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From Capitalocene to Anthropocene: The Feminine Counter-Ecology of Snowpocalypse Films

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Lacan and the Environment

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Abstract

This chapter explores the subgenre of snowpocalypse films as a formal challenge to the totalizing imaginaries of the Capitalocene that present capitalism as an ecosystem without any alternative. Building on Jacques Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, it suggests that their frozen, uninhabitable Earth introduces a feminine counter-ecology of the non-all to explode the masculine logic of the Capitalocene whose all-encompassing whole is maintained by constantly expanding beyond its own limits. Through the close reading of two films, it further argues that Quintet (dir. Robert Altman) depicts capitalism in a state of withdrawal, limited by its absolute boundary of extinction, while The Wandering Earth (dir. Frant Gwo) imagines the post-capitalist ecology of humanity—the Anthropocene proper—after it had passed through a snowpocalyptic zero point.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Fredric Jameson, “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, by Fredric Jameson (New York: Verso, 1998), 50.

  2. 2.

    See Films: Alex Garland, 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle (London: DNA Films, 2002); Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho (Seoul, South Korea: Moho Films, 2013); and George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, Mad Max: Fury Road, directed by George Miller (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 2015).

  3. 3.

    For a concept of immunity as the suspension of one’s obligation to the commons, see Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45-78.

  4. 4.

    Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 14.

  5. 5.

    Phillip McReynolds, “Zombie Cinema and the Anthropocene: Posthuman Agency and Embodiment at the End of the World,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 7 (2015): 149-68, http://cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/storage/7/7_McReynolds.pdf (accessed June 7, 2020).

  6. 6.

    Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 6.

  7. 7.

    Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London and New York: Verso, 2016).

  8. 8.

    Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1., trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 255.

  9. 9.

    Fay, Inhospitable World, 182.

  10. 10.

    Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

  11. 11.

    Robert Altman, Frank Barhydt, and Patricia Resnick, Quintet, directed by Robert Altman (Santa Monica, CA: Lion’s Gate, 1979).

  12. 12.

    Robert Altman, quoted in Steve Lyons, “Memory of a Post-Apocalyptic Future: Whitening Skeletons and Frozen Time in Robert Altman’s Quintet and Expo 67’s Man the Explorer Pavilion,” paper presented at the Montreal as Palimpsest II: Hauntings, Occupations, Theatres of Memory conference, Department of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal QC, April 17, 2009, https://cityaspalimpsest.concordia.ca/palimpsest_II_fr/papers/Steve_Lyons.pdf (accessed June 7, 2020).

  13. 13.

    See Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

  14. 14.

    Esposito defines autoimmunity as the escalation of the tendencies already present in immunity: a “condition in which the protective apparatus becomes so aggressive that it turns against its own body (which is what it should protect), leading to its death” (Esposito, Bios, 116).

  15. 15.

    See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 205-68.

  16. 16.

    Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 204.

  17. 17.

    Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete English Edition, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.), 700.

  18. 18.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore, 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, W. W. Norton, 1998), 107.

  19. 19.

    Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, 56-57.

  20. 20.

    Copjec, Read My Desire, 214.

  21. 21.

    Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 153.

  22. 22.

    In his Seminar XIX, Lacan gives the example of the Freudian father of the primal horde who enjoys all the women as the paradigmatic case of phallic exception. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX: …or Worse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 78-95.

  23. 23.

    Copjec, Read My Desire, 235.

  24. 24.

    Roger Ebert, “Quintet.” RogerEbert.com, February 16, 1979, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/quintet (accessed October 1, 2019).

  25. 25.

    Copjec, Read My Desire, 231.

  26. 26.

    As Lacan puts it, femininity is a “being [that] has no other locus than the locus of the Other” (Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, 77).

  27. 27.

    Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, 103.

  28. 28.

    On the noir stereotypes of the “nurturing woman” and its opposite, the “spider woman,” see Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, rev. ed., ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 47-69.

  29. 29.

    Copjec, Read My Desire, 221.

  30. 30.

    Bracha L. Ettinger, “Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference,” in Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Griselda Pollock (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 62.

  31. 31.

    Ettinger, “Fascinance,” 84.

  32. 32.

    See Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (London: Penguin, 2017); Žižek is not advocating apocalyptic nihilism here, but argues that one has to pass through a zero point of hopelessness, a radical libidinal divestment from the project of amending the current global capitalist status quo in order to imagine its truly revolutionary alternative. Similarly, Quintet leaves open the possibility of a new world after the destruction of the present one in an early image of a goose flying north—a move that seems irrational at the time to Essex who is still headed the opposite direction to the shelter of the domed city.

  33. 33.

    On such feminine aesthetics of haptic visuality, see Laura U. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen: The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television 39, no. 4 (1998): 331-48, 10.1093/screen/39.4.331.

  34. 34.

    See films: Roland Emmerich, Roland, and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2004); Alex Garland, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (London: DNA Films, 2007); Jeff Renfroe, Svet Rouskov, Patrick Tarr, and Pascal Trottier, The Colony, directed by Jeff Renfroe (Woodland Hills, CA: RLJ Entertainment, 2013); and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer. Snowpiercer especially has been analysed by many in this context, see Gerry Canavan, “‘If the Engine Ever Stops, We’d All Die’: Snowpiercer and Necrofuturism,” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 26 (2014): 41-66, https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1298&context=english_fac; and Fred Lee and Steven Manicastri, “Not All Are Aboard: Decolonizing Exodus in Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer,” New Political Science 40, no. 2 (2018): 211-26, 10.1080/07393148.2018.1449405.

  35. 35.

    See film: Gong Ge’er, Junce Ye, Yan Dongxu, Frant Gwo, and Yang Zhixue, The Wandering Earth, directed by Frant Gwo (Beijing: China Film Group, 2019); and see also Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

  36. 36.

    See R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).

  37. 37.

    On Lacan’s notion of the forced choice, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 210-13.

  38. 38.

    The perspective of the station is introduced through a rapid digital tracking shot where the virtual camera travels from the surface of the Earth thousands of kilometers into space in a few seconds, settling on a point of view from which the station dwarves the tiny blue marble of the planet, and looks as a giant weapon directed at it.

  39. 39.

    Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace.

  40. 40.

    In their Lacanian topological critique of the exceptional status of surplus under capitalism, Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra offer a similar definition of communism as the “axiom that asserts that no one can have exclusive rights over the dispatching of the surplus.” See Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra, “Psychoanalysis and Marxism: From Capitalist-All to Communist Non-All,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 10, no. 1 (2005): 93, 10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100028.

Filmography

  • Altman, Robert, Frank Barhydt, and Patricia Resnick. 1979. Quintet. Directed by Robert Altman. Santa Monica, CA: Lion’s Gate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bong, Joon-ho, and Kelly Masterson. 2013. Snowpiercer. Directed by Bong Joon-ho. Seoul, South Korea: Moho Films.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emmerich, Roland, and Jeffrey Nachmanoff. 2004. The Day After Tomorrow. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garland, Alex. 2002. 28 Days Later. Directed by Danny Boyle. London: DNA Films.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Sunshine. Directed by Danny Boyle. London: DNA Films.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gong, Ge’er, Junce Ye, Yan Dongxu, Frant Gwo, and Yang Zhixue. 2019. The Wandering Earth. Directed by Frant Gwo. Beijing: China Film Group.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, George, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris. 2015. Mad Max: Fury Road. Directed by George Miller. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.

    Google Scholar 

  • Renfroe, Jeff, Svet Rouskov, Patrick Tarr, and Pascal Trottier. 2013. The Colony. Directed by Jeff Renfroe. Woodland Hills, CA: RLJ Entertainment.

    Google Scholar 

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Tamás Nagypál

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. English Department, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Clint Burnham

  2. Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Paul Kingsbury

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Nagypál, T. (2021). From Capitalocene to Anthropocene: The Feminine Counter-Ecology of Snowpocalypse Films. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_14

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