Helena speaks for the trees: The Lorax Part II

In my last post, I looked at how creating a back-story for the Once-ler and the boy in the Lorax helped to provide a more thoughtful and effective critique at the motivations behind environmental destruction. This morning, I want to think a little bit about Thneedville, the plastic city that stands at the center of the 2012 movie, but which didn't even exist in the original book.

Dr. Seuss's story of the Lorax begins on the far side of town, where the grickle grass grows, but the movie starts in a mock-up of suburban America, in a song and dance number about the virtues of a clean, plastic world in which one even has to buy air.  The color palate is dramatically different from the first pages of the book, with bright reds and yellows and greens (the sort of colors that Seuss used in all of the rest of his books, and in the flash-back parts of The Lorax).  Dr. Seuss begins with these colors because he wants to tell a dystopic fable of the future.  Forty years after the publication of the Lorax, that future has come upon us, and it doesn't look like Seuss thought it would, so the movie made the very smart decision to begin with a new visual (and political) frame.

Thneedville, from the first frames of the movie

Truth is, it is very easy to fight against an evil as obvious as the smog and pollution in the Lorax book.  When things are that bad, people are able to see how bad they are, and at least some people will have the courage to act: who wants to live amid smogulous smoke, gloopidy-gloop, and the demolished landscape the Once-ler made?  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Dr. Seuss wrote the book, those seemed like good metaphors for environmental destruction: the Cuyhoga River that caught on fire, the persistent smog of Denver or Los Angeles, the clear-cutting of the Oregon forests.  Thanks to non-governmental organizations, the EPA, and car exhaust laws, those easily visible environmental problems are largely gone today, at least in the United States.

Today, we face an entirely different environmental crisis, one that you can't see by looking out the window.  Global warming destroys reefs and slowly raises the level of the seas, but our lawns are still green.  Our hamburgers depend on the deforestation of the Amazon, but that happens (in the language of the Lorax) "outside of town," in places that most of us never see.  Our cheap computers and home appliances and clothes depend on the devastation of China's air and rivers.  But the small world we live in, inside the huge walls of Thneedville, continues to appear almost perfect.  The movie presents a much better portrait of today's environmental crisis than the book.

Helena, about a year ago, on a boat on the Amazon river

The movie also ties together marketing, profit, and power in a very interesting way: at one point, two advertising executives present a new way to sell air, now in little plastic bottles.  "Our research," one points out, "show that if you put anything in little plastic bottles, people will buy it!"  Anyone who has seen a Dasani water vending machine next to a water fountain will certainly laugh guiltily.  Second, they point out, "The factories to make the water bottles will pollute the air even more, so that people will need to buy even more air!"  Even the most radical environmental organizations are seldom brave enough to tie capitalism and environmental destruction to closely together.

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Helena celebrates a successful rock climb
in the forest above Santa Fe.

For Helena, the opposition between Thneedville and Outside of Town (the basis for all of the Lorax games that she invents and wants to play with us) must be particularly touching.  Even as a little girl, as she travels between Brazil and the US, between our home and the Amazon, she must feel the difference between the plastic world of so many people, and uncontrolled nature -- sometimes sublime and beautiful, other times destroyed and tragic.  Several times in the last week, she has told me that she misses the trees in the jungle that surround our house in Brazil.  We have gone hiking and climbing several times in the last couple of weeks, and she feels so free and happy in the juniper and piñon forests of Santa Fe.

Many people never leave the plastic perfection of Thneedville; Ted (the boy in the film) is transformed when he learns that he can go between the two worlds.  Helena, however, always already lives on both sides of the wall, inside plastic post-modernity and in the jungles and mountains.  We adults have many intellectual tools to understand and rationalize the contraction between Thneedville and Outside of Town; Helena, fortunately, discovered The Lorax as a way to think her two worlds.