How to Blow Up a Pipeline: A Review and Interview with the Creators
The creators of the film How to Blow Up a Pipeline want climate activists to wrestle with questions about collective action, pessimism, tactics, and what to do next.
Michael from How to Blow Up a Pipeline (photo permission from NEON)
When Andreas Malm’s polemic in defense of property damage was published in 2021, with its catchy and inflammatory title How to Blow Up a Pipeline, it was met with surprising curiosity and acclaim in liberal, “moderate” media and environmental circles. Vox interviewed Malm on their podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners. The Guardian even published Malm’s piece, “The Moral Case for Destroying Fossil Fuel Infrastructure,” in their opinion section.
Perhaps one of the most surprising reactions to the book was the decision by a quartet of academic filmmakers, an actor and an editor, to adapt the manifesto into a thriller movie. It’s an odd idea, but it works, because of the way the writers blend the technical realism of the bomb making and the conventional beats of an adrenaline pumping thriller. Dialogue plays out the questions and provocations made by Malm in his book in a setting where the answers to these questions have incredibly high stakes. In posing these questions, in suggesting the mix of emotions that might produce a direct attack on fossil fuel infrastructure, and in clarifying the challenges and the risks for anyone who dared to do so, the film has provided a useful thought experiment for radical climate activists: “What tactics are appropriate in the face of such already existing and inbound devastation?”
Malm’s book would more accurately be titled “Why To Blow Up A Pipeline” because “it doesn’t actually teach you how to do it,” as Lukas Gage’s character Logan points out during the movie. The film, by contrast, does come closer to a step-by-step guide to bomb building and pipeline sabotage. A bomb enthusiast working in counter terror even served as a technical consultant on the film to ensure that the bomb-making sequences were accurate. Jordan Sjol, the film’s co-writer, has taken pains to explain that this was the only input from anyone in the security state. The book has become required reading for activists in the West and inspired its own movements like the Tyre Extinguishers, and the think-tank Climate Vanguard, which draws on Malm’s work to propose an emergency politics. To better understand the filmmakers’ aims in making the film, I spoke with Jordan Sjol, the film’s co-writer, and the film’s editor, Dan Garber, over Zoom.
The movie follows seven young characters from different backgrounds in their efforts to blow up a pipeline in Texas. “It’s a fairly classically structured Hollywood heist movie,” Sjol says, and adds that the movie began with the idea “let’s make Ocean’s Eleven for eco-terrorism.” Sjol says that what got him “personally excited about Andreas’ book is that it does start with the scale of the problem…and it says things are really as bad as we think they are. But instead of resolving to fatalism, it actually uses that [analysis] to say, well, if things are really this bad then we need to start thinking about tactics that we are not thinking about right now.” When making the film they wanted “to tell a story in the way that Andreas does so that we can think of the infrastructure as the enemy.”
Dan Garber, the film’s editor, adds that he usually works in documentary filmmaking, “much of which focuses on the past and how we arrived at a certain point but is not so good at charting a course forward to a kind of speculative future. So, making a film set in the present day that cast forward rather than one looking back was particularly appealing to me.”
A much discussed and disputed area of climate organizing is the emotional register required to translate messaging about the crisis into effective action. A 2020 paper published in the science journal Nature found that pessimistic framings encourage people to believe their own actions matter, whereas optimism and fatalism encourage passivity. Optimism about the climate crisis persists among various shades of the deluded, many of whom take paychecks from the fossil fuel industry.
Climate change can engender a swirling mixture of emotional states in people from anxiety and depression, to murderous rage, to revolutionary zeal, to apathy. A common response among those with a pessimistic reading of the situation is to retreat into individualism. For example, the online community and podcast Doomer Optimism encourages you to arm yourself, leave society largely behind, hunker down, and build a self-sufficient homestead for you and your family. The film, by contrast, strikes a different path, coming from a pessimistic—and arguably realistic—reading of the situation, but still manages to retain a core of hope. The action that the characters take is collective, though it’s not a mass movement, they act in the expectation that others will join them, and their motivation is to save the fundamental collectivity of society. So while the movie continues in the vein of Malm’s dire warning about the severity of the situation, it also argues for fighting, as Malm says, “for the possibility of civilization.”
Sjol says that when they were writing the film, they seemed to encounter a double bind, where people were either optimistic or pessimistic, but always thinking in terms of a binary of saving the planet or failing to, meaning the world ends. He adds, “I think at the core of Andreas’ book there is a long section about how every gigaton matters, whether we are past 200 [parts per million of carbon dioxide] or not. And there is a moral question about how do you live in an unconscionable system? What do you do in an unconscionable system? And I think that whether you think it can be changed or not, you can still ask that moral question of yourself.”
The characters all come to pipeline sabotage from a variety of different political and emotional places. One of them, Theo, played by Sasha Lane, comes from Cancer Alley in Long Beach, and has a terminal prognosis. For her, the attack is a last stand against the system that will kill her. Xochitl, played by co-writer Ariela Barer, is grieving her mother who died during a “freak heat wave.” Shawn, played by Marcus Scribner, was frustrated by the limits of liberal institutionalism. Dwayne, played by Jake Weary, is a farmer who, in Sjol’s words, “codes more conservative.” He invokes a legal defense against eminent domain, arguing there is no public interest in building fossil fuel infrastructure on his farm land. Rowan, played by Kristine Froseth, is a punk. Her boyfriend, Logan, and Alysha, Theo’s girlfriend (Jayme Lawson), seem to partly be there out of love for their significant other. Finally, there’s Michael (Forrest Goodluck), a despairing young man of Indigenous heritage whose desire to burn society down sometimes shows shades of the beliefs of groups like Deep Green Resistance. It is unfortunate that the most extreme member of the group is the one from the Indigenous background, given the persistent critique that Malm’s history of successful direct actions is highly selective and ignores Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure, much of which has been among the more successful acts of resistance. Sjol says that “these are stories and viewpoints that came from people we were talking to in research. These are all very direct lived realities that people have, and so wanting to represent that and wanting to represent a diversity of emotions, some characters are angrier than others, some are more skeptical than others. If anyone is a fatalist, Michael is a fatalist. That is to say, you can have different reasons for being here, you can even have different opinions on what the optimal outcomes are, and still decide that you all have one thing in common, which is that you all want to do this action. You come together for the action and let that be that. Living through today’s formation of leftism, we are familiar with infighting over small differences of ideology or opinion that get in the way of doing things. And so, we wanted to build a group that had those differences of ideology and opinion and still did something.”
As well as the risk of creating a demobilizing emotional tenor, asking these questions through the medium of film risks what cultural critic Robert Pfaller called “interpassivity,” where a piece of art or media gives the sense of acting on behalf of its audience. Does HTBUAP leave viewers feeling good, and self-satisfiedly radical, as though by watching fictional characters blow up a pipeline, they themselves have struck a blow against the fossil fuel industry? Garber does not think so. He says, “We made some decisions to try to diminish the sense that it's a complete catharsis. One of them is that you do actually see the real outcomes of these actions for the individual characters, which are not uniformly positive. They make real sacrifices for this, and so I think it's meant to leave people in a position where they feel like this is a victory, but it's a small victory that comes at a great cost. So, in that sense, I don't think that it's like a Marvel movie or something where there's this kind of grand resolution at the end. They're still in a world that is on fire, and they've only done one small part of this puzzle.”
It may become like so many of the critical portrayals of corporate America in the 1990s that reinforce the sense that there is nothing to be done, for my part, I left the film feeling anything but good. Though I enjoyed it, the film left me anxious, my mind racing with questions implied by the film’s narrative arc. If Malm’s book birthed the Tyre Extinguishers and spurred on movements in the global North already contemplating sabotage, who knows what ripple effects a movie streamed and shown in cinemas worldwide will have.
Although the movie portrays a diverse coalition of activists, there remains one notable absence: organized labor. In fact, the saboteurs enter into conflict with labor at times, with Michael attacking random oil workers out of despair before he joins the group. His mum asks him why he is “picking fights with men who just come here for work,” highlighting the tensions between fossil labor and climate activism. This is thrown into even sharper relief later in the film, when Logan considers allowing two pipeline maintenance guys to be killed in the explosion. “Who cares? They’re part of the problem,” he says, before Rowan convinces him otherwise. Sjol says, while writing, they were “mostly trying to think about the affective terrain of Gen Z characters […] people who have grown up being told that the world is ending and there is nothing you can do about it,” and that, “from a very practical level, presenting one of those people as trade unionist might have been a bit of a stretch in part, just because they were so young. There should be more [teenage teamsters], but it didn’t emerge as someone who would be a natural character for this movie.”
It’s a shame that the tension between labor and the environment was not seriously grappled with in the scope of the movie, because this is not an idle issue. To take an example, a train line is currently under construction between Lyon, France, and Turin, Italy, that is supported by the local unions for the jobs it creates, but opposed by Earth Uprising, an environmental network that is no stranger to sabotage, on the grounds of water usage and land destruction. It’s asking too much of a film to even pose, let alone adequately answer, every question that is presented by the climate and ecological crisis, but in providing a model for a film that is nuanced, and intellectually serious without being overly didactic, perhaps HTBUAP can pave the way for further ecological thrillers.
As well as being a movie about climate change and eco-sabotage, How To Blow Up A Pipeline is also a movie about surveillance. The architecture of surveillance is in the back and foreground of the film, with characters hiding their phones in fridges when discussing their plan, and part of the plot hinges on the appearance of a trackable drone surveying the integrity of pipeline, as well as the ever present specter of possible police infiltration of the group. At the most basic level, this eerie presence of the American surveillance apparatus injects tension into the film, but as well as ratcheting up the stakes for the characters, it also serves to show what anyone that might take inspiration from the movie would face. Beyond this, it suggests to the audience that the surveillance state can be circumnavigated, to one degree or another. As Sjol put it to me, the depiction allows us to “think of the infrastructure as reachable. In the United States there is over 190,000 miles of active liquid petroleum pipelines. Which is 100 times the length of the US-Mexico border, which we know from recent US political struggles is an extremely hard length to secure.”
The ubiquity of state surveillance is a feature not just of the film’s internal world, but of its place in reality. The FBI issued a warning about the film, and Rolling Stone reported that, “The nation’s premier domestic law-enforcement agency’s bulletin was one of at least 35 missives from at least 23 separate federal and state entities—a veritable alphabet soup of angst—issuing dire warnings about a commercial film’s threat to the nation’s fossil-fuel infrastructure.” Similarly, admiration for Malm’s book is being taken as a byword for sedition by states internationally. In France, there has been an ongoing crackdown against climate activists involved in a variety of ecological movements. Activists arrested as part of the latest sweep were asked in their interrogations if they liked Andreas Malm, according to French ecological newspaper Reporterre. Malm and the quartet behind the film are by no means the first people to suggest that property destruction is possible or desirable, so why has the HTBUAP brand caused so much consternation among state apparatuses?
Sjol responds to my question with an anecdote, “I think about in Louisiana, where water protectors were fighting against pipelines that would have connected Louisiana refineries to the DAPL. 25% of local sheriff’s deputies were given permission to work as private security for the oil companies. They did this when they were off the clock at the sheriff's office, but they wore their uniforms and they arrested people, which I think is a telling anecdote to me because it’s very very clear that the law is on the side of maintaining the status quo, especially in the US, but internationally as well. I see in the reaction of multiple governmental agencies to our little, independent narrative film, a demonstration that US government agencies cannot help but see any challenge to the status quo, even one that’s in the cultural arena, just asking questions, as anything but a threat.” As for why Malm has enjoyed such infamy among the powerful, “Andreas’ book? It’s got a good title, he’s nowhere near the first person to suggest this, but he is a good advocate for it, he knows how to talk about it and he does make the point about the infrastructure’s vulnerability in a way that people can understand, using historical references that most people are familiar with and feel themselves already to be on the side of. I don’t meet many people who are like ‘I don’t think women should vote.’”
Since I began writing this piece, the French government has mandated the dissolution of ecological activist network Earth Uprising, citing in their justification for doing so the influence of Malm’s text How to Blow Up a Pipeline on activists in France. States internationally are clearly worrying about the interplay between theory and culture on one hand and the practice of activists on the other. Just as the protagonists acknowledge that their action may have consequences beyond their control and make peace with it, so too have the filmmakers.
Sjol says, “What [the ending] gets at is that now that they’ve done what they’ve done, it’s out of their hands. They knew they were doing something highly visible, and now it's out there. Other people are going to do what they will with it. [...] Personally, at least, I feel similarly about the movie. [...] We decided that putting it into the world was a good idea, and we have, but now other people are going to do what they will with it. We’ve all got our hopes, but it’s not up to us any more.”
Olly Haynes is a journalist covering politics, protest, labor, and the environment. His work has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, Novara Media, and Rolling Stone. He tweets @reality_manager.