very setting.

Furthermore, as a result of this intermingling, the film can be seen to mobilize an iconography that, at least when compared to the images of the opening sequence, in fact appears to be more in touch with the compromised socioecological landscapes of the Anthropocene. As an era that marks the arrival of “novel ecosystems,” understood as biomes that have been so modified by anthropogenic activity that they lack natural analogues, the Anthropocene can be understood as a moment in human history that necessitates rethinking conventional environmentalist concepts of conservation, management, and contamination.³³ Dutta’s satire reflects this radically new situation and suggests one way—however absurd it might seem—that life within novel ecosystems might look. In doing so, the film demonstrates how satire might be used as a key strategy for telling the stories of critical hope that Adcock—echoing Haraway, Braidotti, Wynn, and Mauch—calls for.

Turning to the film’s reception, which can be studied by examining the 189 written comments that viewers have posted on the film’s YouTube page, it is clear that Dutta’s film—and especially its sarcastic style—resonated strongly with its audience. Several commenters, many of whom are from Dibrugarh, applaud the filmmaker’s critique of the waste problem and express their hope for change. As one viewer writes: “the sarcasm is hard hitting and i hope will pave [sic] a cleaner Dibrugarh. A talented and imaginative effort. Relevant for the whole country.”³⁴ Other viewers explain how the film evoked feelings of apprehension against the failure of citizens and government alike in keeping the city waste-free: “This is a tight slap on our face for ruining not only generation’s health [sic] but our mother nature our Prithvi as well. And also a front slap on Swachh Bharat Abhiyan [Clean India Mission] campaign which somewhere has been dumped in the election tenure.”³⁵ Finally, some viewers can be seen to mimic the film’s sarcastic voice, echoing its critical sentiment: “I think the competition is really tough in India, every city is doing their best to enhance the beauty with the garbage.”³⁶

These comments warrant a few preliminary observations about the experiential and perceptual dynamics of environmental satire as a form of critical hope. First, the comments suggest that, at least for the viewers who felt compelled to voice their response to the film, its humoristic style represented a welcome break from the conventional modes of environmental communication. Second, the recurrent mentioning of hope throughout the varied comments indicates that, for some viewers, this kind of satire can indeed help nurture a hopeful attitude that things might be different. As such, we may note how the two phenomena of humor and hope here culminate in a shared practice of reflecting critically on the hazardous reality of the present while, importantly, also manifesting a desire to push back against it. Third, it is striking how the relatively uniform tone that characterizes the varied commentaries (with viewers agreeing with the message of the film, venerating its style, or expressing their hope for change) appears to cancel out, almost categorically, the possibility of changing the way viewers see the aestheticized waste in the first place. Of all the comments found on the film’s page, not a single one entertains the idea that waste might actually be considered an object of beauty. Consequently, even though the use of satire in this case does present an effective rhetorical vehicle for reminding viewers about an important socioecological issue, its ability to shape how we understand the more profound relationships that underpin such issues appears more questionable. Simply put, Dutta’s satirical film may indeed be capable of fostering hope, but the message it conveys is anything but new.

The crucial insight that we may therefore draw from Finding Beauty in Garbage is that the practice of critique also comes at a cost: by focusing exclusively on ridiculing the careless citizens and the ineffective policies that enable the dumping of waste across the city, the film forgoes the more subtle, affective affordances that its ironic estrangements invite. In short, the sarcastic voice shuts down the possibility of other ways of perceiving the waste it addresses. Importantly, this disavowal should not be seen as the inevitable result of using humor to represent environmental issues; rather, as I suggest below, it is precisely in using different comedic genres, such as parody, that we may trace the varied affordances that humor embodies in the context of environmental crisis.

The Plastic Cycle of Life: Ecological Parody as Ontological Play

The Majestic Plastic Bag is a short mockumentary³⁷ from 2010 produced by the California-based nonprofit Heal the Bay, an organization “dedicated to making the coastal waters and watersheds in Greater Los Angeles safe, healthy, and clean.”³⁸ The film portrays the journey of a plastic bag as it makes its way from a supermarket parking lot to the sea. Through its depiction of this journey the film calls attention to the unintended afterlife of plastic bags and attempted, at the time of its release, to rally political support for a local bill to ban single-use plastic bags in Los Angeles County—an effort that arguably proved successful, as a ban was in fact enacted in the years following the film’s distribution.

Like Finding Beauty in Garbage, The Majestic Plastic Bag employs humor to convey its otherwise serious message about the effects of marine plastic debris. However, instead of sarcasm The Majestic Plastic Bag relies on parody to tell this story, offering a playful imitation of wildlife programming with its voice-of-god narration, dramatic music, and so on. Using these formal conventions, the mockumentary frames the movements of the plastic bag as if it were an actual migratory animal searching to join its kin in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (currently estimated to host about eighty million tons of plastic). As part of this imitation, the film depicts the bag’s journey through the city as fraught with dangerous perils. In one scene, for instance, we see the bag swirling across a city park, where it encounters what the voice-over describes as “one of nature’s deadliest predators: the Teacup Yorkie.” We then see the bag being chased around by the dog, all the while listening to an intensifying score that serves as the seamless backdrop for the voice-over’s parodic juxtapositions: “Once the Yorkie has locked onto its victim, there is very little hope of survival. But using its superior size and deft maneuvering, our bag manages to escape the Yorkie’s talons and flee for its life.” Through such ironic reversals, the film invites viewers to entertain the incongruous idea that the plastic bag is not only alive and sentient but also deserving of sympathy and protection. By the end of the film, however, the incongruity is resolved, as we watch the bag floating around the surface of the water with a superimposed text reading: “Plastic bags are not indigenous to the Pacific.”

Comparing the two films, one of the first things that immediately stands out is how the two comedic modes—the satirical and the parodic—appear to embody different affordances when it comes to reimagining human relationships with waste. Whereas the critical-didactic voice of Finding Beauty in Garbage saturates the entire film, reminding us that the issue of waste indeed is an issue that we need to address and preferably resolve, The Majestic Plastic Bag does not offer the same kind of explicit prescriptions, at least not until the very end of the film. As a result, the ironic estrangements that result from the film’s parody are not undermined by the film’s final message, thereby inviting viewers to undergo a wider range of affective experiences than those associated with guilt, resentment, or—worse yet—despair. By asking us to sympathize with something that most of us have been taught to condemn, the film effectively challenges the negative attitudes that tend to accompany our relations with waste.

This epistemological potential, I suggest, becomes especially visible when considering the film’s self-reflexive subversion of the wildlife film genre. According to Derek Bousé, this genre can be distinguished by the following seven content characteristics: the depiction of megafauna, visual splendor, dramatic storyline, absence of science, absence of politics, absence of historical reference points, and absence of people.³⁹ Together, these conventions tend to construct images of nonhuman nature as an untouched primeval wilderness that only exists “over there”⁴⁰—away from, subordinate to, and, in essence, different from the human. This dualistic vision, however, is effectively disrupted by the film, as it maintains the genre’s formal cinematographic features but disrupts almost all of the content characteristics. Instead of untouched wilderness we see a bustling city filled with people; instead of visual splendor we see mundane everyday activities such as grocery shopping or diaper changing; and instead of megafauna we see only the most quotidian objects such as the plastic bag itself.

Here we may note how the film displays the effects of DiCaglio’s ironic ecology as it asks the viewer to reflect on why we tend to think about wilderness solely in terms of pristine mountain ranges and impassable jungles. As part of this self-reflexivity the film invites the recognition that the domesticated Teacup Yorkie—despite its high position within the cultural hierarchy as a “cute” animal—is in fact, on some level, also feral and wild. In the end we thus note how the film’s irony can be said to move toward its own dissolution: the viewer realizes that what at first seemed paradoxical, such as an urban jungle, in fact is not; rather, it was the fallacies inherent to the ontological dualism that made the incongruity incongruous in the first place.

The extensive use of zoomorphic devices extends this slippery ontological incongruity even further, as it invites the recognition that the plastic bag is somehow alive and animate. A common objection to this form of zoomorphism (and its related trope, anthropomorphism) is that the projection of animal attributes onto inanimate objects represents a fallacy: plastic bags, the argument goes, do not have feelings in the same sense that we animals do, nor can they be rationally understood to act on an intention to join their kin in the Great Pacific Ocean, as is the case in the mockumentary. Seen in this way, the reason why we might find the zoomorphism humorous is exactly that we can so easily see through its inherent falsehood. In contrast to the often taken-for-granted anthropomorphisms that characterize wildlife films, the zoomorphism of the plastic bag is highly marked, its animal traits so conspicuous that it is difficult to perceive it as anything else than a product of the creative efforts of the filmmakers to endow it with sentience. Indeed, as Pippa Marland argues in a recent essay,

I would like to contest Marland’s claim that the perceived incongruity of the plastic bag’s zoomorphic depiction results in a categorical disavowal of its nonhuman agency. Ursula Heise, for instance, has pointed out how the critique of anthropomorphism is “predicated on the assumption that human subjects are fundamentally distinct from animals, plants, and inanimate objects, and that art should truthfully reflect nature.”⁴² Simply put, anthropomorphism/zoomorphism is only problematic from a perspective that sees human/animal subjects as fundamentally distinct. Consequently, if we take the observation of an incongruity to be the origin of humor, and if we allocate that incongruity in the wrongful projection of human/animal characteristics onto nonhuman objects, then laughter at the plastic bag would indeed, as Marland suggests, seem to reaffirm the narrow anthropocentric hierarchy that underpins the projection as a fallacy in the first place. However, I cannot help but wonder whether there might be more to the bag that we encounter in the film. Serenella Iovino, for instance, notes in her reflections on the mockumentary that the film offers a “useful device to clarify both the concept of matter and the concept of agency as they are used in the context of material ecocriticism.”⁴³ Reflecting on the different meanings of agency, she writes:

Invoking the varied assemblages in which the plastic bag participates, it becomes possible, Iovino suggests, to derive a more nuanced form of nonhuman agency that, while not synonymous with human volition, is forceful and affective in a number of ways. The plastic bag’s migration through the urban jungle makes this relationality tangible, its airborne movements being set against a variety of backdrops, including supermarket parking lots, city high-rises, and urban parks, conveying the impression that the activities of the bag are the complex result of a plethora of intersecting networks, ranging from global petro-culture and planetary weather patterns to oceanic currents and consumer behavior. It is within these material interactions and exchanges that we locate the bag’s capacity to affect, as is made clear by the closing sequence, which highlights the permanence of plastic particles in oceanic ecosystems and its destructive effect on marine life-forms. Such impacts are of course anything but funny; however, the mockumentary nevertheless succeeds in using parody to make these otherwise inconspicuous nonhuman agencies into something tangible that the viewer can relate to. The plastic bag’s intentions, which at first sight might appear ludicrous, make sense as an allegory for the unintended afterlife of plastic matter and its effects on urban and ocean ecosystems; the eventual breakdown of the bag into plastic particles is part of its life cycle because the bag (no more or less than any other object, animal, or person) is itself an assemblage in the first place.

Combined with the playful intermingling of the wild and the urban, the film’s zoomorphic bag can be seen to defamiliarize—or at least trouble—the metaphysical dualisms that arguably lie at the root of the ecological issues that define our current era. Its playful blurring of the boundary between nature and culture is a reminder that the natural environment is all around, not in a distant sphere detached from daily life. Its animated protagonist calls attention to the unruly agency of waste-matter and its influence on a host of ecosystems and assemblages. Taken together, these aspects of the film ask viewers to reflect on the ontological categories that structure their habits of perception and to cultivate an imaginative openness to the similarities and connections—rather than differences—that exist between the human subject and its increasingly compromised environments. Like Finding Beauty in Garbage, this vision can be conceptualized as a practice of critical hope that refuses to reproduce the dominant rhetoric that tends to structure our relations with the ecological crisis. In doing so, the film models a new form of response-ability that is not informed by paradigms of guilt, mastery, and condemnation but by an expanded sense of self and a heightened concern for our not-so-distant others.

The Plasticity of Humor

I have argued that the turn toward humor in environmental filmmaking can be understood to promote a practice of hope that, on one hand, calls attention to the toxic landscapes of the Anthropocene but also, on the other, explores radical ways of moving beyond these. By comparing two films that I describe as environmental satire and ecological parody, I have shown how humor, at least in theory, can challenge how we think and feel about environmental issues. Humor holds this potential because, as Critchley rightly observes, it reveals “the sheer contingency or arbitrariness of the social rites in which we engage.”⁴⁵ It makes tangible, if only for a moment, that the order of things can be subverted. In turn it is this insistence to destabilize our patterns of perception that, in my view, warrants a reading of humor as a hopeful practice, because it suggests that things might be otherwise.

At this juncture, however, it seems appropriate to ask: What is to be gained from such reorientations? After all, is waste not one of the primary agents of environmental devastation? Why imagine other ways of living with something that is so clearly hazardous and destructive? To begin formulating a response to such questions, it is important to note that neither of the films examined in this article is literally proposing that we consider waste beautiful or that it should enter our moral community, for that matter. Neither Dutta’s satire nor Heal the Bay’s parody is actually suggesting that the accumulation of litter is an event to be celebrated or that we should perceive plastic bags as sentient beings. That being said, it remains a fact that if the critics of apocalypticism are correct when they assert that we need to radically rethink how we relate to ecological crisis, then such playful fabulations might be exactly what we need, no matter how absurd or fictitious they might seem at first. Were we to consider waste beautiful, might we, for instance, learn to handle it in less harmful ways? And were we to admit that waste does exhibit certain subjective features, might we come to interact with it in ways that are more caring and thoughtful?

Providing a satisfactory answer to such questions is beyond the scope of this article, not least because this would warrant a more in-depth and empirically grounded reception study of the actual experiences of different audiences. However, I want to close this piece by pointing to two theoretical studies that I believe offer productive ways to think about our changing relations to waste. The first example is Gay Hawkins’s The Ethics of Waste, which offers a stark critique of the conventional anti-waste campaign, lamenting its attempts to promote prosocial behavior among citizens through appeals to our conscience and moral obligations. Hawkins’s skepticism in this regard rests on the observation that our interactions with waste are rarely governed by conscious thought but to a larger extent on bodily habits and affects.⁴⁶ Consequently, for Hawkins, any ethical demand (such as those posed by filmmakers, artists, or policymakers) that appeals too exclusively to our morals or our capacity for reason will likely fall short of its aims, as it can breed resentment or—as in most cases—simply fail to lead to action. Now, regardless of whether one agrees with Hawkins’ assumption that moralism “easily slides into resentment,”⁴⁷ I think there is some truth to the assertation that without the proper mobilization of affect, the enaction of our ethical codes seems highly unlikely.⁴⁸ Humor can help cultivate this form of emotional investment because humor (and with it laughter) is not only the product of incongruity but also a heightening of affective intensity that occurs when we let our guards down and admit our own shortcomings. As such, the irony is that in order to take waste more seriously we might need narratives and images that are anything but.

The second example I wish to highlight is Heather Davis’s article “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” which discusses how we might reconcile with living in a world that has been permanently altered by the toxicity of anthropogenic activities. Drawing on the work of Mel Chen, Rob Nixon, and Claire Colebrook, Davis argues for a “kind of futurity that struggles to be hopeful, but is certainly not apocalyptic,” privileging instead what she terms “queer toxicity” that is capable of celebrating permutation and coexistence outside the bounds of heteronormativity.⁴⁹ She writes: “Just as plastics are inadvertently creating all kinds of new worlds, such as the plastisphere, in order to address the current situation ethically, we must also learn to accept all kinds of strange life forms, human and nonhuman, toward which we generate care, compassion, and commitment. We must learn from queer subjects to build worlds of familial care that are not bound by biology.”⁵⁰ Though both of the films I have analyzed in this article have been produced with the intention of reducing, controlling, and preferably eliminating waste, it is nevertheless striking, I think, how both films resonate so strongly—at least on the surface level—with the toxic futurity that Davis theorizes. Heal the Bay’s zoomorphism prompts us to recognize the strange agencies exhibited by plastics and to take responsibility for uneven rates of extinction that petrochemical capitalism perpetuates. In Dutta’s satire, on the other hand, we witness what life in the plastisphere can look like and we are asked to hypothesize if some form of harmonious coexistence between humans and waste might be accomplished.

In either case, we see how humor can offer one way of giving form to the novel ontological paradigms that Hawkins and Davis call for. Through its construction and subversion of hierarchies and conventions, humor embodies both the actual and the potential—it is a mediation of the world as we know it and its undetermined future. In her reflections on the Anthropocene as an era defined by contradictory pulls that suspend us between feelings of exhaustion and optimism, Braidotti argues that “we need a subtler and more diversified affective range, which avoids the polarization between the apocalyptic variant of mourning and the euphoric variable of celebration.”⁵¹ Humor can contribute to the formation of such diversity. By occupying this delicate middle ground between hope and critique—between positive and negative affect—we may arrive at more productive place from which to engage with the compromised world we inhabit today.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special section, Ayushi Dhawan and Simone M. Müller, for their invaluable guidance and for organizing the workshop “Hazardous Hope: Exploring New Ways of Narrating Toxic Bodies and Landscapes” at the Rachel Carson Center, where this article was first presented. I would also like to thank Peter Mortensen, Tobias Skiveren, Josefine Brink Siem, Stephanie Volder, Maj Ørskov, Anna Solovyeva, Soo J. Ryu, Morten Gustenhoff, and Magnus Andersen for their feedback on various versions of the essay. A special thanks to Philip Armstrong and Nicholas Wright for their insightful comments and for organizing the NZCHAS postgraduate seminar, which helped clarify and strengthen my argument.

Notes

References