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Finding strategies for today’s environmental movement in classic science fiction films

What can science fiction film tell us about the course of the modern ecological movement? On Life Support traces how the environmental concerns of the 1970s were embedded in the eco-dystopian cinema of the era—and considers its implications for ecological thought and activism today.

Illuminating the patterns that shape our thinking about nonhuman nature, Matthew I. Thompson pairs iconic films such as Soylent Green and Silent Running with the transformational environmentalist texts that inspired them and kick-started the modern environmental movement, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thompson examines this confluence of literature and cinema to show how, as they translated environmentalism for Hollywood’s audiences, these movies distilled the movement’s concepts into a form that revealed their inherent contradictions.

A sensitive analysis of the tensions that complicate environmentalist praxis—especially between desire and fear in the activist impulse—On Life Support offers a timely critique of the politics of environmental containment and control, calling instead for a politics of interconnection and contamination. It is, after all, by inviting complexity and chaos that we begin to undermine the myth of human mastery, letting nature flourish on its own terms.

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How does serial drama earn, keep, and reward our attention for so long—over episodes, seasons, months, and years? While we know that characters are the focus of story and viewer interest in television fiction, scholars have for decades overlooked the way those characters are performed on-screen and the lure of performance as a key formal and thematic aspect of long-form television storytelling. In Over and Over, Elliott Logan offers close readings of performance in some of the most celebrated television dramas of the century, casting new light on the attractions and significance of the medium’s seriality. The book shows how the patterning and expressive resonance of performers on-screen binds together otherwise unconnected episodes of shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men. In doing so, it highlights the provisionality of identity and meaning as crucial to their interest in the sustenance of human relationships over long periods of time. In accounting for the resonance of performance over time in serial drama, this book shows, we find the terms of our own attachment to its compelling depictions of human life