Last night I visited Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre, which is part of the Cineplex movie monopoly. I was there to watch How To Blow Up A Pipeline, a new independent film with no stars in it (I recognized only Sasha Lane, from another epic of the young and desperate, American Honey). For a movie that was released several weeks ago the theatre was pretty full, mostly with young people. It was, from beginning to end, insanely entertaining.
This is partly because of the fine genre filmmaking on display. Inspired by heist films like Ocean’s 11, the movie is about a team of disparate underdogs who, for a variety of reasons, come together to sabotage a piece of oil infrastructure. The screen time is cleverly split between the preparation for and execution of the sabotage, and the backstories of the eight conspirators. It’s a fast-paced, relentlessly tense thriller with an incredible score and authentic performances. I think anyone who watches it will find it completely absorbing (see it on the big screen if you can).
There’s another reason I found the movie entertaining, though, and it’s a bit more particular to my interests and beliefs. I have always been highly sympathetic to and interested in the following groups:
social outcasts
the poor
people with very strong left-wing beliefs
activists
You can find plenty of movies about social outcasts and poor people—the crime and detective genres are littered with them as victims or perpetrators. There’s a pretty decent cannon of socialist or communist movies (see: Sorry to Bother You, Communist Godard, anything by Ken Loach). Activists will show up in movies, though often only within historical contexts (see: Malcolm X, Selma, Judas and the Black Messiah).
I can only think of a few movies about eco-activism in particular that had any kind of notable release: Kelly Reichardt’s mostly unsympathetic thriller Night Moves and Paul Schrader’s brilliant existential drama First Reformed. But How To Blow Up A Pipeline is a different beast altogether—a genuinely novel piece of popular filmmaking about fairly normal people doing something radical. It takes seriously the political, philosophical, practical, and emotional realities of direct action. It shows a group of poor young people, some of them social outcasts, with (mostly) left-wing beliefs working to destroy a piece of oil infrastructure as an explicitly political act. I could not believe I was watching what I was watching, on a giant screen, in a corporate theatre chain in downtown Toronto. How is something this cool allowed? I thought.
One of the first things you see in the movie is someone puncturing SUV tires and leaving a note on the windshield explaining the act. This is a direct action that anyone could perform. If many people did it consistently, even if they were a tiny minority of the overall population, you might be able to disincentivize the buying of SUVs to the point of meaningfully moving the needle on climate change. It’s possible. Of course this behaviour is also a crime and a pretty anti-social thing to do. You probably have loved ones who drive SUVs, and you wouldn’t want your loved ones to be the target of such aggression. Anyone looking to make meaningful change has to weigh the risks and possible rewards of such an act, as well as the (admittedly fairly mild) suffering of the SUV owner.
I don’t personally think vandalizing SUVs has much of a chance at catching on or preventing climate change. But I could be wrong. I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong. And if I am wrong, then by not puncturing SUV tires on my nightly walks I am missing an opportunity to do some real good in the world. And that’s a shame because I like to do good when it’s easy and convenient. And honestly, if I knew a bunch of people who did this regularly I might feel more brave and righteous. Because I do believe that, outside of a handful of tradespeople, basically no one should be using an SUV for day-to-day transportation. Their size makes them dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, and the carbon they emit is really bad for human health both in the near term (air pollution) and near-to-medium term (climate change). In other words, I get the impulse to fuck up some vehicles.
Likewise, if you believe that sabotaging oil infrastructure today will save many, many lives in the future, you might start to think you have a responsibility to go out and do it. How could you live with yourself knowing you, in 2023, had the chance to help billions of people all over the world, and you just did nothing?
Yes, this is a simple line of thinking. That’s what makes it both compelling and hard to refute. The good argument against going out and blowing up a pipeline is that temporarily limiting the supply of oil will cause the price to go up, which will hurt poor people who can barely afford to live their lives as is—they will have to pay more for heating, transportation to their jobs, or for food due to higher shipping costs. That’s an argument to take seriously, and the movie dutifully voices it. Of course we also know that climate change has and will continue to hit the poorest people the hardest, both internationally and within prosperous countries like ours. So you end up having to make some kind of unpleasant calculation about short-term pain vs. long-term gain. And your calculation will be largely affected by where you sit on a spectrum of personality types, safety and comfort levels, knowledge, and political beliefs.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline is focused entirely on one end of these spectrums. It’s about the people who, because of anger, impatience, ego, morality, alienation, or desperation find themselves compelled to do something radical at great personal risk and sacrifice. What makes the movie, in my opinion, a work of genius is that it really shows who these people are, or could be. There’s a young indigenous man from North Dakota who’s completely adrift—he’s less interested in change than in a kind of nihilistic destruction. There’s a gun-toting good ol’ boy from Texas pissed off about property rights and environmental damage to his land. There’s a pair of irresponsible druggies seemingly in it for the romantic thrill. There are people whose health has been directly affected by the industry out for revenge. There’s even someone who does it for love. Seeing this group of widely different people join together for a common cause I happen to care deeply about is rare and inspiring. Most popular genre movies, including many I really enjoy, are violent, right-wing fantasies. The exceptions, like the Avatar franchise, are often not set on this earth. And here I was on the edge of my seat for a contemporary thriller that shows an illegal act of “terrorism” as something justifiable and potentially heroic. I still have trouble believing the movie is real.
Even if you’re less sympathetic to this kind of activism, if you find it immature or irresponsible, you will likely find it as fascinating as I did. After all, the types of people represented in this movie are already out there, and I believe this movie will create at least a few more of them. As the planet gets hotter people, young ones in particular, will get angrier, and this kind of sabotage will happen with increasing frequency. The stakes are high and it’s actually not that hard. All you need are a few vehicles, some commonly available consumer products, and a handful of motivated people. Normally movies that style themselves as “important” really aren’t. But I think this movie is actually going to move some people to act—and those actions might end up being part of how we escape catastrophe.