A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Extreme climate and the anthropocentric conception of agency in cinematic ocean planets
Authors: Rezaii Faeze
Editors: Duffy Helena, Leppänen Katarina
Publishing place: New York, NY
Publication year: 2024
Book title : Storying the Ecocatastrophe : Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse
Series title: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
First page : 105
Last page: 121
Number of pages: 290
ISBN: 978-1-032-72694-6
eISBN: 978-1-032-72695-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032726953-6
Web address : https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781032726953-6/extreme-climate-anthropocentric-conception-agency-cinematic-ocean-planets-faeze-rezaii
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/393431394
Faeze Rezaii’s chapter explores the mediations of extreme climate events in the cinematic depiction of ocean planets in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and Interstellar (2014). Considering these planets as projections of Earth affected by global warming, Rezaii argues that, by showing the planets being beset by naturally induced extreme meteorological events, the films play down the existing human intervention in the formation of extreme climate events and affirm an anthropocentric conception of agency. The films thus indirectly suggest that the largely anthropogenic ecocatastrophe of the present has little to do with our actions. Such a figuration of planets ideologically naturalises the environmental collapse, glosses over human responsibility for it, and, ultimately, contributes to the persistence of the status quo.