Louisiana Story and Separation Between Humans and the Natural World: Reviewers' Take

 

Contemporaneous reviews of the film support the claim that the film’s source of financing does not detract from its success as a work of art. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times asserts that the film “is not a submissive nod” to technology; yet, “it is recognition that the machine can be a useful friend of man, no more rapacious, in some way, than primitive man or nature themselves.” Crowther declares the scenes highlighting the oil drilling operation “the most powerful and truly eloquent phases” of Louisiana Story. Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the oil drillers, however, Crowther doubts money supplied by Standard Oil encouraged Flaherty’s perspective. Instead, Crowther asserts, “the ring of sincerity is clear in Flaherty’s film.” 

Variety calls the film “a documentary-type story told almost purely in camera terms.” The Variety review mentions that Standard Oil of New Jersey funded the production only in passing, asserting instead that Louisiana Story “has a slender, appealing story, moments of agonizing suspense, vivid atmosphere and superlative photography.” Instead of valorizing either the Cajuns or the oil drillers, the review suggests that “there are no real heroes or villains” in the film. According to Variety, “the simple Cajun family is friendly, and the oil-drilling crew is pleasant and likable.” The stylistic choices deserve the most kudos, the review asserts, with “long sequences being told by the camera, with eloquent sound effects and Virgil Thomson’s expressive music in the background” rather than through concentrated dialogue-driven scenes. 

None of these contemporaneous reviews suggest that financing by Standard Oil in any way skewed the rhetoric of Louisiana Story, even though the offshore drilling on display here is shown from the perspective of a Cajun boy. Instead, the reviews and biographical overviews of the film agree with and substantiate the message on display in the film: offshore oil drilling, even in a fragile bayou, will have no affect on the pristine wild nature around a well or on the innocent Cajuns who are enriched by mineral rights contracts and lease payments received from the drilling company, a company that enters the bayou and then all but disappears by the end of the film.

Louisiana Story and Separation Between Humans and the Natural World: The Standard Oil Connection

 

The support for oil drilling and its benefits illustrated in Louisiana Story should come as no surprise because the Standard Oil Company financed the film. In his biography of Robert Flaherty, The Innocent Eye, Arthur Calder-Marshall asserts that Standard Oil began negotiating with Flaherty as early as 1944 for “a film dramatizing to the public the risk and difficulties of getting oil from beneath the earth” (211). 

Roy Stryker, Standard Oil’s public relations officer in New Jersey, suggested that “Flaherty would produce an idea, not yet perceived, which would discover in the romance of oil-drilling a theme so compelling that it would play the commercial theatres” (211). In The World of Robert Flaherty, biographer Richard Griffith associates Standard Oil’s choice of Flaherty to direct their public relations film with the success of Nanook of the North, which had also been sponsored by a commercial company and “hailed as a classic with no complaint from anyone that its finances might be tainted” (148). 

In her biography of her husband, Frances Hubbard Flaherty takes this relationship between Flaherty and Standard Oil further, claiming that Standard Oil commissioned Flaherty despite a cynical response from a film industry that saw Flaherty as a free-lance filmmaker without the professional resources to support a film project of this size. 

According to Frances Flaherty, instead of the superficial films Hollywood produced, Standard Oil wanted “a classic, a permanent and artistic record of the contribution which the oil industry has made to civilization” presented “with the dignity and epic sweep it deserved and assure this story a lasting place on the highest plane of literature of the screen” (quoted in Flaherty 34). All of these biographical sources suggest that Flaherty has created an art piece that, as did Nanook of the North, transcends its corporate funding.

Approaches to Progress and Ecology in Louisiana Story and Thunder Bay

 

Although both films connect the oil industry with the environment, Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1948) and Anthony Mann's Thunder Bay (1953) illustrate differing visions of oil drilling, visions that draw on conflicting views of both progress and ecology. Whereas Louisiana Story advocates for a progressivist vision of progress in which corporate “big guys” rather than local “innocent” Cajuns successfully reap the benefits of modernization and an economic or “fair use” approach to ecology, Thunder Bay demonstrates a populist view of progress and an organismic or “wise use” approach to ecology. Yet both films’ representations rest on fabricated American myths, which fall flat under scrutiny. 

Louisiana Story’s progressivist perspective connects Cajuns to the natural world around them in the film. In reality, it exploits them and their land, an exploitation that demonstrates the negative consequences of economic and fair use approaches to ecology. Economic consequences affect both locals and their environment in a series of negative externalities, once again made blatant after the Deepwater Horizon disaster sixty-two years later. 

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).

Oil Films and/or Interdependence

 

 

Filmic representations following Kerr-McGee’s success draw on a drive to minimize the conflict between the fishing and oil industries and valorize oil drilling and the opportunities it brings. Both Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948) and Anthony Mann’s Thunder Bay (1953), for example, commend the oil industry for bringing wealth to an otherwise impoverished region, with differing levels of interdependence between local residents and oil company outsiders on display. 

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. 

As a testament to a continuation of this vision of interdependence, Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on this same mythology, asserting that the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.

The Search for the “Golden Shrimp”: The Myth of Interdependence in Oil Drilling Films

According to John Ezell’s Innovations in Energy: The Story of Kerr-McGee, after the first successful oil well was drilled out of sight of land in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947 by the Kerr-McGee Company, the January 1948 issue of Oil declared, “The Kerr-McGee well definitely extends the kingdom of oil into a new province that is of incalculable extent and may help assuage the all-devouring demand for gasoline and fuel oils” (quoted in Ezell 169). A reporter from the Kermac News illustrated this valorization of the success of the oil well: “Everybody shook hands with everybody twice” (quoted in Ezell 164-5). 

Completion of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2009 resulted in similar kudos. As the deepest oil and gas well ever drilled offshore, the Deepwater Horizon was lauded by Robert L. Long, Transocean Ltd.'s Chief Executive Officer. On Vermont Public Radio, Debbie Elliot asserted the same positive response to oil drilling in the Gulf. But according to Elliot, fishermen and oil companies built an interdependent relationship: “The local fishermen feared their way of life was in jeopardy when the first oilmen arrived in Cajun south Louisiana. But over the last half century, the two industries learned to live together. Oil and gas brought jobs and opportunity for many families.” 

It is this interdependent relationship between the fishing and oil industries that has taken center stage in media discussions after the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater oil rig explosion and spill in April 2010, in spite of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that seemed to demonstrate oil and wild nature don’t mix. From a contemporary perspective, the conflict between these two industries seems new, a product of the rig explosion and its aftermath. In fact, the conflict began with the first oil well in and around the Gulf in the 1910s, culminating with the Kerr-McGee’s successful well in 1947. Any conflict between the two industries, however, has been whitewashed by media representations of their relationship, building toward Elliot’s conclusion that they learned to live together because oil brought money and jobs. Oil films reflect this myth.

O Illinois!

 

O Illinois 

I’m sending you a Hollywood postcard 

a Collateral lush island 

visor 

a Dark City Shell Beach 

nightmare 

a six-year-old’s walk 

on packed sand 

bending for green sea glass 

stretching toward gorged pelicans 

climbing palmetto lined sea walls 

when the sun blisters. 

In a neighbor’s yard 

 dogs race around a collapsed pool. 

 A boxer jumps a fence 

 landing in soft snow.

Quantum of Solace and Water Wars

 

 

After Bond and Camille escape by plane and parachute into Greene’s Bolivian eco-park, they find evidence for the real reason for Greene’s establishing nature preserves: “They used dynamite,” Bond exclaims. “This used to be a riverbed. Greene isn’t after the oil. He wants the water…. It’s one dam. He’s creating drought. He’ll have built others.” With control of water, Greene and Quantum, the clandestine company he fronts can charge exorbitant prices for the resource. 

When Bond and Camille walk through a nearby village, they see firsthand the results of this manufactured drought—an empty water tank and a line of peasants coaxing drops from a dry faucet. The film’s action-filled plot resolves in conventional ways. Camille kills Medrano to avenge her family, and Bond saves her from a series of fantastic explosions and fires. Greene tries to escape, but Bond leaves him in the desert with nothing but a quart of motor oil to drink. His organization ends up killing him. 

The eco-plot, however, is resolved in ways that again highlight the film’s connection with the Bolivian Water Wars: “Well, the dam we saw will have to come down,” Bond declares. “And there’ll be others too.” Ultimately, however, Quantum of Solace most effectively illustrates the repercussions of the appropriative doctrine and its solution: a water democracy like that established in Bolivia after the recent water wars there.