The Bomb Hardly (Agit)Pops: An Essay on How to Blow Up A Pipeline
written by A.E. Hunt, edited by cinemóvil nyc
Before the world premiere of How to Blow Up A Pipeline, an indie thriller adaptation of Andreas Malm’s ecotage manifesto of the same name, TIFF International Programmer Peter Kuplowsky made requisite thanks to the festival’s “lead and major sponsors”: Bell, RBC [Royal Bank of Canada], Bulgari, and VISA. RBC is the largest fossil fuel funder in Canada; the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline slithering over Wet’suwet’en territory is one of the bank’s over $236 billion CAD worth of nonrenewable energy projects. Thus a precedent was immediately set to turn a blind eye to contradictions in the subsequent presentation and discussion of an eco-thriller about a group of raffish activists who are compelled to explode a pipeline and disrupt big oil.
After the rest of the acknowledgments (to the Canadian and myriad municipal governments), Kuplowsky assured the audience that Pipeline (programmed in the “Platform” section) was no less “thrilling and explosive” than the genre pictures he customarily introduces in the “Midnight Madness” lineup. He’s right. How to Blow Up A Pipeline’s filmmakers (by which I mean the complete list of its talented cast and craftspeople) pull off a lean and satisfying heist. What is gained from its editor Daniel Garber’s tight cutting, the screenplay’s punchiness, and perhaps too the film’s rushed production (director Goldhaber had read the book just 19 months prior to the premiere) is kineticism and clarity of plot mechanics: Pipeline goes down disarmingly easy, its steady pace propped up by archetypes, clichés, and genre conventions that are so ubiquitous as to be self-explanatory — they take hardly any screen time to explain.
For example, flashbacks throughout the film assign characters a reason for radicalizing and destroying JDIA property, the movie’s fictional energy company. When one of the eight people who embark to blow up a pipeline, Xochitl’s (Ariela Barer, who also co-wrote the film) mother dies after a heat wave, her friend Theo (Sasha Lane, the star of American Honey), tells her, “You’re an orphan now. It’s like an origin story.” Each character gets their own reductive, essentializing cause. Theo’s? She’s diagnosed with leukemia, which she contracted growing up near an oil refinery. Dwayne (Jake Weary, It Follows) lives in a trailer right off the group’s target pipeline in Odessa, Texas, over which the state deems to extend the pipe and remove him, citing “Eminent domain” — a term the screenwriters (Barer, Goldhaber, and Jordan Sjol) saw fit to have Dwayne struggle to pronounce and recall. This tendency towards infantilizing the working-class, “salt of the earth” character reveals itself throughout the film. In the Q&A, Goldhaber mentions that fellow cast member Olive Jane Lorraine, in the small role of Katie, incidentally became a “Texas consultant” on the script as well as on the performance of Dwayne, who, as Goldhaber said in his interview with Filmmaker Magazine, was the only “diversity hire” of the ensemble — “We’ve got to have a Texan who would’ve supported Trump.”
Actor Marcus Shribner, who plays Shawn in the group, said in the Q&A after the premiere, that his character “was modeled after Danny [Goldhaber]. He doesn’t really come from a background where he’s directly affected by the oil refineries. He doesn’t have terminal cancer but he becomes impassioned by his parents who are [climate] researchers.” In flashback, Shawn booms the mic for a video interview with Dwayne about his impending displacement. With drawn-out stares and air quotes acting, the film pokes fun at the interviewer and cameraman — who, with Shawn, is part of a climate activist organization — specifically his motivations to “raise awareness” and “put a human face on this crisis.” Later, Shawn returns to Dwayne’s home to apologize and recruit him to help destroy the pipeline. Unlike his fantasy surrogate, Goldhaber doesn’t do the interviewer one better.
Pipeline functions on a vaguer level than a matter-of-fact interview aimed at “raising awareness” or “applying a human face to the crisis.” Reifying talking points and counterarguments from a political manifesto into characters, the film takes a jab at its own source material. In a ludicrous scene where Shawn is spotted with the book by a fellow eco-terrorist named Logan (Lukas Gage), who asks him, “Did you know the author doesn’t actually tell you how to blow up a pipeline?” Shawn recruits the stranger on the spot. Then the film doesn’t show you how either. In the Q&A, Goldhaber made clear that the film’s technical advisor, an anonymous “higher-up” at the US Bureau of Counterterrorism, helped them expurgate the bombing procedural “to make sure,” as Goldhaber put it, “that we weren’t doing anything dangerous by putting anything into the movie… We didn’t want to do something bad by making the film.” Like influencing audiences to destroy property to affect change? For sabotage to sustain and elude authorities, it must produce copycats.
I left How to Blow Up a Pipeline both as light as I came into it and remained through watching it. Something Haile Gerima (a figure of the influential late 60s to late 80s wave of UCLA filmmakers of color) once told me lapped the other thoughts in my head — “Social issue films should haunt you all the way to your house because you are also part of the problem.” I shed each moment of Pipeline as quickly as it passed. What the filmmakers dispose of for this breezy quality is their potential to “haunt” us all the way to our homes, let alone through the credits, and to be an efficient and functional instructional for at least a part or few parts of the process of organizing and conducting sabotage. But the film keeps the whole procedural esoteric and at a distance. The “How to” is something that Youtube and TikTok creators have long distilled into a perfectly succinct minute or few — effective instruction would not necessarily be incompatible with Pipeline’s lean and relatively accessible pop entertainment mode. Rather than in the education and emboldening of an audience, the filmmakers are chiefly interested in the advancement and glorification of themselves. Hence its catering to distributors like that it sold to, NEON, who deals in larger independent films with Oscars potential, and whose original cofounders, Tim League and Tom Quinn got their “underdog” start by growing Alamo Drafthouse theaters into a national chain. Actually, League got his leg up with a “two year stint” at Shell Oil Company before diverting from his family’s footsteps into movies — the Alamo and NEON empire originate from oil money; did they think that acquiring Pipeline would buy them absolution?
Watching the film, I thought about how Eliza Hittman’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always wove an efficient instructional on abortion into a feature-length narrative film at a similar scale (distributed by Focus Features). Arranged as starkly as Pipeline, Never Rarely retains an educational function and never reduces its characters to cliches to cut corners or contrive relatability. She shows her teen protagonist, Autumn, browsing the internet for how she might legally receive an abortion without her parents’ consent (required in Pennsylvania) or for alternative methods — attempting a self-induced Vitamin C abortion — before detailing her trial and error with a Planned Parenthood in New York. Despite its stylized, minimal dialogue, Hittman retains key information for teens considering abortion, which she manages to sync to the emotional arc of the film. She unveils enough of the process to make it feel approachable.
Inversely void of research or personal experience to draw from (another cost of its rushed production), Pipeline cannot hope to naturalistically depict anything about the group’s organization or politics but the making of their improvised, ammonium nitrate barrel bomb. And even what they reveal of that process has been made impossible to follow (its screenwriter Jordan Sjol says, “it is well greeked; there are parts missing”), merely amounting to an impression of realism that assists the film’s suspense. The filmmakers never manage to interlace the medium’s potential to be what Ousmane Sembène called cours du soir (night school) with Pipeline’s suspense thrills, in the way that Never Rarely manages to interlace its instructional with its drama. The key difference — the former contends with Federal Law against the distribution of bomb-making instructions, where “intent beyond instruction” must be proven for it to be considered illegal. But then neither is the film capable of educating audiences about the way these people find each other and organize, their individual political identities, or — in the same way Judas and the Black Messiah stripped anti-capitalist theory from the Black Panthers — anything to do with their views on political economy (you never hear capitalism, socialism, etc. named). In the “Pipeline” book, Malm can also be hesitant to identify capitalism as the festering core rotting everything, including the environment, from the inside.
The Strange Matters piece “Socialism with an Anarchist Squint” outlines how in “Pipeline” and especially in his recent book “Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency. (2020),” the author proposes a variation of Wartime Leninism as a fast hard fix to the ecological crisis. In other words, he calls for a form of hyper-centralized planning and authoritarian enforcement of climate change, the likes of which we’ve only seen historically, for good reason, under emergency conditions. The co-editors who share credit on the piece write, “Yet the great lesson of all the Leninist societies (at times, by Malm’s own admission!) is how a society can destroy itself by making an eternal virtue out of temporary necessity.” For such strongman futures, Malm’s work has been celebrated and elevated, as in a tribute of two essays by the London Review of Books. The Strange Matters piece compares his success to the neglect of Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” which rather proposes decentralized and democratic planning — “Communities should be given new tools and powers to design the methods that work best for them.” In the same way that Malm’s call for “draconian” government intervention has an easier time in the market and more appeal to the ruling class than an eco-socialist work such as Klein’s, the Pipeline movie’s anger towards “the man,” without naming the man (other than its fictional energy company, JDIA, which safely resembles no real-life counterpart), makes it ripe for sale.
Back in the Q&A, Goldhaber and co-writer Jordan Sjol said that before it was a thriller, they envisaged Pipeline as a “very edgy” propaganda film. But, Goldhaber continued, Barer thought that sounded like a bad idea. “That sounded fine,” she stepped in, “but I didn’t want to go to jail — I wanted to make a movie. A lot of the early conversations were about the ethics of putting a film like this out into the world and the personal consequences of what that would be. That kind of became the script itself.” Almost every cast and crew member present said they felt at least conflicted about the film’s titular act; Sjol took the liberty of speaking for everyone when he said, “It’s a goal that we all have mixed feelings about.” This explains Pipeline’s political skittishness, which boils down to the film’s three, safely anarchic soundbites:
If the American Empire calls us terrorists then we’re doing something right!
Structural damage is kind of the point!
I need these pills to live and you’re telling me to get fucking coupons!
All but one of these are featured in the trailer; this is as explicitly political as its dialogue gets. Goldhaber cites Bresson in general, A Man Escaped in particular, and The Battle of Algiers as his primary references for Pipeline. Apparently, a Bressonian influence means, for many filmmakers today, a lot of inserts of objects or hands doing things. They often forget his love for language, his stunning lapses into monologues and citations, and how and when he decides to tell his story with sound versus image. Most fatally, they leave all feelings at the door. Rejecting the need for common political action or social revolution, Bresson was no Thomas Sankara, but his films spoke clearly for him. Pipeline’s dialogue is spare and dodgy. The filmmakers are scared of their own voices or feelings springing up from the neat façade that they’ve painstakingly created.
Their trepidation toward radical politics is matched by their trepidation toward radical aesthetics. Barer goes on to say, “Radical aesthetics want to alienate audiences from what they’re looking at and the ideas that they’re digesting.” But she feels their DP Tehillah de Castro made How to Blow Up A Pipeline’s images “warm and inviting.” If it had left any breadcrumbs to resources other than its source material, made its intentions clear, or openly discussed its issues outside of a genre vacuum, accessibility might have been the film’s chief asset. “Radical aesthetics,” like any, have the capacity to alienate audiences, especially when artists lose sight of their expression in rejecting mainstream grammar totally, for the sake of it. But to say that is their intention generally is a deep misreading of the work, as well as a rejection of the various struggles — out of which these styles were often sired — that demanded people become more than audiences to oppression. If I’m also generalizing, these works hoped to remind viewers of themselves and vibrate them into action, in part by communicating with them in ways they are not accustomed to. Pipeline rather sates and placates us with its anonymous visual style, and an ending that folds over nicely onto its beginning: the paper boat looks promising as it sails over the horizon at sundown, but will melt in the water — forgotten, leaving no trace to rediscover. Gerima once told me, “I’m not interested in ending films, because the danger of cinema itself is how it ends. It ends making the world normal, when in fact we live in a very abnormal world.”
So rather than continue the conversation where any forebears of radical cinema left off, Pipeline imitates newfangled styles. It starts, for example, with a series of long tracking shots that introduce each character by following their gaits from behind and into eventual action: Xochitl paces with a knife doubled in her shadow before slashing the tires of an SUV with a shiny finish, then leaves a flier under the windshield wiper that reads: “THIS IS WHY I SABOTAGED YOUR PROPERTY.” Unbroken Steadicam shots have popularly gestured power (Alan Clarke’s Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Goodfellas); they’re used no differently here. With the advent of consumer- and prosumer-level stabilized gimbals in the last decade (Ronins, Mōvis), this flowing camera movement, which was once relegated to productions that could afford a Steadicam operator with a steep kit rental fee, pervaded budget forms of video making. Short films, music videos, wedding videos, etc. hope the technology bridges the gap between them and the monied blockbusters they can aspire to be. Pipeline’s familiar Steadicam shots (benefitting from both a Steadicam and Steadi op), smooth zooms, dollies, tilts, and pans follow a similar line of aspirational Prosumer to Hollywood imitation. They’re perfectly adequate, and keep any conversation it could have with other film grammar in deadlock.
If beyond eliciting entertainment from radical posturing, the film did not educate, nor engage with the history of Third Cinema (revolutionary works that were produced in the Third World, beginning in Latin America in the 60s) or even much of Hollywood film aesthetics, at least it may have generated some “empathy,” a favorite watchword of the cast and crew, for eco-terrorists along the way. When an audience member asked Barer how she combines her acting with activism, she said, “I’ve always been interested in politics. One of my early passions behind my work as an actor is, as they say, ‘the empathy-building machine.’ It is quite literally you taking a character in circumstances that are not your own and fully understanding them and internalizing them.” It’s curious to see the neoliberal concept of the empathy machine, which has vied to make race its first dependency — suggesting that the lives, stories, and expressions of people of color are not innately of emotional value to whites, and require that creators of color build an artistic rather than human interaction through which white consumers can comfortably be supplied that empathy — graduate to subsuming the vaguely anarchic, working- and middle- class identities you find in How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
In a different “How to” book, “How to Read Now,” by Elaine Castillo, the author writes, “The logic of empathy says ‘I feel your pain’ — but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. The story I’m telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, or be educated by: it’s a story about you, too. This work has left a will, we are all of us named in it: the inheritances therein belong to every reader, every writer, every citizen. So, too, the world we get to make from it.” The story of Pipeline’s ecoterrorists is even about the cast and crew who played-pretend to be them to generate, for themselves and comfortable audiences like themselves, empathy for the people who are most directly affected by climate change. Castillo also writes, “If we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives — not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.” Of course, Goldhaber and the film’s crew are visitors to the story they’ve told too. At least, when asked if he sees the film as a form of activism by nochnfilm at the Filmfest in Hamburg, Goldhaber said without hesitation, no — it’s pop, a “commodity that will be bought and sold on the international marketplace.” Yet on April 1st, 2023, he sat on a panel for Pipeline to discuss “film and narrative as a vehicle for climate activism” with groups such as the Environmental Media Association, a nonprofit comprising “entertainment industry influencers, entrepreneurs in business, and green icons,” and which identifies as a “movement powered by celebrity role-modeling” and XRLA, an international movement that employs “exclusively non-violent civil disobedience.”
In his interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Goldhaber tries to find within what he acknowledges is a contained and marketable product a political function, “I don’t think that the movie is calling for this action, despite the fact that Andreas is calling for this action. The movie is dramatizing the action, and that’s very different. The political core of the movie is asking you to empathize with this act, to understand and experience blowing up a pipeline. It’s not saying, ‘Hey you, audience member, go out and do this.’ Part of the way that we do that is focusing on a collective. By removing your ability to heroize a protagonist, you remove the ability to call on action from the individual.” If not with action, how does Goldhaber hope audiences will react to the film? Back in his interview with nochnfilm, he’s convinced that, in not endorsing the action but helping audiences understand it, Pipeline “will create interesting dialogue and interesting cultural movement.” Generously, I give that “interesting dialogue” months — and you’ll need to revisit the cinema by or before the following week to renew your dose of empathy.
So, if it has any, what is Pipeline’s actual “political core” as an indie genre commodity? We have NEON tweeting “Light it up” with clips from the movie to sell advance tickets, revealing the poster with the caption “Nonviolence is no longer an option.” The distributor’s unlikely to organize anything that will tangibly support the cause, but likely to run a performative “impact campaign” (an ineffectual charity- or nonprofit-like model that amounts to exorbitant but virtuous advertising for those who can afford it) or marketing gimmick akin to the free unit of Botox per ticket sale of their Triangle of Sadness campaign. We have a cast and crew who flinch at the notion of doing what their characters do in the film — what its very title proposes — but who at least now have empathy for the characters and people like them! And we have a rejection of radical cinema and its aesthetics. There’s one last bit of information, which I gleaned from the Q&A, that helps us locate Pipeline in the murky political waters of American independent film — Goldhaber specifically thanks Alex Black and Alex Hughes. The former is the CEO of Lyrical Media and the latter is the CEO of Spacemaker Productions, both financiers of the film. Hughes is most likely (though I was unable to confirm) the heir of Herbalife, who, at age eight, inherited his late father’s dietary supplement pyramid scheme and $400 million. His Spacemaker Productions’ about page reads promisingly enough as follows:
Our goal is to champion director-driven films that are deemed too risky and polemical for mainstream studios and production companies due to their incendiary potential to disrupt the norm. We are drawn to projects that have the proclivity to analyze, critique, and ultimately dismantle the status quo and conventional modes of thinking. Spacemaker’s level of interest in a project is liberated from the industry’s profit-driven agenda and is instead motivated purely by the merit of the film’s concept and artistry.
But then, curiously clicking into their catalog, I experienced a familiar whiplash — Spacemaker launched with Dasha Nekrasova’s directorial debut The Scary of Sixty-First and two Eugene Kotlyarenko films: We Are (starring Nekrasova) and Spree. Kotlyarenko is also an executive producer on Pipeline; just last year he was a guest on Nekrasova’s Red Scare, a once pro-Sanders podcast that, with its several thousand followers in tow, fell deeper into “new right” territory as its hosts continued to provoke and make ironic gestures, which became less and less ironic, when faced with criticism from the left. This is all part of a niche fascist film subculture that is clasped to the teat of Big Data, Bilderberg Group billionaire Peter Thiel (an intimately impotent view from which its members like to think they siphon sustenance without his influence or their growing dependence), and which primarily resides in “Dimes Square,” a rapidly gentrifying area at and around the border of Chinatown and Lower East Side. Among Dimes Square’s many bedfellows are the short-lived homegrown newspaper “The Drunken Canal,” Radio Bonita, “The Quarterless Review,” the anti-woke film festival ‘New Peoples Cinema Club,” Metrograph, several dozen DIY clothes vendors (visibly fleeting pet projects of individuals with personal wealth), and BODE’s flagship store. The term also refers to all the above counterculture, which seems to multiply from the area. It is not unrelated that this particular brand of gentrification was given a name in the same year that violence against Asians escalated in New York, especially Chinatown — exacerbated by the worsening housing crisis and the “mega jail,” intended to be the tallest in the world, which rises as the state slowly phases out Rikers Island.
Pipeline has been thrown into this mix. So the same capital behind niche anti-woke cinema now backs the kind of “woke” empathy machines that the former sometimes resents. Neither party is in our favor, and billionaires like Thiel — whose agenda to quell the Left’s supposed war on free thought is no secret — know this. As the movement absorbs liberalisms to feign a competition between itself, it disperses and becomes harder to track. It serves these capitalists to dig their hands into the purveyors of media from the ground up — striking vulnerable filmmakers who are yearning for a start in micro-budget production as financing options and public funding continue to dissolve.
For whatever it’s worth, I can envisage a version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline whose production, aesthetic, and distribution, do not compromise its ethos. Shot on 16mm, the film could have been “eco-processed,” using site-specific ingredients like spices, coffees, and herbs (a handmade work that has been taught at, among others, Tesh Media Labs in Leimert Park, California and Gondar, Ethiopia, as well as by the Echo Park Film Collective), to mitigate toxic waste. It could have retained a teaching function within its genre trappings — like Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky’s educational comedy Something Self Explanatory (15x) — then shown to communities who are most affected by the fossil fuel industry, afterward discussed, and combined ideas made actionable. But neither the proliferation of once effective instruction nor even sabotage, on their own, are enough. In waylaying the construction of a colossal police training compound in Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta since 2021, the Stop Cop City movement is revealing how a vast array of tactics and mobilizations both experimental and old (but appropriately adapted) are necessary at minimum to defend land from state & corporate exploitation. In Crimethinc’s “Balance Sheet: Two Years against Cop City: Evaluating Strategies, Refining Tactics,” the self-identifying “rebel alliance” collectively writes, “The model is always wrong. Even if all one hopes to accomplish is to spread the tactics and gestures of revolt, mere forms, styles, and instructional guides will not suffice” and that open-source resistance, or online infographics and guides, “enables large numbers of people to participate in such activities without theoretical coherence, shared goals, relationships of trust, or longstanding organizations.” The vanguard movement continues to experiment and diversify its tactics across “Weeks of Action (unpredictable bursts of specific, weekly shifting strategies),” defensive encampments, tree houses, the courts, pressure campaigns against the Atlanta Police Foundation’s contractors, and, of course, sabotage. Music, dance, community film screenings, documentaries, etc. are an integral feature of the movement too — Lev Omelchenko’s film Beneath the Concrete, The Forest recently screened in community spaces and microcinemas, in both Atlanta and New York City, paired with a teach-in by the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. All proceeds went towards the legal defense of arrested forest defenders and an independent investigation of the police murder of the activist Tortuguita.
By any comparison, Malm’s book proposes an outmoded model of direct action; the film neuters even that. But I like to think Pipeline, in the slower and smaller form that I can imagine, would have a more explosive influence on a fraction of the viewers in intimate settings than whatever the actual film — “a gesture of revolt” — will do for moviegoers inside indie cinemas and theater chains — perhaps they’ll tweet something afterward (like Edward Ongweso Jr did, calling the film and book “calls to action that fill my chest with hope,” or Charles Bramesco, who called it “the real shit” with “bona fide thought-through revolutionary ideology packaged as a gratuitously entertaining capital M-movie.”); log it on letterboxd; buy a shirt, tote, or barrel bomb keychain from NEON’s merch store, or even the book; or see it again, burn their adrenaline on the commute, and return home with their long fuse wetted and set back to where it started.
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