By Anna Smith
Translator: Eno
Proofreading: LITCAVE
Featured image: Online
The film has been exploring the differences in life, whether it is the fantasy of the ecological environment or the dystopian nightmare. During this period of home isolation, many people imagine a more harmonious and better future when they are bathed in sunlight with their eyes closed, and this is exactly the message that the film "Spaceship Earth" wants to convey to us. Earth Spaceship tells the story of a group of people in the Arizona desert who voluntarily isolate themselves at an Earth system science research center for two years to test how feasible it is to live a self-sufficient life.
This begs the question – what can we learn from science fiction movies when we are isolated in one place?
Many films have depicted the post-apocalyptic world, in which people gather in one place to live, but such a place is usually not related to "happiness". In the 2008 home animation WALL-E, humans are forced to live on spaceships because of the destruction of the Earth, but this seemingly harmonious world has the horrors hidden in the 1973 film Silent Running.
Fiction and critic Kim Newman points out that the emergence of utopias and dystopians in films is widespread, with many fictional future worlds where the gap between rich and poor is large, such as Metropolis (1927) and Soylent Green (1973). And the protagonists are often threatened by villains, like Loki, the villain of Thor, or the killer of Black Panther.
Today, the films that young people love to watch mostly contain dystopian plots: The protagonists are forced to kill each other in the 2012-2015 "Hunger Games"; but the world constructed in 2015's Disney World Tomorrowland is more optimistic: it depicts a world of geniuses, painters, scientists, the smartest and most creative people — a secret world built in a place where there is no politics, bureaucracy, greed, and corruption.
Brad Bird's film goes straight to the topic of how we are opposed to the utopian vision, in which inventor David Nix (Hugh Laurie) tries to play images of the impending destruction of the planet on public advertising screens to warn humanity. But "they're not afraid of the demise of the world in which they live," and the film features the apocalyptic world as a theme for video games, TV shows, books, and movies—the whole world embraces the end of the world wholeheartedly, even running towards it with joy. But the heroine, Casey (Britt Robertson), is different, never giving up on building a better future.
This optimistic attitude is reminiscent of Earth Spaceship. The members who live in the Center for Scientific Research do not live by every day, they not only build huge houseboats where they can travel, but even become a theater company, often performing interesting shows. In the process of testing whether they can live a self-sufficient life on Mars, they continue to move toward this goal – although not everything goes as they wish, but at least they are going to the good place.
Newman sees the utopian world as a closed and peaceful community, which Newman considers to be "a collectivist, discursive space, which biosphere environmentalist Mark Nelson argues is unreasonable because "almost all such communities in science fiction movies do not have green plants or other creatures, but no one has ever thought about where does oxygen, water, and food come from without other animals and plants?"
The difference between freshly grown food and tasteless artificial meals is indeed emphasized in the film Silient Running, in which the vegetative diet also played an important role in the 1996 French comedy film The Green Beautiful. Director and screenwriter Coline Serrea plays Mira, an alien from a utopian community, who arrives in Paris in the '90s and is deeply terrified of the polluted city, the meat-eating behavior, the lonely and crowded environment.
Jennifer Wells, a professor at the California Institute of California, San Francisco and a member of the Society for Utopian Studies, believes that Cerro's character Mira has played a role in building a utopian planet with a good lifestyle, zero carbon emissions and equality. "Through Mira's escape from Paris at the end of the film, we gain a new perspective that some of the things we accept in those established ideas actually need to be transformed."
This view is similar to the experience of many people in home isolation, with more people starting to grow their own vegetables, build small biospheres, and have enough time to observe their own lives and the world. The current isolation experience has made people aware of the importance of a healthy biosphere for people's lives.
As the director of Earth Spaceship argues, "During this period of confrontation with Covid-19, all of us are living in a new, different, but important thing, how do we make corresponding changes in this change, how to reconstruct our time."
What is your imaginary utopian world like?