Director: Daniel Goldhaber (USA). Year of Release: 2022
The film starts following a small hooded figure from behind. The figure takes out a knife and turns slightly, showing us that she is a young woman. She looks about nervously, then approaches an SUV at the side of the road and pushes the knife with all her might into its tyres. Before she leaves she takes out a yellow piece of paper which she places on the car’s windscreen. On the paper, we can read the text saying something like: “This is why I destroyed your property”.
Just before the opening credits roll, ominous music plays as we see a disparate group of people making their way to an abandoned house in West Texas. There’s Xochitl, the young woman from the opening scene – a student activist who believes that the campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels are just not getting anywhere. Xochitl is Latina, and is heartbroken as her mother recently died as a result of a heatwave.
Shawn is a Black member of Xochitl’s student group, for whom he makes videos. But he’s also getting frustrated and now mainly uses the group to gain access to people who are directly affected by corporate climate change – people like Dwayne, a redneck landowner who carries a gun and has a US flag in his yard, but is annoyed that oil companies have requisitioned his land to build an oil refinery.
There’s Xochita’s best friend Theo who has been just diagnosed with leukaemia. Sensing her imminent death, Theo wants to make one last blow against the system, and is fed up with playing nice. Theo’s girlfriend Alisha is more sceptical, especially when Theo starts talking about collateral damage. Nonetheless, Alisha is loyal to her partner and goes along, even if she thinks that Xochita might be a white liberal tourist who hasn’t really lived oppression.
Michael is a Native American nihilist who wants to be Jim Morrison. He is a surly bundle of anger waiting to explode, picking fights with local oil workers who are much bigger than him. Michael is a bit of a dick, and doesn’t show many social skills or much interest in the company of others. But the others tolerate him, maybe because he’s the only member of the group who seems to have a good understanding of how explosives work.
Finally, there are Rowan and Logan – the Honey Bunny and Pumpkin of the group. They dress like grungey hipsters and spend most of their time fucking and taking drugs. You get the feeling that they won’t be good in a crisis. Rowan’s family are trailer trash, but Logan comes from money, and she sometimes taunts him that when things get too difficult he can call his father’s lawyer to bail him out. And why is Rowan always taking photos, and who is she sending them to?
The group has come together a little too easily. Although they put their phones in the fridge when discussing what they’ll do (yes this is a thing), they are a little too trusting of people they bump into in a book store. While the phones are cooling they discuss their plan of seriously disrupting the fossil fuel industry by showing how vulnerable the refineries are – by simultaneously exploding different parts of a pipeline.
Some of their reasoning is naive – although this may just show how accurately the film reflects part of the environmental movement. The young activists don’t want to actually burn any oil, as this would raise prices and hit working class people – as if oil prices are controlled by supply and demand, rather than a lust for profit. They set up an elaborate scheme to turn the oil off before the explosions start. You may question their political insight, but at least they are good hearted.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline shares its name with a (non-fiction) book by Andeas Malm, but it does not try to closely reproduce the book’s contents or structure. This is a Good Thing, as a fictional film works differently to a manifesto. Rather than trying to put Malm’s thoughts onto the screen, the film shows a human drama with recognisable and sympathetic people. Even we feel that they are saying words which have been written for them, we believe in the characters.
I still haven’t read Malm’s Book, but I followed the press coverage. I remember that some Left criticisms put their arguments in the wrong order, starting by condemning the individual terrorism implicit in the book’s title. I’m not saying that these criticisms are wrong, but it’s a mistake to begin here rather than by recognising the angry frustration by people who see that the planet cannot be saved by a Campus protest or by voting in someone slightly more liberal than our present rulers.
The film accurately reproduces the book’s sense of urgency. Its heroes are the voiceless, people who have been marginalised by society, and no longer see an alternative to a life-threatening problem than by blowing things up. You may have a different strategy – I certainly do – but before talking down to the characters for doing things wrong, at first please welcome the fact that they want to do something even when this puts them in great personal jeopardy.
Some clichés are unnecessary. The fact that at least half the characters have suffered personal losses because of climate change only serves to obscure the fact that none of us has any interest in the rampant profit mongering which is killing the environment. And the film is not afraid to show that the problem is systemic and that it is much more effective to target the people in charge of capitalism than indulge in a noble but futile attempt to reduce your own carbon footprint.
All in all, How to Blow Up a Pipeline asks all the right questions, even if it doesn’t always provide adequate answers. It is a film to be watched with a discussion afterwards, which challenges not just the current course to destruction in which capitalism is taking the world, but also the insufficiency of the apparently radical answers offered by the film’s protagonists. But isn’t that what great art is supposed to do? Show us the problem, and trust us to draw our conclusions.
CinePhil 