That is why I adapt the term “multiplex” to my critical purposes here, a word denoting multiple elements in complex relation a signal able to carry numerous messages and a cinematic venue with more than one screen. The film’s materially facilitated semiotic registers originally emerged in the context of a multiplatform and multifaceted media event. The Revenant’s Gendered Media Ecologyįrom an ecocritical perspective that affords a wider view of media ecology beyond the contents of the film frame, The Revenant involves much more than a loosely biographical revenge tragedy about Hugh Glass, a nineteenth-century trapper bent on avenging the murders of his Pawnee wife and son. Fortunately, ecocritical examination can render this studio product a symptom of the problem rather than an unchecked agent of it.įigure 2: Glass loses his Pawnee wife near the beginning of the film. The Revenant, left on its own terms, trades potential insights into the co-constitutive relations between humans and environment for the same gendered and individualist metaphysics that has undergirded a long history of commercial-industrial production. It is built upon a denial of what cannot be denied, since it remains part of us” (Seidler 1994, 18). This fear of what nature might reveal is an endemic aspect of dominant forms of masculinity. After the film’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio, won his long-sought-after Oscar for best male actor (Iñárritu repeated as best director, and Lubezki won for cinematography), all three men went on to other projects, likely unaware of Victor Seidler’s insight that “masculinity is only as secure as your last competitive achievement. The gender implications of this become clear when considered alongside its retrograde view of nature as red in tooth and claw, a nature that is mere crucible for the teleologies of industrializing man. Its relentless, cross-platform promotional campaign pushed audiences away from a possible meditation on the imaged air, waters, and lands and toward the masculinist, competitive adventures of its director, star, and crew in winter conditions. Instead, this commercial production performed a semiotic resource extraction exercise at location shoots, gathering raw audiovisual material for processing and sale elsewhere in a recognizable product form-the male adventure narrative. The film acted in and upon its shooting locations, in the agentic and specifically theatrical sense of that verb, without ever being there in terms of biopolitical risk and mindful ecological presence. The film event channeled to spectacular effect the affective, semiotic, audiovisual force of “extreme” and “wild” environments while ignoring the complex, inter-constitutive relations between human beings and their environments.
The Revenant is understood in this analysis as a composite that includes frame contents, promotional rhetoric, and critical reviews-that is, as an aggregate of the media flows that emerged between 20 to form a heterogeneous media event running from the prerelease promotional phase through the theatrical release window and then through a two-year period of critical reception.
Its masculinist, retrograde narrative is an obstacle to progressive ecocritical readings that seek new understanding of environment, of humans as environmental beings, and of cinema as a medium capable of drawing forth environmental identifications from audiences sufficient to help effect systems change.
This maneuver is part of the film’s wider, gendered, and mediatic effacement of its own material enmeshments in the world. The problem is that the film text, its promotional attachments, and much of its critical reception have functioned to obscure the ecological states of The Revenant’s primary shooting locations in western Canada. Its vividly rendered images of mountains and river valleys-locations shot in natural light by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki-make all the usual appeals to the humbling sublimity of wilderness, while its story worries over an emerging nineteenth-century capitalism that is gathering its early energies. Its wide release and box-office success have made it an ostensibly known entity, ideal for introducing viewing publics to lesser-known forms of ecocriticism.
Alejandro González Iñárritu).Īlejandro González Iñárritu’s frontier adventure drama The Revenant (2015), shot in Alberta, Canada, may seem, at first glance, to offer all manner of immersive qualities and ideo-affective potential on which environmental thought and advocacy might draw. Figure 1: Leonardo DiCaprio as trapper Hugh Glass defending against an Arikara war party in The Revenant (2015) (dir.
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