If you’re familiar with the 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, the images of dead fish and fowl and burning water shooting from kitchen sinks are probably etched into your memory. You also might be familiar with Mike Soraghan’s article from the New York Times that debunks a fair amount of the information offered by Josh Fox in Gasland. From here, you might have either ventured to the sites of America’s Natural Gas Alliance or Barnett Shale Energy Education Council. If these professional sounding, benevolent names didn’t sway you to support hydraulic fracturing – better known pejoratively now as “fracking” – then perhaps you were more comfortable on Natural Resources Defense Council or Environmental Protection Agency sites. These too have official, benevolent sounding names.
The wealth of information, accusations, and rebuttals is massive, confusing, and often skewed. And this is where Gus van Sant’s Promised Land fits into the discussion.
Written by Matt Damon and John Krasinksi, Promised Land is a fine study of gray area that – until the last ten minutes when it’s forcefully thrown into your face – refuses to reveal its stance on the fracking polemic. Instead, it illustrates the various contradictions surrounding this practice. In post-recession America, financial security is doubly alluring, which is why many residents in the small town of McKinley are elated to see Steve Butler (Matt Damon) set foot on their property. The residents know the potential value of the ocean of gas beneath their feet, and they are happy to become “partners” with Global, a “nine-billion-dollar company.” Hypothetically, their children’s education and future will be secured. Each resident in this dilapidating town can say “fuck you loans,” “fuck you bank,” “fuck you, car payment.”
The discussion of financial potential strengthens the film, in part because of Butler. In recent post-recession films, the wealthy become the villains simply because they’re wealthy. (Arbitrage and The Company Men immediately come to mind.) The 99% vs. the 1% has transitioned itself from various Occupy sites to cinema and television. This is all well and good, but simply casting money (and the people who have it) as “evil” is a bit misguided. Promised Land prevents this –again, until the last ten minutes – by giving us Butlter. Yes, he works for a massive company, but he’s from Iowa; he’s familiar with small town life; and, despite his salary, he still believes that natural gas is an injection of money into the local economy that will “boost the town’s tax revenue” and ultimately allow these poverty-line-straddling folks from losing their homes, their land, and their livelihoods. He truly believes his acts are noble, which makes it difficult to root against him.
On the other side sits Dustin Noble (Krasinski), an environmentalist for Athena, an organization looking to prevent the spread of fracking. His agenda, too, is noble. His sad story of dead cows and a farm on land that “just turned brown and died” is heart rending, but often he comes across as a charismatic demagogue.
Both characters are flawed, and both illustrate the nebulous dialectic around this issue. In a time when the economy is still recovering, should we say no to the creation of more jobs? In fact, Butler is correct when he dispels Noble’s crunchy logic that we can’t “run everything on rainbows and happy thoughts.” If we were on the cusp of losing our homes and everything we own, would we refuse to accept the potential windfall of “good money…for doing nothing”? Maybe we would; maybe we wouldn’t, but the existence of this discussion highlights something a bit more endemic to our culture: the disconnects, the dissolution of community for individual gain.
This seems to be the thesis of Promised Land, one that makes the argument over natural gas just a symptom.
Like Butler, his partner, Sue (Frances McDorman) is a travelling salesperson for Global. Together they work to close out the town and buy up as many rights to property as possible. She’s a mother, seemingly divorced, and she only sees her son via Skype. While technology can be a blessing, it also facilitates disconnects. Sue keeps working to earn money to eventually reunite with her son. He’s across the country, and she’s constantly tasked with travelling across it. Even though “it’s only a job,” it’s a job that’s more akin to sustaining a life than her family is.
Also illustrating this point is the Town Supervisor Gerry Richards (Ken Strunk) whose first instinct is to parlay the fracking controversy into money in his pocket. Despite his role in the community, the graft offered by Global outweighs any concerns that he feigns to have.
Ultimately, these moments converge to suggest that the primary disconnect is between people and their history. For financial security, residents will forfeit their family farms to protect their future. Van Sant doesn’t castigate these people; he sympathizes, highlighting the lack of clarity in this discussion. At the same time, he portrays a contingent of folks, led by Frank Yates, (Hal Holbrooke) that are adamantly against fracking. They don’t protest and destroy property, but they don’t offer Butler the time of day, preferring to grasp on to the fleeting memories of their family and its distant success.
And perhaps what Promised Land is most trying to get at is that our choices are becoming limited. We are moving away from history. Our jobs remove us from our families. Technology assuages some of this, but it can’t replace the tangible. In a sense, the people of McKinley can take the chance that nothing will happen to them or their water. Perhaps they’re correct; perhaps they’ll get rich, but perhaps they’ve been forced to mortgage their past for the sake of their future, a situation with no clear solutions.
