Whereas Louisiana Story makes the case that an oil company can build its rig, drill for oil, build a pipeline and disappear, leaving the bayou untouched and the Cajuns around the well a little richer, Thunder Bay asserts that oil drillers and shrimpers can work together. In fact, in Thunder Bay, oil drilling provides more than jobs and money, according to the film. It provides access to “the golden shrimp” fishermen have been seeking for generations, stimulating a more productive shrimp season.
Thunder Bay’s populist presentation of progress and organismic or wise use approaches to ecology seem like more viable choices for both local shrimpers and their environment. But those visions also break down in the face of the negative externalities ever present during offshore oil drilling. Although the film suggests shrimpers and oil drillers can build and maintain interdependent relationships that serve them both economically while preserving the sea and its marine life, suggesting the possibility of sustainable development in the gulf, those claims are all based in fiction (myth) rather than fact (reality).
Thunder Bay approaches off-shore oil drilling from a strictly fictional point of view, without claiming a more fact-based documentary approach to the subject, but it also illustrates a skewed point of view of oil drilling perhaps reinforced by one of the film’s star’s (James Stewart) connections to the oil industry. In her updated biography of Anthony Mann, for example, Jeanine Basinger recounts James Stewart’s connection to the film and its subject, explaining that Thunder Bay was one of three projects Stewart found and asked Mann to direct, in this case because Stewart had joined a partnership with a Texas oilman (132). Despite its weak script, Anthony Mann’s “mastery of physical space” (Basinger 132) stands out in Thunder Bay.
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