Erin Brockavich

At the opening of the film we see Erin struggling: as a single mother, as a human being with potential, courage and individuality, and as a sexual being as well. Erin is a St. Joan of the white underclass, a Green Guerrilla, Mother Jones and Madonna all rolled into one. Unlike the image of second wave feminism which distanced itself from any robust sexuality it felt to be reductive at best or degrading at worst, Brockovich's iconic status is post-"third wave" feminist, that is, eroticized, as it borrows heavily from underground Grrrl culture, aware of being both a body and a mind, and utilizing both to their fullest. When we see her at the beginning of the film, she is filmed against a city using the imagery of 1970s U.S. realist cinema, and the explicitly socialist poetics of Ken Loach or the early Mike Leigh in the UK. Erin's allegedly outspoken comments express what many (women) in the audience feel, and her quips act as so many asides in the Brechtian sense.

Throughout the film Erin explains how Capital functions. She needs to eat and take care of her children, and she wants to contribute to society. Unlike the characters in many a milquetoast Liberal film, she is a rather static character. She is not radicalized and her consciousness is not raised. She starts the film off as a radical. Her radicalness comes from her unique synthesis of theory and practice in a Leninist sense; her practice is her real, material situation; and her theory is her ability to translate that situation in ways that connect her to the victims of toxic industrial polluting as she organizes them.

Everything Erin says onscreen from beginning to end is true, although a bit hyperbolic, which gives the film its distinctive, epigramatic wit. The one time she is wrong is when she fails to see the suffering of her lawyer boss (played by Albert Finney), a man only a few paychecks away from being in Erin's shoes with his ill health, medical and financial woes and a humble but stressful law practice. This blindness on her part makes her more human, and is a function of how divided the middle class and the destitute are from each other, obscuring the fact that, from Capital's point of view, they are the same in the sense that neither of them own the means of production. As a team, Erin and her boss symbolize the indispensable uniting of the (upper) middle classes and working poor to transform this society. Erin Brockovich blends gender, class and environmental struggle into a unified whole, but it is class that is the Absent Cause of this film. Why class?

The iconography of George, the biker next door, is a page ripped right out of romance novels. He is every woman's dream: impossibly sensitive (he actually loves her kids before knowing her!), drug free yet as macho and dirty as can be to appeal to feminine lust. In the end, George proves to be alienated by Erin's sense of mission. In other words, the Romantic motifs are lifted, but given a reality check. Like Erin's co-workers in the law office, he is concerned merely with the private sphere of life.

And speaking of her co-workers, Erin is not on the best terms with them. In fact, many of them are, in physiognomy and ethnicity, more like the actual audience for "Erin the movie" than is "Erin the character," who despite her class solidarity with the film's audience as a poor person, is white and looks like Julia Roberts. Is this a flaw? No, because Julia Roberts digs in and plays the hell out of her character. And Erin is genuinely political, while her co-workers are slightly behind: they are pre-political, vague, "I-dunno, I-guess-so" types. They, like Erin, are in their situation, but unlike her, not simultaneously outside, without Erin's theoretical sophistication. Revolutions have always had leaders and vanguards who are slightly ahead, for better or worse.

Despite the claims of neo-Liberal and "Green Capitalists," environmental problems are first and foremost class problems before being "spiritual" or ecological problems. The example of the former Soviet Union shows how true this is: the degradation of their environment was in reality a result of state

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