Dennis Biba

More glass domes! While the iconic building form in dystopian science fiction often serves as a prison for totalitarian control societies (see Logan’s Run), Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 film Silent Running follows a much older tradition. His domes are greenhouses like those in Victorian England, in which the splendor of plants in distant lands had to be preserved, but they no longer require a solid foundation, but float through empty space as part of a lightly manned spaceship. In 19th century England, greenhouses were still necessary to keep the plants from the widely scattered colonies alive in the moist and cold English climate. The glass house became a symbol of colonial architecture, in which soon more than just plants were exhibited. In Trumbull’s film, however, it is precisely this imperial way of life, which served as the basis for monuments such as the crystal palace in London, that becomes the subject of criticism. The overexploitation of the Earth (both, the planet and the soil on it) has caused severe damage, which is why the spaceship serves as an ark for endangered animal and plant species – and as a reminder to the audience to take the concerns of the early environmental movement seriously. The title Silent Running also clearly refers to the influential non-fiction book Silent Spring by biologist Rachel Carson (1962), in which the devastating effects of pesticides on ecosystems are described.

The protagonist of the story has the telling name Freeman Lowell. The quirky gardener, who devotedly looks after the gardens on the spaceship, is, like all free spirits, an outsider. Nobody else seems to take the mission seriously, his colleagues pass the time with go-kart races and when they receive the order to abandon the space capsules, blow up the gardens and return to Earth, Freeman has to make a momentous decision. A film with explosive potential. Where the destruction of the environment is otherwise only indirectly addressed and regretted, a human takes responsibility for the crimes of his species because he is the only one who recognizes the value of nature, which cannot be expressed in numbers.

From today’s perspective, however, the film seems more like eco-kitsch, which lacks any insight into the systemic interrelationships between humans and the environment. On the one hand, there is destructive humanity, and on the other, nature has been idyllically transformed, an oasis of well-being in which all species live in harmony with one another. If you think of the Garden of Eden – there are loads of biblical references – you are not wrong, because the nature preserved in the capsules actually appears more like a garden than a wilderness. Trumbull’s film is thus blind to the dangers that come from so-called nature itself and, despite all its political ambitions, forgets to classify the human species as part of the biosystem that is dependent on its environment for more than just aesthetic and nostalgic reasons. It is not so much a progressive environmental policy that is propagated as the old idea of nature conservation in the truest sense of the word, which is mainly interested in preserving endangered species. All of this does not necessarily make Silent Running, which should always be viewed in the context of the late 1960s, a bad film. However, to the warning given back then about the consequences of controlling nature must now be added another: if you want to save the planet, you should not make it too easy for yourself.