Give me shelter: the ecology of the home in Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana

Although many documentaries explore the devastating sense of loss residents feel when their homes are lost or destroyed by everyday eco-disasters, few examine the environmental consequences of the building materials used to construct the home. Blue Vinyl (2002) and Libby, Montana (2004) move beyond lamenting eco-driven loss of the home place found in environmental documentaries from mountaintop removal films such as B. J. Gudmundsson’s Rise Up! West Virginia (2007) and Mountain Mourning(2008)[1] [open endnotes in new window] to Josh Fox’s anti-fracking expose, Gasland (2010), and unmask some of the environmental hazards of the home itself. Although their documentary approaches differ, both Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana reveal the toxic environmental hazards faced by workers constructing housing materials and the homeowners themselves, with Blue Vinyl focusing on the dangers of Polyvinyl Chloride, and Libby, Montana highlighting asbestos and its mineral source, vermiculite.

In the personal narrative-driven Blue Vinyl: The World’s First Toxic Comedy (2002), co-director and writer Judith Helfand and co-director/cinematographer Daniel B. Gold become comic detectives in their attempt to find a viable solution to Helfand’s parents’ home repair dilemma:  Is it possible to replace rotting wood siding with “products that never hurt anyone at any point in their life cycle” but still provide the economy, endurance, and good looks of cheap but toxic blue vinyl? After attempting to convince her parents to forego their new vinyl siding choice for a more environmentally friendly alternative (as long as it’s cheap and looks good), Helfand and Gold embark on an investigative journey that reveals both the dangers underpinning vinyl use and the challenge to find a viable, affordable, and environmentally friendly alternative.

In Libby, Montana, directors Drury Gunn Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis take a more traditional documentary approach to expose the health hazards asbestos has caused in Libby’s mines and factories from 1919 until their closure in 1990. Also structured like a mystery, this social documentary combines talking head and direct cinema approaches to illuminate the biggest case of community-wide exposure to a toxic substance in U.S. history, resulting at last count in an estimated 1,500 cases of lung abnormalities. The film carefully documents the history of a town that moved from logging to mining vermiculite. Ninety-two percent of  people who worked for the mine more than twenty years died from lung disease. Most condemning is evidence that W. R. Grace & Company knew the danger of asbestos and did nothing. According to the film, despite overwhelming health problems and clear signs of criminal negligence, the EPA’s arrival in 1999 leads only to more wrangling, this time over whether or not Libby should be labeled a Superfund site.

Blue Vinyl provides a narrative of discovery in which Helfand and Gold reveal what the dangers PVC mean for not only her parents and other suburbanites keen on siding their homes with vinyl, but also for PVC chemical plant workers and home dwellers nearby.  Libby, Montana documents a mystery now solved but unresolved due to bureaucratic battles by EPA officials and corporate leaders over designating the town a Superfund site. In these eco-documentaries, multiple issues of home and homelessness are explored, revealing a plethora of environmental problems that, according to Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana,  especially, should be addressed no matter how difficult the task. The repercussions of doing nothing are too toxic for both human and nonhuman nature. Overlooking these eco-disasters may turn the everyday into catastrophe, these films assert, reinforcing the power of an environmental justice movement grounded in an equitable and humane vision of home.

Although the documentary strategies applied in Blue Vinyl are more compelling than those in Libby, Montana these films both effectively illustrate the complexity of environmental justice issues. Environmental injustice, lack of human rights, and, to a certain extent, environmental racism intersect in the literal study of homes in Blue Vinyland Libby, Montana. For these films’ directors, it’s not just how you live and how you build your home, it’s where you live and what’s around you that contribute to the everyday eco-disasters associated with constructing and sustaining shelter.  

Comic Eco-Horror and The Pack: The Earth Bites Back

Unlike most vampire films with environmental leanings, the comic-horror The Pack (2010) explicitly connects vampirism and its desire for blood with humanity’s exploitation of the natural world. The Pack highlights the sometimes horrific and blood-sucking consequences of mistreating the Earth in relation to exploitative mining techniques, which destroy both the land and its human laborers. Although the film begins as a road movie with illusory romantic possibilities between a lone driver, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne) and a hitchhiker, Max (Benjamin Biolay), both genre and mood change when a drive ends at a café owned by Max’s mother, La Spack (Yolande Moreau), who hides a deadly secret that connects human and nonhuman nature. In The Pack, vampire miners and the slagheap that transformed them seek revenge.

Set around an abandoned post-industrial mine similar to the Lorraine mines of filmmaker Franck Richard’s childhood, The Pack connects vampirism to a ravaged Earth and a desecrated home. In The Pack, vampire-like ghouls are not only produced from a mine’s slagheap but also become an integral part of its byproducts, illustrating the interconnection between human and nonhuman ecologies. The specters arise only when they and the earth they inhabit are fed human blood. Unfortunately, however, The Pack’s attempts at comedy conflict with any serious message the film may be making about mining, miners, and the environment they exploited. The Pack fuses dark humor with multiple genres in its sometimes ineffective attempts to highlight that message.

The conventions of the comic road movie and Western turn monstrous when Charlotte picks up the hitchhiking Max to discourage the bikers. Music and setting changes reinforce this change with the introduction of Max, who is played by Benjamin Biolay and recognizable by most French and Belgian viewers as a singer, songwriter of songs such as “Bloodbath.” This song ties him to the horror genre and foreshadows The Pack’s blood-drinking ghouls, especially with the line, “He tells me, ‘You’re a vampire.’”Horror conventions are cemented when they reach La Spack, the dilapidated café at the end of a dark country lane where any efforts to infuse the narrative with comedy end. The tone grows even more foreboding when Max disappears into the café restroom and does not return. When Charlotte tries to find him behind a hidden door, La Spack assaults and captures her, locking her into one of the animal cages in the middle of a back room. In a makeshift torture chamber that takes Edgar Allen Poe to extremes, Charlotte and Tofu (Ian Fonteyn) are even force-fed their own blood to prepare them for their sacrifice to the vampires on the slagheap.

Connections between humanity and the earth are made explicit when this nightmare turns into eco-horror. At nightfall, the reason for Charlotte and Tofu’s blood diet is revealed. They have been prepared to feed monsters rising from the earth. Now helplessly weak, Charlotte and Tofu are flung into a coal car and pushed toward a slagheap where they are chained by their ankles. Cuts in their calves drip blood into the Earth, luring vampire ghouls dressed in mining clothes out of the soil. Eyeless, fanged and carrying mining tools, they seem to gasp for air but drink the dripping blood frantically, licking Charlotte’s leg and ripping off Tofu’s arm to drain his arteries. These monsters survive only in an earth fertilized with human blood.

The source of these horrific monsters clearly connects human and nonhuman ecologies, however, moving the narrative beyond the extreme gore of the slagheap. As Max explains to Charlotte the next morning, his mother “hasn’t always been like this. But when my brothers died, she went mad. The authorities would rather see them die in the mine than risk a firedamp explosion…. The village elders talked about a creature born of mud and the blood of the dead, miners who died underground. That always made us laugh. …. I think they dug too deep.” Max continues talking as the scene changes to an external shot of power lines crossing a large field lined with winter trees, illustrating his claim, “My mother says the earth wants blood. And we can’t refuse it.” Charlotte’s discovery of a photo album of the La Spack family miners killed in a mining accident reinforces La Spack’s claim. On a page adjacent to photos of the La Spack’s now-dead sons, a newspaper clipping declares, “We raped the earth. It’s sending us monsters.”

The horror reaches a climax at the slagheap during a battle between La Spack and a gang that includes Charlotte, Max, and the motorcycle club that followed Charlotte to the cafe. After a gruesome fight that leaves La Spack dead, her blood draining into the slagheap, the ghouls return, slaughtering everyone but Charlotte, who escapes the now-burning house through a window, exclaiming, “So the earth wants blood. I’ll give it some” as she shoots. When she reaches a field, however, the vampire ghouls rise up from the mist and follow her, feeding on her until the moon fades into morning.

The horror of this scene suggests a tragic end for Charlotte and Max and a resolution in favor of monstrous nature. Instead, Charlotte seems to survive, appropriating the now dead La Spack’s role, with Max resuming his own function as a handsome hitchhiker luring drivers in to feed the vampire ghouls they now protect. Quickly, however, the film switches from this dream sequence to a shot of Charlotte hanging on chains over the slagheap, where a vampire ghoul drinks her blood. The wind rocks the chain, and Charlotte’s blood drips into the soil. The sun comes up, and blood seems to cover the light with a hiss and red clouds. Bluegrass music ends the film, with the line “I’m down in that old coalmine,” lightening the frightening mood with perhaps ineffective humor.

Despite its weak ending and lack of originality, The Pack highlights the terrible consequences of eco-disasters associated with mining. The slagheap broaches not only the filmmaker’s childhood memories but also the real horrors of the mining industry and its exploitation of resources and labor. In Franck Richard’s own region of Lorraine, industrial medicine studies found an increased mortality from lung and stomach cancer in Lorraine iron miners (N. Chou, et al 1017). Coal mining in the region also had disastrous repercussions. According to a 1985 Los Angeles Times article, “an explosion [in February 1985] in a coal mine in France's eastern region of Lorraine killed 22 miners and injured about 100.” The article explains, “The blast, 3,450 feet underground in the Forbach mine near the West German border, was thought to have been caused by fire damp, a gas given off by coal and constituted largely of methane. When it explodes, it immediately ignites coal dust nearby.” The Pack turns these real instances of “monstrous nature” into biting horror.

Garnering Loss--James Garner, Murphy's Romance, and Ecology

Garnering Loss

Your boyfriend’s dead he says

I laugh

ask which one

but think of James Garner

my own Murphy’s Romance

staying for supper only if breakfast is included.

How do you like your eggs?

A sign maybe.

The amaryllis stops swallowing.

The cilantro dries up.

I hear people went to the wrong Roanake this weekend.

I remember stooping under a sumac

on a trail near Toledo,

turning red under its leaves

while the guide explained

fragrant bobs attract bees

stems transform into pipes

fluoresce under ultraviolet light.

I fear

my toes will grow numb

harden and fall off,

useless and without scent.

I fear

I’ll say, “I’m 60,”

just like Murphy

and the door will slam

leaving me outside

in the coming dark.

Fall and Winter and How to Boil a Frog: Eco-Problem Docs with Viable Solutions

In How to Boil a Frog, documentarian (and comedian) Jon Cooksey sets up an effective way to address environmental issues: outline the problems first, but then offer viable solutions to them. He sets up five problems before suggesting we all can work together to solve them. He first highlights overpopulation as an environmental problem that isn’t addressed because of religion and sex. Secondly he highlights the war on nature, catastrophe that is destroying oceans (with gyres and plastic plankton) and fish, trees, animal species, land and air. The third problem is the conflict between rich and poor, an issue conservatives argue we can’t address because any action might hurt the economy. The fourth problem Cooksey addresses is peak oil. According to Cooksey, oil production has reached its peak, and now extracting oil takes as much energy as the energy the oil produces. The last of these problems is perhaps the overarching repercussion of each: global warming.

For Cooksey, individuals can address all of these problems by making a few lifestyle changes. He tells us to drive past Exxon/Mobile gas stations because they have produced more than three percent of global warming since 1982. He tells us to change our “life bulbs” instead of our light bulbs, as Al Gore suggests, cutting our own emissions in multiple ways (stop eating beef because they cause more than ten percent of global warming, have no more than one child, buy used, and live in smaller dwellings with locally grown produce. Most importantly, however, he tells us to make trouble by posting video of environmental disasters on YouTube (or making movies like his).

In Fall and Winter (2014), director Matt Anderson “makes trouble” like this by laying out the long history of environmental exploitation at the root of our current global eco-crises, including not only peak oil, but also peak soil and water that may result in world-wide starvation and drought. Like Cooksey, Anderson takes a human approach to environmental catastrophe that puts solutions in the hands of humanity rather than its institutions.

( Monsanto phosphate plant and slag pour site near Soda Springs, Idaho.)

Fall and Winter presents a strong argument not only for the human causes for current eco-disasters, but also for their solutions. Most notably, the documentary elucidates how our farming practices have depleted our topsoil by drawing on the expertise of environmental journalist Richard Manning, whose book Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization offers strong evidence for the failure of our current emphasis on monoculture.

What sets Anderson’s documentary apart, however, is the recurring image of Hopi spiritual leader Thomas Banyacya’s address to the United Nations, a speech that like Anderson’s documentary, blames Westerners’ interpretation of civilization for the environmental disasters we now face. According to Banyacya’s own English translation,

Hopi in our language means a peaceful, kind, gentle, truthful people. The traditional Hopi follows the spiritual path that was given to us by Massau'u the Great Spirit. We made a sacred covenant to follow his life plan at all times, which includes the responsibility of taking care of this land and life for his divine purpose. We have never made treaties with any foreign nation, including the United States, but for many centuries we have honored this sacred agreement. Our goals are not to gain political control, monetary wealth nor military power, but rather to pray and to promote the welfare of all living beings and to preserve the world in a natural way. We still have our ancient sacred stone tablets and spiritual religious societies, which are the foundations of the Hopi way of life. Our history says our white brother should have retained those same sacred objects and spiritual foundations.

Near the end of his short presentation, Banyacya explains the choices world leaders should make for the survival of themselves and their planet:

Nature, the First People and the spirit of our ancestors are giving you loud warnings. Today, December 10, 1992, you see increasing floods, more damaging hurricanes, hail storms, climate changes and earthquakes as our prophesies said would come. Even animals and birds are warning us with strange change in their behavior such as the beaching of whales. Why do animals act like they know about the earth's problems and most humans act like they know nothing? If we humans do not wake up to the warnings, the great purification will come to destroy this world just as the previous worlds were destroyed.

Fall and Winter documents the “loud warnings” Banyacya  notes, but it also illustrates ways humans can “wake up” and change their worlds: sustainable housing, farming, and lives. Grace Lee Boggs, an activist, writer and speaker for labor, Civil Rights, and Environmental justice issues highlights the need for individual responsibility emphasized by both these films. Her work for Detroit's DETROIT SUMMER program for community gardens and youth education illustrates such an ideal. Fall and Winter and How to Boil a Frog suggest we follow her and Cooksey's examples and "make trouble" in a way that works for us.