I went to the movie theatre and saw Wildwood yesterday. I sat on my seat and watched till the last frame of the ending credits, savoring every bit of the handmade scenes. The last time I sat through all the ending credits was perhaps three years ago, and today I did so because I knew that every frame, every scene, every part of this movie was handmade. I sat and looked at all the strokes, the colors, the water color… the leaves, the mountains, the wolves… every time I see these easily overlooked parts of a creation made beautifully by hand, such as the ending credits of a movie, a scenery in an ad, etc., I sigh for the short lives remained for them. Soon all these will be made by AI, so savor all of it, as much as you can, for now.

I went to the midnight screening, ten minutes late as I usually am to everything. The theatre was full of adults who didn’t sleep or catch up with work on a weekday, adults who gasped when a character was hurt, laughed when a rabbit made a cartoonish gesture toward a human, and felt their hearts moved when a giant eagle carries the protagonist girl on her back and soared through the sky. At least I was an adult like that, sitting on a leather seat in that movie theatre, thinking of the movie’s “alleged predecessor” Coraline, a movie I adore. I thought of the rats, the upstair neighbor who did aerobics, the narrating of the letter that told Coraline that she was in danger, and the black cat walking Coraline through the made-up world that was disappearing on the screen. I didn’t think of the plot but some of the beautifully drawn scenes. The same kind of moving of the heart when I saw the eagle soar through the sky and the leaves, and the leaves had that auburn autumn color that also made me want to take a trip by train upstate next week to see the autumn leaves. This movie is everything I expected, and I completed a flying experience again by watching a movie.

Ecology 1: The Green

While watching the film, I thought of the course content of a student that I tutored lately. Their course was about ecology, with a few subtopics such as dark ecology, feminism in ecology, etc., and one particular reading, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I faintly remember this work from sophomore year in college, watching one of the film adaptations, too. From the student’s lecture slides, their professor had an interesting point: human vs/and more-than-human. The knights in SGGK, like those in other similar words, had horses to ride and hounds to dispatch when going on a hunt. The difference between these animals not only mark their relationship to human but the other way around: humans not only implore tools and animals but also sit at the center of these actions. At first, we draw the difference between horse / hounds and boars / foxes, the hunter’s friend and the hunted. We wear special gears to hunt, too. In this way, the Green Knight is more-than-human because in the poem he is described as wearing clothes like leggings and his horse wearing buckles, but he does not wear a helmet or shoes, the two most important protective things for humans. While the head is the most vital point, the skin at the sole of our feet is the same as on the rest of our bodies, also tender, but the ground is rough. Those who run/fly free do not wear shoes.

Furthermore, the concept of anthropocentric vs biocentric drew my attention. The former means that humans stand at the center of the biological system overall, and the latter says that humans are merely a part of it. (I definitely believe in the latter and am always inclined to regard our own kind as destructive and disrespectful.) Without giving too much spoilers, I see Wildwoods drawing on this concept. In the movie, various species speak and move forward together. The decisions that humans make directly impact the wellbeing of others, humans and animals altogether. One very distinctive example is taking over and fighting for land.
Humans pride ourselves by the invention of tools, but in the woods we are incapable beings. Perhaps this is why we try to transform as many places on earth as possible from woods to something else.

Another point that sort of fascinated me is feminism in ecology, particularly how the gender assignment of “mother earth” is a particularly and contradictorily violent one. As we often call the earth our mother and give her the gender pronouns of she/her, we do very violent things to it, such as mining and prying it open for resources. The very act of prying open the earth is like cutting open our mother, if we examine the gendered identity of the earth.

Other Themes (Some Spoiler Alerts!)

While Wildwood is a brilliant work of art, it deals with a few very complex topics. The biggest one is war. Towards the end of the film, quite a few characters suggested that if they wanted what they wanted, they needed to fight, which literally meant war. As going to war was the characters’ choice (?), plus the dramatic effects, and we also see graphic portrayal of the fighting, there might have ben more time to hesitate to go to war, had they more options. In the end, after the war, people died, land was destroyed, and the innocence of a boy child was lost.

In the End…

I returned to this page after two years of its abandonment. Recently, I received a message about how I should stress less about perfection but simply get shit out, and I decided to embrace this message. There is something comforting about writing a blog post in this age. I told myself I’d type out my thoughts, with minimal editing. Maybe one day we find ourselves begging to co-exist with AI in a biocentric way, but, it being superior, made by us nonetheless, refuses. This blog, however, will be here (?) and mean nothing, but at least I started writing again. Ha, sort of egotistical, no?