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Are Trees Even Real? On the Politics of „Arboreality“

Trees have many remarkable qualities; they grow fruit and wood, exude the oxygen we breathe, provide shade, all the things. Yet, one of the most intriguing arboreal abilities is rarely mentioned: they are able to disappear. I am not talking about trees being cut down, burnt or otherwise being destroyed or dying materially. I am referring to trees – and, as it happens, with them whole ecosystems – disappearing from discourse, while, at the same time, doing all the amazing things trees do. But even though this arboreal disappearing act does not consist of literal plants withering away (a very real problem!), it is also not wholly metaphorical. To wonder whether or not trees are even real is not my attempt at dabbling in philosophy either. Rather, the question has been bugging me because while I was thinking about trees as aesthetic-material phenomena, as ghost trees and tree futures full-time (i.e. writing my book “Fremde Verwandtschaft”), I fear, trees have fallen of everyone’s radar once more.

I noticed the absence, when listening to the radio. The moderator introduced a top three of nonfiction books. Two of the books were dealing with important things – one with migration and Heimat, the other with the question of morals in current political discourse – but the top book of the list was introduced as “something that is not political, but deals with animals”. The book in question was Susana Monsó’s Playing Possum. How Animals Understand Death (2024) in its recent German translation Das Schweigen der Schimpansen (transl. by Thomas Brovot, Suhrkamp 2025). This is not a book about trees, but where a book about grieving animals counts as unpolitical, I don’t even want to know what role plants would play. I am tempted to find out, how many plant (let alone) tree books make it on such lists…for the moment, the dismissal of Monsó’s book as ‘not political’ is enough for me. Not just because I am disappointed that something that at least touches upon my work (i.e. how the relationship between human and non-human actors is understood) is pushed into a realm that, though interesting, has not much to do with our present reality. But also because this pushing aside of human-nonhuman relationships out of the realm of pressing political issues has a lot to do with precisely that reality.

Once again, it seems “a conversation about trees is almost a crime/ because entails a silence about so many misdeeds”. Sure, my head would go to Brecht, when debating how to feel about the speed with which “ecological topics” are pushed to the background when human “misdeeds” come to the fore. And really, aren’t there more important things at the moment than talking about trees (trees, here, being a pars pro toto for all more-than-human matters)? Yes, of course, there are more important things, however, not because they are inherently more important, but because there are so many things and beings that are also important and under threat. So, I am not arguing for talking less about the destruction of human lives in wars, the rise of authoritarianism, the deportation of people who should be welcomed and the discrimination of people who demand nothing more that space and language to express who they are. In short, the global attacks on human rights concern me as much as anyone else. As I argued in a blog post on Bertolt Brecht’s and Adrianne Rich’s “what times are these”-poems, this is not a question of competition per se – looking to trees does not turn you away from human matters permanently. Rather, how we (don’t) talk about trees is part of the cultural poetics in which care and carelessness for other beings (human and more-than-human) unfold.

The ”we”-pronoun I am using is treacherous, precisely because “we” is one of the pronouns that pretends to not ask anything of anyone. It pretends that you and I know whether we are part of the same we or not, I could even suggest and then deny that you are part of my “we”. In relation to trees, “we” is even more treacherous, because the syntactical relation to trees suggests an opposition between “us” humans and an arboreal other. But this beloved Enlightenment universalism has always served exclusionary purposes. Who can lay claim to participation in that idea of “humanity” is and always has been contested. Trees often serve to bridge that gap between nature and culture, body and spirit, because they seem to lend themselves to an easy “we”. Again, this “we” is perfidious, because it pulls a veil over the direction in which this inclusion operates. Those who use it to include trees, often include themselves into an arboreal world rather than the other way around. That is, thinking “we” with trees often equals a fantastic trip into a world that is only “ours”, if “we” wish to. Like the unpolitical, yet grieving chimpanzees whom I heard about on the radio, its humans graciously entering a foreign world that must be ‘interesting’ or ‘teaching us something about ourselves’ to deserve the honor of our precious attention. If I sound polemical, that’s because I am sick of this posture. Being interested in “nature” as a gesture of goodwill, if it is not outright extractivist (we need to know the plants, there might be medicine in them), delegates ecological awareness and activity (dare I say activism) to the realm of hobby and art and as seriously as I take both art and hobbies, this is a dangerous habit. Nevertheless, this habit is ingrained in the concept of ‘nature’ and, as I want to argue, in the concept of ‘tree’. The difficulty is that we need both, even though they do (almost) as much harm as they do good.

Habits: Arboreality and Arborescence

There is a lot of research on the value of ‘nature’ or lack thereof. In 2007, ecocritic Timothy Morton calls for Ecology without Nature in their eponymous book, claiming that the fundamentally romantic idea of Nature (capital N) stands between actual humans and actual nonhumans hindering instead of facilitating direct encounters by putting too many words and images between the two (producing nothing but “Ecomimesis”, Morton’s polemical version of nature writing, and no actual knowledge of or about nature). A little more than ten years later, in his book The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (2018) historian Andreas Malm, equally polemical, dismisses the doing away with “Nature” (=the concept) in favor of a return to nature as a concept that allows for the distance between material and conceptual phenomena to lessen. What both seem to agree on is the notion that ’nature’ is a concept that allows for the representation of a bunch of more-than-human beings and things in order to make it into an opposite (or even opponent) And these are only two examples of thinking about the difficulty to reconcile the aesthetic with the material aspects of nature and it does not become easier when discussions about art and science, fact and fiction enter the picture (as if they were such easy opposites).

Tree forms (round, spreding, pyramidal, oval, conical, vase, columnar, open, weeping, irregular, palm) as per the Northern Sydney Tree Planting guide (here)

“Tree” seems like a less problematic concept, but in fact, it does similar work as nature. I often find “tree” mentioned as one of the concrete or material things that the abstract, immaterial concept “Nature” realizes itself in. But even though “tree” might conjure up images in many people that have a lot in common, it is itself an abstraction or, rather, a habit. That is, there are no trees, only plants that have developed a tree-habit – a woody trunk growing both tall and wide that supports a crown high above the ground in which branches stretch out in order to secure light for the plants leaves. As a literary scholar interested in arboreal agency (in literary texts and beyond), I am inclined to deliberately misunderstand what habit means, in this context. Yet, in the botanical sense it refers to a specific form of growth, not the zoological types of behavior and certainly not the sociological habits and habitus I am inclined to think of. The tree habit is a form that has proven to be useful for plants all over the world and throughout the history of plants:

“The tree habit has evolved independently in a wide range of plants. Given this wide range, it is not surprising that the only common feature of trees is having a perennial woody skeleton. […] This is a superb example of ›convergent evolution‹ where a number of unrelated types of plant have evolved the same answer – height – to the same problem: how to get a good supply of light” (Thomas 2020, 3–4).

Thus, trees are not plants, but forms certain plants can assume under the right conditions. My favorite example is common hazel, a plant which I encounter most often as a shrub, but that can also grow into a tree [Think of the hazel tree in one of its most famed versions in the Grimm fairytale Cinderella]. When we talk about trees or, in fact, when we talk about flowers, shrubs, grains or, perhaps most problematically, weeds, we use categories to lump together plants by means of one of their qualities (growth-habit, propagation form, or, in the case of “weeds” their use to us – read Richard Mabey!!). That is not a problem per se, yet, it suggests concreteness, where we actually use just another category instead of actually talking about a specific plant. You will notice that this is also an opportunity to signify intimacy, to distinguish oneself, – for example, knowing which flowers to chose as a gift can help sending the right ‘message’ [most of us are still familiar with roses signalling love, but the language of flowers is in fact so complex that it needs experts like my colleague Isabel Kranz to decipher it, see book] and the question what your favorite tree might be can be daunting both for people who know many trees and those for whom one looks like the other. The latter case is especially interesting to me, because there will be few people who could not point out a giant woody plant and call it “tree”, but the ability to identify and name specific species differs widely. While I do not subscribe to the idea that it is necessary to learn by heart the species names of all the plants in a specific place to ‘really’ encounter nature, I wonder whether to remain on terms of abstract categories produces difference. Not because you know more about an oak tree, if you know that its species name is Quercus robur but because to know that what you see is an oak tree, you need to pay enough attention to recognize the shape of leaves, bark texture or fruit. Looking closer can even tell you something about individual habits. I have come to appreciate the variety of oak-ish form from almost curly branches and lanky build to gnarly stunted oaks, some I think of as funny, some as earnest – not botanical categories at all but one’s that express familiarity and attention in a way that realizes the abstraction of “tree” not only into (species) names but into attentiveness to specific form. I am reluctant to claim that a tree that I have come to know as a ‘funny dancing oak’ is somehow more real that the concept tree, because I fear that essentializes my very specific habit (this time the behavior) of stopping in my track to look at a plant and allowing me to think of myself as somehow better at recognizing reality. I don’t think this is true or in any way helpful, but the feeling remains, that there are more trees – in the form of material plants – in the world that I inhabit, than in non-tree-people’s worlds. (See what I did there, there’s a new, subtle “we”: tree-people like me; feel invited to be part of it, you made it this far, that counts!!).

Artist Katie Holten plays with this idea, when she uses simplified tree shapes as letters in her font (“Trees”). If you are not very familiar with tree forms (or acquaint yourself with these letters), you will not be able to read a text set in “Trees”. (see Holten The Language of Trees (2023) and Nitzke Making Kin with Trees (2025).

Arboreal discourse intensifies the observation that “tree” is an abstraction because the tradition of using treeness or aspects of it to signify entirely non-vegetal things has turned trees into signs so thoroughly that it sometimes needs reminding that the word actually refers to plants. While the simplified tree-symbol in a book for toddler’s or the sophisticated tree-alphabets of Katie Holten (see image above) signify actual plants, the graph (=tree) that allows to order genealogy, decision paths and all kinds of hierarchical or binary (=branching) information, has taken only one aspect of treeness, that is branching, in order to perform thoroughly human tasks. Arborescence, hence, refers more often to mathematical (e.g. graph theory) than to vegetal worlds. (Arborescence is an even more irresistible invitation to people inclined to purposefully and creatively misuse such terms – such a beautiful word!) I am, of course, not the first to make that observation. Two very prominent forbears are Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze proposed to think in terms of rhizomes instead of roots and to get rid of “the tree book” in order to undermine traditional hierarchical thinking in favor of a wilder, more complex and vegetal thinking. As poet and essayist Sumana Roy has pointed out, that kind of opposition only works if you think of trees only as a graph not as a plant (see How I became a Tree, 2017). That is, the opposition of the real, vegetal rhizome (underscored by an illustration from a lexicon) and the tree that cannot be real for their argument to work. The question whether or not this specific text is interested in trees at all must be relegated to another text, but suffice it to say, even at a quick glance this text increases my suspicions that trees are not real. That does not mean, however, that there are no real trees.

Even without playing around with the term, regarding ‘treeness’ as a habit rather than an ontological state of being, changes what it means to think about trees. A “tree” might not be a real thing but it can be more than a categorization, it can be a means to bring humans and tree into the same reality, a way to relate. Trees are not the realizations of Nature’s abstractions, they are not real things but, if the word refers to plants, are an abstraction that allows thinking very different plants (think oak vs. baobab) together with purpose. This purpose is the point. Environmental historian Jared Farmer puts it like this:

TREES ARE PLANTS THAT PEOPLE CALL TREES—A TERM OF DIGNITY, NOT botany. Personification is intrinsic to treeness. A tree is a radically nonhuman thing, a modular organism, that humans exalt through misunderstanding as a person-like being: an individual with torso and limbs.

Jared Farmer: Elderflora. A Modern History of Ancient Trees, 2022, 3.

By declaring plants with a specific habit (woody growth) to belong to a specific type of plant different from all others by virtue of a form that is reminiscent of how humans like to see themselves, i.e. “trees”, humans include them in a “we”. A tree, then, is a misunderstood or a creatively misinterpreted plant. This misunderstanding/misinterpretation allows for a vegetal-human relationship that otherwise seems unthinkable for “us” (=humans). It also allows, and this is what Farmer shows, to differentiate further among trees. Some are not “just” trees, but bear names or are imbued with story, special conservation status and other anthropomorphic ‘honors’. By singling out some trees – declaring them ‘individual’ trees – it becomes plausible to exclude the vast number of trees that are not set apart and cared-for: “In the shadow of the sanctified tree lurks an oppositional archetype, the tree violator” (11). “Tree” (the concept) is, in this understanding, a device that is far from ‘realizing’ abstract nature into concrete beings. Instead, as a device, “tree” is an offer of relationship that can result in an individual plant becoming more real (as a singular tree, with a species and individual name for example) or in a dissolution of plants in the plural “trees” turned into a collective singular like timber or an anonymous process such as “deforestation”. In both cases tree’s existence is precarious at best, because the tree depends on its position as a focal point of human attention and either becomes something that it is not (a “person-like being” instead of a “radically nonhuman thing”, Farmer) or vanishes into the mass noun “resource”. I am aware that I am at risk of moving my question into the realm of pop-philosophical thought experiments like the famous “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” [Gotta love Wikipedia for having an entry on this! ], what I am really interested in is whether and how there is a way to talk about trees (politically) without either anthropomorphizing them or regarding them as ‘soulless’ matter [Vegetal soul is a huge topic for critical plant studies, and I might get to it at another point in time. Philosopher Michael Marder has (re-)introduced the term and the questions that it raises in Plant Thinking (2013).] In my practical life, I do both, of course, but I wouldn’t be a literary and cultural scholar if I didn’t have a text in mind, that might offer answers to my questions.

Living with trees as if they were plants

One of the reasons I am newly attuned to “conversations about trees” is Rebecca Campbell’s novella Arboreality which was first published in 2022 and came to my attention because it was recently translated into German by Barbara Slawig (Carcosa Verlag). I have been increasingly critical of (anti-)deforestation novels (especially it’s most famous exemplar, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, 2018), for offering, in my opinion, easy outs that will not reach beyond the page. Plant and animal studies scholar Susan McHugh has written a brilliant chapter comparing “big tree novels” in the context of expectations of literature’s power to transform reader’s awareness and skepticism towards “fiction” in non-fiction and pop-science writing (see McHugh 2025). She shows, that the opposition of fact and fiction, wherein fiction only has a role to play, when it comes to convincing audiences of the facts that scientists painstakingly gathered, is false because it is literally too short-sighted for the duration of arboreal and sylvan life and human-arboreal interactions:

Read together, The Overstory and Barkskins make a powerful case that plant science is only part of what is needed for forest conservation and restoration. Centuries of human cross-generational stories of colonization are caught up in the tens-of-millennia evolutionary histories of forest plants and other creatures, implicated in the dramas of nurturing and threatening on which our shared futures depend.

Susan McHugh, “From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking”, 2025, 120.

Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality differs in many ways from the big tree novels that have had considerable success in the past ten years. First of all, it is not a big novel, and second of all, it is, I would argue, not a tree novel. Rather, I read Arboreality as an attempt to live with and in relation to plants, potentially giant woody plants, without mistaking them for humans. What it has in common with the big tree novels, however, is a commitment to arboreal poetics, that is, the attempt to engage formally with arboreal habits. Powers’ The Overstory uses tree-parts roots, trunk, crown and seed as structuring elements of the novel (the most common type of arboreal poetics), whereas Annie Proulx models the temporal pace and scope of her novel Barkskins after Pinus strobus, the white pine, narrating slowly and detailed through four centuries of deforestation history in North America; which makes for sometimes excruciating reading, if your attention span, like mine, resembles a squirrel more than a tree, but it is absolutely worth it. Arboreality, taking seriously its title, takes up those strategies – the stories encompass roughly a hundred years, it pays great attention to very specific qualities of arboreal life and it narrates at a slow pace – its arboreal poetics focus on the connectivity of trees rather than their visible form. “Visible” meaning, here, what humans can see of trees. Instead of depending on the contested if intriguing vision of the wood wide web [the web of tree roots and mychorrizal fungi in the forest floor whose properties are highly debated, see here] and imaginations of arboreal-fungal communication and what it would be like if humans could listen in, Campbell’s book looks both at “tree” as a concept of relation and at the actual plants that might refer to in relation to human beings. That is, both the stories that are told and the forms they are told in take their cue from trees and grow into one another, refusing the individuality and closedness that human categories otherwise suggest. One way this (not necessarily intentional) strategy realizes itself is in the relative brevity of the text and the difficulty of pinning down a genre. The German version seems to have more trouble with it, calling it both “Erzählungen” (stories) and “Mosaikroman” (mosaic novel), possibly because Novelle/novella is a very specific thing in German literary history. Either way, the chapters of the book are both parts of a larger whole and individual stories, which I read as modular storytelling, much in the vein of the modular organization of plants. That is, you can read Arboreality as a consecutive text or read any of the chapters separately and still get an impression of what it does. I deliberately avoid talking of “the whole”, because the text does not form a whole. Rather, its modules/stories shed light on aspects of a world or reality that has lost its claim to wholeness and, thus, becomes more arborealistic, if you will.

Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (link)

The stories revolve around humans living in a warmer world (located in the Pacific West of North America) stretching from scenarios that are not far off from our own present to around the year 2100 (a pivotal year in climate scenarios). My favorite story might be the first one, “Special collections”, following a scholar who collaborates with a librarian to save some of a university library in an act of near-futuristic canonization. In the foreseeable future, the library will be flooded but apparently books and library services are on no official agenda, so the DIY distribution of knowledge and keeping of books follows a very pragmatic logic:

We’re going to need books again, for a while at least. Maybe forever, but we can’t if they’re all turned into mush and locked away on campus.
“What do we save? Beyond Pope, obviously.”
“Pope. And animal husbandry. Geography. Geology. How to extract teeth. How to run a homestead.” This time she laughed. “A homestead.”

Rebecca Campbell: Arboreality, 7.

Yet, making the protagonist an academic ensures that pragmatism doesn’t take over and some appreciation for books and what they are about seeps into consideration. Both romanticism and pragmatism entwine themselves in the decision to save a book that, you might guess it, will take on a life of its own in the course of Arboreality:

He wondered what he had denied the future:  Some fact they would need in twenty years: how to mend a photovoltaic plate, or set a leg or cure croup or make a smoker. He was tired, cold in the damp sunless hall, but on this day in January, several years after he and Berenice had begun dismantling the collection, he stopped in at SB469-476.4. Landscape architecture. From the shelf, he pulled a book full of diagrams and photographs of trees: coppicing and inosculation, pleached Italian hedges and espaliered peaches in a Provençal gardens, tanzlinden in German villages and baubotanik towers in Denmark. The living root bridges of Meghalaya. Bleachers of rubber fig roots, from which young men craned their necks to watch cricket matches. Furniture not made of wood, but grown from the branches of living trees. He could imagine, suddenly, a future world in which these were ordinary, lives lived in the branches and among the leaves. The book was too heavy — as Berenice had put it — to carry with you if you were fleeing a plague or a flood. But nevertheless he packed it in a box bound for a friend in the Cowichan Valley, who had volunteered a whole room to the cause.

Rebecca Campbell: Arboreality, 11-12.

The book will inspire someone to collaborate with (as of yet) fictional trees – Aurum, a species reminiscent of quaking aspen, that forms colonies and can be brought to grow into shapes that adhere less to arboreal habit than to human buildings. Yet, what I admire about Arboreality is the attention to both sides of book- and tree-love and care. There is an atrocious act of tree violation in the center of the book, whose purpose and effect, however, is music so beautiful that it brings a human-arboreal community together and motivates life in the ruins of “our” civilization. The last old growth Sitka spruce, sacrificed for a perfect violin; one ethical conundrum of many in a world in which resources are not invisible because nobody needs to consider them, but because they are simply gone. Arboreality is not a novel of hope that shows people how to save anything (let alone forests, civilization or planets). It is a novel about stubborn acts – very explicitly drawn with the colors of counterculture environmentalism – of hope and even enjoyment in the face of scarcity and destruction. The care with which someone tries to learn about plant medicine and, when she cannot save her partner, tries to make a birthday dinner (Nachos and Funfetti cake) from the few supplies that are available to her; the care with which someone plants ‘weeds’ into the front and back yards of abandoned houses where there were only lawns and the care with which someone coaxes woody plants to change their habit into a symbol of arboreality, that is not treeness, but what Jared Farmer calls “treehood”. All these stories of care are connected by the question of what is possible and how if human life happens in a world where trees are not only real but determine whether or not the world is livable (spoiler alert: it turns out that is always already the world we live in). After “the fiery decades” a slow regrowth both of human settlements and forests becomes barely palpable and the way in which Campbell does not offer explanations of how to live but rather lets her stories explore possibilities of congregation (in a Cathedral Arboreal no less) with trees as an alternative to treeness. Arboreality, as both the reality of trees in the sense that they are real and that our reality is arboreal, shifts the question from likeness to congregation, from anthropomorphization vs. objectification, from treeness to treehood. “Treehood is as multitudinous as treeness is reductive” according to Jared Farmer, and, I want to add, this is where the politics of arboreality really come into play. Not as a narrative or imperative of salvation (save the trees!) but as a challenge to become less human, more arboreal; to include the un-real and abstract, the fictional and imaginary into ‘our’ lived reality. Arboreality hints at the different conditions, privileges and freedoms required for such a call. As Susan McHugh points out, the risks of the currently dominating lifestyles are unequally distributed to the detriment of Indigenous, marginalized and nonhuman communities. Campbell (fortunately) does not suggest, that the impending slow catastrophes of climate collapse will put everyone on equal footing, it is a pessimistic novel in that respect. But that is actually what makes its version of arboreality so plausible. To live in a world in which trees are real and reality is arboreal is, above all, tedious. Like care, it is not realized in grand philosophical or theoretical gestures but in showing up every day. Arboreality and the human place within it depend on practices of care. Relegating more-than-human and human ‘others’ to the background of ‘interesting entertainment’ denies their reality and exposes our lifestyle as a phantasm. I couldn’t imagine a more ‘political’ insight.

Campbell, Rebecca. Arboreality. Stelliform Press 2022.

Farmer, Jared. Elderflora. A Modern History of Ancient Trees, Picador 2022.

Holten, Katie. The Language of Trees: How Trees Make Our World, Change Our Mind and Rewild Our Lives. Elliott & Thompson 2023.

Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press 2013.

McHugh, Susan. 2025. From Tree Talk to Forest Thinking: Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. In Plant Poetics. ed. by Jacobs, Joela, Isabel Kranz, und Solvejg Nitzke, Critical plant studies 10. Brill 2025, 102-122.

Nitzke, Solvejg. Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care. Palgrave 2025.

Roy, Sumana. 2017. How I Became a Tree. New Delhi: Aleph.

Thomas, Peter A.. Trees. Their Natural History. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press 2020.

Mixed Messages: Meta-Travelling to a Time of Environmental Unconsciousness with Lightyear

This is not a proper movie review. Full disclosure: I am an absolute Toy Story Fan (all of them!) and I knew I’d love the new part of the franchise, the minute I saw the trailer. It came out this week and I took my daughter to watch it, determined to have a good time with a movie that I waited 27 years for. (My daughter is six years old, so maybe a tiny bit too young for an action packed Space-Flick, but she loved it too.) So, I am the worst person to criticize anything Buzz-ian, but I am definitely going to spoil the movie for you with the following, so if you (like me) have a soft spot for Pixar and Buzz, go see it and come back later to read this.

Lightyear lets you know right away that it is far removed from our present. Not because it is a movie about the future or the past or in a far-away universe (it’s kind of all that, too), but because it is a hyper-fictional story. The first shot – white text on black screen – goes something like this: “In 1995 a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear action-figure for his birthday. It was a character from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” (miss-quoting from memory here, but you get the gist). So this is more than a prequel. Lightyear is a movie that was originally the implicit precondition for a fictional boy’s action figure in a movie about toys who come alive when said boy is not looking. It was always ok not to have seen the movie, because the fact that there was an action-figure of a space ranger with expandable wings, blinking lights and tons of catch-phrases made it immediately clear why the cowboy doll, Woody, Andy’s first favorite toy, got jealous. Let’s face it, Buzz was MUCH cooler. (This is the nine-year old me speaking who saw Toy Story when it first came out and I am not to be debated on this.) The sequels revealed more about Buzz (there was an adversary, a backstory, all that kind of stuff but it always remained blissfully vague). Lightyear, thus, fills gaps that might not have needed filling. But, you know, there are a gazillion Marvel movies, so leave this one alone. Also, as much as I try to watch this as a movie I did not know I waited 27 years for (yes, I am probably going to repeat this number a lot, because it feels weird) without my media/cultural studies glasses on, I couldn’t and this has a lot to do with the weirdly awesome meta-set up of a movie that tells the story of a movie within a movie that was always only alluded to.

So why would I write about Lightyear on a blog about ecologies? Because it pretends so hard that it’s not about that at all. After all, this is a version of a movie that someone didn’t need to come up with because the pattern of movie-merch is so familiar that making up the merch is enough to tell a story about toys (and movie merch). So the prequel to a story that even in the fiction mostly existed so you can produce toys and Pixar (later Disney Pixar) can make movies that are higly self-referential. Oh boy, my head is already spinning from all the meta-levels and I work with stuff like that all the time…and I am not even getting into all the intricate levels of allusion and movie-references…

Anyway, I think – despite my love for all things Toy Story – this is a premium piece of capitalist realism (Mark Fisher) and in some ways so postmodern, it almost hurts. “Almost” meaning: it lets me know all these things right away, before even the first star-spangled sky-panorama. So what does it say? The movie says, “Hey Solvejg*, let’s watch this, like it’s 1995!” What a great ivitation, I would love to. Let’s play pretend…let’s ignore that there’s a heat wave, all kinds of crises, and that we really both know that we’re both too old to pretend we don’t know that Astronaut-flicks don’t work like that anymore. This movie, however, pretends that this is all possible – a suspension not only of disbelief but of context altogether – for old time’s sake, for the kid(s), not least for the kid in you. 

Or does it pretend? Does Lightyear really avoid signals to the present? It doesn’t, otherwise it wouldn’t be censored in many countries for two women kissing, it wouldn’t continue the diverse casting that Star Wars and many other franchises finally (!) implemented. But while it successfully stars a cast in which the white, male hero (with the voice of Captain America’s Chris Evans after all) seems so out of place, he has to work together with others (who still seem like a band of misfits) and get over himself. Which is, basically, the story of the 1995 Toy Story movie but with a much wider range of humans. And yet, despite all of this, the movie pretends that this is all easily solved and, this is where I come in, that you can still tell a story about humans colonizing a planet and the biggest problem being that the hero finally needs to learn how to be a team player. 

I am convinced, the movie really knows that this only works on the pact of playing pretend. That is, on the shared nostalgia of Pixar’s team finally doing that movie and me finally getting to watch it. But it seems, neither of us trusts nostalgia. Not even for two hours. Lightyear sends so many mixed messages and the whole thing is so meta that it leaves me wondering whether it wants me to know what it shows and so obviously NOT comments on the fact that it is, in the end, an even bigger comment? Do movies even work like that? Well, I am, as you can tell, confused and I think this confusion says something that is at least noteworthy in the context of (contemporary) ecological story-telling.

This is where the spoilers start. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Captain Buzz Lightyear and his commander, Alisha Hawthorne, go on a detour to a planet on which their board-computer detected life (whatever die-hard fans say about the movie, the AI running gags alone make it worth watching, so many easter eggs…). So they land smoothly, don’t notice that that alone is always a bad sign in a movie and go on exploring (wonderful teachable moment to short-cut your kid to genre-awareness btw, that is if you raise your kid this way ;). An eerie, yet beautiful (i.e. ”alien”) landscape of trees with redd-ish leaves and scarce undergrowth unfolds before them and captivates them enough so they don’t notice that plant-like tentacles begin to snake around their spaceship, which is full of cryo-sleeping scientists and more space rangers. Long story short, plants and insects reminiscent of almost the entirety of outer space horror (to name only a few: I thought of Spaceship Troopers; Alien; The Call of Cthulu and really doubted whether it was such a good idea to take my kid, but she’s much tougher than I am) attack, they need to flee, something goes wrong, they crash on the other side of a mountain ridge and have to make due on this planet until they’re able to restore the hyperspeed-crystal to fuel their spaceship and go home (which, I assume, is planet Earth, but i am pretty sure they never mention it – which, in itself is interesting). In order to do so, they can ‘mine this planet’s resources’ and that’s basically that.

The rest of the movie is about Buzz’ attempts at testing a hyperspeed crystal which literally brings him out of tune with (the) time(s). In a neat take on Einstein’s twin paradox, while Buzz feels he’s only leaving the planet for minutes, he’s actually gone for years. And while everyone has full lives and ages, he is stuck trying to undo a mistake that for him, makes all that happens on T’Kani prime worthless (of course he changes his mind in the course of the movie). 

While for me the first five minutes set off several alarm bells (monster plants; extractivism; trees in a wasteland), none of this is a problem ever again. Plant tentacles and giant bugs are really only a nuisance rather than a problem or – this is almost unthinkable in this context – lifeforms who might have a right to live on their own planet. Nope, you chop them, electrocute or shoot them and all is well enough. There are also no plants in the growing modular make-shift city or any mention of agriculture and although in the course of the movie the trees from the beginning sequence reappear without leaves, this is also not recognized in the movie. Which is strange, because apparently there is food, though apparently artificial (which is what Buzz’ stereotypical ‘astronaut food’ suggests) and different to terrestrial traditions. There is a lengthy discussion about ham sandwiches and whether you should put ham between two slices of bread or vice versa (obviously the latter, you gotta evolve somehow on a new planet) during which I could think of nothing else than where and how they’d get the ingredients without pigs or crops or vegetables? Well, they came from a vending machine. What’s more to ask?

It is this weird and, I suspect, intentional or at least collateral ignorance toward resource-use that puzzles me the most. Maybe because I could under no circumstances verify whether the math behind the time travel makes sense (I am, however, very proud to have recognized the twin paradox and roughly explained it to my daughter). More probably it is because I have trained myself to look for the ecological context of a given movie. And (I hope) it’s not just me. Decades of post-apocalyiptical wasteland and Roland-Emmerich-type disaster films, global warming narratives and debate (I hate calling it “debates”, because what is there to debate!?) and, for me at least, dozens of texts about anthropogenic transformations of global ecosystems do this.

So what about this movie? Is it another instance of denial? I don’t think it is. Maybe it is a type of benevolent escapism, an offer to hit pause for just a couple of others. Rarely have I felt so targeted as an audience. This movie offers two hours of respite in an air-conditioned theatre playing pretend during a literal and figurative heat wave. Yet, there are enough signals pointing to the fact that even for Buzz Lightyear “infinity…and beyond” isn’t easy to achieve anymore. Giving up on the crystal that could turn everything around and make it un-happen in favor of the people and the planet who are there, who have “a full life” in spite of everything is a message that goes beyond the simple “you got a friend in me” of the original movies. Maybe, just maybe, I wish Andy (and me) had seen this movie with its disturbing lack of answers to environmental crises, when we were ten years old. I stopped believing that one movie might have or will change anything. Still, that even the movie that gives itself a perfectly plausible excuse to not talk about the way we (humans with lots of training and technology) treat ‘our’ planet, cannot seem to look past the wreckage, is strangely hopeful in its pessimism. There might not be a way to turn everything around, but there’s life in the ruins.