Fatal attraction: Wildness in contemporary film

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 297-315

  Drenthen, Martin ^a  

^a RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350757603     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200931332     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. For a list of environmentally relevant films, see http://www.esf.edu/ecn/ films.html.
2. Val Plumwood, "Being Prey," in David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus, eds., The New Earth Reader: The Best of Terra Nova (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 79.
3. In a sense, of course, wildness is part of the human world: our existence is intertwined with natural processes on all levels, most of which we do not control. For that reason, the idea of wildness as the inhuman has been contested. However, seen from the perspective of a subject who interprets the world, wildness conveys itself as an "outside," in contrast with the "view from the inside" that is constructed to sustain a sense of self (cf. Plumwood, "Being Prey," p. 79).
4. This notion is not meant to play down the difference between more or less violent acts of appropriation of nature. Draining marshland literally destroys the wild and unruly, whereas-in contrast-the merely symbolic act of appropriation of a poet attempts to give voice to a meaning that lies "beyond." Still, the term appropriation is used here to remind us about the difference between the familiarity of our words and images and the strangeness of what they try to express.
5. Martin Drenthen, "Wildness as a Critical Border Concept; Nietzsche and the Debate on Wilderness Restoration," Environmental Values 14, no. 3 (2005): 317-37.
6. Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Villard/Random House, 1996).
7. In the scene where Chris arrives in Alaska for the first time, the viewer is confronted with an overwhelming silence of wild nature, only to be reassured with a nice music soundtrack a few moments later.
8. Actually, McCandless stayed in a very "civilized" part of Alaska: if he only would have had a detailed map, he would probably have made it back alive.
9. From Jon Krakauer's radio interview with host Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which is distributed by National Public Radio and produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia.
10. Krakauer, author's introduction, Into the Wild.
11. Ibid., p. 12.
12. Krakauer, Radio Interview on Fresh Air.
13. Cf. Martin Drenthen, "The Paradox of Environmental Ethics. Nietzsche's view of Nature and die Wild," Environmental Ethics 21(1999): 163-75.
14. Cf. Plumwood, "Being Prey," p. 79.
15. For an extensive analysis of the way various types of organisms "mediate" their relation with the "external world" differently,
16. see Helmut Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975).
17. Herzog, voiceover, Grizzly Man. We could in turn criticize Herzog for not recognizing that bears do have a world on there own. For him, wild nature as merely that which is left if we remove all that is human.
18. From Treadwell's original video footage (emphasis added).
19. Sam Egli, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
20. Herzog, voiceover, Grizzly Man.
21. Mamie Gaeden, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
22. Larry Van Daele, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
23. Treadwell in original video footage of Grizzly Man.
24. Treadwell in original video footage of Grizzly Man.
25. Sven Haakanson, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
26. Sven Haakanson, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
27. Sven Haakanson, Grizzly Man, inserted interview with Hertzog after Treadwell's death.
28. See, for instance different "Third and Forth World" critiques on the wilderness idea in M. Nelu-son and J. Baird Callicott, eds., The Great Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Macmillan, 1907), para. 223.