Ecocriticism and Torchwood

[beccaelizabeth]

So, the Beginning Theory book ends with a chapter on Ecocriticism. This is apparently being invented as the book was being written, so its a bit light on your actual content. But it has a few bits of useful. Especially if you use it to sort of balance against the extremes you can get out of postmodernist and psychological readings - it adds back actual reality and the outer world.

Like, nature and culture might mush together in the middle, but nature is those bits that would keep on happening even if everyone ignored them, more or less. Sort of. Actually I was the one that wrote that bit in the margin to try and make sense of a page or two of the book explaining how obviously reality is reality (which reminds me of Morpheus in The Matrix explaining about 'what is real' and starting with 'electrical impulses in the brain' - he's missing the point there, because only within a certain paradigm of reality, technical scientific bioelectrical, is that true, and he's had his whole life of having his whole experience fed to him by your actual philosophy demons, so no empirical evidence is available that could support that paradigm. In fact he's only acting on faith that he's out of the Matrix right then, and the sequel films make it make rather more sense to assume he isn't.)(Sorry, I just have that paragraph sort of hypertexted to that discussion in my brain. It writes itself without me really thinking about it.).

Also some about how a landscape might be a metaphor for emotional boundaries, but it is also a large amount of land.


Actually I think forcing most stories into a all-about-ecology reading makes them look kind of daft, but if you ignore the trees and look at the energy stuff it mentions later there's some interesting.

And 'nature' also means things like age, aging, getting old, decay, falling apart, all that stuff that just kind of happens even if you decide it shouldn't.

So this quotey bit is about a big dark house in a big dark house story:

"The ecocentered reading uses ideas of energy, entropy (systems tend towards breakdown and disorganisation) and symbiosis (mutually sustaining, co-existing systems).
Thus, the house exists as an isolated entropic system which has no symbiotic connections at all with the broader biosphere.
The stagnant lake reflects the house's own unmoving image.
It has its own sealed-off microclimate, and as the climax approaches it seems to stew in its own locked-up and aborted energies.
It is not part of a living system; no new elements come in from outside to energise it and enable it to contribute to other systems"

{NOT an exact quote, specially at the beginning, I left bits out to make it make more sense. Yes I know that's cheating without putting ... everywhere, but this isn't an essay and it would look a right mess.}

So naturally this made me think about Torchwood, specifically episode three.

... er, yeah, there was also a bit about how 'nature' and 'naturally' are often used to legitimise things that are anything but natural. Moving on...

Going to talk specifics under the cut.

Torchwood has a lot of images of being sealed off - underground, secret, with that huge great door and a cage and stuff.
BUT, what reflects it is a great big waterfall thingy, and the way in and out is moving so what it reflects is movement into and out of Torchwood. Which is not in fact a closed system. It may have been for a while before canon starts, we don't have that data. But what we see is Gwen being introduced.
Plus the entire reason for Torchwood Cardiff existing is the tendency of new things to flow in, through the Rift. Which isn't exactly presented as natural, more supernatural, but is a natural phenomenon in that nobody actually built it, though alien tech enhanced it.
And yet all we've seen Torchwood do with these new elements so far is lock them up.

So Torchwood itself exists in a tension between new energies and attempts to control them.

Gwen is new. Will she change them or be changed to fit in?


Then in episode 3 we get another closed system - the house the old man hasn't left for years. We see him young, we see him old, all he did in between was sit in that house and stew. Destructive energies from a Very Bad Thing shut up in there with him, psychological entropy.

But then a new element gets introduced - Owen.
Only, is he new?
Not so much - he's bringing the past in with him.
Have another dose of entropy, just in case the first one was wearing off.
So it makes a change - it gets him to collapse completely, falling in on his own knife, the Very Bad Thing finally destroying him.

And damaging a few people who got caught in the vortex with him - Owen and Gwen come out of this arguably worse off than they went in, though the whole doesn't kill them makes them stronger argument might apply here.


There's echoes that the two stories share - Beige old man, old man this week in navy but last week in blue and beige. Morgan in one sealed system, Jack in another?
Jack has a big defining event in his past that he may have responded to by cutting himself off from the usual flow of his world and surrounding himself with dead and decaying things (unless you want to call that hand still alive).
Torchwood has such a mixture of the rusting old and shiny new (but currently partly out of order).
And Jack is the one who keeps trying to lock all this stuff up, shouts at people for taking it, decides it's not for them.

Jack also uses tech a lot, so it isn't all one way.
And Jack was the one who brought Gwen in and is making the most effort to reach out to her.

So I think Jack has the same tension in himself - new things and locking them up, keep it hidden and away, keep himself hidden and away, but trying to benefit from new energies.

Symbiotic or parasitic would be in how it all works out.


Basically when I poked it from the idea of isolation and energy flow I got some interesting out.
Always fun.


Now if I want to write something about trees and wilderness I think I need to pick a different text. Very different. Not one of the ones that always spring to mind.
There was a demon tree in Angel, but I don't think that's quite the thing here...

I go read more book. Maybe change colors of highlighter. Been using green all morning.



I read the chapter on postcolonial stuff last night but then I went to sleep without using it to write about Torchwood. This will probably result in me remembering it less well.
Plus there was something I wanted to argue about in it, so I might copy that out later.