Still from “The Shape of Water.”
The Shape of Water, Dir. Guillermo del Toro, is a tale of a woman establishing solidarity with the non-human whilst enduring the oppression of a corporatist, militaristic society – and then experiencing a profound physiological transcendence. The movie is suffused with post-humanist notions – where ethical concern expands beyond the human to embrace a connection with the multiplicity of the biosphere and where the teleological drive to subsume the earth under human consciousness and thus materially consume it, begins to wither. Theodore Adorno wrote that “Progress begins when it is at an end”. Is it time to begin rolling back half a millennium of Modernity? Hollywood, ever an indicator of the zeitgeist, seems to think so. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded del Toro Best Director and Best Picture of 2017 for his self-proclaimed homage to Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dir. Jack Arnold, 1954. It is out of such mythic tales that the Earth’s destiny may be shaped.
Pete Dolack, in China Can’t Save Capitalism from Environmental Destruction, writes that at last October’s 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, President Xi Jinping proclaimed, “Man and nature form a community of life; we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it…Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us”. Xi was channeling his inner Thoreau, but as Dolack makes clear, his sentiment…