Everything Changes & Everything Stays the Same
In the early 1970s, French director Alain Resnais was approached by a pharmaceutical company to make a short film about a chemical memory aid. To develop the project, he was guided by Dr. Henri Laborit, famed neurobiologist and philosopher (and surgeon and writer and pharmacologist and behavioral scientist and expert on evolutionary psychiatry), who had been instrumental in developing tranquilizers and the theory of psychosomatics. Ultimately, the short film was canned but the two remained friends and Resnais would go on to write and direct My American Uncle, a film about the way that three people of different socioeconomic standings intersect with one another framed by the behaviorist theories of Laborit.
Laborit begins the film's narration by explaining the evolution of the brain. Every animal species' approach to survival works depending on the development of three distinctive cerebral cortices—a primitive, reptile kernel, which is the survival brain; an emotional, memory brain; and the outer layer, or neocortex, which allows for associations and imagination. Humans have a highly developed neocortex which is where our conscious thinking, or free will, comes from.
But how much choice do we actually possess? The three cortices are interlocked; humans react to the environment around them based on a complex interplay between the three. Laborit seems to believe that our primitive, survival brain heavily influences our choices; our ability to ‘choose’ is more determined by our physiology than we like to think.
Laborit shows us an experiment with two lab rats. A cage is split into two rooms. An alarm goes off and the floor of one room lets off electric shocks. The rat quickly escapes to the other through an open doorway. The experiment repeats; the rat learns to run back and forth until the door is closed and the rat has nowhere to escape to. The rat crouches in a corner and accepts his fate. Another rat is introduced to the cage. They escape from one room to another. Then the door is closed again. Rather than crouch in a corner, protect or console one another, they fight.
The experiment demonstrates Laborit and Resnais’ central idea: when human survival, both real and imagined, is placed under stress we dominate. But, not unlike every other animal species, our need to survive is shortsighted. Although we have the capacity to project our futures, we fail to commit to the complexity of our actions. We often, oddly, place the future survival of ourselves and those around us in peril because of our need to dominate and survive the present.
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“The quebracho forests of northern Argentina and southern Paraguay have the distinction of being the only forests of their kind in existence,” begins researcher William D. Durand in a 1924 study of the quebracho forests that cover the northeast region of Argentina. At the time, the forests were estimated to occupy 100 million acres or 14% of the country’s landmass. Durand hypothesized that if the forests continued to be cleared at an annual rate of 333 thousand acres, it would require 150 years to exhaust the resource.
Durand’s estimates were correct. Today 33 million acres of virgin forest remain and deforestation continues and increases. Our domination over natural resources has evolved over time. In the early twentieth century, quebracho was logged mostly for building materials and tannin; today, the forest is cleared for soy fields and cattle ranches. The industry changed but the destruction of resources remains the same. Agricultural technology has allowed a farm belt to develop in arid areas that are naturally inhospitable to wide-scale agriculture. Durand didn’t live in a time where he could see the whole picture, the future impact of the destruction—what’s our excuse now?
I became curious about quebracho after a friend of mine told me that he goes through one ton of wood a month to run his pizzeria. The number shocked me. His shop is only open four days a week with a limited run of about 40 to 50 pizzas a night. In a few months, he will open up a full-time pizzeria open five or six nights a week with triple the stock. He couldn’t justify burning through so much wood, which continues to be cleared at alarming rates with no real efforts to reforest. He opted to build a new gas oven instead. It’s a very unglamorous decision amidst a moment in local gastronomy when all the cutting edge pizza shops are building hornos de leña (wood-burning ovens), which is advertised, for reasons that are completely ambiguous to me, as a marker of quality. Cooking with fire is better. Better for what? I can’t seem to figure that out. I assume that most people think that since wood is a renewable energy source that trees are being replanted. Or maybe it is hard to conceptualize a distant (for most) forest as massive as the Gran Chaco being finite.
These processes aren’t finite or distant at all. We eat it up. In Argentina, forests are cleared for cattle and soy, the latter used during the final fattening process, which we then cook over a wood or charcoal fire with the tree that was cut down for our soy-fed cattle. It’s circular but not never-ending. At some point, we run out of trees to cut down and chemical treated fields of soy turn the soil to dust.
Later this month I’ll travel to Chaco to see the quebracho forests myself for a story. I’m interested in writing about how these processes and the problems they bring aren’t as distant as we imagine them to be. I’ll be thinking about all this through the lens of Laborit and our need to survive through domination. Does our physiology doom us to extractivism? I’ll be thinking about how our immediate need to survive (sustenance, economy, social hierarchy) is imagined because there are more equitable, sustainable alternatives that ensure our ultimate survival, alternatives that are farsighted and don’t cash in the future for all for the immediate for some.
I find myself cruising the line that separates optimism and pessimism, not really sure which way to turn. In November, President Alberto Fernandez spoke up at the COP26 about ecological reparations, ‘exchanging’ debts for climate action, and “adopting a fight against climate change”, asking the global North to provide debt relief in order for the global South to depend less on the extraction of natural resources and make serious strides towards combating the climate crisis. I don’t think that a leader within a dominant political party, let alone a Head of State, has ever suggested something like that.
In mid-December, he remained silent after Canadian company Pan American Silver successfully lobbied to mine in the Patagonian province of Chubut, a decision roundly opposed by scientists, researchers, and the general public in an area where access to clean water is already scarce. The decision was overturned after days of sustained protest. Just a few days ago, the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development approved a measure to exploit petroleum on the north Atlantic coast. Currently, wildfires are ripping through eleven provinces as a direct effect of overdevelopment. The list goes on and on.
About halfway through My American Uncle, Resnais dresses his protagonists up as giant rats to replay pivotal moments where their survival is being tested. Now that Laborit has explained to them the way that their brains function, can they fight their urge to destroy? It’s better on screen than how it sounds. I don’t think that Resnais or Laborit ultimately believe that we are rats in a cage, or that our free will can’t override our primitive brain. Laborit believes that the key to change is knowledge, understanding the way our brains, how and why we make the decisions that we make, is the only way to create change. I agree. I also believe that we are all capable of becoming more conscious of ourselves and the world around us, see things more completely. How we get the masses to be more conscientious? Beats me.
Resnais closes on a bittersweet note. The camera moves through hollowed-out buildings in the Bronx, New York before arriving on an abandoned street. A beautiful mural of a lush green forest by artist Alan Sonfist is painted into a tall brick building. Resnais slowly zooms in until the mural becomes unrecognizable. I wanted to show something beautiful and then destroy it, Resnais later remarked. Let’s zoom out and look at the whole picture.