I am pleased to present my undergraduate thesis! Access the full document here.
Over an eight-month period, I researched the up-and-coming field of ecocinema studies, identified environmentally threatening current events, and furthered my study on Lacanian psychoanalysis (see my previous essay on The Platform) in rhetoric. This thesis cumulates each of these aspects in an eclectic dive into the human relationship between the environment and public culture.
After the events of the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, I became fascinated with the 2022 film White Noise, a Don DeLillo book adaptation that takes place, too, in Eastern Ohio, and features an eerily similar toxic train derailment. In my research, I ask what it means for the future of the human-environment relationship when collective, subconscious climate anxieties, expressed via film, can seem to predict real-world environmental catastrophe. Using the cipher of the train as a symbol of human technology, I examine White Noise and other cinema featuring trains to paint a broad picture of the evolving, subconscious relationship between humans, technology, and the natural world.
The thesis is published on the Univerisity of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons. Click here to access the download page.