“We” wake up in a dark alley, covered in blood—whose blood is it?—footsteps echoing in the distance … or was that just throbbing in the head, a reverberation of a pounding heart in the ear?

In medias res: a Latin phrase that means “into the middle of things”—a narrative technique in which readers or spectators are dropped, well, “into the middle of things.” Gradually, the backstory is filled in, becoming clearer, usually through flashbacks or other narrative devices. It’s a common technique in film noir stories in which detective and audience alike work to piece together what happened. The Anthropocene unfolds in medias res. Before “we” knew it, “we” were in the middle of it.

What will “our” role be in the shifting moral grounds of an Anthropocene neo-noir? Witness? Detective? Perpetrator? Jury member? An uneasy mixture?

But who are “we,” besides a fraught pronoun, stretched impossibly to encompass generalities or capture complexities? By “we,” I mean those living in relative global wealth and who (I assume, though perhaps incorrectly) constitute the majority of readers of this website. Though, by “we,” I generally also mean the couple billion highly industrialized humans involved wittingly and unwittingly, willingly and unwillingly, directly and indirectly, in a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is reasonable to consider as victims those who carry the burden of the climate crisis, suffering due to the cumulative actions of emitters in wealthier countries. But the privileged of the planet are not precluded from also finding themselves in the role of victim, while nonetheless having acted as assailants toward the atmosphere or aggressor toward the environment.

How should individual action or inaction in relation to systemic impact be weighed? How should voluntary choice and involuntary, inherited, infrastructural interpolation across generations and geographies be considered? 

No form of exceptionalism can serve as an alibi. The testimony of victims, both human and nonhuman alike, must be heard.

When “we,” whoever each of us is, ingress into the judicial chambers of deep time for the proceedings of climate crime and assume our role or roles, the question of justice will hang in the air.

Do you recognize this face?

It … it … looks like a living entity. No, no, wait—it’s not a living organism. It “recycles all its own wastes, which no organism can do.”6.2.1 It is the face of Gaia, planet Earth as some sort of emergent entity, an idea co-developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. For Lovelock, Earth was a sort of “superorganism.” Yet, for Margulis, conceiving of Earth as a living organism was akin to pareidolia—seeing faces where there are none. Among the precursors to the Gaia hypothesis, Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere was particularly important. As Margulis’ son and sometimes co-author Dorion Sagan writes, “Lovelock makes the move by considering Earth alive, Vernadsky by considering life a mineral. Both are right.” For Margulis, it was crucial to make clear that the surface of Earth is not an organism but more like something else—another kind of system, even an “ecosystem,” which also includes, for example, the sun. Similarly, Vernadsky writes, “To a great extent, exogenous cosmic forces shape the face of the Earth.”6.2.2

This face, the surface of Earth, has been undergoing a transformation. It’s almost unrecognizable. It seems to be molting to reveal another face. The shifting features make the new identity elusive, but the character goes by a few aliases: the noosphere, the technosphere, the anthroposphere. The Earth’s biotic face is melting. 

The T-1000 android in Terminator 2: Judgment Day appears to be an organic human, but its face peels away, revealing an entirely other, inorganic entity: a mimetic assassin of mercurial reflective metal. Black is exchanged for mirror—film noir to film miroir. Rare earth. Death machine. This is a face from tech noir, a hybrid science-fiction film noir genre where the perpetrator is revealed to be technology itself.

Karl Marx writes: 

The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. (Grundrisse, 1939) 

Flashback: Were there any witnesses?

As laid out extensively in the Anthropogenic Markers project, there are many materials and molecules that serve as evidence of (industrialized) human impacts on the environment through processes ranging from plastic pollution to nuclear waste. The Anthropocene entails much more than the change in atmospheric gas ratios, though this is perhaps what most immediately comes to mind.

Following the mid ’00s surge in media coverage around anthropogenic climate change, at least in part sparked by a film (the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, 2006), climate change might seem to have appeared as a sudden revelation to hegemonic culture. Yet, basic detective work makes it clear that awareness that humans are changing the climate has been around for some time. Exhibit A: 1990s reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Exhibit B: a (petroleum) mob coverup; oil companies like Exxon knew about climate change at least since the 1970s. Exhibit C: the 1960s Keeling Curve showing a steady increase in atmospheric CO₂. Exhibit D: scientific observations and experiments documenting nascent climate change that stretch back to the nineteenth century. 

Each exhibit of evidence and testimony is political in its framing, if not explicitly, then implicitly. This of course leads to the many Anthropocene aliases, from the Chthulucene to the Capitalocene. 

The Capitalocene is often associated with the work of Jason W. Moore, who frames capitalism not simply “as an economic or even social system, but as a way of organizing nature.”6.2.3 While some claim that “it all begins in England with coal and steam,” Moore argues that a proper examination of the evidence reveals this narrative is “absolutely flawed.” Factories began in Madeira and on sugar plantations, not in England’s mills; they started on the “frontier,” where “cheap natures,” cheap food, cheap (slave) labor, and cheap raw materials were available. Capitalism still depends on these.6.2.4

Cumulative and ongoing processes of the present are directly traceable to the imperial violence perpetrated by European powers and their colonial offshoots. The populations they devastated across the planet were also (and continue to be) witnesses to ecocide. The reorganization of the biosphere—the movement of people, plants, animals, and microorganisms from one biotope to another—was and is an integral part of the capitalist-colonialist economy.

Coloniality continues in many guises that are more subtle than occupation and appropriation. The sometimes insidious violence of colonialism extends below the flesh, exerting control of bodies, a sort of “endocolonization,” which likewise insinuates itself into the environment through what Margarida Mendes frames as “molecular colonialism.”6.2.5

Let’s go over the story again

“But it attacked you!”

“It mirrored me, I attacked it. I’m not sure it even knew I was there.” 

“It was mutating our environment, it was destroying everything.” 

“It wasn’t destroying, it was making something new.” 

“Making what?” 

“I don’t know.”6.2.6

Both speakers are scientists. Together they try to ascertain the characteristics and motives of the shape-shifting alien they have encountered in the film (adaptation of) Annihilation. What constitutes an alien depends on the position and perception of the speaker. Read another way, this interrogation draws out the uncertainty of exactly how to approach aspects of the Anthropocene that one finds difficulty in identifying with.

Technology is the alien doppelgänger of industrialized humans, mirroring social desires. Matteo Pasquinelli points out that “humankind has always been about an alliance with alien forms of agency: from ancestral microbes to artificial intelligence.”6.2.7 Alliances may be uncomfortable, unwitting, coldly pragmatic—for the sake of survival—and even ironic when one considers that the technosphere is also what enables climate models that reveal the reality of the climate crisis emanating from the technosphere itself. James Lovelock claims in Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence that an alliance with artificial intelligence will “save” the planet and humans—a redemptive technological face for Gaia.

Shape-shifting genres

Somehow J. M. W. Turner’s painting of a steam locomotive, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), has ended up in a penthouse Las Vegas apartment.6.2.8 The atmosphere outside is the color of an orange fire, as if the combustion in the coal-burning stomach of the steam engine has escaped and spread its choking heat across the sky.6.2.9 The postapocalyptic aesthetic has also escaped from the cinema screen, as when California wildfires turned the sky an orange reminiscent of this scene from the neo-noir film Blade Runner 2049.6.2.10 

The face of Earth is changing again, along with its character, behavior, and even its metabolism. There is a risk that Gaia will be recast as a femme fatale, a stock noir character and a projection of male fear when confronted with a loss of power. This is literally the case in the recent horror film that took Gaia as its name.6.2.11 How to avoid a swerve from noir into horror?

“Everyone thinks the future needs to be a variant of today,” Wolfang Lucht states.6.2.12 Yet any ending other than dystopian will require not simply a search for alternative stories but alternative narrative frameworks—genres—in which to imagine those stories, those possible futures.

The patriarchy is busy with its old genres, like westerns (literally, as Jeff Bezos wore a cowboy hat on the way to his rocket) and its superhero flicks (Elon Musk’s hiring of a Hollywood costume designer for SpaceX to materialize escapist tech fantasies from the cinema). 

Realities that modernity (capitalism, colonialism, Enlightenment, patriarchy) rendered as alien, irrational, objectionable, or objectifiable—and therefore exploitable without moral regress—are, however, emerging and reemerging. “The abolition of class, gender, and race—hinges on a profound reworking of the universal,” writes the collective Laboria Cuboniks in “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation.”6.2.13 “In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever! If nature is unjust, change nature!” demands Laboria Cuboniks.

Let there be genres that give up “natural” gender roles,6.2.14 acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty,6.2.15 explore “situated embodiments” of reason beyond Enlightenment modes,6.2.16 embrace the “subjectivity of our microbial overlords,”6.2.17 and more.

Method and montage

“The seeds of scenario thinking techniques were planted in the late 1940s” when RAND Corporation think tank members sought to “think the unthinkable” by bringing together experts from various fields with screenwriters and filmmakers to model scenarios for the looming crisis of possible nuclear wars.6.2.18 Are (Cold War–era) thinking tools inseparable from the context in which they emerged? Or could an appropriation and reworking of such a method—bringing together specialists like scientists and creatives from diverse backgrounds (until class, gender, and race are abolished)—help to model new scenarios for the climate crisis? 

Films are scenarios. What does it mean to think through the Anthropocene using film? On the one hand, this text has used film (noir) as an extended metaphor, but on the other, it presents film itself as a space for working through Anthropocene-related issues. Film is a powerful tool for humans, as storytelling animals, to confront moral dilemmas and invoke both experience and empathy. Films can warn about or prime audiences for possible futures. The cinematographic apparatus is inherently ideological, since the reality effect of the medium creates real experiences of unreal worlds. As mass media, a film’s world can enter the social imaginary of a culture. While this power often serves hegemonic purposes—and the industry itself has a significant carbon footprint—it can just as well be counterhegemonic. Film is an essential domain for modeling alternative imaginings, depositing those depictions into the social imaginary to be recombined, synthesized, and some day materialized.

In my key contribution accompanying this pathway, I have chosen to eschew narrative—the default organizational principle of film—in favor of montage. While narrative unfolds an explicit (usually linear) story as the vehicle for meaning-making, montage stages encounters with raw materials in which meaning is more implicit as emergent experience. I seek to conceive historiography as interweavings that cross and coalesce in a series of image-moments. Montage as a filmic analogue of assemblage, one of the key material logics of the Anthropocene. The digital device upon which this text was written and upon which it is being read is an assemblage of reorganized geological matter from all over the world.

Flash-forward

When Gaia completes its molting, may the surface of Earth not reveal one face as the project of modernity set out to sculpt, but instead bloom into 10,000 faces.