Open Collections

Kirby, Andrew

University of British Columbia

The discipline of film studies is seeing a growing body of work that looks to questions of ecocriticism and humanity’s relationship with nature. This subdiscipline often looks to the blurring of human-nature boundaries and works to decentre human subjectivity. This decentering of the human experience is, in part, a political project in that the goal of ecocriticism is to challenge the anthropocentric perspective which has dominated philosophical thought throughout the modern era. The break between ecocriticism and the human experience, however, leaves questions open as to why the human perspective struggles to make sense of these ecological values and concerns. This thesis takes the terminology and concerns of ecocriticism as developed by thinkers such as Jane Bennet, Murray Bookchin, and Timothy Morton and puts it into conversation with the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis with its focus on the limitations of human psychology. By engaging with Lacanian thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek, this thesis develops the framework begun by Robert Geal of ecocritical psychoanalysis further by exploring how much of what is properly ecological exists outside of the Symbolic order and in what Lacanian thinkers term the Real. The Lacanian focus on the thinking-subject is used to show the limitations of an anthropocentric framework as it fails to comprehend modes of action that are unintentional yet reverberate throughout the universal ecosystem. The chapters of this thesis demonstrate this ecocritical psychoanalysis through close readings of two films: Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1988) and Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011). These films are used to demonstrate two approaches film can take in regards to the limitations of human perception of the Real of nature by either reducing nature to a projection of ourselves in order to make sense of it or by accepting the incomprehensibility of something larger than humanity. In developing the framework of ecocritical psychoanalysis these films are also used to distinguish subcategories within the field of disaster cinema as the films in question demonstrate the distinctions between categories of global catastrophe and apocalypse cinema.

Text

2023-01-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83738

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/