Science Fiction Film & Television

‘We will change’

Deep past and uncertain future in Blood Glacier

Science Fiction Film & Television (2021), 14, (3), 395–412.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2021.27
Language
English
Pages
18

Abstract

One of the many threats accompanying climate change is that of deadly viruses being revived or uncovered when the permafrost melts, as in the 2016 uncovering of anthrax in Siberia. Blood Glacier (Kren Austria 2013, originally Blutgletscher) addresses this in creature feature form, telling the story of something nasty emerging from the natural world (in this case, microorganisms emerging from a melting glacier) to threaten humans and human superiority. Blood Glacier reflects a larger twenty-first-century creature-feature trope of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice as well as an expansion of ecohorror beyond familiar nature-strikes-back anxieties or fears of humans becoming food for animals. Instead, the microorganisms discovered within the glacier change people (and other animals), causing mutations and leading to the creation of new combinations of species. The film juxtaposes these environmental concerns with one character’s past abortion, which comes to represent another, more personal, challenge to Western values. As a result, the film asks questions not addressed by other similar creature features: Which life has value? What does the future look like, and who decides that? The film therefore addresses the ethics of bringing life into being, gesturing toward the responsibilities inherent both in bearing children and in choosing not to bear children. These questions are addressed in the end of the film, with the birth and then adoption of a mutant baby. By bringing these issues of reproduction and environmental futures together, the film asks us to consider how our past and current choices help shape the future - both personal and planetary. The conclusion of the film serves in part to reinforce heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, both of which stake the future on the replication of the past through traditional relationships and by reproducing ourselves and our values through our children. Simultaneously, however, it gestures toward new possibilities for queer, nonhuman, mutant kinship and care.

Access Token

FormatArticle

£25.00
READ THIS ARTICLE
References
Full Text
PDF
If you have private access to this content, please log in with your username and password here

Works cited

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Google Scholar

Alaimo, Stacy. ‘Discomforting Creatures: Monstrous Natures in Recent Films’. Beyond Nature Writing. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001. 279-96. Google Scholar

Barclay, Bridgitte. ‘The Extinction-Haunted Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World’. Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Ed. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles. University Park: Penn State UP, 2021. 133-50. Google Scholar

Barclay, Bridgitte. ‘“My Heart Slowly Cracks”: Making Kin and Living Through Extinction in Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God’. Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss. Ed. Jonathan Elmore. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. 31-48. Google Scholar

Bidle, Kay D., SangHoon Lee, David R. Marchant and Paul G. Falkowski. ‘Fossil genes and microbes in the oldest ice on Earth’. PNAS 104.33 (14 Aug 2007): 13455-60. Google Scholar

Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. Google Scholar

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. Google Scholar

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Google Scholar

Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019. Google Scholar

Giraud, Eva Haifa. What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. Google Scholar

Haraway, Donna. ‘Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice’. Making Kin Not Population. Ed. Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2018. 67-99. Google Scholar

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Google Scholar

Houwenhuyse, Shira, Emilie Macke, Lien Reyserhove, Lore Bulteel and Ellen Decaestecker. ‘Back to the Future in a Petri Dish: Origin and Impact of Resurrected Microbes in Natural Populations’. Evolutionary Applications 11 (2018): 29-41. Google Scholar

Huebener, Paul. Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis. Regina, Saskatchewan: U of Regina P, 2020. Google Scholar

Johns-Putra, Adeline. ‘Borrowing the World: Climate Change Fiction and the Problem of Posterity’. Metaphora: Journal for Literature Theory and Media. EV 2: Climate Change, Complexity, Representation. Guest ed. Hannse Bergthaller (2017). http://metaphora.univie.ac.at/volume2-johns-putra.pdf. Accessed 9 Jul 2021. Google Scholar

McWhorter, Ladelle. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Google Scholar

Morgenstern, Naomi. Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018. Google Scholar

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Google Scholar

Plumwood, Val. ‘Surviving a Crocodile Attack’. Utne Reader (1 Jul 2000). https://www.utne.com/arts/being-prey. Accessed 9 Jul 2021. Google Scholar

‘Russia Anthrax Outbreak Affects Dozens in North Siberia’. BBC (2 Aug 2016). https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542. Accessed 9 Jul 2021. Google Scholar

Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2013. Google Scholar

Sheldon, Rebekah. The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016. Google Scholar

Stevens, William K. ‘Scientist at Work: Wallace S. Broecker; Iconoclastic Guru of the Climate Debate’. The New York Times (17 Mar 1998). https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/17/science/scientist-at-work-wallace-s-broecker-iconoclastic-guru-of-the-climate-debate.html. Accessed 16 Sep 2021. Google Scholar

Tidwell, Christy. ‘The Ecohorror of Omission: Haunted Suburbs and the Forgotten Trees of A Nightmare on Elm Street’. Gothic Nature 2 (2021): 84-109. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/issue-2/. Google Scholar

Tidwell, Christy. ‘“Life Finds a Way”: Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, and De-Extinction Anxiety’. Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss. Ed. Jonathan Elmore. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. 31-48. Google Scholar

Tidwell, Christy. ‘Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman & New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s Parasite’. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment 21.3 (2014): 539-49. Google Scholar

van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Google Scholar

If you have private access to this content, please log in with your username and password here

Details

Author details

Tidwell, Christy