Back in late 2021, I saw chatter online about a new book called How To Blow Up A Pipeline with a cover the orange of neon 🐷warning signs. I was dumbstruck by the straightforward radicalism of the title (and nervous I might get put on a watchlist for Googling it). Still, deeply frustrated as I was with the lack of climate progress happening through legally sanctioned means, I bought a copy. As I waited for it to arrive, I wondered if it would actually tell me how to do what the title suggested.
It didn’t, but I was still captivated (and convinced) by Andreas Malm’s call for the sabotage of the infrastructure responsible for the destruction of our planet. Malm, a climate activist and author working out of Sweden, offered simple examples of the kind of activism he had taken part in, like a group of activists wedging pebbles the size of peppercorns in the air valves of SUV tires to deflate them, then leaving behind a flier on the windshield to explain the rationale behind the sabotage. After doing this for months, Malm writes that SUV sales in Sweden were down. It doesn't matter much if one person stops driving an SUV, but what if the fear of being late for work encourages hundreds to ditch their gas-guzzlers, or thousands to not buy one in the first place? When do personal choices add up to a material difference?
Those are questions the book works through, and two years after it was published, a movie with the same name, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, and written by Goldhaber, Jordan Sjol, and star Ariela Barer, is dramatizing those questions in multiplexes around the world. Characters discuss ideas that Malm lays out in the book, like the necessity of a movement having a flank that is willing to escalate, making the powers that be more willing to negotiate with the non-violent flank. The tire-and-flier tactic even shows up in the movie, but the humble pebble has been replaced by a more cinematic knife. The film isn't a straightforward adaptation of the book, but instead takes the source material as a mission statement and builds a propulsive narrative around it.
That story follows a group of young people who meet in rural Texas to create improvised explosives, strap them to a pipeline, and blow it up with minimal leakage and collateral damage. It's a compelling heist film that begins in the action before turning back the clock to give backstory on each of its characters, showing what radicalized them, the experiences that pushed them to embrace actions which they know will get them labeled "terrorists." This gives the movie a terrific rhythm as you become entranced by the tense action and bubbling synth score, only to get pulled away right as the plan appears to be going to shit. This makes every moment of backstory a moment of tension.
It's a triumphant and entertaining piece of art, but I'm most impressed that it exists at all. I went to a multiplex on Saturday night, sat down in an auditorium not far from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and watched a movie that lionizes a group of young people destroying oil infrastructure (with a decent crowd, no less). It's rare that we get movies with politics this clear-eyed, even when depicting the events of the past. In 2021, I found it remarkable that Warner Bros. was willing to distribute Judas and the Black Messiah, which depicted the Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton as heroes, and the FBI as murderous villains. It takes a lot of money to make a movie, and people with a lot of money don't tend to have radical left-wing politics. Corporations may posture as being progressive, but it's rare that they willingly fund projects that are ideologically opposed to their very existence.
That's why How To Blow Up A Pipeline feels so thrillingly dangerous. If it's difficult to secure the money to present figures from the 1960s as heroic, how much more difficult is it to present characters doing illegal actions that could potentially hurt a corporation's bottom line now in that light? Those people are my heroes, but it's remarkable that the team behind the film was able to secure enough funding to depict them as heroes on the big screen.