LEGEND: RUNNER
2024
00:13:04 min
elida-maria
Film still from LEGEND: RUNNER.
Oxygen is sucked in through the teeth. Entering the body, it inflates the air sacs in the lungs to slip into the capillaries. The red blood cells in the capillaries, oxygenated by this sharp inhale, faithfully return to the heart. Continuing to cycle, the heart pumps them back through the body. As it courses from chest, to arm, to fingertip, the oxygen leaves the haemoglobin to power neurons, skin cells, bone cells, and muscle cells. In the legs the muscles are rejuvenated by this exchange. They tense up and stretch to exhaust energy through to the foot. Feet hit the ground in a sprint. Under this same ground the root network of trees is tied in cursive knots communicating the requirements of photosynthesis to their leaves as if reciting a family recipe. Each tree and leaf enact this by collecting carbon dioxide from the air and water from the atmosphere to produce more oxygen. Earth breeds a system of reciprocity. This cycle is repeated, over and over again, by MARIA’s character in the film LEGEND: RUNNER.
Our ecosystem is sustained by the delicate balance and cooperation of these individual beings, much like a human body is sustained by the balance of its organs. As stated by independent scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock in his Gaia theory, ‘the entire Earth is a single living organism.’1 This theory highlights a living planet, where the sum of its parts maintain its ability to sustain life. This worldview is oppositional to the current standard, which sees the planet as a separate entity, disconnected from the flora, fauna and, most importantly, the homosapiens living on its surface. In LEGEND: RUNNER, MARIA asks us to imagine a world where this system is severely disturbed as the individual becomes greater than the Earth and its parts. She asks us to consider how this affects the human body and how it affects our greater Earthly body. The diminishing sound of birds and cicadas provide us with one facet of this answer.
Through the main character’s monologue we are introduced to a dystopian world where water is scarce and fuel is scant. They describe their relationship with their autoimmune disease by calling themselves ‘an inhospitable climate’, as their cells destroy healthy tissues in their body through a biological defect. Big pharma’s rapacious greed is highlighted in the film through the untenable prices for daily pharmaceuticals that create another barrier for life. This is reciprocated by Earth, as she explains the damage people have done to the planet through capitalist extremes. The corporations MARIA alludes to in her work seek to isolate the individual from the whole. Through a litany of desires, pre-packaged and presented in different shades of disassociation, the individual is cut off from the system. This allows an apathetic stance against the irreversible damage that is being done to become the norm. By isolating us, the corporations of ‘the great American empire’ employ distraction tactics to dissuade us from looking at the damages caused in the name of profit.
While the film explores a not-so-distant future, these themes are based on real actions and consequences effecting communities around the world today. The Coca Cola company, for example, use private wells that extract groundwater from Cerro Prieto reservoir in the Nuevo Leon state of Mexico for their production lines. This reservoir, built in the 1980s, supplies the city of Monterrey with its only source of water. As of July 2022, Cerro Prieto has fallen to ‘0.5% of its 393m metre capacity’ signalling a critical drought for its communities.2 These transgressions are made exponentially greater when we recognize Coca Cola’s response to the drought was to urge people to drink their Topo Chico branded water products. If our planet is a body and we are its white blood cells, what good is attacking it to produce inanimate goods? How will we survive if we insist on prioritizing a product over people and our planet?
Through stills of a forest from Ridley Scott’s film Legend, MARIA shows us a path forward. She suggests ways to retether ourselves to Earth through her character’s own curiosity and appreciation for the all the forest provides. Through our actions we can recalibrate the greater organism of Earth in the same way MARIA’s character runs to subside the symptoms of their autoimmune disease. MARIA urges us to reconnect with our surroundings, whether through running, planting our own food or by corrupting the cycle of consumption set in motion by corporations. As written by Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer we must reconsider not just our gratitude to the Earth as our greater body but to consider ‘what [we] consume’ despite our distance to the sources of these products. ‘We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity.’3 Through which we can strengthen our relationship to the planet and alleviate the symptoms of previous attacks on its systems. We must recognize the connectivity present in everything. By tracing the line connecting plant to oxygen, to lung, to leg, to foot, to ground, to tree and back again we can see how much a part of this planet we really are and in doing so, enact the necessary change for our collective survival.
Lovelock, James. Novacene. Edited by Bryan Appleyard, 2nd ed., Penguin, 2020, p. 14.
Bishop, Julia. "Water Is the Real Thing, but Millions of Mexicans Are Struggling Without It." The Guardian, 28 July 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jul/28/water-is-the-real-thing-but-millions-of-mexicans-are-struggling-without-it.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Penguin, 2020, p. 195.
Written by Elida Silvey,
Writer, editor and artist who uncovers the entanglement between everyone and everything