[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!. Until June 19th, we'll be publishing retrospective pieces on films released during the dog days of 1985. We're accepting submissions all the way up until close date, so get in touch (keithuhlich@gmail.com) if you'd like to contribute. And keep checking in with Aaron, Jamey and Jerry's shows for 1985-themed tribute episodes.]

John Boorman's The Emerald Forest may seem to today's green-conscious audience to be a comparatively obvious message movie about how industrial and economic progress are at odds with the interests of the environment. But we live in an age in which environmentalism has become a P.R. bandwagon, with everyone from the smallest individual to the biggest corporation allying in efforts to "save the planet." In truth, the planet is not what's in need of saving. It was around long before us, and will be around long after we have either obliterated ourselves or transformed our species into something unrecognizable. Sometimes more habitable, sometimes less, sometimes not at all, the planet has nevertheless endured, pursuing its relentless course of entropy in time and space. We can't stop, reverse, or even slow that entropy; and we cannot presume to "save" nature, for in everything we do, we are inexorably a part of it. It is in our nature to discover, invent, build, and destroy, and it is not a question of whether we can save the planet but whether we can save ourselves.

For Boorman, the motif of environmental spoliation was never the message but the metaphoric medium for his continuing vision of the human being—a curious sort of animal that has forgotten it is an animal, linked inescapably to its own nature as well as to the natures of the other creatures that surround it. The same tension between contemporary civilized men and the elemental nature they have forgotten is evident in Boorman's Deliverance (1972), where the same metaphor was used: a dam is being created that will divert the flow of a once mighty river, simultaneously submerging a vast forest. That wilderness is what we have forgotten we are part of. Continue Reading »