Crude oil, the black prince of the fossil fuels: it’s all around us, making possible our civilised society, whether we like it or not – whether we see it or not. Oil, of course, means an awful lot more than just the petrol most of us still pump into our cars. Petroleum derivatives are vital in various ways to the making of rubber and plastic, to agricultural fertilisers, phones and footballs, tampons and toilet seats. But unless we’re filling up at the pump then the oil process is very largely invisible to the naked eye. And that maybe suits us – until there’s a calamity, an oil spill, an energy shock, and the whole world sits up, aghast.
Oil was a foundational story of the twentieth century, roughly as old as the movies; and the drama of oil seems well suited to cinema, but that mysterious hidden aspect of oil’s real processes maybe makes it harder to visualise interestingly. That’s why movies do love “the gusher scene”: the part when the drill bites through rock into reservoir, and a column of black comes spurting up into the air from the lower depths. Martin Scorsese is the latest to paint this picture in his Killers of the Flower Moon, and that movie goes on to serve some of the classic tropes of black gold and all it brings in its wake – exploitation, thievery, dirty political fixes, environmental desecration.
Such things have been the grist of all “petrofictions”; and my new novel The Black Eden – a dramatising of the hunt to find and exploit oil in the North Sea from the 1950s to 1970s – dips in the same well. What follows is my selection of ten fine movies that show us vividly what oil can do to people and to places – the gift it gives and the price it makes us pay.
10. Thunder Bay (1953)
“There’s oil under this gulf. And we need it… Without oil, this country of ours would stop! And start to die. And you’d die.” Thus does wildcatter Steve Martin (James Stewart) try to sell a vision to the good people of a Louisiana fishing town: that they should give up their shrimping boats and join him in the hunt for hydrocarbons offshore. The prize is clear, but so are the costs: to the men if they are lured from their usual livelihoods and to fish stocks if the waters are blown up with dynamite. Anthony Mann’s picture was as authentic a depiction as could be made in its day of the high-cost big-risk world of looking for oil under the sea. Stewart, also the star of Mann’s stark, parable-like Westerns, was already on his way to effacing his homespun charm to play the sort of dangerously driven obsessive he would perfect for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But Thunder Bay is very firmly on the side of the drill, rating the natural environment a poor second behind economic growth. Its female characters are hopeless, and if it were remade today it would look and feel very different; but it’s still worth a watch.
9. Pioneer (2013)
Sixty years later, from Hollywood to Norway, Pioneer offers a strong, detailed evocation of the offshore environment, its director Erik Skjoldbjærg having first earned his spurs with the thriller Insomnia, later remade by Christopher Nolan. Where Pioneer excels is in its focused depiction of the surreal and insanely risky world of saturation divers: heroic men who made the first offshore boom possible by subjecting themselves to extraordinary pressures and taking mixed gases into their bodies so as to work long stretches at extreme depths on the seabed. These are workers for whom a gruelling dive is merely their commute to a yet more dangerous workplace. Pioneer’s hero, commercial diver Petter (Aksel Hennie) jokes that entering the diving chamber is “one small step…”; but the astronaut analogy has some force given that these divers go 200 miles offshore and 500 metres down, there to be kept alive only by umbilical cables. Pioneer is not perfect, but in its high points it really captures the surpassing eeriness of saturation. It is, inevitably, a story about safety: an accident that shouldn’t have happened, the cover-up that follows. Its detail is authentic: key to the plot is the intolerable process of decompression, the days a diver must sit out in confinement before their bodies are fit for return to civilian life. But Pioneer is above all a conspiracy thriller, about Norwegian complicity in American corruption.
8. Three Days of the Condor (1975)
“This whole damn thing was about oil!” Robert Redford exclaims when the rules of a dirty game finally become clear to him in Sydney Pollack’s classy thriller. Conspiracy, the “paranoid style”, ran through American movies of the 1970s like a dark stain in water. Here, Redford plays bookish CIA desk worker Joe Turner, who nips out for lunch one day and returns to find his officemates slain. Turner has to go on the run, fight off trained killers, and figure out what the hell he was working on that made him a target. It turns out he had handled material exposing a rogue plot within the CIA to invade the Middle East. At the picture’s climax Turner confronts head spook Cliff Robertson, who tells him that the plot was only in the best interests of the American people. Turner retorts bitterly that the people ought to have been asked for their views, but Higgins is dismissive: “Ask ‘em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold... They won’t want us to ask ‘em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em.” This bad-guy realpolitik – the idea that the “deep state” only does bad things because the people secretly, selfishly, wish it to – became a staple of the political thriller, and a feature of many an oil story to follow.
7. Lessons of Darkness (1992)
If you want a first-rate political documentary about oil exploitation you could hardly do better than Sweet Crude (2009), Sandy Cioffi’s brave study of corruption in the Niger Delta. Werner Herzog, though, belongs in a league of his own, and Lessons of Darkness marks his move to becoming as acclaimed a documentarian as a maker of dramas. The film’s context is clear enough: at the death of the first Gulf War of 1991, as the US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s retreating troops deliberately blew up oil wells and refineries and set lakes ablaze, making an environmental disaster and a truly hellish task for firefighters. This was something for cameras to capture; but Herzog decided swiftly it was “an event which only the poet, and not the TV documentary filmmaker, could preserve for our memories.” In interviews he has gone so far as to characterise Lessons as science fiction: an image-poem with operatic music and otherworldly voiceover, in which the landscape is made strange, like nothing on earth, and one could see it as the point of view of an alien come among us. Herzog took a fair bit of critical flak for “aestheticising” a real catastrophe. But he argued that his movie would endure as a kind of “requiem for an uninhabitable planet… the planet that we ourselves have destroyed.” In that sense Lessons of Darkness has the force of prophecy about it.
6. Deepwater Horizon (2014)
The further and deeper offshore exploration went and the more it cost, the greater was the challenge to worker safety, and the potential for rank disregard – that profits might be prioritised over lives. The 1988 catastrophe on the North Sea platform Piper Alpha, where an explosion took the lives of 167 men in all, will never be forgotten, in Aberdeen most dearly. Oil stories, then, lend themselves to the genre of the disaster movie, though they draw on reserves of human tragedy, and they don’t incline to consoling endings. Deepwater Horizon dramatises the 2010 disaster that cost 11 deaths and the biggest marine oil spill in history following an explosion on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico leased by BP. Mark Wahlberg plays the technician who smells a rat in how the company are testing without due assessment of risk. Kurt Russell is the veteran manager who takes it up with company man John Malkovich, to no avail. (This big-budget movie is as swingeing in its scorn for Big Corporate as any anti-capitalist tract.) For those who wonder how on earth oil gets safely conveyed from a subsea position, this movie has much to teach about the importance of drilling mud, correct well-sealing and blowout prevention. But then, nerve-strainingly, it shows us how all of that can go wrong: we know hell will break loose and, when it comes, director Peter Berg makes us feel the mayhem and the terror.
5. Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Oil work has always required a reserve army of manual labour: hard-wearing types willing to do dirty, dangerous jobs. So it’s often attracted men who are rootless, ready for action but prepared also to be replaceable – some perhaps even seeking anonymity, running away from broken situations they’d rather not face. “I move around a lot,” says Jack Nicholson’s character Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, “because things tend to get bad when I stay.” This brilliant movie really captures the melancholy fag-end of the oilfield life, and in a very particular place: Bakersfield, Kern County, California. There we meet Bobby, working tough days on a rig with his pal Elton. After shifts he drinks beer and listens to country, plays cards, goes bowling, and is unfaithful to his waitressing girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black) whom he mistreats generally. We sense something is wrong with the picture; it’s only when Bobby dons a jacket to go visit his sister in LA that we truly see it. Partita Dupea (Lois Smith) is recording a Beethoven sonata in an upscale studio, and she addresses Bobby as “Robert Eroica”. In fact, he hails from a high-bourgeois family of classical musicians and has only been masquerading as a guy like Elton (whom in the heat of the moment he calls a “cracker asshole”). Now their father is ill, and soon enough Robert is compelled to revisit the family home, heading from the parched plains of Bakersfield to the cold wooded north of Puget Sound, there to face how much of his young life he has spent as a disappointment to himself. Driven by one of Nicholson’s finest early performances, Five Easy Pieces belongs on more than a few best-of lists.
4. Mad Max 2 (1981)
To the degree that our voracious appetite for oil has helped to augur the age of the Anthropocene where we have produced geological change that threatens the survival of the species – there has been an appetite for oil movies cast in the style of dystopian post-apocalypses, showing us the worst of all worlds. George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, still going at full throttle, was inspired by Australia’s 1970s experience of petrol rationing, and it imagines a world so “powered by the black fuel” that its scarcity leads to the proverbial Hobbesian war of all against all, just for the sake of “a tank of juice”. In Mad Max 2 the warriors of an outback wasteland are on the prowl, the chief pack led by the Lord Humungus, who besieges an isolated fort held by a ragtag band with significant reserves of the juice. Their only hope against Humungus appears to be Mel Gibson’s Max, the tough-as-leather ex-cop seemingly hardened past any humanity by the killing of his wife and child in the first movie. (Mad Max 2 is also a western, Gibson clearly channelling Clint Eastwood’s mercenary Man With No Name.) But in the epic final act we see the return of Max’s dogged streak of heroism, joining up with umpteen other utterly crazed elements to make this movie such a rambunctious, redemptive white-knuckle ride.
3. Giant (1956)
The Edna Ferber novel that inspired this 20-year Texan saga is pretty soapy (though not a patch on the underrated 1980s TV series Dallas, about the dark dealings of the Ewing oil dynasty on their homestead known as Southfork). Giant is about Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), the big man in an old-money family grown rich on cattle. Bick falls for the spirited Leslie Lynnton (Elizabeth Taylor), as well he might, and succeeds in bringing her home to the Benedicts’ Victorian mansion on a plains ranch they call “Reata”. There, a wilderness has been transformed, but Bick fears something is not right. The snake in his grass is Jett Rink, a restive upstart ranch-hand who inherits a small acreage on the Benedict estate, where, after much fruitless toil, he strikes oil. The enduring reason to watch Giant is because it contains surely cinema’s most rousing gusher scene, and because Jett Rink is played by James Dean – still to this day one of the most wondrous sights in the movies. It’s a massive moment when Dean is sprayed head-to-toe with crude from his erupting well, and we feel his demonic joy in stealing fire from the gods. He gets directly into his truck, still besmeared in oil, and drives right over to Reata to rub it in the faces of those “stinkin’ sons of Benedicts”: Hudson, whom he hates, and Taylor, whom he loves. That’s as good as it will get for Jett in the story, but Dean really makes us feel it. As movies get older you could wonder how long Dean’s cult will survive, but I expect it will go for as long as there are movies.
2. There Will Be Blood (2007)
There was a grand, momentous feeling abroad among movie lovers when the news came in that the masterful writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson would bring his trademark ambition and canvas to a film loosely derived from one of the major works of “petrofiction”: Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! Sinclair’s book tells of a zealous wildcatter named J. Arnold Ross who cons his way into the acquisition of a goat-ranch, planning to drill under it for oil so as to enhance his burgeoning family empire. But after much research into the early 20th-century oil boom in Bakersfield, Anderson decided to adapt only Sinclair’s first hundred or so pages, and he renamed it accordingly. (As The Band once sang, “You take what you need and you leave the rest.”) Anderson’s protagonist is Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), as devious and determined as Sinclair’s Ross, albeit more dapper; but with a different kind of family, and more eccentric obstacles in his path. The movie builds up into a kind of epic parable of capitalism; but it might be a shade too stark in that way. Anderson makes some rather curious dramatic choices, as well as some over-familiar ones. (One day we might see a movie where a born-again Christian is not a venal phoney; I just don’t expect I’ll be around.) But There Will Be Blood is indubitably the work of an amazing picture-maker; and everyone ought to see it.
1. Local Hero (1983)
A movie doesn’t need a soft heart to be loveable; and Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, undoubtedly one of the best-loved British films, has rather a gimlet eye on human nature, as oil movies must. Forsyth’s script was inspired by the fine true story of Ian Clark, a county clerk in the Shetland Islands to whom big oil came knocking in the 1970s when a North Sea refinery was needed. Clark, grasping the leverage of geography, cut a legendarily remunerative deal for his community. Local Hero comes at this via a young Houston executive MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), despatched to Scotland by his tycoon boss Happer (Burt Lancaster) to buy up the town of Ferness and its surrounding coastline so it can be turned into an oil refinery, “the petrochemical capital of the world”. Even 40 years ago we’d seen enough movies (Frank Capra’s especially) in which predatory city folk are send packing by canny, plucky small-towners. But Bill Forsyth doesn’t pretend we’re all angels. Ferness’s local fixer-entrepreneur Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson) really wants the villagers to sell out to Texas, and the locals are soon dreaming of what to do with the proceeds, whether to buy a Rolls or Maserati. Meanwhile, though, MacIntyre goes native, finding himself changed within by the beauty of the Scottish coast (embodied by two ethereal female characters, rather archly named Marina and Stella). The deal MacIntyre is licensed to negotiate will run into one key dissenter, elderly beachcomber-hermit Ben Knox, who represents something that Mac realises is worth preserving. Local Hero is no ecological tract (though it rather prefigures Donald Trump’s schemes to buy up tracts of Scottish coast for golf links). Never sentimental, the film still conveys that there are all kinds of dreams we might cherish, some of which money – even oil money – can’t quite buy.
The Black Eden by Richard T Kelly (Faber) is out now in hardback
