Who the Earth is for: reframing rural landscapes as collective polities in Leave No Trace and Beasts of the Southern Wild

In the past decade, roughly spanning from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, rural poverty and deep poverty rates in the United States have dramatically risen. The impact of the pandemic is set to considerably intensify these inequalities as the decades of neoliberal dismantling of public healthcare and other social institutions leave inhabitants of impoverished rural areas particularly vulnerable. Even before the pandemic, representations of rural landscape in US cinema have sought to spatially visualize the country’s economic, ecological, and political crises under neoliberal capitalism.