American Energy Cinema ed. by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre (review)

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Reviewed by:

• American Energy Cinema ed. by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre
• Micah Donohue

Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, eds., American Energy Cinema. Morgantown: West Virginia UP, 2023. 360 pp. Paper, $29.99; e-book, $29.99.

The editors of American Energy Cinema explain that this volume, which collects the work of scholars and industry professionals, analyzes how Hollywood "filmmakers have portrayed energy and energy industries across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century" (3). The contributors evaluate an impressive array of US films (and one miniseries), which range from well-known early classics like Wings (1927) and Boom Town (1940) through films reflecting—and reflecting on—the oil crises of the 1970s to contemporary energy-themed films like There Will be Blood (2007), San Andreas (2015), and Deep Water Horizon (2016). (The most contemporary work discussed is the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl.) Methodologically, the essays employ historical "methods and foci" to survey the sociopolitical contexts informing more than a century's worth of cinema telling the highly ambivalent story of the United States' fraught relationship to electricity, hydropower, nuclear energy, and, above all, oil. Each chapter is essentially a case study, spotlighting one or two films. The overall effect of American Energy Cinema is like that of a bustling film festival exhibiting works sure to be of interest to historians, film scholars, energy scholars, and environmental studies scholars.

American Energy Cinema divides into five chronologically organized parts that follow the same basic structure. Each section begins with a chapter on a film from the early or middle-part of the twentieth century, and it concludes with a chapter on a film from the end of the twentieth century or the start of the twenty-first century. Part 1, "When Disaster Strikes," addresses filmic depictions of energy [End Page 85] catastrophes (or near catastrophes) such as cascading power outages, nuclear reactor meltdowns, and oil spills. Part 2, "Energy and Nature," focuses on the environmental effects of energy extraction/use and the relationships between energy cinema and environmental movements. Part 3, "Critiquing the Western," details several intersections between energy cinema and the western genre. Part 4, "Energy and Morality," explores the ambiguous ethical dimensions of US energy films and how those films register changing moral attitudes about energy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume concludes with "Energy and the State," which foregrounds the role of governmental policies and political ideologies in US histories of energy and their complicated representation in film. These five sections combine to form a coherent and highly informative narrative about "the different ways that Americans have understood energy creation and use" during the last one hundred years (12).

Readers of Western American Literature will understandably gravitate toward part 3, "Critiquing the Western." As case studies, these five chapters—on Tulsa (1949) and Giant (1956); Hellfighters (1968) and The Fires of Kuwait (1992); Matewan (1987); Montana (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989); and Hell or Highwater (2016), respectively—offer probing and insightful analyses of these films that document, principally, growing anxiety about the "changing oil landscape" in the United States and abroad (167). As genuine "critiques" of the Western, however, they do not offer much that's truly new. To note, for instance, that "Tulsa screenwriter Frank Nugent" was also the screenwriter of The Searchers (1956), "one of the highest grossing Westerns of all time" (175), is an interesting connection to make, but it needs to be paired with more recent scholarship about the Western than Richard Slotkin's, and it needs to buttress more innovative critiques about the genre than that it traffics in "national expansion" and "conquest" (175). Similarly, to argue through—again, in terms of US energy history, very illuminating—readings of Montana and Powwow Highway that the "post-Western … remains rooted in Western experiences but is shorn of myths and commentary" does not add anything substantive to postwestern and revisionist western scholarship (207–08). As discussions of oil, coal, and labor in the US West (which often serves as a synecdoche for national concerns), these chapters will unquestionably reward their readers. But as contributions [End Page 86] to a deeper understanding or rethinking of the...