Background of the Study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

During the last decade, the environment becomes the front-page news as public tend to believe that apocalypse will be happened by unintended environmental disaster. This is not only an inane talk but fact. High rates of deforestation and forest degradation are common in many parts of the world, but it was the rapid loss of tropical rain forests that particularly captured the attention of the world’s media from the early 1980s onwards.More recently, it has been increasingly recognized that many other ecologically important forest types, such as temperate rain forests and tropical dry forests, are also being lost at an alarming rate. 1 It affects the world for some other issues such as global warming and climate changing. Since then it has burgeoned and public starts to concern about fate of the environment and takes increasing hold, initially in the West but now worldwide. Environmental damage is not only caused by human but by itself as well. There are two major forces which can cause environmental damage; nature and mankind. People believe that nature have some kind of magical power. So that each culture have their own tales or mythological believe of nature’s power. By the early 21th century, the universe has already been through varies natural 1 Andrian C. Newton , Forest Ecology and Conservation UK: Oxford University Press, 2007 p. vii 2 disaster in all over the world; hurricane, storm, earthquake, tsunami, indication of mountain eruption, etc. It shows that nature have its own natural power beyond human capability. The environment was becoming an increasingly salient public concern and a major topic of research in science, economics, law, and public policy and certain humanities field as well, notably history and ethics. 2 American, led by Cheryl Goltfelty with her essays entitled The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology University of Georgia Press, 1996, established an institution for environmentalist and natural perspective writers called the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment ASLE in 1992. ASLE has its own house journal, called ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which started in 1993. 3 So in America, environment was already a burgeoning academic movement by the early 1990s. They focused on the critical field that had previously been known as the study of nature writing. The term of literary-environmental studies has some other terms that environmentalists can freely choose such as environmental criticism, green studies and ecopoetics but its best known as ecocriticism. Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. 4 Ecocriticism is enabling us to analyze and criticizeabout the world in which we live, and about our human relationships with that world and with our fellow 2 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p.3. 3 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2 nd ed., UK: 2002, p. 161. 4 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 3. 3 inhabitants. 5 Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis. 6 Environmental issues, in turn, have become an increasing provocation both for academic and for artist. It is inspiring many authors and movie makers to put the issue in their work. Film, as well as other literary genres: poetry, prose, short story, play or drama, is seizing the happening public issues at the definite time then formulates it with the intrinsic elements of film. Films and stories are reliably best media to deliver messages to other people and tell that there is a problem that needs to be paid attention like environment. Film is unique compared to other genres of literature. It exploits the subtle interplay of light and shadow, manipulates three-dimensional space, and focuses on moving images that have complex rhythm. Film communicates not only through imagery, metaphor, and symbol; visually through action and gesture; verbally through dialogue, but also directly through concrete images and sounds. Last, film expands or compresses time and space, traveling back and forth freely within their wide borders. 7 There are some movie makers that extracted the environmental issues into their film, for example Wall-E and Narnia 2: Prince Caspian. Those films portray nature into the story as a main theme. They describe nature and how it gives impact to human and non-human in a certain time and place. In Wall-E, the viewers can see the damaged earth in a result of carelessness of human who make 5 Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis USA: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009, p. 1. 6 Greg Garrard 2004, Op.cit., p. 4. 7 Joseph M. Boggs and Dennis W. Petrie, The Art of Watching Film, 7 th ed New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008, p. 3. 4 Earth becoming a place full of rubbish. Then human with their intelligence walk away from the broken earth and live finite life in the space. Whereas in Narnia 2: Prince Caspian, the viewers can see contravention between those who want to take care of environment and those who want to exploit it for their own sake. The other environment al film is James Cameron’sAvatar which the writer chooses as the unit of analysis.Avatar has blasted its way to the number one all time-box office spot and nine Oscar nomination. 8 The film has additionally received various awards, nominations and honors, including in Academy Awards and 67 th Golden Globe Award. Later, the film, that wowed the viewers with its special effect that spent massive budget for, is inspiring environmental activists. The film released in 2009 instead of 1999, the planned released year, because the necessary technology was not yet available to achieve Cameron vision of the film. The film is set in the middle of 22 nd century, 2154 for precise. The narration is written by the producer, James Cameron, who produced the outstanding film, Titanicand the famousAlien sequel film. Avatar is a film about human’s 9 group, RDA Corporation, who explores a planet in Alpha Centauri star system called Pandora to mining the precious mineral, unobtanium. But in order to do that they have to win over the natives heart first, which is the 9- feet tall blue thing called Na’vi. The scientists make avatar, the hybrid native body mix from human DNA and native DNA to get 8 Adam Rosenberg, Avatar: A Look at Its Box-Office Reign, accessed at August, 2011. http:www.mtv.comnewsarticles1629437avatar-look-at-its-boxoffice-reign.jhtml. 9 Human, adj belonging to or relating to people, especially as opposed to animals or machines. Human also human ‘being, n a person Longman, Advance American Dictionary: The Dictionary for Academic Success. USA: Pearson Longman, 2008, p. 788 5 closer with the native. Beside the air is poisoned for human. Na’vi in this film is counted as the non-human 10 alien character in this research. Jake Sully is the main character of the film who also leads as a narrator. He is a deformity ex-marine who came to Pandora as avatar driver replacing his twin brother, a killed scientist. In the first journey to the wild life of Pandora, Jake in the avatar body gets lost at the forest. But he is rescued by female native, Naytiri, after getting sign from her god, Eywa. Then she takes him to her clan, Omaticaya clan, to learn their lifestyle after the chief permitted. Jake Sully reports his activities to both Dr. Augustine, the chief of scientist, and Colonel Quaritch, the marine’s chief for different purpose. To Augustine, he reports how Na’vi real life and the way they live with the environment. To Quaritch, he reports where the location of unobtanium is and tries to drive the native out of the place diplomatically to get the minim victims. Na’vi has a spiritual relation with the environment 11 . They tend to dependent on nature 12 , especially to the sacred tree; the trees of soul, where they believe their mother goddess, Eywa, live together with the ancestors and the soul of dead people. Right under this tree is where unobtanium that human looks for 10 Non-humanity – a space alien, a machine, a symbolic novum – as a means of exploring what it is like to have the label ‘different’ imposed on a person by some normalising system. Wolmark observes: The science fiction convention of the alien attempts to present otherness in unitary terms, so that ‘humanity’ is uncomplicatedly opposed to the ‘alien’; both Jones and Butler focus on the way in which the opposition seeks to suppress the others of both gender and race by subsuming them within a commonsense notion of what it is to be human. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction USA: Routledge, Taylor Francis e-Library, 2002, p. 100 11 Environment, n The combination of external conditions that influence the life of individual organisms. The external environment comprises the non-living, abiotic components physical and chemical and the inter-relationship with other living, biotic components. Gareth Jones, Alan Robertson, Jean Forbes and Graham Hollier, Collins: Dictionary of Environmental Science Great Britain: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990, p. 145 12 Nature, n Plants animals etc. biology everything in the physical world that is not controlled by humans, such as wild plants and animals, earth and rocks, and the weather. Longman: Advance American Dictionary, 2008, p. 1060 6 lying. In the end, Jack Sully has to choose to whom he will fight and whom he will protect. From this film, the viewers can compare the difference of relationship between human and the environment, and non-human alien with their environment. Avatar film also shows vary relation between human and environment, such as the power of nature upon human and other things, the friendship between non-human alien and their environment, the exploitation human did to the environment, and social moral messages about the environment that can be taken from the film. These bring to the analysis of the statement 13 of film. From the explanation above, the writer is interested in analyzing the problem concerned on environmental issues and its relation with human in Cameron’s film, Avatar, using ecocriticism.

B. Focus of the Study