Film & Sustainability Series: The Dark Knight Rises

Though this film has been out for quite a while now, I must still warn everyone that spoilers await them here.

The Dark Knight trilogy begins and closes with the question of human sustainability. During its 7-year run, Director Christopher Nolan has peppered the films with the issues of clean water, the poverty gap, urban corruption. Nolan makes his loudest comment on conservation, however, by ending the series with two of the biggest concerns to human existence: the economy and the environment. And Nolan symbolizes these with his focus on nuclear energy.

Between the Dark Night and its sequel the Dark Night Rises, billionaire Bruce Wayne seems to have tried to replace his heroic Batman activities with philanthropic zeal — for a while at least. He founded a magnanimous (and expensive!) project to develop "clean" energy for all of Gotham. The benefits of such an endeavor, though largely unspoken, resonate the trilogy's theme of clean, ethical living. Unfortunately, Wayne cancelled the project without producing anything to show his investors, losing the  money and confidence of the Gotham elite and himself. After this massive failure Wayne becomes a recluse and withdraws from business and society altogether, marking the decline of Wayne Industry's sustainable works.

The kicker: Wayne's project actually succeeded.  Partway into the film, Wayne reveals that he created a nuclear fission core, capable of powering clean, sustainable energy for the entire city. But fearing its power, he keeps it hidden from the world. The reactor, Wayne learns during the development process, can be transformed into a nuclear time-bomb large enough to take out the entire metropolis. And Wayne won't take the chance of the reactor landing into the wrong hands.

The film begins with Wayne's colleague Miranda Tate attempting to persuade others to restart the project, expounding how important clean, sustainable energy would be for Gotham. Of course Wayne refuses, stating the project is dead and useless. To this Tate replies, "a man who doesn't care about the world doesn't spend half his fortune on a plan to save it." This line, spoken right after the return of Batman, ingeniously connects conservation efforts with Wayne's more exciting acts of heroism. Saving the world obviously comes in many forms.

The movie continues in this vein by building a humming tension centering around Gotham's seemingly inevitable collapse. Nolan clearly juxtaposes the unsustainable nature of the city's power players devouring decadence from its average, downtrodden citizens. As Catwoman impresses upon Wayne and the audience, "you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

No wonder Batman cannot trust humanity with the decision of sustaining or destroying itself.

In the end, Batman's enemy Bane takes the decision away from him by stealing and weaponizing his core reactor to blackmail the city of Gotham into submission. Nolan beautifully parallels Batman's threats. A source of energy efficient enough to power his city of 12 million, locked underground just as Bane was locked away in a Middle Eastern prison. Both Bane and this reactor contain dangerous potential which are realized once they hit the surface in tangent to threaten every citizen of Gotham.

Of course Bane plans on letting the core detonate itself after it becomes too unstable. In this film about the lack of durability and the lack thereof, not even Batman's most dire threat can sustain itself for long.

The terrible state of Gotham under the nihilistic warlord Bane depicts one extreme: annihilation. Nolan shows his audience the great and terrible power we humans have in carving our own future with today's technology. And in doing so, he bring into question the ethics of progress, urban environmentalism, and the limits of human nature.

Overall, Nolan beautifully employs the Batman mythology to engage with a issue that will only become more pressing as time passes. The Dark Knight trilogy's end doesn't answer all of Gotham's problems or tie everything up in a pretty bow, but it poses at least one significant question: Does the world needs better management of our resources as urgently as Gotham needed Batman?

Up next: WALL-E and Waste

Film & Sustainability: WALL-E

Using tried and true techniques that the company has mastered in the past decade, Pixar creates cute, comic movie characters to access serious themes that relate to the real world. Marlin the clownfish displayed the trials of single parenthood, Woody and Buzz witnessed the painful process of growing up, and, most recently, Merida must navigate the volatile nature of mother-daughter relationships.

In Wall-E, Pixar raises environmentalist awareness with a particularly sympathetic main character, and – in my opinion –  the most adorable robot since R2-D2.

This robot captures audiences with his big sad eyes, yes, but also with his tender reverence for old times. His past, however, is our present. WALL-E, to paraphrase John Green, imagines the future with a kind of nostalgia by presenting a futuristic reality that keeps glancing longingly at its much greener past.

Set in the year 2805, earth has become one ginormous landfill, so cluttered and polluted that it cannot sustain organic life anymore. It is every environmentalist's worst nightmare. In an obvious critique on consumerism, humanity has literally used up all of its resources and leaves earth to fend for itself.

Only the main character, WALL-E, inhabits Earth. He also has the impossible task of cleaning it up all by himself. Throughout the film flashed the massage "WALL-E: works to dig you out." His job is to maintain what is left of earth by sifting through its piles of trash. Due to centuries of neglect, all of WALL-E’s fellow janitorial-robots have perished, leaving him with only a cockroach for company as he works to clear humanity's mess.

The most stunning aspect of this near-apocalyptic world is the blatant waste. Technically speaking, WALL-E focuses on land pollution, or the contamination of the earth’s surface level by dumping waste and misusing soil; the kind of pollution only people can cause. WALL-E’s incredibly detailed animation shows a brown, desolate Earth with a skyline of compressed trash and a mountain of loose litter.

Clearly, pollution is the real antagonist of the film.

Fortunately, the earth couldn't ask for a better steward. WALL-E has a knack for fixing the broken and nurturing the weak. So it is only appropriate the WALL-E is the one to find earth’s first sign of life in decades, a fragile new plant sprouting among the waste piles.

This one plant comes to represent humanity's last hope to connect to their natural roots.

The human race, having abandoned the dirty Earth to live in a space-cruise ship, has grown animalistic due to its separation from nature. Lazy, gluttonous, and entirely dependent on technology, this “advanced” society seems less human than the robotic force it depends on. WALL-E, in comparison, seems that much more sensitive to the needs of others, including the earth.

The beauty of this robot lies in his compassion and resourcefulness. WALL-E never disposes what he can save and reuse. He stays functioning by scavenging parts from other broken down robots, and his home is full of trinkets he has saved and repaired.

Despite his technological nature,WALL-E has often been compared to early human figures like Adam and Prometheus – great classical men striving to make the earth a good home for humanity. Though he is no Batman, WALL-E truly stands up to Pixar's most noble heroes.

Tell us your thoughts about WALL-E: is it a warning of what might come to pass, or mere science-fiction fun?

Up next: The Pursuit of Happyness & Sustainable Happiness Week

Film & Sustainability Series: The Hunger Games

Last spring The Hunger Games set off a new wave of fantasy movie buzz with it's tidal wave of popularity and financial success. The second film installment, Catching Fire, is sure to be even bigger when it premiers Nov. 22, 1013.

This post will look at the film The Hunger Games as well as the book trilogy which birthed the movie series. So, be warned, mild spoilers lie ahead.

To start, I love the series' social commentary on starvation, poverty, and oppression. Though other films and books have tried to discuss the same issues, not many have found that incredible balance of subtle-but-powerful that Suzanne Collins created. The Humer Games' fictional pseudo-kingdom of Panem, a dystopian North America that doesn't shy away from violence, mirrors problems of the real world in an accessible way only fantasy can project.

Due to the Panem government's strict regulations and oppressing nature, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen's world looks bleak from the outset. The people of her home, District 12, are desperately lacking the most basic resources. Katniss must break the law and risk torture - or worse - to enter a forest in search of food nearly every day. She must choose between constant danger and starvation. This lack of food is highlighted in one of the film's most poignant scenes; right before Katniss is ripped away from her home to join the Hunger Games, her parting line is an order to her friend: "Whatever you do, don't let them starve."

Right after she leaves District 12, Katniss' train to the Capitol contains many lingering shots of a rich buffet in the dining car. The film, as well as the book, juxtaposes District 12's pervasive hunger with abundant food imagery in wealthier locations. This theme fills the entire trilogy, from flashbacks of Katniss' family drinking mint tea to fill their empty stomachs to a Capitol party where the fashion is to publicly purge and go back for another stomach-full of food.

From these scenes, the Capitol strikingly resembles America's perchance for over-consumption while many areas of the world live in perpetual hunger. The site Mindfully gives some eye-opening statistics about our consumption in relation to other countries; the U.S. tosses 200,000 tons of edible food daily, and eats extra, unneeded food that would feed 80 million people.

The Hunger Games draws much of its content from such realities, including Katniss' reaction to the Capitol. Though Katniss is momentarily dazzled by the new world of food she has entered, she can't look at it without thinking of the thin, gaunt faces she knows back home. Never is there a big meal or a banquet celebration without her thinking back to District 12's lack of sustenance. This juxtaposition of starvation and decadence shows two economic extremes that our world also faces. In Katniss' world and our own, the poverty gap is a real concern.

Wealth vs. poverty is another social commentary theme Collins draws from. While this socioeconomic gap becomes prominently gross as the series progresses, the first installment suavely introduces it with the hunger game lottery rules. The citizens desperate for food enter their names extra times for essential staples. The poorer the family, the more times the child enters themself.  One review calls such children "economic conscripts. As one New York Times article puts it, for people like Katniss, this practice is essentially "a death sentence — no one from the underfinanced and under­nourished District 12 has won in decades." These conscripts must face against their wealthier counterparts, who are trained from birth for the hunger games and have significantly higher odds of winning.

The is certainly more connections to be made here. Katniss fits the bill for a sustainable heroine: she's happiest when she hunts and forages, preferring untouched forests to overcrowded cities. And Katniss never lets things go to waste if she can help it [much like another hero in a previous post].

Though I've only scratched the surface of all that lies bubbling beneath The Hunger Games' popular draw [note: war, reality television, Jennifer Lawrence's incredibly complex performance, the seemingly-inevitable-love-triangle], I am excited to see how this story will play out further on the big screen.