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Petroculture as Minor Cinema: Blood Car, Satire and the US Oil Addiction

In document TOWARD A PETRO-CONSCIOUSNESS: (pagina 42-57)

For the life of the flesh is in the blood -LEVITICUS 17:11

What would happen if petrol prices became so high that nobody could afford to drive anymore?

The central catalyst for the events that play out in Alex Orr’s 2007 black-comedy Blood Car captures the very prominent concern of peak oil pre-empting interpretations of the energy-triggered financial crisis of 2008.Burning at a faster rate than it could be extracted from the ground – so the discourse imagined - declining petroleum reserves and speculation of peak oil meant that fuel ceased to be cheap, which was most vividly expressed in the global oil prices that tripled between 2007 to 2008, peaking at $147 per barrel. Furthermore, in the United States, gasoline prices reached a historic peak of $4.11 per gallon (Matthew T. Huber vii). However, for a sub-culture of Americans in the early twenty- first century, Matthew Schneider-Meyerson observes, peak oil became more than a concern: it became an ideology. Between 2004 and 2011, hundreds of thousands of these “peakists” came to believe that impending oil scarcity would lead to the imminent collapse of industrial society (1). Thus, despite the growing knowledge of the environmental and ecological consequences of oil usage at this time, the inability to think of alternative solutions beyond the petro-capitalist logic is ultimately what materialises in the surrounding cultural production

because of fossil capital’s dominance. William Simon explained in 1975 that “petroleum is a unique commodity, entering into almost every facet of our economy, as the fuel for heating our residences and other buildings, as the fuel for transportation of goods and people and as the raw material for a myriad of products like fertilizer and petrochemicals. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that petroleum has become the lifeblood of our economy” (“Statement of William Simon…”). Then, as the ideology of peak oil began to filter into the American consciousness at the cultural moment of the financial crash, the lifeblood of the economy was suddenly at a deadlock. It is this concept of petrol as the lifeblood of modernity that Blood Car attempts to expose through its status as minor cinema against the dominant (and hence more ideologically sincere) position of Hollywood cinema.

The energy impasse afflicting humanity in the 21st century, and first given substantial critical attention in a 2014 article by Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, is where we need to look to explore the role of minor film in analysing petrocultures. Simply put, the impasse is the crossroads between knowing that the complex systems of living granted by

petromodernity are no longer sustainable, and not knowing how to break through that barrier. Hence, Boyer and Szeman look to the humanities as a necessary solution to overcoming the threat that fossil-fuelled modernity can no longer continue in its current form. They argue “solving our [environmental] dilemma requires the humanities’

involvement – not as an afterthought to technology and policy, but as a forerunner

researching the cultural landscape around us and imagining the future relationship between energy and society that we need to strive toward” (40). While a significant amount of work has been done in the field over the past decade, the energy humanities is still emerging as a research area. The tension that fuels this impasse, between recognising petrol’s cultural and material dominance within the sub-field of petroculture, and using that knowledge to forge

a sustainable future is where historicising cultural production becomes vital to the work of the energy humanities. It allows us to examine the material and cultural implications of oil from the period of the mid-late 2000s, when energy was only beginning to be analysed from a cultural perspective. In order to imagine a future relationship between energy and society and overcome this impasse, I find it imperative to look at how emergent cultural production from periods of energy and economic crises has figured the hegemony of oil today.

As a “minor” field, I henceforth argue that reading petroculture through minor cinema is vital to understand the all-encompassing logic of petro-capitalism outside of the dominant sphere of Hollywood cinema as the Financial Crisis took hold. Blood Car counters the Hollywood representation of petrocultures that I have delineated thus far in There Will Be Blood and Wall-E, and as an object of minor cinema, provides a space to probe the spillage of oil beyond dominant cultural arenas. To express this cinematic dichotomy in simple terms, William Brown states, “Major can be seen as the dominant filmmaking

practices of Hollywood, while the minor can…be co-opted to define other/alternative modes of representation, and/or to challenge representation itself” (291). I will delve further into this idea of minor as this essay develops, but for now want to pay attention to these alternative modes of representation. If the goal of the Energy Humanities is to generate alternative thinking to overcome the impasse of petromodernity, then I must look at how the cultural and infrastructural implications of petromodernity are constructed in

alternative cultural forms of cinema. I maintain that minor cinema is one such alternative form in which we can analyse oil as the dominant cultural logic of late fossil capitalism because of its position outside of the hegemony.

William Brown, following Deleuze and Guattari’s work on minor literature, concludes that “minor works make us rethink the way in which a major language is perhaps

unthinkingly deployed, thereby refreshing its potential for novelty and change” (290).

Deleuze and Guattari further the political credentials of the minor, arguing that it can

“forg[e] the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (17). Minor cinema becomes vital in analysing how the cultural logic of petro-capitalism arises in the emergent cultural production of this period because of its capacity to highlight and criticise the

dominant structures of petromodernity that are taken for granted in major cultural arenas.

In Blood Car, the premise that exorbitant gas prices means nobody can afford to drive is a heightened evocation of the external socio-economic forces taking hold in 2007.

The film’s absurdist premise thus amplifies a kernel of truth underwriting the 2007 financial landscape, informed by rising oil prices (and, in turn, the rise of the peak oil ideology). The film then uses its role as minor cinema to antagonise this intense acceleration of petrol consumption, culminating with oil’s historic price peak in July 2008. Plot-wise, the $32.31 per gallon of petrol force protagonist Archie Andrews, a vegan kindergarten teacher, to look for an alternative source of energy to fuel his car. Whilst trying to power the engine with wheat grass, he accidentally cuts himself on the engine’s fan and realises that human blood functions as a potent substitute to the compressed organic matter of petroleum-based fuel.

As a result of Archie’s seeming ability to be able to afford gas, his social value increases, but his determination to keep the car fuelled comes at a price much higher than petrol – human life. The film thus satirises the modern petroleum addiction through the liquid life-force of humanity: blood.

Matthew T. Huber problematises the metaphor of oil “addiction” within the US political and cultural landscape, and postulates that “addiction” frames oil as an

uncontrollable substance trapped in the American bloodstream: “pernicious, yet practically unavoidable” (x). This idea is further explored by Stephanie LeMenager in her

phenomenological assessment of oil culture, where she posits, “We have learned to expect of oil maximum motility and liveliness, as if it were blood” (101). The substitution of blood for oil allows satire to become the mode of minor cinema where the film can operate on a critical level, engaging our oil ontologies in more substantial ways compared to a Hollywood view of petromodernity that inherently produces and reinforces the dominant logic of petro-capitalism. For M.H. Abrams, satire can be described as the “art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation” (275). Blood Car can therefore tap into the social conscious by ridiculing the in order to expose oil’s dominance at the cultural moment of the financial crisis through minor form. The concept of exposure to/of oil that lies at the crux of the energy-economy intersection, in both a material and cultural capacity, is where I suggest the film’s rendering of petroculture is at its most provocative. Is it in the minor where fossil capital’s cultural logic can be most rigorously probed? We turn to Blood Car to examine.

Life for Lifeblood: Satirising Oil Addiction

In his State of the Union Address in 2006, President George W. Bush accused America of being addicted to oil: “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil” (“State of the Union…”). He strongly advocated for the use of technology in developing clean alternative energy sources. Yet, here was a President whose time in office was contoured by a burgeoning energy crisis.

While placing the blame on the American public for their petro-reliance, it must not be ignored that Bush made two visits to Saudi Arabia within five months to plead with them to open up its valves for lower oil prices and attempted to lift a twenty-seven-year-old ban on offshore drilling. Oil’s influence upon domestic and foreign affairs at the presidential level

asserts oil as the dominant logic, shaping the decisions that were made and controlling the actions that were taken. In Huber’s analysis, Bush was “acting like an addict himself” (vii).

Speaking at the Rose Garden in June 2008, just as oil prices were on the verge of peaking, Bush stated that “In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil.

And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home” (“President Bush”).

Like an addict willing to do anything for their next fix, Bush could not see past the economic necessity of increased oil supply as the country was about the enter its worst Recession since 1929. At this impasse, knowing the consequences of the over-consumption of oil and how to overcome them, the economic conditions of 2008 prevented anything other than a petro-capitalist logic remaining at the core of American society.

This logic of petro-capitalism and its ubiquity in everyday life filters down from the political arena into cultural representation because of its pervasive dominance in the infrastructures of modern society. This is where the major/minor cultural dichotomy in terms of Blood Car and its expression of oil addiction in the context of the economic and energy crises comes into focus. Brent Ryan Bellamy voices his concern that “Oil’s liquid mobility is part of what makes it a difficult target for academic study and political action”

(“Oil Infrastructure as Literary Form”). How may oil be criticised, then, if we cannot grasp its slippery contours in a theoretical sense? Its visual representation in minor cinema is one such mode where the problem of oil can be acutely identified, and I argue that satirising oil through another substance of “liquid mobility” – blood – is how Blood Car exploits America’s oil addiction within the sphere of the minor. In the way that There Will Be Blood and Wall-E perhaps fail to imagine a life beyond petromodernity because of their position within the hegemony of petro-capitalist society, Blood Car can actively work against the dominant through the minor. If satire is the art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous, Blood

Car’s elucidation of oil as a literal “lifeblood” opens the film up to a critical position at the juncture of becoming petro-conscious.

U.S. House Representative William Cole said in 1941 that “the progress of the people as a whole depends on upon this lifeblood of commerce and industry— petroleum.”

(“Speech to the American Petroleum Institute”). Archie’s discovery of blood as an alternative source of fuel to power his car engine is where Blood Car fully establishes its satire of oil addiction as the American “lifeblood”. Standing shirtless in his bathroom, the handheld, shaky camera zooms in on his face which slowly travels down his arm, finding him clutching to a bright yellow utility blade which becomes the focus of the frame. Evoking the routine of an addict finding a vein, the shot tracks the blade as it hovers around the space just below Archie’s elbow. Archie aggressively inserts the blade into his arm, cutting deeply as dark red blood oozes out of his body. Intravenously penetrating the open wound with a long, plastic tube, the camera follows the tube around the room as it drains a copious amount of Archie’s blood into a large plastic gasoline can. Archie’s desire to overcome the limits of peak petro-capitalism and keep the structures of petromodernity alive overtakes his own regard for life, and thus Blood Car is created. When the lifeblood of the economy cannot serve anymore, the answer, for Archie, lies in blood itself.

Oil’s “violent” logic is explicitly produced in this scene. Peter Hitchcock argues that the violent logic of oil places a bar on the ability to create alternative forms of cultural representation (81). Blood Car counters this argument by using an equally violent, and equally real, representative of oil to expose the deeply harmful consequences of

petromodernity. The idea that blood could substitute petrol as an energy form is ridiculous.

Yet, as Daniella Morgan points out, “The reality inherent in the absurd…is always a

characteristic of satire. Satire is absurd, to be sure, but not wholly unbelievable” (169). Thus,

in the tradition of satire, it is the element of reality that explicates oil as the “lifeblood” that fuels petromodernity, or what Huber calls “the American way of life” (47). The mode of satire therefore allows the film to strip away that bar on oil’s inability to create alternative forms of cultural representation by rendering “oil” through the symbolic form of blood, exposing the material and cultural oil addictions pulsing through the collective American social body.

There is, however, a duality at play in the term “exposure”: exposure to the substance in a literal, visual sense, and exposure to the idea of oil, or the immaterial capacity of oil as a cultural logic. While minor cinema is not limited to a genre, the mode of satire employed in Blood Car most rigorously confronts and challenges America’s oil

addictions, and it is through this lens that the film produces its provocation of oil’s social, political, economic and cultural dominance. There is space for non-dominant forms of entertainment to directly engage our oil ontologies, and this is exactly where the minor of Blood Car is most effectively utilised. The duality of “exposure” in its literal and theoretical dimensions becomes pertinent here in Archie’s creation of blood car. As Archie extracts the blood from his body, draining his reservoir for fuel, the extractive processes required for taking crude oil out of deep bedrock are intimated. The material qualities shared by oil and blood make blood a perfect substitute upon which oil can be satirised and I argue that the aesthetic dimensions of oil (as blood) conjured by the film’s use of satire become more provocative through the crude, gratuitous depiction of blood. Theoretical exposure, however, comes from the cultural form of the minor, where film is in a unique position to counter the dominant logic by exposing oil culture through cinematic form itself.

The style of filmmaking employed, as mentioned earlier, is what one could label as crude, too: the handheld shaky-cam, intense close ups, an unsaturated colour palette that

highlights the deep, dark, dirty red of Archie’s blood, and a jarring mix of tracking shots and quick cuts combining to construct an uncomfortable, disturbing, energic portrayal of an

“addict”. The glossy sheen of Hollywood’s oil that we have seen in There Will Be Blood is subverted by the structures and aesthetics of minor cinema in Blood Car, and what this exposure to/of oil achieves is the potential to “forge the means for another consciousness”, as Deleuze and Guattari would attest. This particular scene vividly attacks the destructive nature of oil addiction through Archie’s butchery of his own body to find fuel, which

becomes explicitly more violent as the film progresses. Thus, the exposure to petrol through satire becomes a critical tool in minor cinema’s ability to engage and enliven an audience’s senses in becoming more consciously aware of petrol’s violent logic and its distinctive hold on the American psyche.

If “the progress of the people depends upon the lifeblood”, the cultural moment of

“peak oil” halts this progress and oil’s finite quantities become an intense object of concern, as it signalled the end of petromodernity, or life as it was (Schneider-Meyerson 2). Blood Car’s satirical evocation of this concern is first expressed in the literal delineation of blood as fuel, but is rendered more provocatively when Archie’s fuel addiction transgresses all moral boundaries as he looks for his next fix of blood, and life itself becomes the sacrifice for the continuation of petromodernity. Out of fuel and desperate for more, Archie finds his old neighbour, Mrs. Butterfield, sitting dead outside her apartment. Archie excitedly realises what this means for his blood car. He carelessly throws her off the balcony onto the ground to ensure her death, signalling the extent of his addiction. Quickly dragging her out across the street and over to his black blood car, he shoves her in the boot where his blood-engine contraption is situated, and the sound of a churning body is heard as a shaky zoom-in on the

gas gauge shows the needle pointing to “full”. Archie’s oil addiction is deeply intimated by these quick movements and shaky camera shots as he finds his solution get blood car functioning. Hence, the life of the car, and the meaning of life associated with

petromodernity takes on greater importance than human life itself, and Blood Car thus subverts the notion that progress of the people depends upon the lifeblood. It seems now that the progress of the lifeblood depends upon the people. The satire of blood as oil informs a broader interpretation of Blood Car as, to borrow from Ted Atkinson, “a meditation on the…economic consequences of global fossil-fuel consumption and the resulting conundrum of imagining alternatives to petro-capitalism” (215). The film’s satire of lifeblood thus expounds the US oil addiction that was facing a crisis of its own within the petro-capitalist fabric of the mid-2000s, and the overt absurdity of the film’s rendering of

“lifeblood” is where the film becomes a critical force in making oil’s hegemony a conscious cultural concern by questioning what oil addiction might look like if it is not rigorously examined and overturned.

The absurdity of this scene functions in the realm of believability because the blood-fuel is never made visible, illuminating the “nowhere seen but everywhere felt” presence of oil. However, through the aesthetics and intimate details of the car as the blood-fuel makes its way from body to engine, Blood Car elucidates oil’s invisible ubiquity that has allowed the substance to hegemonize across the cultural and social parameters of modernity. In a rapid series of shots, evoking the “quick-fix” capitalist logic that defined Bush’s response to the economic and energy crisis of 2008, there is a close-up of Archie inserting his key into lock cylinder, a horrible chugging sound as the blood-fuel audibly makes its way through the rubber piping and into the car’s oil reservoir, causing the engine to run, and the

aforementioned shaky zoom-in on the gas gauge, with the needle pointed to “full”,

delineating that Archie has gotten his fix of blood. The lifeblood cannot be physically seen, but the aurality, vibrancy and energy of oil is emphatically expressed through the crude cinematic aesthetics employed within the film as the sound of Mrs. Butterfield’s blood pours into the engine. Though never visible in this scene, the film’s cinematic language thus

generates an expression of oil as feeling through the embodied form of petroleum (via its satirical counterpart of blood) in the car. Therefore, the car of Blood Car is central to this rendering as it provides a space to expel oil’s hidden ubiquity, and focalises the distinctive forms of petroleum addiction that the film attempts to challenge. Although physically hidden here, oil becomes explicated by the sensory perception, or aesthesis, of “lifeblood”

that is felt as it travels through the car, fuelling Archie’s addiction.

However, in the seminal essay precipitating the energy humanities, “Petrofictions:

The Oil Encounter and the Novel,”, Amitav Ghosh asks “why the story of oil, on the

American side, has proved so imaginatively sterile?” (30). He comes to the simple conclusion that it is because oil smells bad. It is dirty, crude, violent and, for many people, should remain unseen and unheard; invisibly and silently fuelling their cars and heating their homes. The American cultural imagination has thus long held a reluctance to be confronted by physical oil, making it a difficult substance to aestheticize. Following this, Andrew

Pendakis asks, “Is there an aesthetics of oil or are its cultural manifestations too diverse and localized to be usefully generalized?” (8). Considering the lack of material oil present in Blood Car, I am somewhat compelled to agree with Pendakis that oil does not carry a particular aesthetic. I argue, however, that this is where our alternative modes of

representation come into focus, and where the mode of satire becomes integral to Blood Car’s exposure to/of oil culture. If satire is the “art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or

In document TOWARD A PETRO-CONSCIOUSNESS: (pagina 42-57)