“Beautiful ain’t it? Just beautiful.”
“What is Arn?”
“All of it.
Every last bit of it.”
Train Dreams
These are the last words spoken by Arn Peeples in Train Dreams, the Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Original Song. This film deserves all four of these nominations and hopefully, it wins most of them. There is an underlying message shrouded around the heartbreak of Robert losing his wife and daughter, and life’s purpose along with them: environmental destruction at the hands of an unknowing society.
The film is an adaptation of the book by Denis Johnson with the same title. The movie has small variations, but the ultimate plot and themes are the same: loggers set in the early 20th century, harvesting wood through the Pacific Northwest in seasons. Robert, the main character, has a wife and child at home, and ventures out every summer to cut down trees and sometimes to build railroads. Intertwined is the death of Robert’s fellow loggers in the dangerous and occasionally racist lands. When a logger passes, they bury him and nail his boots to the tree next to where he lies to represent their life among the trees. Robert spends most of the time introspectively, trying to understand his purpose in life, with influence from the other loggers, Arn is one of them. Arn’s dialogue brings the viewer’s attention to the world around logging: the sublimity of nature. He is killed by a “widow maker” (a large branch fallen off a tree), and still, he sees the beauty in “all of it,” a sentiment that the other loggers and our society today have lost sight of.
That beauty is juxtaposed against the traumatic event at the climax of the story: an enormous forest fire killing Robert’s wife and child, leaving only the corpses of trees, the stove from their cabin, a bed spring, and a widower in its wake. Robert spends the rest of his life waiting for them in a haze of traumatic dreams, changed logging practices, and few friends. The rapid industrialization of the world around Robert leaves him behind, trying to catch up, but never successful. A pivotal moment that encompasses this feeling is when Robert is logging one summer, and he comes across a pair of boots nailed to a tree. They are pressed into the bark like a head on a pillow, creased and molded around it. They disturb the natural vertical lines of the wood and create new contours. Time and nature have run their course through them, and Robert sees this as a metaphor for his own life and the loggers. It has been years since he has been back to this spot, untouched until now. Loggers with chainsaws make their way through it now like the previous generation was not even there, and there won’t even be the tree with the hung boots anymore to remind anyone, only the decimated land scattered with stumps.
Robert dies in his rebuilt cabin, and the end of the film leaves him still resting in bed, years later, with vines, dirt, shrubs, and saplings all growing, enclosing him from the modern world around. A world that is connected by thousands of concrete and steel roads and bridges. Spaceships that connect our world to others. Robert was lost to nature’s will, and I think our society is starting to be lost too, not to nature’s but humankind’s will.
Society’s effects
Robert dies in isolation before he can see the ramifications of the new world, but now we are living them; isolated in our own way. Are we more connected by roads, social media, technologies, or are we isolating ourselves in the illusion of a community we never see, places isolated from the natural world, and are completely ignorant of the interworking of an effective ecosystem? Humankind was a sustainable ecosystem in itself once upon a time. Now we feed off of each other and the environment: a parasitic relationship, using every resource it works so hard to create, exploiting the earth in the name of innovation and societal development.
Where is the line between sustaining a progressive image of humanity and a dystopian, destroyed world that we don’t recognize, just as Robert didn’t recognize the world that developed around him?
When do we call the world dystopian? When the last tree is cut down? When people are getting experimented on in the name of science? When there is a mass outbreak of illness killing people across the world? When the government is killing people who just “don’t belong?” When we can’t speak our minds freely without consequence? Or are we in dystopia presently? Is it no longer represented in futuristic societies that we read through ink on paper and watch on silver screens, but are we living it? We know the signs; we have been watching them play out for years, but what will it take to see a united world to stand up to it? Train Dreams is an exceptional cinematic exploration of the tradeoff between the exploitation of our environment and technological advancement. Another message asking society to recognize where we came from, and a beautiful image of what we stand to lose.
The last tree hasn’t fallen, but much more has, and our government won’t recognize where they went wrong or that they are actively feeding into a dystopian society fit for a science-fiction bestseller. The ending: I don’t think anyone knows.