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me and who?!!

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the best fucking movie I’ve seen in a minute. Imagine Elephant (2003) meets Night Moves (2013) meets an 80s thriller. Holy shit, I’m almost tempted to watch it again following a rewatch of Van Sant and Reichardt’s respective films—what a boxset trilogy that would be! Jesus Christ. Wow. And why the fuck have I heard nothing about this movie!? It came out a year ago, but it is only now getting a US release. It feels like the same unfortunately overlooked treatment that another exceptional recent thriller, American Animals (2018), received. What a crime, man. Plus, it’s not some hippy dippy ending that weird online “metamodernists” love to harp about, talking about hope and shit. But, my God, what a fucking rollercoaster. I was about to get pissed as hell that they were setting up the two sexy ass anarchists to rat out the entire operation to the feds. I was thinking, “man, Marxists are gonna have a field day with this shit and say, ‘they fucking George-Orwell’d another leftist cause.’” (Funnily enough, the author of the 2021 book of the same name, Andreas Malm, is supposedly a Marxist). And yes, a word (or two) from the other Marxist scholar alluded to in the title in just a moment (or two).

But enough about the illusion of form—I could go on and on about how the film does an incredible job of balancing the polyvalency of all the character’s attitudes toward their ecoterrorism and giving them all credit where it’s due (I’m thinking of reformist Alisha’s line about Xochitl being a college girl who read one book and now thinks she can change the world LOL) or how it feels like the best onscreen depiction of how Gen Z really speaks and acts, like in the night-before hangout scene in the abandoned desert house. No, it’s time to talk about form itself. This film appropriates the wonderfully postmodern formal structuring device of Van Sant’s fragmented reflection on the Columbine massacre: focusing on individual characters through labeled, personalized flashbacks to recontextualize, refine, complicate the accepted notion of audience’s (and critics’) expectation for [cinematic (linear)] Truth. Further to this point, just incredible that a film can end with a goddamn TikTok and not make me wince or take it any less seriously. Wait, that’s actually so fucking genius. Ending with a TikTok call-to-action AND THEN CUTTING TO THE DESTROYED PIPELINE UP IN SMOKE—THAT IS BRILLIANT, THE FILM IS LITERALLY SAYING THAT TIKTOK IS NOT JUST A PLATFORM FOR ACTIVISM TO SPREAD AMONG THE YOUTH BUT A GENERATION-DEFINING CATALYST THAT IS DISMANTLING THE VERY FORM OF CINEMA AND MOVING IMAGE CULTURE AS WE KNOW IT AND HOW THAT IS NOT A BAD THING! We absolutely should question, organize against, and dismantle existing ways of doing things.

So, that brings me to the topic of the nostalgia mode (Frederic Jameson’s oft-quoted symptom of postmodern culture, a culture, which, he asserts, has lost the ability to historicize, and thus, everything is flattened into an inescapable, hellish present. Anyway, the nostalgia mode is a formal fixation on what Mark Fisher describes as the “antiquated models” of form, despite a work’s best appearances toward the contrary in terms of c*ntent (Capitalist Realism 58). So, while Coppola and Lucas and Spielberg lamented and resurrected the 50s from their position in the 70s and 80s (and today), we have been doing much the same with the 80s since the turn of the century and even still into the 2020s. (However, I cannot help but feeling a sense of shift, the slow death of the 80s nostalgia wave, which I strikingly realized when I saw Ben Affleck’s Air in the theater two weekends ago, an experience from which I have developed an essay that I’m dragging my feet to finish. In other words, the 90s are already here as the current occupying Ghost of Aesthetic Past.) The synth-heavy score of How to Blow Up a Pipeline recalls those common in any 80s thriller, but I would argue is not simply nostalgia, or to produce an equally menacing, ambient tone to the desert visuals, or just ’cause it sounds cool. No, Gavin Brivik’s original soundtrack appropriates the familiar sounds of synthesizers to transport the viewer back into the social climate of that particular decade. Think about it; a film this smart and socially/politically forward-thinking would not just slap on an 80s-esque sound just to catch the top-end of this cultural wave’s trough. Put simply, when I think 80s, I think Reagan. The successful neoliberal takeover—the privatization of everyday life, rampant deregulation, tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, the empowerment of multinational corporations, increased crackdowns on organized labor: the New Deal has long been old news. And so, it’s not just the tense situations onscreen that create suspense but the droning electronic sounds that get your leg shaking. Spectatorial anxiety as economic anxiety. The very suspense stems in large part from the audio track (and its particular wicked 80s feel), a rather blockbuster-esque formal innovation with its reliance on Dolby (then later, surround) sound. To trace and diagnose the state of the present condition through nostalgic (hauntological?) sounds, in my mind, diverges from the lush operatic fantasy (John Williams) or comfortingly engulfing drone-and-braaam (Hans Zimmer) that dominates the soundscape of the Hollywood blockbuster.

It was just recently too that I was expressing to a friend how everything that’s coming out looks like utter dogshit, but if I have to sit through a laughably bad Ezra Miller Flash preview as a trade-off for a We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) or a How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I’ll definitely still complain about it for sure, but at least I know anti-content is still out there, even if it is priced out of deserved theatrical slots. I had never even heard of director Daniel Goldhaber, but I will absolutely go back and watch his debut Cam (2018), a horror film about a camgirl, which sounds sick as fuck. I love films that make you wanna get out there and fuck shit up, as what you do right after you finish watching is what really matters. Anything that makes you move to create/destroy something. In terms of sheer affect, I’ve not wanted to go out and blow shit up this much since I rewatched Fight Club a couple months ago. So, if anyone reads this semi-hastily composed musing, here is my humble contribution. Now, I am free to learn how to build a bomb, it seems.