Just to get this out of the way for YouTube reasons: I don’t approve of violence and I don’t advocate for it.
In response to the horrors inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian government, protests sparked across the United States. Roads were blockaded. Politicians have been harrassed. Manure has been dumped at Nancy Pelosi’s house. Funerals have been interrupted. Rallys and marches have gathered thousands of people across the world.
If there’s one thing you can count on any time there’s a massive protest movement, it’s criticism. If you’ve been on the internet, you’ve probably heard the truism that to those not doing the protest, there is no right way to protest. Kneeling is wrong, marching is wrong, boycotts are wrong. This is a very real and frustrating phenomenon. As with all political truisms on the internet, it’s deployed at all instances of critique. It becomes sacred. Deploy it at any time, and suddenly all critique is consumed into a vortex of respectability politics and attempting to shut down the very idea of protest.
“A riot is the language of the unheard,” you might’ve heard. That’s from MLK, the poster-child of non-violence, the card pulled out by those always longing to deligitamize all protest. “Why can’t you be like Martin Luther King? Oh wait, he said what?” Or perhaps you’ve seen someone refer to Fanon while saying you cannot critique the actions the oppressed take to resist their oppression.
It’s a debate that’s gone on forever and will last as long as the human race lasts, I’m sure. There will likely always be something to protest, and both people who need to destroy the concept of protest and who need to defend any and all actions wrapped up under the banner of protest. If you say that people probably shouldn’t commit suicide to bring attention to an already salient issue, then you’re an enemy. Self-immolation is martyrdom, is the claim. But that’s a topic for another time where I’m sure people won’t get insanely angry at the assertion that maybe you shouldn’t do self-harm.
During all of these debates about the “right” way to protest, along comes a book that says, “They’re both wrong. Peaceful protest is ineffective, and the riot is chaotic. Instead, cause actual destruction. And in destruction, in violence, not only will we cause actual change, but we will fight off the sea of nihilism.” That’s the thought behind Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a climate manifesto published in 2021. Or, at least, that’s the gist of the book I got from John Rapko’s review of it for Marx & Philosophy.
Upon hearing the title, you might expect actual instructions on how to build a bomb. It’s a provocative title meant to get you to read it. It doesn’t actually give you those instructions. In fact, the “How To” aspect might be better understood as “how to prepare yourself, mentally and ethically, to take violent action such as blowing up a pipeline.”
When the book was adapted into a movie, the filmmakers showed the titular action. Is it a how to? Well, superficially you might think it’s a “how to pull off this action,” but we’ll get to that. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to Malm in that it’s exploring what you have to prepare yourself for in order to take this sort of action.
I watched the film at the start of March 2024. It’s a nice movie. There’s a great use of and understanding of craft behind it. And. I’m not entirely sure if the film knows what it’s saying. Because the film paints itself as pro-pipeline bursting, but I’m not sure the text actually matches their vision. Maybe they needed a dramaturg.
One - The Film
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a 2023 heist film from Daniel Goldhaber. Inspired by the growing climate crisis, a group of eight young or young-ish people set out to destroy an oil pipeline in Texas. They target two lengths of pipe, one aboveground and one they have to dig out. Apparently the height of the underground pipe and the sloping on the aboveground section will prevent any wider ecological disaster from potentially spilt oil.
They meet up at an abandoned shack in Texas nearby their targets and set about building their bombs. Chemicals are mixed in oil drums. A car horn somehow helps make the ignition. Michael, their explosives expert, sets up the bombs and nearly kills himself during the assembly. After a night of drinking, they head out on their mission in their various vehicles. At the underground pipe, while they’re lowering the bomb into the ground, a survey drone approaches. Dwayne, the local and land-expert, manages to destroy the drone. They leave it there. At the aboveground section of pipe, they have to use ratchet straps to lift the heavy oil-drum-bomb up to the pipe. One of the straps rips, and the bomb falls. It breaks, crushing the leg of reluctant skeptic Alisha. Despite her girlfriend’s assertions they need to go to the hospital, the group pushes on with the plan.
Loving couple Rowan and Logan are sent to shut off the valve in order to make sure they don’t cause a mass environmental disaster. Rowan has been sending pictures to the FBI. A set of workers for the pipeline show up. Logan slashes their tires, cuts the phone, and runs off to distract them. They give chase, shooting at him, while Rowan shuts off the valve.
The bombs burst. They successfully blow up a pipeline. Dwayne is busy getting drinks at a bar to establish his alibi. Alisha drives home and drops off Shawn and Michael at a bus stop. Xochitl and Theo go back to the cabin to destroy any physical evidence. Logan and Rowan go back to their motel. Rowan digs a bullet out of Logan’s shoulder, and she convinces the FBI this was all carried out by Theo and Xochitl. From Roawn’s tip, police and feds arrive at the shack just in time for it burst. They arrest the two. Theo dies of cancer. Xochitl uploads a video version of her manifesto to social media.
Through flashbacks we find out the characters’ connections to the climate crisis and how they came to join the operation. Xochitl’s mother dies from a heavy heat wave exacberated by the changing climate. She’s best friends with Theo who has a fatal cancer caused by growing up next to oil refineries in a town where playing in the rain resulted in acid burns. She’s dying. When Xochitl drops out of college, Theo joins her plan. Theo’s girlfriend Alisha is heavily against the idea but eventually relents, joining in order to honor Theo’s dying desire. Before she dropped out, Xochitl was part of an environmentalist group on campus. They reject her suggestion of radical violence except for one member, Shawn, a film student. It’s through Shawn’s work on a documentary that they meet Dwayne, a more conservative minded Texan whose land was taken via eminent domain in order to build the pipeline. Shawn also reads the How to Blow Up a Pipeline book in a library which is how the group runs into Logan and Rowan. Rowan was in legal trouble for previous eco-terrorism, and they needed to find a group for her to rat on in order to save her skin. She came clean to Xochitl and they decided to play the FBI and place all the blame on Xochitl and Theo, partially because of the optics of the US government making a cancer patient die in their custody. Xochitl reached out to Michael after watching his video uploads about learning how to build a bomb. He, too, has had his life upended by an oil company entrenching on the lands of his reservation.
As the majority of the group returns to their lives, a different group sets a bomb on a yacht, carrying on the idea of attacking the luxury goods of the rich.
Two - A Few Great Things
Before I critique the film, I want to talk about the things I think it does well.
At first I wasn’t vibing with the camera work. It’s constantly moving. The action is close to the lens. I like distant, still shots. But! I think that constant movement adds to the tension. This is meant to be a thriller, a heist. The near-constant panning and zooming gives a bit of disorience. Disorience adds a layer of subtle anxiety that’s useful for thrillers. In the same vein, I thought the placement of flashbacks tended to be effective. Michael’s flashback occurs when he makes a mistake arming one of the explosives, setting it off and luckily coming away uninjured. But the flashback occurs right as it bursts. The usage summons ideas of TV shows and manga that build sympathy via flashbacks in order to get a bigger gut punch with a character death. Our media diet has trained us to expect the worst. So while we’re technically removed from the action, we’re still given a sense of anxiety about the inevitable. Theo’s flashback cuts in right as a barrel bomb falls off the aboveground section of pipeline. Because of Michael’s previous flashback placement, this primes the viewer to think she’s about to be injured or maybe that once again, a bomb goes off when it shouldn’t. Even better, when we come back to the present, it isn’t Theo who’s injured at all but rather her girlfriend. As we learned in the flashback, Theo is dying of cancer. Though her death would have been tragic, it seems to a degree she’s already accepted that part of her fate. By injuring Alisha, though, the film harms the one thing she has left, the one thing she can’t truly risk. She almost ruins everything by insisting they take Alisha to the hospital. Alisha’s life is most important to her, and because of her actions, Alisha is injured. Theo thinks she might die. It’s genuinely great character work.
The flashback placement also works well in regards to Rowan and revealing exactly what her deal is as an informant. We see her texting pictures to someone, but that’s about it. And she does it under the covers away from Logan’s sight. So when she and Logan get to their spot and she seduces her boyfriend, it gave me a sense of delicious deviousness. Was she doing this as a distraction? If he wasn’t in on it, was it a way for her to keep him there without finishing the job until the police arrived? He’s only revealed to know she’s an informant after he leads the armed guards away. Another life in danger, another flashback.
In a review for Lit Hub, Olivia Rutigliano says, “At first, it might seem that fictionalizing Malm’s treatise, rather than, say, make a documentary about it, might produce an alienating effect–creating distance, an “unreal” circumstance for a problem which is real and must be recognized as such. But the film quickly dispels this concern…” And I think she’s wrong. Rather, I want to briefly talk about alienation. In theatre, there’s an aspect of epic theatre often called the the alienation effect. It’s more accurate to call it “distancing.” Bertolt Brecht, playwright of Mother Courage and Her Children, is the name you’ll hear most often with this idea. This technique tends to distance the audience from the actors and action. Sometimes this is through acting techniques, sometimes it’s through breaking the fourth wall, sometime’s it’s through historification, oftentimes it’s through scene headings… The point is reminding you that what you are watching is theatre. The idea behind it is that distancing will allow the audience to engage critically with the goings on rather than emotionally seeking out catharsis.
So what does that have to do with How to Blow Up a Pipeline? Well, it’s everything to do with the flashbacks. Each flashback is labeled with the name of the character(s) it’s based around. It tells you where the flashback is. By forcing you to suddenly ingest text, something you’re not expected to do the majority of the film, you’re pushed out of the narrative, briefly. The title card is black. The beginning of each flashback screams, “You are watching a movie.” This is not a real thing that happened. These characters are inventions for a movie. You are watching a movie. And through building suspense beforehand, we’re inclined to want to dive back in. But to want to dive is to realize that you’ve surfaced. You’re distanced. And that forces you to think about what you’re watching. These people have decided to partake in eco-terrorism. Why? Do they have a point? Are they being dumb? The moments of distance, the “alienation” forces you to reckon with these questions, even if just for a moment. For such a purely political film, that should be on purpose. I found myself doing that in the flashbacks. Their attempt at this aspect of Brecht succeeds.
The actors also manage to pull out quite nice performances. The grime team in the makeup department put in the work. The characters are complex for the most part, the dialogue is never preachy and doesn’t treat the audience like idiots who need to be forcefed political theory.
The only other movie I’ve seen that manages to make dozens of closeups on wires so suspenseful is The Hurt Locker, an anti-war war film I’ll get around to talking about eventually. I know this is small praise, but it’s also nice to see such a diverse group of actors helming an action film especially with their collective youth.
Overall, it’s a nice watch. I understand the praise. Now, lets talk about
Three - A Few Stupid Things
So Michael, our bombs-expert who nearly blows himself up. After picking a couple of fights, he starts a new job at a store. Cool, whatever. He then starts trying to teach himself how to make a bomb on a budget… and he uploads it to what I’m guessing is TikTok. He’s making a “how to make a budget bomb” series. So dumb thing number one: I’m not sure the filmmakers entirely understand social media. TikTok would not keep up such a video series. The feds would have been on his doorstop. And, when Xochitl reaches out to him, that would be a clear line of evidence between the two of them, making him liable for conspiracy to commit terrorism even if they couldn’t prove he was there in person. But, more likely, it would have put both of them on a list before they ever got to meet up to build the notorious bombs.
That social media oddness continues into the conclusion. After Xochitl and Theo are arrested, Xochitl’s manifesto video uploads… to what looks like Instagram but is apparently also TikTok. We watch it for a few seconds. While I do believe TikTok might take a few seconds to getting around to taking such a video down, it obviously goes against terms of service about advocating violence and terrorism… Now, realistically, I can see this getting uploaded, immediately mirrored onto sites such as 4Chan, and taken off TIkTok. But given that it inspires bombers at the end of the credits sequence, it seems like the video is relatively easy to view, especially since the bombers are meant to be a success of the pipeline group… right? We’ll get to it. Honestly, if it weren’t for the weirdness with how they handled Michael’s uploads, I wouldn’t have even flagged this moment as… off. But I’m not sure how to read the two together with one, in a generous reading, being a complicated, nuanced understanding of the messiness of social media and the other being the mess.
In a video for Marxism Today, host Paul Connolly interviews former IRA member Donal Costello. Fair warning: I’m not a Marxist. I watched it because I wanted to hear someone else’s perspective. Costello points to several dangerous and likely ineffective bomb-making methods shown in the movie. There are apparently though some methods shown that would also neutralize the bombs in the process, so if someone were to follow the instructions set out, they wouldn’t be able to blow up a pipeline… but they might still hurt themselves. To do this successfully, Costello says, there would need to be heavy community connections willing to materially support them. He connects the danger with the overall success of the plan and the facts that the movie had a consultant from a US counterterrorism official as well as a website showing off pipeline locations in the United States with a suggestion that people take action. The implication is that the movie is encouraging young extremists to go try to bomb US infrastructure and, via showing bad and unsafe methods, get themselves killed or arrested. Connolly clarifies he doesn’t think the film itself or the people behind it are actually part of a fullblown PsyOp himself, but that the government official had ulterior motives in helping get this made.
So… psy-op, political manifesto, heist flick, adaptation, what is it?
Four - The Characters
When the Activist Handbook covers the film, they’re quick to point out stupid things done by the characters. They’re working as a small cell. They’re loose with their digital footprints. The alibi for Alisha is built off changed meta-data and apparently that’s easy for a prosecutor to prove in court. This is a bad how to guideline, says the Activist Handbook, though they don’t claim it’s a bad film.
So the characters are dumb young people. Dumb young people do cause a lot of change over the course of human history. Uploading their crimes online is dumb. Risking their lives to build explosives before they even get the chance to harm the pipelines is dumb. But it’s not a sin to have characters make mistakes. Mistakes are integral to narratives, especially thrillers. They ratchet up the stakes and tension. Will this be the mistake that does them in?
What I’m more interested in is how the film paints its characters. If this is a film that’s sympathetic to the actions depicted… Why are its characters the way they are?
Xochitl goes to her environmentalist club and suggests sabotage. When Shawn later goes to her to talk acting on this, she suggests attacking an oil refinery. When Shawn points out this could kill someone or cause an environmental disaster, Xochitl says, “Sabotage is messy.” In the fight for what she sees as right, a little murder is fine. The momentary effects of her action don’t matter so long as it’s on a large enough scale to scare people. She advocates for straightforward terrorism that’s only tempered by her colleagues who aren’t as down with the murder-furder sickness. The film digs deeper into Xochitl’s lack of empathy and regard for human life later in the film after the oil drum breaks Alisha’s leg. She doesn’t show concern for the woman, doesn’t empathize with her pain. Her main concern is to make sure there’s no blood left behind at the scene. That would ruin their plan. The plan is more important. Xochitl’s is cold-bloodedly attached to her goal. Everything must be the cause. When Alisha confronts her in a flashback about how destroying the oil in Texas could negatively impact lives across the US, lives of innocent people, Xochitl again doesn’t care. The innocents of today don’t matter to her. It’s the future. Sacrifices might have to be made.
They don’t matter to Michael either. His flashback shows him going up to an oil worker and picking a fight, spitting and hitting. This man works for the enemy and therefore he too must be the enemy. What’s it matter if Michael hurts him? Michael uploads videos to tiktoks about learning how to make explosives with cheap, accessible materials. The reason that’s against the terms and services of most social media is that it can quite easily lead to curious and stupid people attempting to copy those actions. Especially when learning alongside a non-expert, the risk of injury and casualty is pretty high. But Michael doesn’t stop to think about that. He doesn’t care. He also doesn’t care when the group talks about the likelihood of whether or not they survive the bombs. They might not, and he’s fine with that. They can all die as long as he gets to build his bombs.
Logan is a rich boy with a rich daddy who can get him out of trouble if he’s ever in a tight spot, a point Rowan uses to showcase why he’s not as scared as she is about any of this. Theoretically, he has less to lose. He can game the system. She can’t. Right before he leads away the guards, they talk about the drone that Dwayne took down near the underground pipe. They’re going to go off to retrieve it. Logan is fine with this, but it’s Rowan who isn’t. If they go there, they might die in the explosion, and she insists they aren’t murderers. If it weren’t for Rowan, would he have let those men go die?
What about Dwayne? Dwayne, our good ol’ conservative-coded man, isn’t influenced by environmental concern, at least, not primarily. They took his land to build their pipeline, and he lost his home. He’s angry. He wants revenge. The rest is peripheral to that. Oddly enough, he also seems to be the one who puts in the most work to make sure they cause as little damage to other people as possible. In doing so, he’s actually the one who vibes with Andreas Malm the most. In Rapko’s review, it’s made clear that Malm doesn’t believe human targets are legitimate. Xochitl and Michael obviously do.
So if those are the characters, if this is the title, if the film agrees with Malm about the need for “violence, then what does it say about…?
Five - Activism
In her video “Violence & Protest,” Abigail Thorn of Philosphy Tube talks about Malm and his views on violence and protest as put forward in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. She summarizes his beliefs as viewing current methods as ineffective, thinking pacifists ignore the history of violence being effective, asserting that violence never be against people and never be the only or even primary force of a movement, and that what he asks for is violence. Thorn’s video, overall, is about exploring the concept of violence. What is it and why do we label it as such? Would other people label the pipeline explosion of the movie as violent? Or would they say it’s self-defense? Based on what I’ve read of Malm, I think he’d call it both. And I think he’d say that the label of it as violence is important. To convince the rich and powerful to change, you need to not only disrupt them but to scare them, to showcase your power. And to do that, you need to make them think of violence, even if it isn’t violence targeting people.
So then, what does the film say?
The self-defense line of thinking is stated explicitly in the film. There is a climate catastrophe looming on the horizon that humanity must confront. In order to prevent the worst disasters, action against climate change is instrumental for the continued survival of humanity. In that case, it’s a death match, and the machine of climate are ready to destroy life. Attacking those machines is an act of self-defense. This is further pushed by showing how the oil companies directly negatively affect the lives of several of the characters. They’ve already been hit. Fighting back is not instigation. It’s self-defense… Right?
To be a true adaptation of Dr. Malm’s book, the film can’t only show people advocating for structural damage. It has to also argue that other protest methods are not working. So, how does it go about doing this? We’re shown five methods of other action in the film.
The one we see the least of, only mentioned in passing, is the legal battle. After the oil company sets up shop on Dwayne’s land, he tries to take them to court, but because of imminent domain, there’s nothing he can do. The courts, the film shows, are ultimately useless in this fight, instead only costing the average person thousands of dollars in legals fees. Think of the current SCOTUS. How would they gut any environmental action? When combined with how the film showcases the FBI and the police, it comes together for a whispered critique that the US is corrupt and stacked against the idea of change.
Ineffective legal work translates to ineffective lobbying, Malm and the movie might argue. That’s when we see the college environmentalist group who are setting up a way to get one university to divest from fossil fuel intake. The leader of the group is portrayed as cruel. He doesn’t show any empathy at all to Xochitl for the loss of her mom, instead being annoyed with her for not finishing the task for their upcoming event because of her family tragedy. This is of utmost importance, he claims. This is when Xochitl first argues for sabotage and claims what they’re doing doesn’t matter, not in the long run. Getting this one institution to change their energy habits won’t prevent the coming disaster, she and the movie argue. Not only that, but the people pursuing it don’t seem to have any empathy. That’s why he’s cruel to her, and perhaps that’s why he doesn’t sign on to her “let’s do a violence” idea.
Alisha works or volunteers for a food bank. Now you might think doing so isn’t actually an action of climate protest or work at all. But in those brief moments, the film makes sure to have the kitchen fail. They’re out of supplies. This is the last meal they can supply for the week. Is this because of a food shortage due to climate change, a lack of funds for a non-profit, mismanagement? We’re never told, because none of that is the point. The point is the food bank’s failure. Sure, the film says, we think of this as noble volunteer work, but, compared to acts of sabotage, it’s useless. It will fail. Little to nothing will come of it. We must do a revolution. Anything else is pointless.
Speaking of food, in Michael’s flashback, we get to meet his mother. She disapproves of the fights he picks with the local workers. She instead asks him to help her with the conservatory for whom we see her counting and packing seeds. Assumedly they’re planting trees. Michael hates this. He sees it as ineffective. He says it’s work that’s all meant to make white people feel better and, more importantly, to make his mother feel better. Her work, he claims, is more about her ego than anything else. This is the most intriguing part of the commentary to me, because it seems like the film isn’t sympathetic to Michael in this moment. He refuses his mother’s help when she tries to ice the wound on his face. He’s being an asshole. But because the protagonists are the bombers, are we meant to agree with him that she’s self-serving?
Self-serving is the way the film wants you to see documentarians. Shawn is a film student. At first he was going to cover the university demonstration that Xochitl was going to part of before she got on the violence chain. After that, he joins the crew of a documentary film looking at the effects of oil in Texas. That’s how the group discovers Dwayne. The director of the film sets up the perfect shot, he asks questions and presses on issues the couple don’t want to answer or think about, and he doesn’t want their anger and desire to strike back. It’s not good for the film. Dwayne views him as a petty, self-obsessed asshole. The documentary doesn’t serve to change anything; it’s meant to stroke the director’s ego. Is this then the film’s view of documentary?
What I find intriguing is that, based on what other people have said about the book, I don’t think Malm himself would have taken this approach. While he does call the current non-violent movement largely useless, he does make clear that violence and sabotage has to be part of a larger movement. That larger movement has to include other, non-violent forms of action, doesn’t it? But the movie seems to be saying that no, those forms are all self-serving. They do nothing. They’re chosen by naive or self-centered people. The reason these people don’t support the suggest acts of sabotage is that ~they~ are the ones without empathy. That’s why they aren’t as angry and radical. It’s a moral failing.
The argument that annoys me the most here is the one over documentaries. I’ve talked about it before, in specific with reactions to the bombing campaign Israel carried out during the Superbowl and how some leftists reacted, calling all culture a “distraction.” There seems to be an idea amongst, and I cannot stress this enough, *some* people on the left that everything must be the cause and it must be as maximally the cause as it can be. What I find so incredibly frustrating is the idea that we must refuse to engage culture. Here’s a question. Why does every successful regime and movement in human history rely on propaganda? Because it works. I might have critiqued him before, but Hasan Piker clearly understands this. His streaming matters because it works as propaganda to bring people to the left. I will always argue that you must allow room for distraction and joy because otherwise you miss out on the fullness of the human soul. Art is wonderful. Joy is wonderful. But beyond that, if you need a purely pragmatic argument, refusing to engage with culture removes your ability to engage with the masses. You know the easiest way to make friends? Have shared interests. You know the easiest people to convince? Your friends. You have to be friendly. That’s why the dirtbag left nonsense is doomed to fail. They have no interest in convincing anyone of anything. The entire point is just to be cruel. And people who refuse to engage in culture are also doomed to fail. You have to be able to discuss these things in order to advance your political projects. You talk about Taylor Swift positively and passionately and then you bring up your concern about fuel emissions. You do it gently. You’re prepared for pushback and you don’t resort to assholery when it’s received. You watch popular movies so you can join the conversation. Shutting yourself off from the world also shuts the world off from you. Being off-putting makes people wary of you and your political projects.
Back to the film. Plenty of people in activist spaces are assholes. That’s because plenty of people in general are mean, selfish, and petty. We all hold those traits within us to varying degrees and we all indulge them to varying degrees. But you have to make the documentaries because documentaries are part of successful propaganda campaigns and successful propaganda campaigns are key to successful movements. You write plays, you make documentaries, you sing songs, you paint art, you ~film movies like the very movie we’re talking about~ because art always has been and always will be the most successful way of conveying ideas and emotion. There’s a hypocrisy to rejecting the idea of documentary while making this film. By that logic, this film is also selfish and ego-fluffing. Afterall, the people behind it made a film, but they didn’t go out and actually destroy any real-life pipelines. It’s eco-terrorism or nothing as far as the characters are concerned.
This is about activism. There’s a moment near the start of the film where the characters are wondering about the chances they’ll succeed and the chances that they’ll cause an accident and blow themselves up. Shawn mentions some statistic or anecdote about Che, assumedly Guevera, comparing the group to the Cuban revolution. This is the start of a revolution, after all, that mythical dream of certain leftists who imagine that violence will solve all the ills of the world even though it won’t and there won’t be a glorious revolution because revolution is and can only ever be a nightmare. But in this moment, when they ask Michael what he thinks the odds are that they’ll die, he states he doesn’t care.
It’s almost like the film is commenting on what kind of person can commit this sort of sabotage.
Six - Mental Health
The film asks a simple question. It has to in order to make the case that blowing up the pipeline is an act of self-defense. That question is: What drives a person to acts of political extremism?
If Malm’s “how to” is more about how one prepares oneself to commit violence, building ethical and historical support for it, what does the film have to say about that? Shockingly, not much. Or, rather, it doesn’t say much about the ethics, philosophy, or theory one accepts to get there. So let’s ask: what drives each of our gang of eight?
Logan and Rowan’s overall motivation isn’t explored much. They were doing the vandalism game before the group was brought together. They are shown to be pleasure addicts of sorts, consistently consumed in drugs, alcohol, and sex. I don’t know their broader motivation, but if they’re slaves to their passions, is there part of them motivated by the adrenaline rush, only sublimated into “morality” via sabotage.
Dwayne is clearly shown to be motivated via rage. These people wronged him and he wants to harm them in return. They sinned against his family and his property. It’s divine retribution he wants to bring. He doesn’t seem to care much for the overarching goal of preventing climate disaster. He doesn’t care to bond with any of the others. His action is a malignant action. That it could be argued to have a positive result doesn’t much change the intent. Dwayne seems the sort of character who would John Wick or Liam Nissan anyone who wronged him. This time it just happened to be big oil.
Alisha is there because of Theo and that’s it. She doesn’t want to be. She thinks the whole action is stupid, dangerous, and morally inept. But she’s there for her girlfriend. Why is her girlfriend there? Despair. And rage. Theo is dying from cancer likely caused by growing up near a refinery. Her life has been taken, and she doesn’t have long to live.
Michael is shown to be another avatar of rage. He picks fights with the local oil workers at his reservation. He lashes out at his mother. He only starts learning how to build bombs after he got his ass handed to him when assaulting the oil worker. Michael wants to cause damage. Yes, he is aimed at oil. But his drive isn’t to better the world. It’s to bring suffering and damage to those he views have wronged him.
That rage is also what drives Xochitl. Her mother died from a heat wave likely made worse by climate change. Therefore, she blames it. It killed her mother, and when her mother died, she went to political extremism. This was directly started by a moment of deep despair for her. It’s almost as if the film is trying to say this group is, collectively, having a mental health crisis. I remember after the immolation in 2024, there were some people who called the concept of therapy itself wrong. There’s an assumption that all issues are purely caused by the world, and that should be accepted and acted upon. But… that’s not really how it works.
Shawn joins Xochitl after sitting on his bed scrolling through Twitter. He’s not just scrolling, he’s doom scrolling. It’s a phenomenon of social media where you scroll and scroll through feeds filled with negativity, pessimism and bad news. The point of doom scrolling is to feed into despair. It builds a pit of nihilism in your being. And that pit can destroy you. It’s an affect made even worse by the knowledge that it’s baked in algorythmically. People are most likely to engage with negativity on social media, whether that’s dunking on people or wallowing in despair. By building that pit of nihilism, often you sit further and further into the idea that nothing matters. When nothing matters, consuming the despair becomes action. You scroll because it’s the only thing you can do. Because acknowledging the overwhelming pain and your lack of power becomes a sort of comfort. It’s killing you. When a giant lays down on your chest and crushes your ribs, sometimes you’re greatful for the cuddle.
Shawn’s doom scroll is what sends him back to Xochitl. He stares at the sea of nihilism and embraces it, in a way. Nothing that’s been done so far has destroyed the doom scroll. So, perhaps, a new form of violence will. Of course, it won’t. Utopia does not one exploded pipeline make. And the doom scroll does not one averted crisis destroy. Interestingly, in an interview, the filmmakers called this a rejection of the doom scroll. He’s actually getting up and doing something. But is it really a rejection? He goes from “nothing can be done” to “something must be done, and this is something, so therefore it must be done, and that will ease this existential fear that is causing me despair.” That’s… avoidance. Existential angst doesn’t just vanish. You have to confront it. You have to determine your answer to the absurdity of the universe. Running from it doesn’t fix that coming pit.
In her response to the climate group at her college, before Shawn’s habit of doom scrolling is shown, Xochitl also speaks in the language of nihilism. None of what they’re doing matters. It’s not just that it’s ineffective or that it needs to go further. It doesn’t matter. Her mother is dead, after all. If they had only taken drastic measures long ago, would her mother still be alive? Logically, we can all acknowledge that’s not true. Even if they had destroyed every pipeline in North America before her mother’s death, there’s still a high chance she would have died anyway. The underlying thinking driving Xochitl’s nihilism doesn’t reflect reality. And that’s why a lot of times people say obsessive online activists need to go to therapy. Activism is not a replacement for working through your traumas and healing yourself, for confronting the “feel-truths” each of us have that drive us insane. Every now and then, there’s pushback. They pull out that Krishnamurti quote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” It’s the continuous leftist trend of pulling out quotes and pretending like they’re some holy text and like holy texts are the end all of any debate. Sure, maybe he’s right. Therapy is still good.
You might say, “But they can’t be nihilists! Nihilists inherently believe nothing at all matters and there is no action that can matter.” Good! Yes. They’re on the edge of nihilism, more specifically, and they’re desperately trying to pull away from the cliff they’re dangling off. Shawn might have his legs off the side, but Xochitl is only hanging on by a finger. After all, she doesn’t care if they kill people. So what if there’s collateral when she destroys an oil refinery? Human life doesn’t mean anything to her. When Alisha gets injured, she shows no empathy towards her. Xochitl shows no empathy towards anyone at all. She doesn’t answer calls, as Theo points out, and when she finally meets up with her long term friend who has recently received a fatal diagnosis, it’s to use that diagnosis in order to recruit someone to her act of terrorism. The film paints non-violent activists as self-obsessed, but Xochitl is the most self-obsessed character of the entire film. And she sublimates her despair and self-obsession into political extremism.
When the characters are talking about potentially dying for the cause by accidentally blowing themselves up, it’s at first easy to chock it up to typical gallows humor. You know, there is a chance that’ll actually happen. And that would be horrifying to consider. So to deal with that potential, you make it into a joke. Comedy relieves tension. But Michael comes along and says he doesn’t care if he dies or not. His own life doesn’t matter. Suddenly, when you’re distanced via his flashback, when you see his anger and how he pushes his mother away, you wonder if he doesn’t mean that on a deeper level. Michael is violent, sure, but it also seems like he might be fine with death. He might even want it.
Wanting to die is called suicidal ideation. It is a serious symptom of serious mental health issues that require immediate attention. Adding “meaning” to your death doesn’t suddenly change that. When Shawn attaches Che to the idea of them dying, is he attempting to keep the mood light or is he trying to justify his potential death as revolutionary marytdom? That’s what we see with Theo. It’s made clear that she is not long for this world due to the cancer she has. She is going to die soon. At Xochitl’s manipulative guidance, she’s ready to give up her life for a cause, to have her death mean something. Becoming an eco-terrorist is her form of self-immolation, politically attached suicide. Yes I know that’s contentious. Yes I’ll talk about immolation another time. But when we find that out about Theo, it adds yet another person to the group who doesn’t care whether this kills her. She’s dying regardless, so why would she? Except then Alisha gets hurt and it all comes crumbling down. Theo isn’t like Xochitl. She’s capable of human emotion and empathy. And the one thing she has left in this world is Alisha. The plan was formed so Alisha would be safe and get away with it. When the barrel drops and injurs her, when the threat of death targets her, Theo loses it. The idea of her own life lost doesn’t matter. But she can’t bare the idea of Alisha’s life ending. And because the film goes out of its way to show that the equivalent of Michael almost blowing himself up is Theo’s girlfriend getting hurt, it’s almost whispering that it agrees her death wouldn’t matter.
I’m of two minds of all this. The characterwork suggests, in some way, that the activists who go this route must be willing to lay down their lives for the cause. It adds a level of suicidality to political extremism. It also showcases several of the characters as consumed by rage and at least one as incapable of human attachment and empathy. If other forms of activism are plagued by narcissists, what of sabotage? Based on the characters presented, it, too, is filled with nihilistic narcissists, harmed and despairing, in crisis mentally. Is that a commentary on the perils and evils of this road or is it saying this is a valid avenue for despair? No measure of health and all of that?
I don’t know. And part of why I don’t know is I’m not sure the film truly understands itself.
Seven - The Implications
To clarify something really quick here. I don’t believe depiction equals endorsement. I don’t think you should be forced to do anything in art because of moral or ethical opinions. You can have a theiving, murderous deviant as your protagonist and not punish them in the narrative and that be a fantastic story that isn’t advocating for anything horrid. I’m not an “anti” or whatever stupid internet term comes up. I believe in fiction. I believe in art. And trust me, we’re going to talk about censorship and fantasy and how the publishing industry is on the way to destruction because of “morality.”
But I say all of that because in the last section it might come off that I think depicting character flaws means the politics of a piece of art have to agree with those flaws. I don’t. I think that’s an infantile way of engaging with text. But part of textual analysis is taking every piece and examining it, weaving it together, and trying to figure out what it *might* say, regardless of what it *means* to say. I’m not accusing the filmmakers of supporting eco-terrorism or not supporting it. I’m not even saying they agree with Professor Malm.
And that’s because the film is a bit muddy.
For instance, with the above painting of its characters, what is the film saying about the sorts of people who carry out this action? Is it merely saying they’re distressed and injured people fighting back or is it painting them as mentally ill nihilists trying to throw their suicidal rage at something that might give a bit of meaning to their deaths? With Michael’s interaction with his mother, are we meant to agree with him that she’s self-serving and therefore see her attempt to nurse him as an extension of her self-absorbtion or is it an indictment of him and his youth? With the naive and reckless, sometimes idiotic actions they take, is the film supporting them or calling them morons?
One thing I’m interested in is how the narrative punishes the characters. Often times I don’t find that a particularly relevant way to examine plot, but in this case… Well, who is punished? Are there any connections? All of them are on the receiving end of tragedy before the heist starts. That’s the glue that brings them together, so I’m not sure you can count that as narrative punishment unless you consider it the universe punishing them for not taking such action earlier. I don’t. Towards the end of the film, Xochitl and Theo are cruelly knocked about by the police, though we don’t see much of it. Xochitl succeeds and gets what she wants. Theo dies of her cancer in captivity. Xochitl’s video manifesto goes viral. We don’t see any long lasting injuries on the two. Michael almost blows himself up. But in the aftermath of the explosion, he’s perfectly fine. There are no visible wounds. He doesn’t bleed. Meanwhile, Alisha has her leg crushed. You see these heavy cuts on her face for the rest of the film. Her brief epilogue moment has her on crutches. Logan gets shot.
But Logan isn’t really the character punished here. Logan doesn’t function as an individual unit in the film, not really. His flashback is tied up with Rowan, and Rowan is the clear focus of the moment. In the present, Logan might run off to draw away the armed workers, but the movie doesn’t stay with him. We stay with Rowan. In that way, the film attaches him to her. He’s an extension of her character. His injury is almost a wound upon Rowan. It’s tempting to say that the same might be true of Alisha. After she’s hurt, we spend a good moment inside Theo’s agony as a result of that injury. But. Alisha recieves her own flashback. The film treats her as her own individual entity. She acts as the foil to Xochitl. They’re the two ideas that battle. If Xochitl’s nihilistic lack of empathy is what drives her in action, Alisha’s all-consuming empathy is the thing that ropes her into the scheme: she’s here for Theo. But she’s horribly aware of all the ways in which their actions might harm other people, and she views that as inexcusable.
The biggest injuries sustained, the ones the movie settles into, are with Logan and Alisha, which is really Rowan and Alisha. What connects the two of them? Well, if you want to be extremely uncharitable, they’re the two concerned with killing people. If you want to be extremely charitable, narrative punishment doesn’t exist. Or something along the lines of: Logan is rich, Rowan is working with the feds, and Alisha was against the whole plot. Punish, punish, punish. Now if you were paying attention, you would note that Shawn is the one who got Xochitl off the idea of going on a bit of a murder spree. Why isn’t he punished? Well, he is, in a way. I’ll talk about that in a second. But he’s the one who talks about Che and sending people off to die, pushing that comparison. He’s potentially fine with causing death for the cause, it just has to be of him and his allies. That sets him apart from Rowan and Alisha who both seem to be anti-death at large.
So given that, does the film actually agree with Malm that violence against people is unacceptable?
Speaking of Shawn, in his little epilogue, you see him nervous. There are suits watching him. Is that the FBI? That’s the question we’re supposed to ask in that moment, we being both the audience and Shawn. It could be a moment of narrative punishment, but you see a lot of people from their lives staring at the various characters, watching them. I’d argue instead then that the film says partaking in this action will ruin your life. You might die carrying it out. If you don’t, you might die in custody like Theo. You might spend your life in jail like Xochitl. And even if you think you get away with it, the US government will find you. Or, perhaps, you’ll be trapped by paranoia, thinking they’re onto you, always watching over your shoulder, always worried that the identity you tried to protect will be spotted. Blowing up a pipeline might advance your cause, the movie says, but it will ruin you. To partake in such an action requires that dedication. It’s an act of surrender. Of death, one way or another.
How can that be read as an endorsement?
That same sort of muddiness colors how the film paints the FBI, too. Given how the group manages to trick the FBI, you might think that’s the end of things. “You can win over the government. The system is not unbeatable,” it might be saying. “The feds are fairly easy to trick. Work with informants and feed them false info to steer things how you want them to go.” But when we’re forced to ask that question with Shawn at the end – “Have they caught him?” – suddenly that comes into doubt. “No, actually. The FBI isn’t stupid. You didn’t cover your tracks as well as you thought you did. The feds will catch you.” Which is true of the film?
And it’s with that muddiness that I wonder about the ending moment, right before the credits truly begin to roll. Another group of activists plant a small bomb on a yacht. They paste a poster manifesto like Xochitl did from when she would slash SUV tires. The connection is to tie them to her, to say this is a result of what they did with the pipeline. So here’s a question: Is this a good outcome?
In the context of the film, I’m unsure. The first thing we have to note is that there’s no indication this is part of a larger movement like Malm said was necessary. That Marxist YouTuber man sneeringly called it “adventurism,” which is apparently a bad thing. I mean, I agree it’s bad, but I’m not a Marxist. Is this another small band of people or are they actually part of a larger movement? We also have to note that they’re placing a bomb. Is it just enough to destroy the interior? Will it sink the ship? Will it launch debris? How big is the blast? The percussive force of an explosion tends to be the thing that kills you. If they’re planting bombs here, are they putting bombs in SUVs? Is this an extension of Malm’s tire slashing experience, a true fight for climate, or is this sadistic terrorism that just latched onto a movement? Is this a single cell? We don’t know. What I know is that the film is muddy. This could either be a success of Xochitl, saying she managed to inspire others to drastic action and that perhaps this could be the start of change. Or it could be stating that terrorism is infectious. Is it a disease that spreads and grows beyond control, quickly becoming impossible to tame?
A few of the team members on the film did a Reddit AMA. During it, editor Daniel Garber says, “We don’t believe that property destruction of the kind portrayed in the film should be considered ‘terrorism.’ As for whether the film is pro-sabotage: we are not advocating for any particular course of action but exploring why these eight characters believe that destroying an oil pipeline is an act of self-defense.” Besides the fact that the film does not do that, Alisha does not approve of what they’re doing, that also seems to go against both the message of the characters and of Malm. From what I’ve gathered, Malm is very clear that this must be called violence. People who choose to downplay the violent aspect of it remove the power. And the power, as the films characters say, is in its potential to scare people. It’s not just that attacking oil in Texas would cause prices to go up and make oil more annoying to deal with for capitalists; it’s that it should make them fear this type of action. Political activism meant to inspire fear is called… terrorism. That’s just what it is. Xochitl might call this self-defense in her little video, but in talking with her collaborators, it becomes clear that she embraces the idea of terrorism. She is pro-eco-terrorism regardless of what you call it. If the film believes it’s purely “self-defense,” then they take the “fear infliction” out of it, one of the primary goals of both the action and of Malm’s suggestions. It’s almost as if they’re trying to claim this isn’t violence. In which case, they don’t agree with Malm at all.
I was reading an interview with director Daniel Goldhaber done by Isaac Feldberg at Roger Ebert. In it he says they were “wanting the audience to feel like this was actually happening, that they were almost participants in it… inviting the audience in… and asking them to identify with these character, to epmathize with these characters.” I found that interesting because it’s incredibly anti-Brecht. And I thought the few Brechtian moments, the reminder that you are watching a film and not something real, were the most effective at making this a political piece you engage in while you’re watching. If you were fully in it the whole time, imagining yourself there, not acknowledging this as a film, would it successfully make you ask the questions? If they didn’t intend for the viewer to step out and recognize they’re watching a film, if we’re looking for catharsis, why did we do a Brecht? Did we know that’s the effect the title cards do? But if this film is supposed to inspire catharsis, and this is a classic debate in theatre, does it not want action from the audience? Or does it think catharsis can inspire action? Is it attempting to suggest real-life sabotage can provide that same level of catharsis?
Then again, is my proclivity to look for Brecht-ish moments in text the thing that makes the entire film feel muddy? If I were fully drawn in, not asking questions, not wondering about the politics, would it be easier to tune in to the exact frequency of the filmmakers? Is Goldhaber entirely aware of the film he made and the suggestions it places?
In that interview, it says they cut a lot of the theory and debates. Maybe that’s where they get the idea that Alisha agrees with this action. That’s not a thing that happens in the finished product, but maybe on the cutting floor are the remains of the debate that led her to that point. Maybe her decision is there. Maybe the moment where they decide this isn’t actually violence is there. Maybe the moment where they decide fear isn’t part of the point is there.
Based on that interview, it seems like Goldhaber is at least very sympathetic to the ideas of eco-terrorism. Based on what this Esquire interview article says, the goal of the film was to push back against the taboo on violence, to present it as an option that needs to be considered. He sites his own experience around the climate movement and how things are going too slowly. Maybe he agrees that activists who don’t do property destruction are ineffective and self-abosorbed.
Then again, all he did was make a movie. At least it was pretty fun.
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