Oh man, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is going to piss people off. Based on the vitriol from Armond White, I initially assumed the extreme right would be the most incensed. Wait, you haven’t heard of Armond White before? I’m sorry for introducing you to this rabbit hole. Armond White is a film critic for the National Review and the absolute master of nonsensical, scalding-hot takes based on his extreme and delusional politics. For example: he thinks Michael “Transformers” Bay and Zack “Batman v Superman” Snyder are cinema’s modern auteurs.
In his review for “Pipeline,” White is quoted as saying the filmmaking is sociopathic and the movie itself is a, “cold-blooded illustration of why we no longer trust our media” and that the actors “have that desperate, proto-Antifa look of the politically brainwashed.” White also makes sure to mention in the review that he doesn’t believe in climate change.
On the opposite end, in Jude Dry’s review for Indiewire, they say that the movie “fulfills a fantasy that direct action is possible [but] there’s nothing to suggest it had any political or environmental impact. The review goes on to say “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” actually doesn’t go far enough to make people wake up and listen.
So, which is it? Does the film go too far or not far enough? To answer that question you really have to look at what the filmmaker’s intentions are and what kind of movie he set out to make in the first place. Based on the nonfiction activist manifesto by Andreas Malm, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” fictionalizes his critique of pacifist climate activism and the collective despair of climate fatalists.
The film introduces eight characters: two best friends who grew up in massively polluted Long Beach, California, a Texas rancher whose wife had a miscarriage after the pipeline was put in their land, a crust-punk couple from Portland, Oregon, and a few others. Their motivations are all different, their backgrounds are varied and their educations range from college-educated to high school dropouts. All they know is Big Oil will only listen if someone takes action, so they all team up to blow up a pipeline in West Texas.
In an interview with “Filmmaker” magazine, director Daniel Goldhaber says he looked at the film as a “dramatization of ideas.” He was quickly dissuaded by his filmmaking team into making, “a piece of propaganda and starting a movement.” Instead, the film plays like an eco-terrorist take on “Oceans 11;” a heist film where nothing gets stolen and the heroes are technically the “bad guys.”
Watching “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” as a thriller and not as some filmed adaptation of the Anarchist’s Cookbook is definitely the way to enjoy the film. The constant building of tension, the perfectly calibrated performances and the economical storytelling keep the movie as a pulse-pounding and intense character drama, not an actual piece of propaganda trying to encourage people to commit domestic terrorism. It certainly doesn’t romanticize bomb making or any aspect of non-passive activism.
I guess I can understand Indiewire feeling like the film could have or should have gone further, but there’s something ugly to me about putting your own desires on another person’s piece of art. If “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was attempting to be a call to action for activists around the world, then it would be a failure, but that wasn’t Goldhaber’s intention, so he shouldn’t be called out for it. There’s nothing lazier to me than a writer who criticizes something for what they want it to be instead of for what it actually is.
Armond White thinking the film is sociopathic is the exact reason why I read his “work:” to look outside my own echo chamber and listen to a politically opposite voice so delusional in its own faux-profundity as to be consistently, unintentionally hilarious. White not only misses the point of the entire movie, but assigns his own liberal panic to the filmmaker’s intentions, completely invalidating his own point of view.
The only real way to find out whether “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” achieves what it sets out to do is up to you. I don’t think it’s going to make you want to learn how to build a bomb, but maybe it’ll re-spark a fire of activism inside you that’s already got some heat. If a movie can do that, then something really important has transpired between artist and audience. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I’m here for.
This article appears in Source Weekly April 27, 2023.
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