How to deliver a message

There are a lotta stories and all kinds of ways to tell them. Likewise, there are lots of messages and many different ways to deliver them. The question that every author and director and transmitter and dogmatic is confronted with is: How? How do I tell my story in a way that will bring meaning to it? How do I convey my message in a way that will carry it into the hearts of its readers/listeners/viewers? This, I think, is a quandary no different with How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Inherent to its title and its basic premise, there's no doubt that that this is a message film. This isn't in the same vein as a romantic comedy or a sci-fi epic. This is a bit more down-to-earth, as it were, and wrapped up in very realistic themes that are tied around an actual situation that all of us are currently confronting. The book that it's based on is not an instruction manual as the title implies but rather a spirited defense of the idea of property destruction as a valid response to the destruction of the planet. That, too, is a debatable approach to both delivering one's message and telling the story of those who feel frustrated and powerless in front of the unstoppable tides of profit and modern demands of both industry and the energy production to drive it.

The story that writers Daniel Goldhaber (also the director) and Ariela Barer (who stars in it as Xochitl) extract from the book is a thin one. They're not trying to create elaborate drama. The backstories of all of the characters in the eco-defense/terrorist (feel free to pick your label) group are pretty standard; avenging a lost mother, defending the family land, the outrage of indigenous peoples, and the fury of a terminal disease most likely linked to the pollution that modern industry creates, especially among those not wealthy enough to escape direct exposure. None of these stories are new or particularly interesting, but all of them are either familiar or understandable to anyone who has bothered to pay attention for the last several decades. In fact, one thing that occurred to me halfway through the film was how much better it might be as a mini-series if one actually wanted to create characters that would sit with people, rather than just serve their purpose on the screen and disappear after a couple hours. But that wasn't really the point. The film wasn't created to leave you with lingering thoughts of Theo (Sasha Lane) and her terminal disease or Michael (Forrest Goodluck) and the drive that has led him to cut off most human contact. It was created to point out what the book's author and the film's creators are arguing is the only answer to the looming disaster before us. In that respect, spreading it out over three TV episodes would have drained it of both impact and the constant tension that the film employs to great effect. That tension is physical (the risk of handling homemade explosives) and emotional (the fear of failure, whether by being caught or blown up or simply not succeeding at the statement that they're trying to make) and mental (constantly questioning whether what they're doing is the right thing or even an effective thing) and it keeps the viewer interested by what is, again, pretty much only the framework of character and story. If it were intended to be a drama in prose, it would be a short story. Stretching that into a two-hour film is an accomplishment in and of itself.

But, despite it being entertaining, the one thing that kept nagging at the back of my brain the whole time was the essential inadequacy of blowing up one pipeline from one producer of the toxic sludge that keeps the lights on for many people. There's some justification attempted by Shawn (Marcus Scribner) about affecting oil prices and the response by Alisha (Jayme Lawson) that doing so hurts the poor people who depend on the gasoline to get to their jobs far more than it does the producers of that oil. These are all reasonable, intelligent people who know how the world works to at least some degree. There are a couple like Dwayne (Jake Weary) and Michael who are only interested in lashing out for their own reasons. But there are questions raised, mostly by Alisha, who is the only one committed to what book author Andreas Malm disdained as the environmental movement's commitment to non-violence, which he considers no longer effective or necessary. Most of these characters agree with him and, thus, the essential message of the film becomes that of the book and it's one that's hard to argue with even if, again, the global impact of a single pipeline is not likely to be large enough to generate the response that either Malm or these characters would like. The excellent tension of the film conveys that message better than any soliloquies on the injustice of the situation ever could. This is a problem now that needs to be dealt with now.

But for those concerned, like the whining National Review who referred to it as "sociopathic filmmaking", that this is an actual instructional manual, rest assured that you'll be no closer to constructing an actual IED than you would be trying to learn how to make crystal meth from Breaking Bad. My favorite part of Armond White's opinion in NR was that the film was being used to "enforce partisanship", which means that the GOP knows that they're on the wrong side of an issue and has to accuse someone of implicitly siding with the opposition rather than ever admit that. White and others like him should be the ones who are the first to burn when the situation that Chevron and companies like them have created comes crashing down, if only for turning the survival of the planet and everything inhabiting it into a political football. If by that you assume that I'm on the side of those willing to use violence to push back, you're absolutely right. The film didn't need to deliver its message to me, as I've long since internalized it. When I was running the Green party in Michigan, the most difficult part of the party's central philosophy that I had to continue to convey was non-violence, as some situations simply demand it. That's the story that I'd be telling, too.