Graeme MacDonald suggests that “part of the point of theorising energy as cultural is to expose and determine reasons for our acculturation to its hierarchy of material (and, increasingly, immaterial), forms and the manner in which they dictate fundamental aspects of social life and organization” (10). Across these three objects, the Financial Crisis can be seen as the moment in which the faltering of the petro-capitalist system that so many Americans had taken for granted starts to be felt on a social and cultural level. Therefore, I have attempted to map the significant forces of petrol’s material and cultural realities within film produced at the beginning of the Financial Crisis by recognising petrol’s cultural hegemony within the capitalist system. My integration of film and cultural theory and economic history into the energy humanities has provided insight on the capabilities of film to generate a consciousness surrounding the impacts of petro-capitalism as deeply felt through the films’ contextual layers. Reading There Will Be Blood, Wall-E and Blood Car as a series of petrofilms that are inherently tethered to and informed by the external economic and energic conditions of the period encompassing historically high oil prices and the onset of the Recession opens the texts for a critical analysis of the implicit and explicit figurations of petrol’s dominance and how it is mediated through the cultural form of film. Individually, each object generates a unique formation of the petro-consciousness through its own internal logics, narrative structures, aesthetic dimensions and position within the cultural hierarchy of American cinema. When considered together, however, these objects indicate a larger narrative of the pervasiveness of petrol within the cultural imagination of this time, from Hollywood period drama, to popular children’s animation, to low-budget minor
cinema, and provoke petrol’s proliferation as a result of the external petro-capitalist tensions engulfing the texts.
Amy Riddle has argued that an ironic problem central to the cultural logic of late fossil capital is that the more oil is described in a work, the more it disappears. This
naturalization of oil indicates the “energy unconscious” — that which erases or contributes to the depiction of fossilised social relations (57-58). However, as I have argued throughout this thesis, the external socio-economic environment of the mid-late 2000s was intrinsically conditioned by a crisis of petro-capitalism, and these objects all produce an atmosphere utterly informed by that logic. Moments of crisis engender realisations, feelings and forge a new consciousness upon the dominant ways of living and thinking within that moment. As Raymond Williams says, structures of feeling do not have to await definition before they exert palpable pressures (132). Therefore, the cultural logic of oil that is manifested within the fabric of these films formulates and makes recognisable the powerful forces of petro-capitalism through this periodisation.
There Will Be Blood, the object most explicit in its rendering of oil as a material substance, intimates the petro-consciousness through its production of oil’s “violent” logic, as Peter Hitchcock would describe (81). The film is rife with aesthetics of oil’s physical ubiquity across the American landscape. But, it is through Daniel Plainview’s embodiment of energy that oil may be understood as the material and metaphysical substance that shapes social being. Through the affection-images that construct oil as the fulcrum of the social consciousness, the aesthetic rendering of petroculture in There Will Be Blood thus responds to and represents the concrete historical situation in which it was produced, which becomes the field of force that informs the mood of the film.
The mode of perceptual realist animation in conjunction with the framework of petro-capitalist realism in Wall-E formulates an aesthetic of the impacts of petro-capitalism on the planet. Though never physically present, the mark of petrol is distinctly left upon the uninhabitable wasteland of earth as rendered in the film. Therefore, through its portrayal of a world indebted to oil culture, Wall-E confronts the deeply embedded aesthetics of
petroculture in its visual rendering of the pervasive dominance of petrol as the logic of late fossil capitalism, which is paradoxically illuminated by the absence of petrol. The role of animation can be seen as an integral part of the film in the way that it provides aesthetic form to the pervasive cultural logic of petrol, and not in the material substance itself. It is ultimately through this dichotomy of physical absence/cultural presence where a
consciousness upon the impacts of petro-capitalism starts to form.
A caveat that arises with There Will Be Blood and Wall-E, however, is that their cultural statuses as objects of a dominant cinema means they potentially reinforce oil’s hegemony into culture. I therefore turned to minor cinema and the film Blood Car, which counters the Hollywood representation of petrocultures. As an object of minor cinema, the film provides a space to probe the spillage of oil beyond dominant cultural arenas. The film’s satirical absurdity amplifies a grain of truth underwriting the 2007 financial landscape, and in its minor space becomes explicitly critical of the American oil addiction. Through its alternative mode of representation, in both its satirical rendering of oil as a literal
“lifeblood” and its position as minor cinema, Blood Car recognises the brutal extent of the US oil addiction at this time, and utilises its cultural position by actively ridiculing oil’s material and cultural hegemony. Thus, I argued that the minor is where the
petro-consciousness emerges and operates on a higher critical level than in the dominant cinema of this period.
With America still leading as the world’s largest consumer of oil, I limited this research to US film to provide an in-depth analysis of oil’s dominance within US culture. To expand the scope of this research, one could employ a global comparative framework to trace the impact of this period of cinema across cultural geographies, and analyse the cultural and social consequences of petro-capitalism in film on a global scale.
For now, we must ask what we can do with this research at the current junction. As Angus maintains, fossil fuels are embedded in every aspect of the capitalist system (173). If we accept that fossil fuels are completely embedded in capitalism, then the conclusion must be that we have to get rid of that system. This realisation is what is ultimately constructed by these three objects within the context of the economic and energy crises of 2007/2008.
As we find ourselves attempting to overcome the energy impasse, I have found that looking back upon this historical cultural archive of the Financial Crisis, when the cracks of petro-capitalism start to reveal themselves, has elucidated oil’s cultural centrality within this period of late fossil capital, and we can use these new discoveries to understand what has come before, and use the petro-consciousness to formulate ideas of moving beyond the petro-capitalist impasse.