Thinking (and Talking) in an Emergency
How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Neon
By Russell C. Powell
Popular filmmakers have long grappled with the very American tendency to conflate violence with heroism. Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven, and Kathryn Bigelow are chief among them. As the climate crisis has deepened, however, filmmakers have begun to explore the role violence might have in society’s reckoning with its environmental misdeeds. None gives as full-throated an endorsement of violence as Daniel Goldhaber’s recent film How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023), based on Andreas Malm’s nonfiction book of the same striking name.1 As a heist film, Goldhaber’s achievement is in giving eco-sabotage its own star turn: ecologically motivated property damage has never been so exhilarating.
Yet, while Scorsese et al. are interested in violence primarily for the purposes of social criticism, Pipeline explores its potential redemptive value. The question of whether violent delights always have violent ends is of course worth asking, especially in our age of climate crisis, which presents challenges requiring levels of global cooperation and cultural creativity heretofore unseen. The problem, though, is that the answers Pipeline gives to that question amount to the failure of imagination that violence all too often winds up being.
The story history often tells is that emergency precipitates authoritarianism’s emergence. Interestingly, the aims of Pipeline are galvanized around reverse engineering the conventional consequences of emergency politics. If we grant that, more often than not, insuperable governmental power materializes to stem widespread political crises, who, Pipeline asks, will take responsibility for climate change when the world’s most insuperable governmental powers fail to act? The people, of course.
One of Pipeline’s merits, along these lines, is the cultural diversity among the individuals it conscripts for the work. The relationship between Xochitl and Theo, childhood friends from the same working-class community in Long Beach, California, is the film’s beating heart. Both are politically mobilized after Theo’s mother dies of pollution-caused cancer. The personal is similarly political for the other characters who are part of Xochitl and Theo’s group, which is assembled around the conviction that, if not more desperate, then more direct means of action are required in our desperate climate times. Along with Alisha, who gets roped into the group due to wanting to support Theo, her partner, Sam is an undergraduate film student who becomes disenchanted with the artistic means available for turning the climate tide. Dwayne is animated by a desire to protect his and other working-people’s land. Michael, an explosives autodidact, seeks a more effective means to resist corporate profiteering on the reservation where his family lives in North Dakota, while disaffected drifters Rowan and Logan seek community as much as a viable avenue to channel their radical politics.
Perhaps the most important aspect about the film’s diverse cast is the way it embodies the diversity of purpose in the contemporary environmental movement. Concerns around wilderness and its preservation don’t motivate the characters in Pipeline like they customarily have for environmentalists, a sign that environmental justice has rightfully begun to dictate environmentalism’s overall political direction. All the same, the film’s focus on sabotage, which has long retained conceptual currency in environmentalism owing to Edward Abbey’s abiding influence, makes Pipeline’s broader political complexion identifiable with the traditional concerns of the mainstream. Pipeline may employ stereotypical conventions in its characterization of its main cast (for instance, Dwayne, who is white, is the staid and stoic cowboy while Michael, who is Native, is irascible and brooding), but its setting in West Texas is what troubles the film’s ideological context. Not only will cowboys and Indians unite on the open frontier against the tyranny of fossil fuels, the message seems to be, but so will broad-based political coalitions.
The series of conversations that unite Pipeline’s characters, told largely through flashbacks, also serves to elucidate what Goldhaber and Malm take to be the criteria for a moral eco-sabotage: it must cause no direct harm to human life; it must prevent (and cause no additional) ecological damage; and it must compel real change in the fossil fuel industry. It’s too “lame,” Xochitl tells Sam early on, to deploy the old half measures of traditional activist-led sabotage: destroying coal trucks and damaging roads are named, but ostensibly this also includes tree spiking, sugaring construction vehicles’ gas tanks, and protracted tree-sits. “We need to do something that will scare people,” Xochitl says. Her calculus: the bigger the destruction, the more vulnerable the fossil fuel industry looks. Hence the idea to explode the titular pipeline in Texas. Destruction is the primary goal (“Property damage is kind of the point,” Xochitl quips early in the film), but just as important is that the destruction takes place where oil prices are set so that destruction will also impact the markets.
It’s not surprising to see young activists (everyone in Xochitl and Theo’s group are in their teens or 20s; some are undergrads) choose expediency over deliberation. The revelation that Theo, like her mother, is also suffering from a terminal form of cancer caused (we infer) by her prolonged proximity to industrial pollutants, adds personal urgency to an already-urgent global crisis. What is surprising, though, is how easily Pipeline’s main characters are swayed by the idea that all options outside of large-scale sabotage have been exhausted. Divestment (selling off assets and investments tied up in fossil fuels, namely, at the institutional level) is floated as an alternative but is immediately shot down as too slow and trivial a response. This is discouraging. Methods at seeking systemic change like divestment have never been (nor were they ever intended to be) silver bullets for solving climate change. In an “all hands on deck” situation such as we’re in today, the erosion of interest in democratic means of change-making is the starkest impression Pipeline leaves.
Democracy is slow, of course; it requires patience and deliberation. Sharing reasons can be tedious; hearing different perspectives, meting them out and considering their merits—the careful thought that these practices require is the lifeblood of a successful democracy. It also takes time. Yet as Elaine Scarry shows in her book Thinking in an Emergency, the time that thinking requires is precisely what we tend to convince ourselves we lack in times of crisis. What is required, rather, is action. “The basic assumption during peacetime is that the world stays the same and persons change,” Scarry writes. “But in an emergency this is inverted: the world is changing more quickly than we can change.”2 Scarry’s analysis here is reminiscent of a popular bumper sticker displayed by environmental activists: THE CLIMATE, it reads in bold letters against a stop-sign red background, IS CHANGING FASTER THAN WE ARE. If we accept this, the only conclusion to be drawn, Pipeline suggests, is that if the system will not change on its own, it must be forced to change—lest our action come too late.
Scarry’s book is focused on the ways modern governments use the claim of emergency to undermine democracy and increase executive power. Pipeline’s case is curious insofar as it is not government but the people whose acts suspend democratic norms. Of course, Xochitl and her fellow saboteurs would likely respond to this charge by claiming that it is oligarchic, not democratic, order that their actions hold in abeyance (not to mention contempt). The night before the group carries out their mission, they argue, drinks in hand, over whether they’ll be called “terrorists” for pulling off their plans. But the debate quickly gets subsumed into freewheeling claims about the modern media’s control of information and the penchant of the American political apparatus for revisionist history. “MLK was called a terrorist . . . Jesus was a terrorist!” Sam declares, before Alisha, the only member of the group who ever voices ambivalence about their chosen tactics, reminds everyone of those tactics’ costs: “We should acknowledge that what we’re doing is actually going to hurt a lot of people.” Rowan, between swigs from a red Solo cup, responds matter of factly and in the cavalier style of dorm-room philosophy: “Revolution has collateral damage.” “Yeah, but who’s the collateral?” Alisha retorts, forcefully noting that, whether it’s the ecological degradation wrought by the system or the heroic attempts of those who want to burn the system down, it’s poor and vulnerable communities who deal most immediately with the consequences.
The shift that comes when the group begins to enact their plans also accompanies a shift in genre. Much of Pipeline’s first half plays the beats of eco-horror, its ambient score swelling with an impending sense of doom. Characters like Sam are shown scrolling through depressing news of climate-related destruction on Twitter; Michael accuses his mother of cowardice for enacting her politics through her work with a local land conservancy rather than taking the fight to the front lines. The slow zoom Goldhaber sometimes focuses on his characters makes their predicament feel hopeless and their despair feel isolated, not unlike the mood that afflicts many of us over climate change’s severity. Yet in the film’s latter half, Goldhaber is decidedly resistant to holding on an image. Methodical, reflective camerawork yields to efficient cutting and a quick succession of adrenalized action sequences. Goldhaber turns Soderberghian when the heist is on.
Not that being Soderberghian is a bad thing. Goldhaber’s direction achieves maximal suspense. And not unlike Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films, when Pipeline’s principal antagonists show up (including the police, armed infrastructure engineers, even a remote-controlled aerial drone), they’re sufficiently impersonal, shadowy, and crass to leave no doubt about where our rooting interests ultimately should lie. After the dust clears and Xochitl’s group achieves their objective (I hesitate to spoil the film’s conclusion, but it’s in the title), they’ve also inspired similar attacks in other locations around the world. The film ends with an altogether different group of radicals firebombing a yacht in Miami.
To head off any concerns that Pipeline is as much of a justification of violence as it might initially seem, its creators have gone on the offensive since the film’s release. Andreas Malm, for one, has said his intention wasn’t necessarily to provide a manual for vigilantism but rather “to spur a conversation.”3 Yet if conversation was what Malm and Goldhaber wanted, I wish they’d had their characters do more talking. Once Xochitl and Theo’s group sets to task, in fact, much of their talking stops. The focus is action, not mere words. Yet it is precisely our words, our language, that we most need in emergency situations, according to Scarry. For without them, we invite greater forms of domination than the ones we are called to confront. The thinking mind may well be exiled in moments of emergency. That we lack the time in those moments to think through our actions contributes to our coming to regret them later. Still, if we remain in conversation, if we keep giving and taking and sharing our reasons for action with one another, it will be more likely that what is called out of us is our best (or better) capacity for response. The maxim Scarry gives is: “Whatever happens, keep talking.”4
The line between persuasion and violence has always been fuzzy; persuasion can also coerce. Yet a requirement of modern democratic governance is that we use words rather than blows to seek the society and the future we could reasonably be said to want. I say “reasonably” because the society and future we desire are made reasonable by virtue of their being shared—that is, discussed, contested, refined, even transformed—with our fellows. As soon as the conversation stops, so do our chances for arriving at a vision of the future together.
In one way or another, multinational corporations will take responsibility for ushering in sustainable economic systems—there’s no money to be made on a dead planet, after all. Whether or not they do this in league with modern governments will depend, I suppose, on how open governments are to cooperating with their efforts. When it comes to the place and the power that ordinary people will have in all of this, I would prefer not to dispense with those tools available to citizens for holding power accountable, such as what we currently possess in democratic society, imperfect as those tools (and those societies) may be. The tools of community organizing, for instance, are helpful to building the necessary coalitions and power bases for enacting meaningful climate legislation. It is just these tools, however, that are relinquished when we endorse the power of violence over and against the power of words. If we are not careful, a tyrannical obsession with action will result in the sort of political tyranny that, had we had our wits, we may have better been able to thwart.
Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir in Woman at War
What sets Pipeline apart from other films about radical activism is that the plot at its center succeeds. Most others (notably Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point) focus on failure. Interestingly, the success Pipeline focuses on is the source of its moral failure. Consider how “self-defense” is the primary justification for violence in Pipeline. “They will defame us and claim this was violence or vandalism,” Xochitl proclaims just before the credits roll. “But this was justified. This was an act of self-defense.” Setting aside the peculiarity of such a conservative ideal motivating as traditionally liberal an agenda as radical environmentalism (most radical environmentalists I know draw inspiration from more ecocentric commitments), it is important to note the long ideological history of self-defense in the United States as it is relevant to Pipeline’s aims. The historian Caroline Light has shown that the right to self-defense relies on the assumption that “good guys” will necessarily wield violence to fend off the “bad guys” who threaten us all.5 Of course, the bad guys in Pipeline—oil executives, police officers, quixotic activists—aren’t given much of an opportunity to air their views. Their words are withheld. The result is an overly simplistic moral vision that the violence required to stand one’s ground will invariably be used for good.
A focus on moral ambivalence doesn’t generally make for fun or entertaining cinema. Yet what is lost in entertainment value by shifting our attention to the wrenching choices that encircle the decision to resort to violence is gained back in the opportunity to examine something that feels closer to the truth. Documentaries like Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls (2011), which tells the story of the environmental activist Daniel McGowan’s involvement in, and subsequent imprisonment for, a series of arson attacks with the Earth Liberation Front, is a case in point. Before burning down the offices of a lumber company engaged in the practice of clearcutting old-growth forests, McGowan maintains the sort of moral clarity Xochitl also voices. The cinematic achievement of If a Tree Falls comes after the fire, though, as it captures McGowan doubting in interviews whether his own resort to violence actually moved the needle for environmentalism’s larger cause.
Doubt isn’t cool and failure isn’t sexy. Yet struggling with their stubborn persistence in movements for social change is a large part of what contributes to the success such movements eventually are able to win. This is why it is dismaying that doubt and failure are decidedly absent in a film like Pipeline. For as revolutionary as the film takes itself to be, its politics is sterile, as calculated as its own taut construction. No loose ends are left untied; everyone walks away with their convictions unchanged and unchallenged. Any sense of suspicion or uncertainty is detonated along with the pipeline.
A better film, like Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013), takes that suspicion, that uncertainty, the shaking of one’s moral faith, as its raison d’être. Like Pipeline, Night Moves also straddles genres—in this case, it is heist and film noir. Yet, like Curry, Reichardt knows the real drama sets in only after the explosion has gone off. In Night Moves, the unanticipated drowning of a man downriver from a dam throws the environmental activists responsible for blowing the dam up into a storm of moral anguish and distrust. The film’s insights come not from a focus on the activists’ success or failure (Reichardt leaves that particular stone unturned), but from exploring the ways violence finally destroys the one who wields it. Josh, the group’s leader (played by Jesse Eisenberg), learns over the course of the film that he’ll go to murderous extremes to keep other members of his group quiet, like Dena (Dakota Fanning), whose guilt and self-reproach threaten to blow their cover.
With all their differences, what all films about environmental activism—indeed, about all forms of activism—have in common is an inquiry into where hope can be found. It is a telling coincidence that the most successful films about climate change give insight into the importance of finding something that, amid all the despair we might feel, is worth hoping for. Woman at War, Benedikt Erlingsson’s 2018 film, explores this question beautifully. Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, in a stellar performance) is a middle-aged choir director who secretly wages war on the aluminum industry by monkey wrenching the electrical services that run to a local smelting plant. While Halla has singlehandedly kept foreign investment from ushering in a new era of large-scale mineral mining in her home country of Iceland, her commitment as an eco-warrior is thrown into doubt when she is approved to adopt a child from Ukraine after spending years on the waitlist.
Like Pipeline, Woman at War relies on the machinations of plot to achieve final resolution. Yet, Erlingsson’s film draws its strength from a willingness to deal in the sort of moral and political complexity that Pipeline avoids. After Halla impulsively writes and releases her eco-sabotage manifesto that invites her fellow Icelanders to join her in the work, her friend Baldvin (Jörundur Ragnarsson) entreats her to slow down, if not to abandon her plans altogether. “Why didn’t you let me read it before?” he asks Halla, worried her haste will lead to her arrest and to the end of her dream to become a mother. “I just had to get it out, the timing was crucial,” she responds.
Crisis, expediency, no time for thought: the same theme emerges. Baldvin’s scruples, though, are more about the reasoning Halla deploys to justify her violence than the violence itself. While Halla thinks she is planting the seeds of a revolution that can’t be stopped, Baldvin chastens her naïveté: “They don’t want to stop it,” he insists, clarifying the ways that violence, even violence directed toward admirable ends, is too easily co-opted by the powers that be. “They want to control it.” In the montage sequence that follows, Halla confronts the ways her hasty words get twisted in the national media. Her reliance on violence equates to losing the narrative.
The narrative that motivates Halla is one of self-defense, sure; but it is also much more than that. It is that a world as miraculous as ours deserves our care, and so deserves to be protected. Erlingsson has Iceland’s renowned geographical resplendence, as well as Halla’s own felt connection to the landscape, figure heavily in the telling of that story. (Pipeline, which was filmed in New Mexico, contains strangely little of the land’s own enchantment.) Hope, the idea seems to be—a genuine, life-affirming, life-directing hope—springs only from love.
The question of whether love has, or can have, any lasting effect on the political sphere (“justice,” as Cornel West says, “is what love looks like in public”; justice is the political doing of love) is one to which we still lack an adequate answer.6 That lack remains potent, however, for inspiring the search for just what we can and should do with our love in light of our climate despair. It is what inspires Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), which, by my reckoning, is the very best cinematic response so far formulated to both the climate crisis and the crisis of meaning (personal, societal, political) that climate change has thrust upon us all.
Ethan Hawke in First Reformed (2017)
Reverend Toller, played by Ethan Hawke, is the sole pastor at First Reformed Church, a dying historic church in upstate New York. When Mary (Amanda Seyfriend), an occasional parishioner at First Reformed, seeks Reverend Toller’s help to counsel her depressed environmentalist husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), Reverend Toller becomes captivated by Michael’s cause: resisting those multinational corporations most responsible for causing global climate change. Reverend Toller is undergoing his own dark night of the soul when his relationship with Michael begins. Spiritually adrift and unable to pray, Reverend Toller’s own resort to violence is hampered by the question of whether, in the end, it will matter all that much.
Reverend Toller is redeemed when he gives himself over to the love he feels for Mary, thereby accepting the radical possibility of his actually overcoming his solipsistic doubt. Just before exploding a suicide vest to kill the leader of a polluting corporate conglomerate at a reconsecration service at his church, Reverend Toller instead passionately embraces Mary in a scene that is best described as a cinematic miracle. Spinning around the lovers, the camera is unmoored from its previously static position, giving First Reformed’s stark conclusion more of an ethereal than vertiginous quality. With Reverend Toller, we realize that only love offsets the weight of our despair, and only by giving ourselves over to expressing our love does a life with so much despair (if we take current climate-related forecasts seriously) become most livable. Hope, again, springs from love. Love is at once hope’s wellspring and support.
If the most fundamental problem with violence is the way it forestalls conversation (or worse, shuts it down altogether), the task of filmmakers exploring activist-led violence in our age of climate emergency should be to contribute new ways to think and talk about what options might be available to us for dealing with our despair. As it stands, though, it is the degree to which filmmakers endeavor to explore whether the use of violence is ever an adequate container for our love that separates those films about eco-sabotage that contribute something substantial to the conversation from the ones like Pipeline, which have far too little to say.
Notes:
- Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Verso, 2021).
- Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (Norton, 2011), 10.
- Mark Olsen, “Please Don’t Blow Up a Pipeline after Seeing This Film,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2023.
- Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency, 9.
- Caroline Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017).
- Cornel West, Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir (Smiley Books, 2009), 232.
Russell C. Powell is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He was previously a Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Theology and Ethics at Boston College.
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