TY - JOUR
AU - Nandi, Swaralipi
AB - With unprecedented temperature extremes, melting polar caps, ocean acidification, the recurrence of devastating natural disasters, and steady multi-species extinction, the reality of climate change and environmental damage has become what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject” or things that are “so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity” (1). Yet, in spite of the immediacy of living on a planet that is teetering on the brink of irreversible damage, the political rhetoric has often been oblivious or brutally dismissive of the scientific consensus over man-made environmental damage. In the North American context, climate change denial is more of a political ideology than an environmental question, with the conservative political rhetoric vehemently discrediting scientific findings, attesting to what Dunlap calls “an organized disinformation campaign to manufacture uncertainty over global warming” (691). As is often the case in the Global South, like in the case of India, environmental concerns are neglected in the larger public discourse, or are mired in fierce political debates in a rapidly polarizing country. Thus, a judicial decision to ban firecrackers during the Indian festival of Diwali as a measure of checking the deteriorating Air Quality Index in most Indian cities invoked protests from right-wing groups claiming it as an attack on the religious sentiments of the majority Hindu population. Subsequently, the current Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has handed over forest clearances and mining licences in erstwhile protected areas like the Aarey Forest, the Mollem National Parks’s wildlife sanctuary, and the Kawal Tiger Reserve with little or no larger public outrage, the protests often staged by only the fringe activist groups and tribes directly affected by such debilitating policies. Alarm bells on climate-change in an era of unbridled consumerism and global capitalism thus encounter a variety of negating politics—from the fervent denial of climate change in the US political rhetoric to its deliberate invisibilization in developing neoliberal economies like India. Invoking a materialistic critique, this article seeks to analyze Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon (2017) as a fictional resistance to the cultural amnesia of climate change. Set in a speculative future of 2067, the film not only offers a dire prediction of the future of fossil capitalism but also situates the climate question amidst a capitalistic dystopia, contextualizing through the form of what can be called an “eco-noir” that stage ecological disenchantment amidst a “pervasive atmosphere of corruption, crime, psychopathology and evil” (Damico 104). Referring to the problematics of the term Anthropocene as originally proposed by Paul Crutzen, I invoke Jason Moore’s concept of Capitalocene to offer a comprehensive discussion of fossil fuel capitalism and the invisibility of the fossil fuels. The article also discusses the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.1 Climate Change and the Anthropocene Climate change is often mapped against the Anthropocene era, whose beginning Crutzen locates in the latter part of the eighteenth century, coinciding with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine and the beginning of industrialization. The “carbonization” of the planetary environment, as Crutzen asserts, is aggravated in the period of the “great acceleration”, which refers to the post-war industrial boom that resulted in a phenomenal increase in atmospheric carbon. Rendered visible through the “planetary dashboard” that charts human activity through 24 graphs from the start of the industrial revolution in 1750 to 2010, the great acceleration marks the phenomenal changes in the Earth System—in greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation, and biodiversity deterioration. However, Jason Moore contends that the “Anthropocene has become the most important—and also the most dangerous environmentalist concept of our times” (“Name the System”), particularly since assigning the process of climate change to a simple acceleration in abstract human activity without historicizing it against the growth of capitalism is not only naïve but, as Moore contends, “a colossal falsification.” Moore’s contention is against Anthropocene’s assumption of the human species as a “mighty, largely process, homogenous, acting unit: ‘the human enterprise’.” Inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and much more—all have been cleansed from “Humanity,” the Anthropocene’s point of departure (“Name the System”). Moore instead proposes the Capitalocene—“the ‘age of capital’—the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital,” thus assigning specificity to the human intervention in nature. Though Moore objects to the popular narrative of the fossil fuel driven nineteenth century as the sole harbinger of capitalistic growth and locates the beginning of the “Capitalocene” in the sixteenth century, the importance of the carbon imprint of coal in the long nineteenth century’s two Industrial Revolutions and the acceleration of a petroleum-culture post-1950s remain uncontested, even by Moore. Borrowing from both Moore’s Capitalocene as well as Crutzen’s “Great Acceleration,” it can be safely asserted that a sustained theory of climate change must thus invoke a comprehensive critique of extractive economies, particularly the omnipresent impact of fossil fuel capitalism. While in Petrocultures Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman chart the “geopolitics of the modern era” though the history and politics of fossil energy, Dipesh Chakrabarty goes as far as asserting that “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use. Most of our freedoms are energy intensive” (208). For Timothy Mitchell too, the dissemination of modern political systems like democracy and by extension the formation of the modern state and the neoliberal state are contingent upon increasing quantities of low-cost carbon energy. There are several takeaway points in these recurrent articulations of the indispensability of fossil fuels for ubiqdefining modern ways of living. First, that the continued use of fossil fuels constitutes one of the major barriers to mitigating climate change. Second, the lack of sufficient critical attention to climate change is inextricably related to the taken-for-grantedness of our energy use and its consequent invisibility. While fossil fuels emerge ubiquitous as a pre-supposed energy form fueling the motion of a global capitalist society, the “order” of its functioning has often been invisible. The question of “invisibility” that, as Graeme MacDonald explains, has less to do with the sensory lack of vision and more with the “public indiscernibility” or in Szeman’s words suggests an “epistemic inability or unwillingness to name our energy ontologies” (Literature and Energy Futures 324). The invisibility of fossil fuels in the existing climate change discourse is contingent upon this epistemological gap. Working in tandem with neoliberal modes of consumption, existing climate change discourse emphasizes the effects—staged through apocalyptic visions—rather than the consumptive aspects of fossil fuel systems that are rendered invisible. Thus, in the popular discourse, as Avi Brisman points out, climate change entails a stock set of unrelated visual clichés—melting ice caps, cities in black smog, weather extremes, spectacular footages of tsunamis and cyclones—that seem to have spiralled out of context into stunning spectacles of impending apocalypse, but nevertheless deliberately dissociated from accelerated consumerism that sustains the ecologically destructive pursuit of economic growth (“Representing the ‘Invisible Crime’”). In tow with the Anthropocene rhetoric, climate change in popular rhetoric often posits the wanton wrath of nature persecuting the humans with good reason, a case in point being the Kedarnath floods and the Kerala floods that became more about human suffering and victimhood than human abuse of nature.2 Commenting on the misplaced priorities of an apocalyptic ecological discourse, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer contend that the fact that “these discourses are unable to mobilize or produce any response to a disaster as we know is a direct result of the law of capitalism—limitless accumulation” (68). One of the fundamental critical tasks of the energy humanities is therefore to explore climate change through a language of visibility of carbon capitalism, drawing attention to modes of human consumption that define the ontological experience of the modern way of life. How does art and literature make energy visible in an era that deliberately conceals the environmental devastation of capitalism? The answer might not lie in realism. Realist fiction, as Amitav Ghosh contends in The Great Derangement, has been largely deaf to the environment. For Ghosh, this lack of attention is due to the very character of the modern novel: its narrative and generic form has developed in a manner that makes it insensate to the environment and allows it to contend poorly with climate change. At best, one might read it as the absent ground against which the rest of the work of the novel is carried out; at worst, the novel could be seen as a technological apparatus that has framed its readers to view the planet and humanity’s relationship to it only in very specific ways. Ghosh bravely poses the question of whether we look in vain to literature to animate the energies that will be needed for the mess and disaster already here and still to come in this century and beyond. To quote Ghosh: serious literary fiction” had failed in its duty when it comes to addressing climate change, noting that ‘fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction (7). Yet calling out Ghosh for excluding science fiction as serious literature on climate change, since they are disaster stories set in the future rather than examining the recent past and present, Shelley Streeby in her book Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World Making through Science Fiction and Activism lauds speculative fictions for their resistive potential to stage activism for the fringe communities. Speculative fiction on climate change, as Charlie Anders states, “is uniquely suited to help us imagine what’s coming, and to motivate us to mitigate the effects before it’s too late” (“Why Science Fiction Authors Need to be Writing About Climate Change Right Now”). Speculative narratives thus carry unique possibilities of staging the invisible effects of present capitalistic modernity, which camouflage ecological precarity with a euphoria of consumption. Though set in a future time, Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon is a critical commentary of our carbon present and the unfettered consumption that obliviates the impending doom. Ecological Noir and the Crisis of Capitalism Framed as a speculative narrative, Carbon: The Story of Tomorrow is based on a futuristic world where carbon dioxide has completely replaced atmospheric oxygen, which is now supplied by industries. Written and directed by Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan, the movie stars Jackky Bhagnani, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Prachi Desai in the lead roles. Set in India in 2067, Carbon presents a dystopian world where unmitigated carbonization of the Earth System has led to a complete exhaustion of atmospheric oxygen. All the rich and the powerful have left for Mars, abandoning Earth in an uninhabitable state. A smog-shrouded futuristic city—modeled on the conventions of ultra-modern urban spectacles of cinematic science fictions—serves as a backdrop for the narrative. The technology, too, is futuristic–the protagonist Random has an artificial heart, which gives him a permit to carry personal oxygen, otherwise considered illegal for private use. Random, however, uses the permit to smuggle oxygen, which has now become more invaluable than any other commodity. Random smuggles oxygen for a client who claims to be from Mars but is actually a professional killer sent to hunt Random down and assume control over the oxygen syndicate. What follows is a grim tale of crime syndicates, smuggling, murder, and human greed—all surrounding the hypothetical exhaustion and the consequent commodification of atmospheric oxygen. As a film, Carbon scores very averagely in its execution and overall cinematic appeal. The film runs for 25 minutes and is produced as an independent film released as a part of the “largeshort film” series on YouTube for popular viewing.3 However, the film stands out amidst similar films of apocalyptic futures in its conceptualization of the human factor in climate change. Unlike the other films in the climate disaster genre—like Absolute Zero, Snowpiercer, Day After Tomorrow or 2012—Carbon does not project a dramatic spectacle of climate disaster and the consequent tale of human resilience. Climate disaster films are almost always existentialist tales of the triumph of the human spirit, pitted against overwhelming, often vicious forces of nature out to wipe out humanity. As James Holland Jones points out, science fiction can show “how people work, how they fight back, how they engage in the prosaic heroism of adapting to a changed world. This is powerful. It gives us hope for a better future” (“The Big Melt”). Disaster film’s narrative of human heroism is a derivation of the Judeo-Christian ethos of an Anthropocentric relationship with nature, compounded in the Cartesian orientation to development. Moore comments on how the Cartesian worldview syncs with the capitalistic ethos of nature: Capitalism’s governing conceit is that it may do with Nature as it pleases, that Nature is external and may be fragmented, quantified and rationalized to serve economic growth, social development or some other higher good (“Capitalism a Web of Life” 601). Subsequently, the ecological crisis is presented as an aberration of sorts, where human beings battle against the hostile nature and eventually emerge victorious. Carbon subverts this popular narrative (a) by using the climate hazard as just a context to the story and not a figure of contestation and (b) by putting the onus back on human greed and capitalism through a spectacle of violence. Carbon’s speculative trope is also built on a noir narrative, thus invoking an existing tradition of a blend of the two forms of noir and science fiction, as seen in Miéville's The City and the City and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The form of noir essentially represents a bleak dystopia of violence in a dysfunctional society that is ushered in by the modernizing forces of technology and capitalism. Originally coined by French critics in reference to the low-key lighting used to enhance the dramatic effect, “noir” refers to a style of filmmaking characterized by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philosophy (Encyclopedia Britannica). The emergence of film noir in the US coincides with the turbulence of the World War II era, the form commenting on the insecurities, violence and pessimism of post-war society. However, Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland assert that despite its American roots, the popular crime form “is best appreciated as an always international phenomenon concerned with the local effects of globalization and the threats to national and urban culture it seems to herald” (2010, ix). Similarly, pointing out how film and the literary noir invoke overtones of pessimism and disillusionment about the modern society, Lee Horsley comments that the noir genre embodies the voice of violation and dissent—“it also has the potential for critique, for undermining complacency and illusions (the false promises of the American dream, the hypocrisy of the British establishment).” More generally, the noir sensibility might come to the fore at any time of discontentment and anxiety, of disillusionment with institutional structures (2001,143-144). In current times, noir holds a particular significance in neoliberal socio-cultural contexts where the optimism about new emerging economies contrasts with the despondence of depleting older economies, where promises of social mobility are offset by an increasing income gap, and where the rapid transformation of spaces into glittering hubs of capitalistic consumption is challenged by a dark underbelly battling poverty and deprivation. The “neoliberal noir”—as Misha Kokotovich terms it and explains in the context of burgeoning crime fictions in post-1990 Latin America—thus acts as a social criticism of neoliberal, free market capitalism raging in Latin American societies post Reagan-Thatcher era: This new Central American noir forms part of a larger Latin American literary phenomenon I refer to as neoliberal noir. Since about 1990, most of the continent has experienced something of a boom in narratives that use elements of detective or crime fiction to criticize the effects of the neoliberal, free market capitalism imposed on Latin American societies over the past two decades (15). Matthew Christensen observes a similar connection between the prevalence of African popular crime genres and the problematics of structural changes imposed on African nation states by the market-driven policies of the IMF and World Bank. The genre resurges with prominence in the context of the neoliberal changes, as Christensen observes: “Given its historical engagement with the crises of liberalism and global capitalism, crime fiction offers an even richer critical apparatus for investigating the morphing valences of sociability, criminality, and political legitimacy under neoliberal governance” (2013, 106). Carbon’s invocation of the noir form echoes the more sustained trend of cynicism in post-millennium Indian fiction, depicting a reality that Rana Dasgupta calls “almost unremittingly dark,” and “cynical” to the point of rendering everything meaningless. Speaking of the literary expressions depicting contemporary India in post-millennium texts, Dasgupta observes a pattern in narratives where “the majority of society lives precariously amid violence and exploitation, and it must kill and manipulate to survive. There is not even any room for moral judgement because the world is so sick—and its protagonists, spiritually lost, have no comment on the terrifying reality they discover” (“A Bend in the River”). In the same strain, the rise of the Indian film noir of the 1990s in mainstream Hindi cinema and the morally ambivalent, dystopic and cynical worldview it represents coincides with the free-market liberalization in the 1990s and the concurrent anxieties of the shifting socio-economic paradigms in neoliberal India.4 While the crime films of pre-liberalization Bollywood dealt with the disenchantment with the state and its systems through the figures of individual criminals, embodied primarily in two archetypes—(a) the once innocent man turned into an outlawed, vigilante hero (Shahenshah), and (b) the gangster or the seasoned criminal boss (Parinda, Don)—crime in post-liberalization cinema caters to the convention of an all-pervasive cynicism typical of the noir form. Thus, post-1991 Bollywood sees the emergence of a plethora of noir/crime dramas—for example, Satya (1998), Vastaav (1999), Company (2002), Black Friday (2004), Shootout at Lokhandwala (2008), Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (2010)—that takes crime beyond the purview of individual morality to invoke crime on an allpervasive, populous, and grander scale. These films offer a more comprehensive narrative of moral corruption that taints every level of society beneath the gloss of shopping malls and multiplexes, advertisement hoardings, offices of multinational companies, and the burgeoning real estate that emerged with the onset of India’s economic liberalization. As Ranjani Mazumdar points out, the new wave of noir cinema in Bollywood is marked by a complete absence of tradition and romance, and reveals a “new, melancholic, almost sinister imagination” in portraying the city of Mumbai as it grapples with urban violence while undergoing seismic changes under neoliberal globalization (152). The essential noir characteristics of violence and disenchantment are embodied in Carbon’s basic premise. Violence in Carbon is projected in more ways than just the speculative possibility of absence of oxygen. The futuristic aggressive scramble for oxygen in Carbon and the ensuing violence for its control equals the more contemporary global scramble for oil and the allied violence of prolonged geopolitical disturbances. Once found abundantly as a natural resource, oxygen becomes commoditized through a network of demand and supply that is built on a process of “expropriation”5 by force. Carbon invokes the conventions of noir in etching a dark world of illegal syndicates and crime, with each cartel violently pursuing their control over oxygen. Professional killers haunt the scene in disguise, Random tackles numerous dangerous adversaries, and an evocative scene shows Random being tortured to near-asphyxiation by being denied his mask in the unbreathable air. In its portrayal of the dark dystopic world, Carbon can thus be called an “eco-noir”—a narrative that stages ecological disenchantment by using classic elements from the conventional “film noir,” namely, a “pervasive atmosphere of corruption, crime, psychopathology and evil; the constant resort to gratuitous violence, the dark and gloomy underworld, the femme fatale, and brooding, sardonic loner anti-heroes” (Damico 104). An example of cinematic eco-noir aesthetics is Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009), which is, according to Torsten Bøgh Thomsen, “a primary and genre-defining artwork of dark ecology” (125). Lucas Hollister have read the violence in crime fictions through ecological awareness and Anna Estera Mrozewicz reads the Nordic TV series Occupied through the trope of the ecological noir. The connection between ecological thought and noir has long been suggested by Morton: Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it. (16–17). For Morton the inclusion of “negativity and irony, ugliness and horror” (17) in ecological thought in contrast to the environmental rhetoric that is “too often strongly affirmative, extraverted” (16) creates a unique “metaposition” for making “ecological pronouncements’’ in an age where the catastrophe is no longer imminent but has already arrived. In a similar way, Carbon also blends in the ecological question with the form of the noir, offering a critique of carbon modernity. The ecological question in Carbon is broached through structures of human crime, greed and violence, whereby the oxygen syndicate echoes existing illegal systems that thrive as the dark underbelly of a commodity market. As several actors scramble for control of oxygen through vicious means including murder, the story of Carbon becomes more about human depravity than that of a hostile environment, led to its doom by the same humans. The choice of the noir genre set against a speculative premise in a film like Carbon however works on a dual level beyond just a method of irony and unsettling certainty. While Ghosh explains that the trope of the “improbable” or the “exceptional moments” that characterize climate calamities render them incompatible with the “realist novel’s mimetic ambitions: detailed description of everyday life (or fillers)” (19) that define its essential bourgeoise form, I would like to argue that the cinematic representation of carbon toxicity is untenable in both the realist and the traditional disaster genres. Given its veritable invisibility in the lived experiences of most people, carbon toxicity poses an imaginative difficultly to portray in the visuals of a realist film without resorting to a calamitic moment, typical of a disaster genre. Yet again, carbon pollution does not have the dramatic potential of a tsunami or cyclone on screen, for it entails what Rob Nixon would call the “spectacle deficient” “slow violence”—“a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). Thus, carbon pollution embodies both the Nixonian slow violence and Morton’s “hyperobject” in its distended temporal dimension of sustained yet invisible damage, imperceptible in a framework of temporal immediacy. Thus, a futuristic setting that visually portrays the after-effects of the disaster seems to be a logical choice for the cinematic medium. Moreover, the choice of noir adds the necessary critical dimension to the film—unlike Morton’s description of the supposedly neutral POV of the noir narrator who is subsequently “implicated” in the process of investigation, the protagonists in Carbon find themselves deep “inside” the pollution (in contrast with the disaster-movie representation of environmental collapse as an external spectacle “over there”). The film thus spectacularizes the “slow violence” of degraded atmosphere by transitioning from the neutral point of view of the classic noir to one of an inevitable implication of inescapable doom. Staged through all the classic noir tropes in its cinematography, Carbon brings the ecological degradation home. Carbon as an Eco-Noir Carbon recreates the characteristics of the classic film noir—namely, the quest of the seeker-hero in the noir world, the chaos of the glitzy urban hub, and the dark world of rampant criminality. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays the suave contract killer in disguise while Yakub is the crude gangster with a twisted modus operandi of torturing, scrambling for control over both packaged oxygen and water. Random navigates through dangerous challenges and the film ends without a conclusive resolution in this morally twisted carbonated universe. Carbon also invokes the classic noir in its visual details—the film being shot in a monochromatic sepia tone conveying “bleak/fatalistic overtones of despair and madness” (Damico 104) heightened by an overwhelming pall of darkness and shadows and cluttered dark interiors. The urban spaces in Carbon are both claustrophobic and precarious, embodying what Edward Dimendberg theorizes as the noir’s penchant for “cinematic excoriation of the polluted and mechanized metropolis” (17). As Fay observes, noir “heroes are already accustomed to forms of temporary living. Living in down-and-out flophouses, they don’t build homes; they just struggle to make rent” (105). Random is also shown to dwell in a dark, squalid cage lined up with other cages housing people as animals (see fig. 1). The dehumanized living space of Random not only becomes a cinematic visual of overall filth but also projects what Dimendberg further asserts as the noir convention of staging metropolitan squalor that represents “the symptom and critique of the spatiality that it represents” (199). Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Random’s abode. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Random’s abode. Carbon’s narrative premise is built on the abandonment of earth by the rich and the powerful who have all left for Mars, thus reducing the earth to a massive planet of slums for those that are incapable of mobility. A long shot pans abandoned and dilapidated skeletons of rows of buildings where Random lives, creating contrasting effects of a deserted war-torn alley and swarming multitudes jostling for space inside (see fig. 2). The dingy residential coops, crowded public transports, and shabbily dressed people scurrying for survival that predominate the earth-scape suggest a gentrification on an inter-planetary scale, an extension of the contrast between the high-rises and the slums that characterize every modern city. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Shantytowns. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Shantytowns. The earth in Carbon is a space that is irrevocably damaged; bereft of any semblance of daylight, the city is perpetually shrouded in a hazy black smog that remains constant across all scenes, embodying the irreparability of the rot that has set in. In the final shot, Random and Pari look out towards the dystopic city, blurred by the swathes of dark smog descending on it. As they stare into an uncertain future, the futuristic city stands menacingly with its protruding spires and the red neon lights—another classic noir image—to create a nightmarish scene of both moral and environmental decay. The film’s nightmarish feel is also heightened by the recurrent scenes of the grotesque, mask-wielding people populating the city as dehumanized spectres of a toxic disaster. The eerie distortion to the human face lent by a gas mask, and the normalization of the masked visage as a mutant variety of the future humankind creates an effect of gothic horror in a noir setting (see fig. 3). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Masks in a metro station. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Masks in a metro station. Carbon also features the classic noir element of the glamorous gangster lady in the figure of Pari, not as the temptress, but rather as an android victim trapped in this dystopia that symbolizes an irredeemable decay of society in the face of ecological crisis. Though Pari represents a comparatively tangible moral compass otherwise missing in the human actors of the film, her frequent technical glitches create a sense of dehumanized alienation, leaving Random bereft of any meaningful human contact. Capitalism and Carbon Rift: A Marxist Framework As the film offers a blatant critique of capitalism, it is helpful to read it through Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks of capitalistic environment making, as signalled by Moore’s “Capitalocene.” Carbon critiques modern capitalist society through an intense portrayal of the violence of privatization. Carbon’s futuristic disaster is portrayed as a direct consequence of India’s neoliberal growth, spiralling out of control in its consumptive excesses to an inevitable ecological ruin. The film attempts to historicize the environmental doom, as Siddiqui’s character asserts: “The atmosphere had started to deteriorate since the first factory was built.” Emphasizing the point further, the present and the future are juxtaposed in the very beginning of the film, with the speculative vision of a disastrous future being shown as a logical outcome of contemporary environmental degradation through a time lapse video. Shots of green idyllic fields and azure skies transition into the gradual darkening of the earth, panning out further to reveal a smog covered sepia-toned city, evoking a sort of hyperbolic pastoral nostalgia for a lost world. In a poignant shot, the camera casually zooms in on an advertisement for a real estate boom in Mars that uses the same lingo as the current housing market: “Your home on the red planet. VVVII Mars. Ready for possession” (see fig. 4). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Advertisement for real estate in Mars. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Advertisement for real estate in Mars. The satire hits the viewers hard—having rendered this planet unliveable, market forces move on an inter-planetary scale and invoke a more massive system of privatization of resources. In a telling scene, Yakub comments on the unbridled greed of people—typical of the neoliberal ethos of consumption: “The problem is everyone wants everything. And they want it now.” Carbon’s success lies in staging the post-apocalyptic world as an extrapolation of the present, thus offering a scathing critique of the current capitalistic regime and its interactions with the environment. Violence in Carbon is essentially tied to capitalistic consumerism. Yet the normalization of violence in Carbon testifies to what Lee Horsley points out about the noir genre embodying the voice of violation and dissent against capitalism, asserting that “it has the potential for critique, for undermining complacency and illusions. More generally, the noir sensibility might come to the fore at any time of discontentment and anxiety, of disillusionment with institutional structures” (12). For Pepper, too, the form of the capitalist noir asserts that “all expressions of deviance and violence, however shocking, can be understood as an inevitable symptom of free market rationality” (220). Carbon’s free market nightmare is a speculative manifestation of what Naomi Klein would call “disaster capitalism,” defined as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (6). Explaining this as a strategy to re-organize the economy at a moment of shock or crisis, Klein touts “disaster capitalism” as the Milton Friedman led Chicago school’s method of total capitalistic overhaul, an opportunity for neoliberalization as a process of rebuilding after crisis. As Klein explains: the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance…some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free market reforms. (11) With the state machinery in action, the market system in Carbon stages a deliberate reorganization of natural capital in the “free market” through an exploitation of crisis. Carbon thus veers away from the traditional disaster movies in not only pinning the focus on the cause rather than on the aftereffect of disaster but also successfully blending the conventional noir tradition of disenchantment with a contemporary trope of “disaster capitalism,” thus offering a critical perspective of the post-disaster world beyond just its debilitating structures. Carbon offers a sinister extrapolation of “disaster capitalism” in an oxygen-less world, the film acutely critiquing both the mindless spiralling towards doom and the post-apocalyptic capitalistic systems that have taken over. In Carbon, the capitalistic violence is raw and unabashed, with the dystopic tenor of the film arising from the dual precept of both acute crisis and extreme, state-supported marketization of “free” resources. The post-oxygen dystopia is drawn with terrifying details—the absolute depletion of atmospheric oxygen is coupled with the utter breakdown of a democratic, peaceful civil society. Existing historical footages of curfew, war, and nuclear clouds are used in the film to recreate scenes of utter chaos, oppressive regimes where autocratic state powers clash against large swathes of common people, terrorizing and suppressing them, thus letting the free market thrive. The film draws an anarcho-capitalist hellscape with a compliant government playing a compatriot to the “laissez faire” of the oxygen syndicates operating in a million-dollar industry. Big production houses line up for the control of oxygen; it is bottled and traded like a product in a capitalistic system, often on the grander scale of an inter-planetary market. Oxygen parallels oil in its supposed inexhaustibility, and this speculative proposition of an oxygen-industry is both a dire warning of an impending carbon doom as well as a brilliant materialistic critique of human extraction of nature to fuel a capitalistic system. The privatization of breathable oxygen is far from being a fantastical proposition offered by the film. The demand for commercial, packaged oxygen, apart from its industrial and medical use, has been steadily growing in the contemporary marketplace as well. From portable canned oxygen for private use to the trendy “oxygen bars” that offer recreational oxygen, the commodification of oxygen has gone beyond its industrial and medical needs in an increasingly polluted world. Similarly, while the valuation of earth’s unlimited resources like air, water, and sunlight as “natural capital” was proposed as early as in 1973 by E.F. Schumacher in his book Small Is Beautiful, its sustained use in the language of politics and governance has gained increasing momentum in the recent years. As George Monbiot ponders over the plethora of ecological terms coined in corporate language: The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it nature any more: now the proper term is “natural capital”. Natural processes have become “ecosystem services”, as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now “green infrastructure”, while biodiversity and habitats are “asset classes” within an “ecosystem market”. All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable (“The UK government wants to put a price on nature”). Carbon’s oxygen industry seems a logical extrapolation of the increasing attention to “natural capital” as a value-added asset in the market system. Now assigned with price what was erstwhile taken as “free,” oxygen in Carbon embodies a symbolic discursive shift in the way natural resources are perceived in capitalism, albeit to the same end. It is helpful to recall Marxist theories of the co-option of nature to analyze Carbon’s sardonic portrayal of the oxygen industry. Natural resources, as Marx and other classical political economists like Malthus and Smith asserted, were considered “free gifts of nature to capital.” As Marx commented “All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production” (488–89). Implemented through the enclosure laws that abruptly declared public lands as private property, outlawing wood pilfering and berry picking as punishable offences for the rural landless poor, the control of nature was seen by Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital”—the very basis of capitalism. Patel and Moore’s History of the World in Seven Cheap Things similarly argues that “capitalism couldn’t have emerged without cheapening of nature,” defining cheapening as being “yanked into processes of exchange and profit, denominated and controlled” (48). However, Patel and Moore’s contention that all human appropriation of nature is a “kind of ongoing theft,” what John Bellamy Foster labels as a “misanthropic position,” is fundamentally different from Marx’s distinction between “appropriation”—“the appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs, the activity through which the metabolism between man and nature is mediated” and “expropriation”—the appropriation of land or resources without reciprocity (maintenance of the “conditions of reproduction”). As John Bellamy Foster explains: Such a perspective, common to most mainstream environmental thought, necessarily distracts from the alienated mediation of the human-social metabolic relation to nature, and from capitalism’s specific forms of expropriation of nature and their effects on ecosystems. In the classical Marxian perspective, it is precisely because human history has created a mode of production (capitalism) that alienates the metabolic relations between human beings and nature, thereby creating a metabolic rift and rupturing the conditions of ecological reproduction, that we can hope to restore that essential metabolism—through a revolutionary overturning of the capitalist integument and the creation of a new, coevolutionary material reality. This is Marx’s core ecological message (“Marx, Value and Nature”). Thus, for Marx, while sustainable social metabolism, or the “complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and nature” is “prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” the imbalance in the natural interaction between man and nature due to capitalism’s inherent characteristic to extract and expand led to a loss of soil nutrients, environmental degradation, and an “irreparable rift” in man’s social metabolism with nature. The premise of Carbon’s ecological crisis is built on this very construct of the Marxist “metabolic rift”—“an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life,” or more precisely, as Brett Clark and Richard York would term it as a “carbon rift.” Proposed by Clark and York in a 2005 article titled “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, And the Biospheric Rift,” “carbon rift,” a derivative of Marx’s “metabolic rift” emphasizes the disruption of earth’s natural carbon balance due to capitalism: As Clark and York explain: Capitalism, in organizing the social relations of commodity production, effectively plunders the historical stock of concentrated energy that has been removed from the biosphere only to transform and transfer this stored energy (coal, oil, natural gas) from the recesses of the earth to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide…capital’s constant demand for energy necessitated the continual plundering of the earth for new reserves of fossil fuel. With over 23 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere per year, current production is creating “waster emissions faster than natural systems can absorb them”. As a result, carbon dioxide is accumulating—as atmospheric waste—at alarming rates, warming the earth, and causing dramatic climate change (“Carbon Metabolism”). The film stages a “carbon rift” in the excesses of carbon accumulation in its speculative future and in its the portrayal of the disruption of the natural process of breathing. The process of breathing is a classic embodiment of a Marxian social metabolism, exemplifying a natural process of human-nature interchange. With the carbonization of the atmosphere, the film not only shows an irreversible disruption of the natural process but also features a commoditization of the most abundant of “nature’s free gift” that can no longer be naturally accessed. Bottled oxygen thus becomes the most haunting metaphor of a final rift between man and nature, an extreme image of ecological violence in a post-apocalyptic world that ironically thrives on the same system that brought about its doom in the first place, projecting a compounded form of capitalism more terrifying than our current one. What can be a more potent metaphor of capitalistic violence than the private accumulation of the last natural resource that is shared commonly by all humans and non-humans? Moreover, the amoral, dark, violent world of Carbon is thus symptomatic of what Marx had labelled as the “four-fold alienation” of “primitive accumulation.” As Elizabeth Terzakis explains, when humans no longer have a direct relationship to the means of subsistence, one of its effects is the alienation of humans from one another: we are alienated from each other, because rather than engaging in a communal project to satisfy our needs as human beings, we are forced into competition with each other to secure access to the means of production from capitalists and labor for their profit, and because we are by nature social, we are thus once again alienated from ourselves (“Marx and Nature”). In Carbon, the alienation is thus played out as both the loss of the self and the irreparable loss of a stable, sustainable society. Through the relentless violence of the human actors, Carbon offers a dire warning of a complete disintegration of human society transformed into a mad scramble for the survival of the fittest. However, Random is never assigned a distinct personhood, and therefore is alienated from the audience, who see him only through his external actions. He has no identity, no history, and no subjecthood beyond being just a vehicle to carry oxygen. While Conlon contends that “personal growth in noir paradoxically equates with a kind of shrinking of subjectivity, in successive moments of recognition of the self as being fatalistically caught up in the structures unveiled by the hermeneutics of disenchantment” (17), I would assert that for Random there was never a self to begin with; he is in a perpetual state of subjecthood-less-ness, his existence defined only by the mechanisms of the external forces. The semblance of agency he assumes after killing Shah’s imposter is quickly dislodged by the fatalistic forces of annihilation which lurch him to an uncertain future. As Fay observes: film noir’s account of history without a future, a chronology without a telos, humanity without agency or intentionality, anticipates what we might call Anthropocene historiography rooted through pessimistic epistemology (119). The alienation is also etched through the glaring absence of romantic or familial relationships, an otherwise staple of Hindi cinema’s narratives and a quintessential trope found in most Bollywood films, even in the ones that follow the noir conventions. Pari and Random are pitted in an impossible dialectic of attraction that can never materialize, not because one is a human and the other android, but more because the world of Carbon renders it impossible for individuals to both survive and connect. The absence of a romantic relationship also invokes the noir convention of eschewing what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” and embraces instead as Fay points out “a queer negativity and a pessimistic ecology without familial hope” (99). The world of Carbon is one of hypermasculine violence that shuns kinship, family, and domesticity highlighted by the sheer absence of women on screen. Barring Pari, whose presence is more of a non-human foil to Random, the absence of any other element of femininity strikes solely as another layer of the absolute bleakness that engulfs the “carbonated” world. As Fay comments on this total annihilation of a hopeful future: “Rather than strive to mold a future, to right all wrongs, to create or procreate, the noir hero typically gives up. Film noir thus offers us a vision of not so much a fallen but a fallow humanity” (99). The eco-capitalist dystopia of Carbon offers no hope for reconciliation, and the film ends with Random and Pari staring into an uncertain future, albeit a technologically sophisticated one (see fig. 5). Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Random and Pari in the last scene. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Random and Pari in the last scene. Carbon is a thus a tale that critiques unbridled consumption and the commodification of environment, a dire warning against our unmitigated use of the earth’s resources for a lifestyle that can only spiral down to more devastation if not checked. And in a world that is too conditioned to capitalistic modernity to see the urgency of climate change, art and literature must sound the clarion call. Carbon offers a fresh approach to invoke climate questions in the Indian context—a task that is both daunting and unique given the absence of a sustained discourse of environmental disaster in India. Carbon stands out in addressing the cause rather than the aftereffect, with its critique of capitalism as a key connection that brings together a reappraisal of the concept of the Anthropocene, the choice of noir—a genre that has conventionally revolved around questions of money unlike the conventional detective story, which revolved around justice—as a form of story-telling, and a speculative future of carbon rift expressed in the film through the hyper-capitalist commodification of oxygen. Naomi Klein (2014) cogently points out the blind spot in several climate discourses: A different kind of climate movement would have tried to challenge the extreme ideology that was blocking so much sensible action, joining with other sectors to show how unfettered corporate power posed a grave threat to the habitability of the planet. Instead, large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades, attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself. (37) In a world where climate change discourse often precludes the central issue of capitalism, and instead veers around technological fixes and “green” solutions that seek not to radically disturb the status quo, films like Carbon offer art’s resistance to what Ursula LeGuin calls the “inescapable power of capitalism,” a resistance embodied in the “art of words” (115). Climate change may seem inevitable, but narratives of a speculative future project the enormity of the impending doom, spurring us into possible action. Swaralipi Nandi is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Academy, India. She has a PhD from Kent State University, US on postcolonial literature and theory. She has published in journals such as Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, MacMillan and Pencraft International. She has also edited two books: The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (MacFarland, 2011) and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Masculinity and Violence in Postcolonial Films (Zubaan Books/Chicago UP, 2012). Her latest volume of essays is Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrocultures (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Footnotes 1 Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification 2020 (set to replace the EIA notification 2006). As Nidhi Adhlaka points out “Released by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) this month, it requires the public to respond within 60 days of being issued. Absurdly released during a nationwide lockdown, it has several dangerous loopholes: public hearings are no longer mandatory for several projects, project expansion rules have been eased, the public consultation process is weaker, and it legitimises the wrongdoings by industries” (“The Curious Case of India’s Environment Ministry” The Hindu, April 28, 2020. 2 Kedarnath in the northern state of Uttarakhand, India and Kerala, a southern state of India saw devastating floods in 2013 and 2018, respectively. While the floods were primarily caused by unprecedented rainfall, the human factors like deforestation, overcrowding, and illegal land use aggravated the loss of property and lives. 3 The “largeshort” films are a series of low budget, independent short films by independent filmmakers released on youtube for non-subscribed public viewing. The films cover a wide range of issues from infidelity, marital relationships to social stigmas, and garner a wide viewership. 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TI - Speculating the Carbon-Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in Carbon
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isab039
DA - 2021-04-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/speculating-the-carbon-rift-capitalistic-dystopias-and-the-ecological-uwoXMeIECT
SP - 987
EP - 1009
VL - 29
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -