The recent Disney computer-animated film Strange World (Don Hall, 2022) revels in political correctness. The viewer meets – and sympathizes with – Ethan Clade (Jaboukie Young-White), the gay teenage son of interracial couple Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Meridian Clade (Gabrielle Union).
Also, the happy family has a three-pawed dog who doesn’t appear to be handicapped by his disability. But behind this facade of tolerance lies nothing less than environmental fascism.
Fascism, of course, is a term that is notoriously difficult to define. Very often the label is circulated as a reproach against various currents of authoritarian politics or against political opponents, whether left or right, whom one deeply despises.
But at heart, fascism (especially in its traditional versions dating back exactly a century) posits the organismic totality of the state or nation, in which the individual members assume the role of wholly dependent cells or organs.
The unified whole subordinates itself to its parts without leaving a residue. Its organismic totality corresponds to an animal organism, which in this respect is quite different from plants, which reproduce in open and constantly self-assembling assemblages. Looking at biological models for political arrangements, one could say that animality tends toward fascist totalization, while vegetality points toward anarchistic multiplicities.
To the author
Miracle Plant is secretly destroying the entire habitable world
And here, through a spectacular reversal of plant-centric perspective, Strange World challenges the viewer to side with an animal organism and its totalitarian structure. It all begins with a literal embrace of green energy – the lush fruits of a plant called Pando, which Searcher Clade discovered on one of the expeditions he embarks on with his father, legendary explorer Jaeger Clade.
Searcher settles down to grow pando plants and power the entire community of Avalonia. Unlike contemporary biodiesel or plant-based ethanol, this method of fuel procurement does not require the burning of entire plant monocultures; harvesting the fruit does not destroy Pando. But it turns out that the miracle plant is secretly destroying the entire habitable world.
(Warning, spoilers!)
The avowedly green ideology that pervades the first part of Strange World is shaken when the pando plants show signs of what appears to be a rapidly spreading disease. Your fruit no longer erupts with electrical energy, but becomes dull and dry. But what is proving to be a problem for these miracle plants is proving to be a vexing problem in the discourse surrounding the plant-based salvation of humanity and the planet.
The Herbal Cure for Our Energy Dilemma Turns Into Poison: As the film’s heroes delve deeper into the strange world permeated by Pando’s roots – in search of the diseased “heart” of Pando in a strange animal transposition that has it all other than accidental – they realize that it is the subterranean part of the plant that suffocates the heart of the organism that is the living planet. Vegetable life is placed in the light of a parasite that evisces the whole it parasitizes.
The clonal Colony on behalf of “Pando”
A few words about “pando” are in order at this point. This name is not a Disney invention, but refers to the actual clonal colony of Populus tremuloides, the aspen, growing in Utah, USA. This colony is one of the oldest and largest living structures on earth, dating back over 10,000 years. Although their above-ground members give the appearance of solitary trees, their underground root system is connected.
Pando, from the Latin word for “I spread out,” occupies over 43 hectares of land. It is this spread, uncontrollable and disobedient to the demands of an organismic totality, that inspires either fear or awe in all those accustomed to the reassuringly self-constrained animal organization. Finally, Pando (both the supercolony growing in Utah and its cinematic homonym) represents all plants, for their characteristic activity of dispersal, whether through growth and reproduction, through dispersal, or in maximizing plant surfaces, expanding outwards and to open.
Plants are able to form new things from their organs
In contrast, the Strange World team is fascinated by the inwardness and depth that is the province of animal physiology and psychology. In a movement reminiscent of mining, her ship dives beneath the mountains and explores the bowels of a planetary organism, each part of which is alive – a nod to Plotinus, Leibniz and Spinoza – and serves the needs of the whole.
The state of aliveness is also uniquely associated with the animalistic; the vegetable life is at best a strange vitality that counteracts rather than supports the animal. The film’s obsession with depth coincides with its focus on the heart, an organ without which the entire organism cannot function. The same cannot be said of most roots, which in their spreading, branching, and expanding cannot be destroyed at once. (Even if this were the case, plants are capable of forming other types of organs, such as roots, from stems, leaves, and virtually every other part of them).
Orientation towards plants a fad?
The world in which humanity lives is predominantly plant-based; Land plants make up 80 percent of all biomass on earth. Strange World is not so much against the plants themselves as against the vegetalization of our relationship to the world: our practices of sourcing energy, the notion of ways to gather and communicate with each other and with non-human beings, the notion of possible forms of economic, social, and political organization without the towering animal figure of the Leviathan or the Behemoth, the state as a great organismic totality.
Searcher, the middle character in the three generations of the Clade family, chooses to grow crops (first pando, then tomatoes), but he’s an evanescent link between his father and son, who are both avid explorers and like animals move in the unimaginably large animal representation of the environment.
The future-oriented projection implied by this chain of generations is crystal clear: the orientation towards plants and environmentally friendly practices or forms of symbiotic coexistence is a fad that will soon be replaced again by proven animal prototypes. Behind this is the hope that the uncontrollable, exuberant, anarchic propagation of plants, independent of the whole, is no more than a social and political blueprint. This hope is fascist through and through.
The animal kingdom reflects the ideals of life
The release of Strange World coincided with the centenary of the march of the fascist blackshirts through the streets of Rome in October 1922, shortly after Benito Mussolini came to power. With the new fascisms thriving around the world today, the film resurrects the totalitarian logic that extends to biology – particularly the animal kingdom, which embraces the ideals of real life, power, interiority, and total organization harbors, in contrast to parasitism, the weakness, externality, and distraction that predominate in the vegetable kingdom.
Repeating an ancient mythological view, the film’s final shot shows that the world is a turtle surrounded by a boundless ocean, not a pando. It is a cinematic X-ray of a bad political fantasy.
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