Environmental melodrama

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 92, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 239-261

  Schwarze, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA   (United States)

Author keywords

Asbestos; Comedy; Environmental Rhetoric; Libby, Montana; Melodrama; Polarization; Social Movements

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750295174     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630600938609     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. This interpretation is most apparent in Michael Osborn and John Bakke, "The Melodramas of Memphis: Contending Narratives during the Sanitation Strike of 1968," Southern Communication Journal 63 (Spring 1998): 220-234;
2. see also Carl Burgchardt, "Discovering Rhetorical Imprints: La Follette, 'Iago,' and the Melodramatic Scenario," Quarterly Journal of Speech 71.4 (November 1985), especially pp. 449-452.
3. For a more recent essay that rehearses the "dangerous ramifications" of melodrama in the context of national identity, see Elisabeth Anker, "Villians, Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama, Media, and September 11," Journal of Communication (March 2005): 22-37.
4. A. Cheree Carlson, "Gandhi and the Comic Frame: 'Ad Bellum Purificandum,'" Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 446-455;
5. and "Limitations on the Comic Frame: Some Witty Women of the Nineteenth Century," Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 310-322;
6. Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, "Comedy as Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS," Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (May 1996): 157-170;
7. Anne Teresa Demo, "The Guerilla Girls' Comic Politics of Subversion." Women's Studies in Communication 23 (Spring 2000): 133-156;
8. Gregory Desilet, "Nietzsche Contra Burke: The Melodrama in Dramatism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 65-83;
9. Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, "The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Matthew Shepard Murder," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5.3 (Fall 2002): 483-505;
10. Kimberly A. Powell, "The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching: Strategies of a Movement in the Comic Frame," Communication Quarterly 43 (Winter 1995): 86-99;
11. Caitlin Wills Toker, "Debating 'What Ought To Be': The Comic Frame and Public Moral Argument, Western Journal of Communication 66 (Winter 2002): 53-83.
12. Desilet, "Nietzsche," 76.
13. For one analysis of melodrama in contemporary popular culture, see Daniel Mendelsohn, "The Melodramatic Moment," The New York Times, March 23, 2003. Available at http:// www.nytimes.com.
14. Terence Check, "Condemning a Corporation: Exxon as Scapegoat," In Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment, ed. Susan L. Senecah (Syracuse, NY: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 1997), 133-144;
15. Mark Meister and Phyllis Japp, "Sustainable Development and the Global Economy: Rhetorical Implications for Improving the Quality of Life," Communication Research 25 (August 1998): 399-422;
16. Tarla Rai Peterson, Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997);
17. Toker, "Debating."
18. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 41.
19. Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 49.
20. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 223.
21. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 224.
22. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 230.
23. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 232.
24. Carlson, "Limitations," 312.
25. Christiansen and Hanson, "Comedy," 160.
26. Steve Schwarze, "Juxtaposition in Environmental Health Rhetoric: Exposing Asbestos Contamination in Libby, Montana," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6.2 (Summer 2003): 313-336.
27. Carlson, "Ghandi," 448.
28. Carlson, "Limitations," 319.
29. William Lewis, "Of Innocence, Exclusion, and the Burning of Flags: The Romantic Realism of the Law." Southern Communication Journal 60.1 (1994): 4-21.
30. Christiansen and Hansen, "Comedy as a Cure for Tragedy," 158.
31. Christiansen and Hanson, "Comedy as a Cure for Tragedy," 169.
32. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 25.
33. Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society, ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 94-95.
34. Heilman, Ways of the World, 96.
35. Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993): 16.
36. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984/ 1976): 15.
37. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 20-21.
38. Heilman, Iceman, 52.
39. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 224.
40. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, "Performing Critical Interruptions: Stories, Rhetorical Invention, and the Environmental Justice Movement," Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 1-25.
41. Andrew Schneider, "A Town Left to Die," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 18, 1999. Available at http://seattlepi.nwsource. com/uncivilaction/lib18.shtml.
42. David F. Latham, "Libby presents united front to governor," The Montanian, August 15, 2001, pg. 8. One month later, at a field hearing in Libby that included EPA director Christine Todd Whitman and Montana's congressional delegation, speakers were calling the actions of W.R. Grace "criminal" and one suggested that they be charged with homicide.
43. Available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/uncivilaction/. (The title of the series plays off the book and movie "A Civil Action," which recounted the toxic contamination situation in Woburn, Massachusetts-also involving W.R. Grace.) In addition, the documentary film Dust to Dust visually performs this juxtaposition by showing document as well as extensive footage of Margaret Vatland (Gayla Benefield's mother) on her deathbed, coughing and gasping for air as a result of asbestosis that she contracted through exposure to her husband's work clothes.
44. This footage helps develop monopathic identification with victims and with Benefield. Michael Brown Productions, Dust to Dust: A Documentary Feature, dir. Michael Brown, 2002.
45. Lawrence Buell, "Toxic Discourse," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998).
46. Lois Gibbs, Love Canal: The Story Continues ... (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1998).
47. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 229.
48. Check, "Condemning," 134.
49. For one recent study, see Christine Harold, "Pranking Rhetoric: 'Culture Jamming' as Media Activism," Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.3 (September 2004): 189-211.
50. For contrasting perspectives on the politics of green consumerist discourses, see M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, "Liberal and Pragmatic Trends in the Discourse of Green Consumerism," in The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment, eds. James G. Cantrill and Christine L. Oravec (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996)
51. and Timothy Luke, "Green Consumerism: Ecology and the Ruse of Recycling," in Ecocritique: Contesting The Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
52. For a discussion of discourses that rhetorically homogenize and singularize interests, see Celeste Michelle Condit, "Hegemony in a Mass-Mediated Society: Concordance about Reproductive Technologies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11.3 (September 1994): 205-230.
53. This sense of community, especially among mine workers, is depicted vividly in the beginning of Dust to Dust. The idyllic descriptions and depictions of social unity against the backdrop of the rugged, pristine beauty of northwest Montana sets up a powerful contrast to the rest of the film's portrayal of the mine's devastating effects on the community's well-being. Lawrence Buell argues that these motifs of "pastoral betrayal" and an "Eden lost" to pollution are typical in the rhetoric of toxic contamination; here, they heighten the sense of villainy and moral rupture characteristic of melodrama. Buell, "Toxic Discourse," 639-665.
54. Upon W.R. Grace's announcement in January 2000 that they would pay for medical bills, former miner Les Skramstad reflected, "In the past, everything that Grace has touched involving health problems at the mine has wound up hurting the miner and his family. Many people need the medical help that (Grace is) offering, but you can understand why some are frightened about the company being involved." Andrew Schneider, "Grace to pick up medical bills in tainted town," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 22, 2000. Available at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/uncivilaction/libb221.shtml. Subsequently, victims have seen several unannounced cutbacks to the insurance coverage provided by Grace.
55. At the August 2001 public meeting, "Skramstad presented to Martz a quart-size jar of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite that he said he scooped up the export plant after W.R. Grace & Co. had supposedly cleaned the area. 'I didn't do any excavating, all I did was look under a piece of plywood. I could have gotten a five-gallon bucket but I thought this would do." David F. Latham, "Libby presents united front to governor," The Montanian, August 15, 2001, pg. 1.
56. http://www.ewg.org/reports/asbestos/facts/index.php
57. Phaedra Pezzullo, "Resisting 'National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (November 2003): 345-365.
58. Schwarze, "Juxtaposition."
59. Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report. Public Affairs Television, Inc., 2001.
60. Brant Short, "Earth First! and the Rhetoric of Moral Confrontation," Communication Studies 42.2 (Summer 1991): 172-188.
61. Jonathan I. Lange, "Refusal to Compromise: The Case of Earth First!," Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 473-494;
62. see also Short, "Earth First!"
63. Robert Patterson and Ronald Lee, "The Environmental Rhetoric of 'Balance': A Case Study of Regulatory Discourse and the Colonization of the Public." Technical Communication Quarterly 6.1 (Winter 1997): 25-40.
64. Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006): 344-346.
65. "One of the strengths of the [environmental] movement has been its ability to build on the frustrations and rage of people who see their quality of life threatened by technological systems and perceive themselves as victims." Fischer, Citizens, 111.
66. See Brian Plonka's "Living and Dying in Libby," which won First Place in the Issue Reporting Picture Story category of the 2002 Pictures of the Year International competition. Images available at http://www.poy.org/59/16/ 1601plonb01.html.
67. However, their heroism is bolstered by victimage, too. Both Benefield and Skramstad have asbestos disease, and such disease is pervasive in their families. Benefield has dozens of relatives who are affected; Skramstad's commonplace, echoed across multiple texts and in his own testimony, is that it was bad enough that he has asbestos disease but absolutely wrong that he "had to bring it home to his wife and kids."
68. Patterson and Lee, "The Environmental Rhetoric of 'Balance.'"
69. G. Thomas Goodnight, "The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation," Journal of the American Forensics Association 18.4 (Spring 1982): 214-227.
70. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 230.
71. Osborn and Bakke, "Melodramas," 231.
72. This position is consistent with other rhetorical scholarship on polarization, which explains polarization as a tactic that invites audiences to "abandon the middle course" and take sides on some issue. William D. Harpine, "Bryan's 'A Cross of Gold:' The Rhetoric of Polarization at the 1896 Democratic Convention," Quarterly Journal of Speech 87.3 (August 2001): 295.
73. This instrumental view is explicit in one classic statement in the rhetoric of social movements, Bowers, Ochs and Jensen's The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control. By defining rhetoric as the rationale of "instrumental, symbolic behavior," the constitutive potential of agitation is obscured. Polarization is again treated simply as a means "to force a conscious choice between agitation and control." John W. Bowers, Donovan J. Ochs, and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993), 34.
74. In contrast, Charles Stewart's study of Stokely Carmichael's rhetoric illustrates how polarization not only offers audiences stark choices, but also can recast social identities and constitute moral issues. Charles Stewart, "The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83.4 (November 1997): 429-446.
75. For example, one "Citizen's Guide" to the World Trade Organization produced in the run-up to the 1999 Seattle meeting describes how "corporate interests trample workers" in a trade dispute over bananas. The guide insinuated that "huge campaign donations by Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner" influenced the US to argue for trade sanctions against Europe on account of their preference for Caribbean bananas over those grown in Central America (where Chiquita owns plantations). The guide positions this affluent CEO's interests at odds with the livelihood of indigenous farmers. Quoting unnamed Caribbean womens' groups, the guide explains how the European market provided "'thousands of families in the sub-region of the Windward Islands a measure of security and has afforded us dignity and self-reliance. The loss of this security through a sudden change in market opportunities would leave us without resources to build a future for our families and our countries.'" Working Group on the WTO/MAI, "A Citizen's Guide to the World Trade Organization," July 1999. Available at http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/ documents/citizens_guide.pdf.
76. Communication scholars are giving increasing attention to how discourses circulating around globalization are problematizing agenda issues, social identities, and the very forums of public participation; respectively, see Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, "From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the 'Violence' of Seattle," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (June 2002): 125-151;
77. Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde "Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (June 2002): 172-189;
78. and J. Robert Cox, "'Free Trade' and the Eclipse of Civil Society: Barriers to Transparency and Public Participation in NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas," In Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment, eds. Marie-France Aepli, Stephen P. Depoe, and John W. Delicath (Cincinnati, OH: Center for Environmental Communication Studies, 2001), 172-181.
79. Jonathan Lange and Mark Moore's studies of the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest are instructive here. Melodramatic rhetoric surely reified the existing conflict between loggers and environmentalists. It is questionable whether any rhetoric could have ameliorated this conflict successfully, but as Moore suggests, advocates might have reclaimed the symbol of the owl to generate new modes of consubstantiality. Jonathan I. Lange, "The Logic of Competing Information Campaigns: Conflict over Old Growth and the Spotted Owl," Communication Monographs 60.3 (September 1993): 239-257;
80. Mark P. Moore, "Constructing Irreconcilable Conflict: The Function of Synecdoche in the Spotted Owl Controversy," Communication Monographs 60.3 (September 1993): 258-274.
81. Toker, "Debating."
82. Powell, "Association of Southern Women."
83. This is clearly the case throughout Osborn and Bakke's delineation of the distinct traits of melodramatic characters; among other things, such characters are "incredibly simple representations of humanity." This observation quickly leads them to flatly assert, "Indeed, melodrama denies complexity" (222).
84. Burke, Attitudes, 5.