Exhausted Ecologies: Depleting Energy and the Capitalocene in Susanne Bier’s Serena (2014)

Abstract

This article examines Susanne Bier’s Serena (2014) through the frameworks of the Capitalocene and the energy humanities to argue that the film reimagines extraction as a pervasive regime of exhaustion. Set within the timber industry of Depression-era North Carolina, Bier depicts the Smoky Mountains as a “commodity frontier” where forests, laboring bodies, reproductive capacities, and affective relations are subjected to a common logic of depletion. The article demonstrates how the film traces the circulation and exhaustion of ecological and human energies through capitalist accumulation. Rather than presenting deforestation as an isolated environmental crisis, Bier reveals extraction as a world-making process that reorganizes landscapes, labor, intimacy, and social reproduction around expendability. The film’s visual emphasis on repetitive labor, bodily injury, environmental degradation, and emotional collapse, constructs exhaustion as a shared atmospheric condition linking human and nonhuman life. Ultimately, the article argues that Bier critiques extractive capitalism by exposing the exhausted forms of life it produces, revealing that the violence of the Capitalocene resides not only in environmental devastation, but also in the gradual depletion of the material and affective conditions necessary for sustaining life.