Careening down our Lost Highway

 
An accumulation of crimes against tribal peoples is catching up to us ecologically, and they can’t be outrun
 
by michael nenonen
 
Lost Highway has a very strange plotline. It goes something like this: Fred Madison, an emotionally disturbed jazz musician, suspects his wife is having an affair. He eventually murders her and is sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, he transforms into Pete Dayton, a young and innocent garage mechanic. Dayton has never heard of Madison, and he has no memory of how he ended up on death row. Dayton is released and returns to his loving parents, his committed girlfriend, and his supportive workplace. His parents refuse to talk about the night he disappeared—the night he took Madison’s place in jail. Their behaviour suggests that the secret is too terrible for him too handle. Shortly after his release, Dayton is seduced by a villainous woman resembling Madison’s wife. She lures him into danger, and finally manipulates him into committing a theft and a murder. As his sins accumulate, he turns back into Madison. The movie ends as Madison races down a darkened highway. He starts to seizure, and his skin begins to burn.
I was bewildered by this movie until I read Anthony Leong’s 1997 essay, “Demystifying Lost Highway.” According to Leong, Madison never really turns into Dayton at all. His life as Dayton is simply a psychotic fantasy, a desperate attempt to convince himself that he’s someone else—someone beautiful and naïve, someone whose only fault is that he loves too intensely, and who, because of this fault, is deceived and destroyed. Even though he totally immerses himself in this fantasy, it can’t be maintained. As it collapses, his old identity returns. Despite appearances, he dies not in a car, but rather in the electric chair.   
Lost Highway encourages us to identify with Dayton, and to regard with horror his metamorphosis back into Madison. We don’t witness the death of Dayton’s cherished innocence; we witness his realization that his innocence was a lie, that the person he is happens to be unspeakably more corrupt than the person he thought he was, and that he can’t escape the lethal consequences of his crimes. The film is an exquisite meditation on self-deception and the terrors of self-discovery.
It’s here that the ecological metaphor comes into play. Like Madison, we’re clinging to a crumbling fantasy of innocence. Like Madison, our crimes are catching up to us, exposing our self-serving lies and revealing our true natures with maddening clarity.
According to anthropologist John H Bodley, author of Victims of Progress (Mayfield, 1999), capitalist civilization, both in its traditional and state capitalist forms, has been responsible for genocides of unimaginable ferocity. In every encounter between tribal and capitalist cultures, the same pattern has occurred. Capitalist economies depend upon unlimited growth, which leads capitalist societies to invade lands held by tribal people. The tribes are forced into submission, often through wholesale slaughter. Tribal economies are decimated, and the land’s resources are fed into the capitalist machine. Those tribal peoples who survive find themselves destitute, traumatized, and excluded from the power structures of the invading society. Many are enslaved.
Bodley estimates between 1780 and 1930 tribal populations worldwide fell by 30-50 million people. Take the Americas, for example. Prior to contact with Europeans, the tribal population of North America was approximately 7,000,000, while the tribal population of Lowland South America was 8,500,000. At their lowest point after colonization, these numbers had fallen to 390,000 and 450,000 respectively. Even Bodley’s figures may be conservative. Scholars like W E B DuBois, Walter Rodney, Cheik Anta Diop, Joseph Inikori, and Basil Davidson estimate that the European slave trade alone was responsible for the loss of between 50 and 100 million African lives.
In terms of raw numbers, several genocides in the 20th century rival this genocide of tribal peoples. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 11 million people died in the Holocaust. According to Religious Tolerance.org, 20 million Soviet citizens were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1987, while 35 million Chinese citizens were killed in Communist China between 1949 and 1987. These comparisons mask the severity of the genocide of tribal peoples in two ways. First, the planet’s population has increased dramatically in the last two hundred years. In 1780, the global population was approximately 1 billion. By the 1930s it had reached 2.2 billion, and by 1987 it stood at 5 billion. Relative to the population of the planet, the genocide of tribal peoples remains unparalleled in human history. Second, the Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese genocides didn’t completely wipe out the people they victimized, and afterwards the survivors were often able to rebuild and prosper. In contrast, during the genocide of tribal peoples, many tribes, such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland, were driven to extinction. Throughout the world, surviving tribal peoples remain marginalized and impoverished.
Our civilization was built upon the proceeds of a crime more nightmarish than the Holocaust. Of course, for some time now, we haven’t had to think about it. It was easy to rationalize our actions as the inevitable result of societal evolution. We were the torchbearers, carrying light into the shadows. We were waging a righteous war against savagery and superstition, banishing ignorance and bringing civilization to those lost in primitive squalor. Our way was superior to theirs, and inevitable, too.
Only now it turns out that while the planet could support small-scale tribal societies for many tens of thousands of years, our civilization is ruining global ecosystems and destabilizing the climate. Fifty-five million years ago, increased volcanic activity caused the planet’s methane levels to increase, raising global temperatures and triggering widespread extinctions. It took the Earth over 100,000 years to recover. Earth Sciences Professor James Zachos, the leading expert on this period, has reported that greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the atmosphere at 30 times the speed they accumulated back then. Jim Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and President George Bush’s top climate modeller, predicts that melting ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise by 25 metres in the foreseeable future. World-renowned scientist James Lovelock believes that as a result of positive feedback loops, climate change is now irreversible, and that “before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable.”
We wouldn’t be facing this danger if we’d left the majority of tribal peoples alone. To do so, we’d have had to drastically modify or abandon the capitalist project. We chose otherwise. The capitalist system has now achieved such a suicidal momentum that it may well be beyond restraint.
We butchered and enslaved the tribal world for nothing, and for worse than nothing. Now the consequences of our crimes are catching up with us, and they’re terrible indeed. And here our rationalizations, our fantasies of righteousness, start falling away. Our precious Dayton disappears, revealing Madison the pariah, Madison the killer, Madison the reality. The night is pitch-black, and we’re careening down the lost highway. Buckle up, because it’s going to be a hell of a ride.