“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” – Howard Beale, “Network”
Documentaries have for years done all they can to motivate people to action. They utilize empathy, emotion, logic and fear, and those frustrated enough to act are all just a little angry.
The Oscar nominated documentary “GasLand” and Monday night’s HBO premiere of “Gasland Part 2” appeal to all your senses, but these are angry films with a damn powerful reason to be pissed. As portrayed by Director Josh Fox, “fracking” is not merely irresponsible but a literally life threatening epidemic already spreading across our nation and posing imminent danger to millions around the world.
I write Howard Beale’s words because although as a movie critic I may question a handful of Fox’s choices as a filmmaker, I cannot lie about how deeply both his films moved me. The first informed me about the science and the dangers behind the oil and gas companies’ new method of extracting natural gas from right beneath American soil, and this new film exposed me to the contempt and corruption bred by both the corporations and the American government.
I’m not just mad as hell. I’m fucking furious.
“GasLand” hits so close to home because Fox stages it as an erratic, aggressive, handheld, horror story and video diary. The guerrilla style filmmaking that give flashes of his childhood and gray scales Dick Cheney to demonic undertones make “GasLand” less a documentary and more a pandemic movie. When his letter arrives in the mail offering to pay him upwards of $100,000 for the rights to his land, you’d think someone was chasing him from how it plays like a conspiracy.
But in doing so, Fox personalizes this story and removes its political underpinnings. He’s uninterested in the politics because the “Halliburton loophole” put into the Clean Water Act is so garishly underhanded that to give it any credibility would be a mistake.
Fox is also uninterested in the science behind how fracking works, only to the extent that the things these companies claim are safe clearly aren’t. In one graphic he reveals that fracking, or specifically horizontal fracking, is the process of drilling into the shale of the Earth’s crust and fracturing the rock so that the natural gas inside it escapes and seeps up.
“GasLand” is a film about the public losing their way of life to higher forces. Through countless vignettes of families setting their water on fire, huffing turpentine solutions and torching it into homemade plastic, Fox’s terrifying freak show of a movie accomplishes the simple task of introducing an unknown force into the world.
The streams are no longer the same. Holes dot the surface of the Earth. Gigantic swaths of public land have been turned over to private hands. All of it is to be replaced with other forms of water and nature, but Fox’s point is not strictly an environmental one but a practical one: how much can you actually replace?
Contrast that with “Gasland Part 2,” in which “the public,” commandeered by a corrupt government, a ruthless PR team practicing military PSYOPS on American civilians and corporations speaking through targeted ads and the media, have invaded the private lifestyles of individuals. Families are forced out of their homes because wells have been built in such close proximity, and the companies have waged war on the little man who they have deemed “eco-terrorists.”
By opening the film with footage of Obama and both Clintons speaking about how fracking and natural gas will become the priority of the country, Fox changes his course by making this film strictly political, but not along any party lines. He smartly interviews a Republican turned independent who switched because of the support of fracking. “This is the biggest assault on private property rights,” he says of wells showing up in his backyard, “And that’s one of the tenants of Republicanism!”
The immediate thing critics will point out about “Gasland Part 2” is that Fox starts by playing the same hand he did the first time around. Video diary, playing the banjo, haunting filters and editing and even revisiting some of the people interviewed in the original; these are all signs of a guy still angry that things didn’t go the way he hoped.
And although plenty of water is set on fire, “Gasland 2” is hardly the exhibitionist freak show the first is. One of the more memorable moments is about as practical and simplistic as can be: a woman stabs a Styrofoam plate repeatedly until it sheers along the sides and creates giant ridges in the plate, a perfect analogy for how earthquakes can be caused by incessant drilling.
“Gasland Part 2” stands out as a superior film because he swarms us with new facts and a desperate plea in the midst of the aftermath.
- He looks at the war companies are waging by creating a presumed political debate out of false science, just as the tobacco industry did when they knew there was no good way to polish their dangerous turd of a product.
- He makes a direct plea to Hollywood media people by saying drilling along the San Andreas Fault can only spell their doom.
- He invokes the groundswell of energy behind the environmental movement by explaining how methane spewed into the atmosphere by these wells is far worse than CO2.
- He devotes more time to saying how the people of Dimock, PA were cheated out of clean water in an election cycle than saying what they can do now.
- He even finds a guy who has a sustainable energy solution plan for the world that can be implemented by 2030, only to have other talking heads spit in his face.
Fox doesn’t necessarily have a compelling reason for why Cabot Oil, Halliburton and the other involved companies are as evil as he makes them appear. They’re money-grubbing, power hungry and stuck in their old ways. But his convincing reason is the non-answer that says exploring a natural gas solution around the world is likely to follow the same trajectory it did with coal and crude oil.
Fox finds someone to explain that the narrative behind homegrown American oil made for Americans and removing the dependence on foreign oil is a cleverly deceitful one. These are global companies who will sell this natural gas to the highest bidder, and natural gas will only remain cheap for so long.
By the end of “Gasland Part 2,” Fox has almost completely given up with the system. The fight is lost, and the worst is still to come.
But there’s another Howard Beale line that sums up what Fox aims to do: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” This may be a losing battle, but we can’t be complacent about it. If “GasLand” and “Gasland Part 2” can get you mad as hell, Fox has done his job. I’m certainly on board.
And in case you still needed to get mad as hell, just how modern is this, still?