Contemporary film images of the future are usually made within the hegemonic world of the Hollywood1 film industry. This paper will argue that these films, with their global reach, are contributing to the dominant single view of the future. A view that limits the future to a Western high-tech, white, heterosexual, patriarchal, militaristic, dark blandness where a small number of the rich and powerful men are in control; it is a view that misses out on the lushness of human and biological diversity and the joyful messiness of plurality and truly democratic systems of shared power. Using Causal Layered Analysis as a methodological framework, and ecofeminism to ask questions, this paper explores images of the future in a small number of contemporary films, with specific attention to images of the ecological future in depictions of landscape, food, and animals as well as women's roles in society as an indicator of social justice and equality.
Ecofeminism provides a theoretical base from which to identify areas of domination of women, human Others, non-human Others, and the Earth. Ecofeminism combined with Futures Studies provides direction on alternative ways to envision futures—futures that celebrate and protect local human and biological diversity as well as a recognition of common values based on requirements for peace, shelter, food, water, basic material well-being, and cultural expression.
The sheer difficulty of imagining future sustainability different from the present is one of our greatest problems as a society. (Elise Boulding, [1, p. 90])
There is no avoiding the reality that the dominant images of the future today are bleak futures of entropy, violence, and despair [2] or naïve projections of Western scientific/high-tech optimism. For many people, images of the future come to them in the form of American films, either in theatres or in the expanding range of television. In films about the future, the Earth is usually in a state of ecological breakdown, where mega-cities dominate, and there is vast disparity amongst the haves and have-nots. These films may not be seen by everyone in the world but nevertheless their reach is large and deep. Therefore, analysis and critique of contemporary film is a worthwhile attempt to contribute to an understanding of what the hegemonic images of the future are doing to our ability to envision ecologically sound and socially just futures.
Ziauddin Sardar [3, p. 1] writes, “The future is being colonised and futures studies has become an instrument in that colonisation.” Futures studies, like future-based film production, is largely American, male, white, and assumes a uniformly heterosexual, traditional-family focused, often singular vision of the future. According to Ivana Milojevic [4, p. 62], “the domination of the masculinist images of the future has now reached a new peak. These images are accepted by globalising popular media, by local and global policy-planners and even by many liberal futurists.” Film images are created within an industry where cultural pluralism is expected to defer to the Western “creation of a single, world culture, based on the current ever-increasing expansion of Anglo-American culture, social norms and ethics and, last but not least, ways of doing business” [5, p. 163]. Film production today is indeed an example what Johan Galtung [6] refers to as ‘Americanisation’ because it is US cultural and economic domination under the name of globalisation. The majority of films seen in the world today are produced by the Hollywood machine, Bollywood's prodigious production notwithstanding, and it is rare to find a film based in the future that is not American, contributing to the “belief that America is the locus not just for futures studies but for the future itself” [3, p. 13].
There are other ways forward, however; they are paths based on peace, ecological, and cultural diversity, localism, and where women's visions for the future, as well as those of the non-West, are fully considered and acted upon. As Eleonora Masini [7, p. 43] writes “It is crucial that the visions approach to futures studies stop being an evasion and start to be recognised as a force by those who are bearers of the vision.” The visioning of our futures is far too important to be left solely in the hands of the Hollywood studios.
