Living imperfectly between knowledge and despair: Social impact entertainment, activism, and ‘Dark Waters’
by Karim Townsend
The now defunct American film production company Participant was founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll, a billionaire entrepreneur and former president of eBay, with the aim of producing films that can be categorised as ‘Social Impact Entertainment’ (SIE). The SIE Society defines SIE as ‘all storytelling that is self-aware of its potential impact on its audiences and incorporates that knowledge to effect positive change at the individual, local, or global scale on one or more social issues’.[1] As Adam Lashinsky writes:
[Participant’s films] tackle weighty subjects such as eco-Armageddon, petro-terrorism, education reform, and women’s rights. In short they tend to reflect Skoll’s progressive, and ultimately optimistic, worldview that shining a light on the world’s problems will inspire people to band together to bring about change on a large scale. (Indeed, the name ‘Participant’ evokes a call to action.)[2]
In 2019, the Skoll Center for SIE at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television released a lengthy report positioning SIE as the ‘future’ of the film and media industries.[3] The report references several Participant films whose releases were accompanied by activist campaigns. And indeed, some of Participant’s documentary and fiction films, including An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008), Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018), and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022), among others, spurred important social and political action. In the case of An Inconvenient Truth, the SIE report claims that the Oscar-winning documentary ‘mobilized a new generation of pioneering environmental activists’.[4] Meanwhile, the release of Roma was accompanied by a campaign in collaboration with various advocacy organisations to help secure protections for domestic workers both in the United States and Mexico.[5]
Yet in screening urgent societal issues in the hopes of sustained anti-corporate activism and, ultimately, social change, many of Participant’s films trigger various tensions pertaining to the film industry, activism, and commerce. And these attendant tensions are complicated still further as a result of Skoll’s position in Hollywood as a billionaire entrepreneur, drawing attention to the neoliberal logics that undergird philanthrocapitalism.[6] Given its strong anti-corporate sentiment, the Participant film I focus on in this article – Todd Haynes’ 2019 film Dark Waters – occupies particularly fertile terrain upon which to examine these tensions. Indeed, I analyse how the film, as a media object seeking to inspire activism in viewers, navigates its status as social impact entertainment alongside its designs on commerciality.[7]
In this article, I think critically about the rhetorical strategies deployed both in the film and in the social action campaign that accompanied its release. The central issue of the film and its campaign revolves around the ecological crisis of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ (named so because of their resistance to biodegradation) and the slow violence they enact. Rob Nixon identifies the protracted operations of the climate crisis and other environmental catastrophes as key examples of slow violence, defining the term broadly as ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’.[8] This defining characteristic, for Nixon, renders slow violence ‘deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV’.[9] Yet as Nixon writes in relation to literature, ‘[b]ecause novels about slow violence suffer from a drama deficit, they risk resorting to sentimentality and political moralizing as substitutes for arresting spectacle and narrative tension’.[10] Dark Waters, as I examine, perhaps also espouses this sense of sentimentality in its attempts to elicit embodied, affective responses to the environmental injustices depicted on screen, particularly in relation to how slow violence manifests in the material body, both human and nonhuman.
Begoña Simal-González has drawn on Nixon’s work in a comparative reading of Dark Waters and Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007), analysing how the Hollywood legal thriller ‘can bypass the problems found when trying to represent slow violence’ by focusing on the corporate actors who are most culpable.[11] I, however, reflect more prominently on the film as a work of social impact entertainment, analysing how the affective charge of the film’s visual-narrative strategies of portraying slow violence may incite action on the part of the viewer in accordance with the goals of the film’s activist campaign. I examine, for instance, the rhetorical presentation of the film’s indexical images of material harm (particularly in the film’s insertion of real-life video footage of contaminated animal bodies which, as Haynes suggests, causes the line between documentary realism and the horror film to become ‘vanished’).[12] As I argue, the metonymic function of the vulnerable material body – representing the crisis of forever chemicals across species lines – serves in the film as the impetus for the will for knowledge and action on the part of the viewer.
On the question of genre, while Simal-González insightfully traces the historical context of the Hollywood legal thriller and its development throughout the twentieth century, I complement this analysis by referring to Linda Williams’ theorisations on embodied genres. In doing so, I consider how Dark Waters, as a legal thriller, bears a proximity to the melodrama – a similarly embodied genre and a key aesthetic mode of Haynes’ broader oeuvre. In my reading of the film, I examine how Haynes’ interplay of varying generic tonalities is crucial to the ecological and ethical stakes that the film represents, particularly those concerning domestic space, the nuclear family, and the shared material precarity of human and nonhuman bodies. These issues also invite intertextual engagements with Haynes’ previous films in relation to genre and the question of sincerity, allowing us to draw contrasts between the conventional Hollywood aesthetics of Dark Waters and Haynes’ often ironic and irreverent earlier work.
Beyond my analysis of Dark Waters, I reflect critically on the film’s ostensible social impact and analyse the rhetorical components of the film’s activist campaign. Moreover, I also consider how the temporal dimensions of the campaign are intertwined with ethical and political responses to slow violence. Responding to Nixon’s concept of slow violence, for instance, Max Liboiron et al. suggest ‘slow activism’ as a complementary form of politics that is similarly ‘incremental and attritional, stars no one, and is not premised on nor produces events or clear-edged representation’.[13] This response to slow violence, based in ‘ethics rather than effects’,[14] also raises implications for SIE films’ social action campaigns and the question of their material impact and success, as I discuss later.
Forever chemicals and corporate power
Dark Waters details the true story of the environmental lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), who led a vast class-action lawsuit against DuPont, an American chemical company that disposed of the unregulated chemical PFOA (known alternatively as C8) into the predominantly white working-class town of Parkersburg despite being aware of its toxicity. Ultimately, DuPont’s disposal of this chemical polluted Parkersburg’s ecosystems, causing a litany of cancers, diseases, and birth defects in both humans and nonhuman animals. Adapted primarily from the writer Nathaniel Rich’s non-fiction piece in The New York Times, ‘The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare’ (2016), the narrative of Dark Watersis instigated by a Parkersburg farmer, Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), who implores Bilott to investigate the unexplained animal deaths on his farm, bequeathing to the lawyer his archive of VHS tapes, footage of which is borrowed from the real-life Tennant’s extensive archive.[15] In his account of the real-life Tennant’s grainy and choppy video recordings, Rich characterises one particular recording as having ‘the quality of a horror movie’, with Tennant’s accompanying voiceover offering a visceral description of the material effects of forever chemicals on his cattle and nearby wildlife. Tennant then vows to expose DuPont’s ecocidal activity: ‘They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’[16]
Tennant’s efforts to record, archive, and expose the material effects of DuPont’s violence push against forever chemicals’ resistance to visibility, in the process nuancing the notion of invisibility in Nixon’s account of slow violence. As Thom Davies suggests, an overemphasis on slow violence’s ostensible invisibility serves to undermine the ‘situated knowledges’ of people who are directly exposed to, and live with, the toxicity of slow violence, such as Tennant and the residents of Parkersburg.[17] For Davies, foregrounding victims’ ‘visual, embodied, and lived experiences of toxic places’ allows us to engage more critically with Nixon’s assertion that slow violence remains hidden.[18] Tennant’s embodied, ‘situated knowledge’ of his polluted farm and its environs thus resists framings of slow violence as primarily invisible. Indeed, in its use of Tennant’s video archive, the film bears witness to the peculiar manner in which forever chemicals’ toxicity indexes and inscribes in the body the material effects of the slow violence inflicted on both the human and nonhuman.
The film’s investment in nonhuman animal embodiment in relation to slow violence is first expressed in a detailing of the effects of DuPont’s chemical pollution on Tennant’s cows. As we learn in the film and in Rich’s article, the creek running through DuPont’s property eventually became contaminated, bleaching the stones white and leading Tennant’s cows, which often drank from the water, to become ‘deranged’. In the film, we witness a cow violently charging at Tennant – a hazy point of view shot from the cow’s perspective provides a fleeting approximation of bovine subjectivity, underscoring the corporeal vulnerability shared across species lines. In another scene, Bilott watches Tennant’s VHS tapes documenting the contaminated cows’ stained teeth, rotting organs, and bloody flesh. The low-resolution of the camcorder footage renders the cows’ decaying carcasses a colourful mass of strange, unintelligible matter (Figure 1). In one video seen in the film, Tennant zooms in on a deceased cow’s decaying skull, allowing viewers to perceive in close-up the material processes of putrefaction unfolding before the camera: flies buzz on and around the cow’s head, crawling into the crevices created by the cow’s sunken eyes.[19]
Fig. 1: Contaminated bovine flesh in Dark Waters.
In Dark Waters, Tennant’s videotapes thus mobilise the connection between the animal, human, cinema, and the affective charge of the close-up, not simply as a cinematic disclosure of the material effects of slow violence, but to disrupt the hierarchical position of the human. For Laura Mulvey, ‘[t]he cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human, figure.’[20] Here, however, Tennant’s video archive extends this fascination to the nonhuman, a fascination which is deployed elsewhere in the film to place the human – especially the working class subjects who are most exposed to the dangers of forever chemicals – and nonhuman on a plane of shared vulnerability in the hopes of foregrounding broader questions of environmental ethics.
Following an investigation by veterinarians (three of whom were, notably, appointed by DuPont), the cows’ deaths were attributed to Tennant’s ostensibly poor animal husbandry,[21] a finding to which Tennant objects in the voiceover narration of his video recordings. DuPont’s shirking of responsibility here reflects how slow violence is intertwined with the environmentalism of the poor, ‘the principal casualties of slow violence’.[22] When poor communities, such as the blue-collar workers of Parkersburg, raise concerns about environmental issues, ‘they often become targets of well-funded antiscience by forces that have a legal or commercial interest in manufacturing and disseminating doubt’.[23] For Nixon, those adversely affected by this slow violence ‘must find ways to broadcast their inhabited fears’, [24] as we see in the example of Tennant’s videos, documenting the corporeal manifestations of slow violence and, in the process, inculpating corporate actors and drawing attention to the capitalist forces that enabled the proliferation of forever chemicals.
Discussing the ‘breakneck deregulations’ that have characterised contemporary neoliberalism, Nixon notes that Rachel Carson had previously flagged up the potential dangers that would arise with capitalism’s propensity for unregulated consumer products across various industries.[25] Drawing attention away from national anxieties pertaining to the Red Scare, Carson displaces this anxiety, resituating it firmly within the typical American home and its preponderance of potentially hazardous consumer goods, such as ‘the aerosol can of Doom perched on the kitchen shelf’.[26] Broader questions of biopower thus emerge in the historical context that inaugurates this commodification of forever chemicals. Bilott, for instance, learns about the military history of PFOA, a history that ultimately ties together American imperialism, war, ecology, and capitalism and its material inscriptions at the level of the corporeal body.
After suing DuPont, Bilott requests access to the company’s archives in order to ascertain whether DuPont knowingly exposed factory workers to high levels of unregulated chemicals, and whether the company disclosed the hazardous nature of these chemicals to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In a tactical move, DuPont grants Bilott access to the archives with the expectation that Bilott will never have the time to review the vast number of documents (as Bilott’s colleague says, ‘No one can go through all of this crap. Not in a million years.’). However, in a series of dissolve shots, we see Bilott spending hours painstakingly perusing DuPont’s archives (Figure 2), reconstructing a timeline of DuPont’s activity from the postwar period onwards. As Lisa Mighetto writes, Bilott ‘employs the skills of any worthy scholar: organization, synthesis, analysis, and development and articulation of an argument’.[27] Bilott learns that the company knowingly dumped hazardous chemicals into their landfill and neglected to disclose to the EPA that the chemicals were unregulated. It is this emphasis on the importance of knowledge that epitomises the film’s status as a work of SIE, yet the broader question of SIE’s balancing of its educational registers with entertainment represents challenges regarding the question of commerciality, as I broach later.
Fig. 2: Bilott uncovers DuPont’s troubling history in Dark Waters.
Nevertheless, this question of knowledge and its transmission is again foregrounded in what is perhaps the film’s centrepiece sequence. In an expository monologue to his wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway), Bilott expounds upon the history of DuPont, his speech interspersed with images from DuPont’s archives. Functioning as an audience surrogate, Sarah listens intently as Bilott maps out the history of PFOA. As Bilott explains, the synthetic chemical PFOA was invented as part of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. Upon learning that PFOA was effective at repelling the elements, it was subsequently used in waterproof coatings for military tanks and weapons. Yet, eventually, as Bilott notes,
Some companies thought, ‘Hey, why just the battlefield? Why not bring this chemical into American homes?’ […] They called it Teflon. A shining symbol of American ingenuity, made right here in the USA, in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
PFOA, branded as Teflon, with its waterproof qualities being ideal for household products such as non-stick frying pans, became embedded in circuits of postwar capitalist consumerism. In close-up shots of archival documents, we see that Teflon’s print advertisements from the 1960s, targeted primarily at American housewives, foreground efficiency in the nuclear family household and feature slogans such as ‘Your chores just got easier’ and ‘It will keep the sparkle in her smile’ (Figures 3-5). In these advertisements, an irony emerges in the contrast between Teflon’s efficiency and its enactment of slow violence. Mobilising the gendered homemaker-breadwinner model to promote to housewives the aspirational ideal of increased familial leisure time, DuPont’s ‘innovative’ consumer products ultimately lead to the destruction of the nuclear family through the cancers they cause. Yet as I discuss below, the representation of the heteronormative nuclear family in Dark Waters is complicated by the authorial voice of Haynes in the film, particularly regarding issues of genre, sincerity, and Haynes’ positionality and reputation as a maverick queer filmmaker, whose previous films, such as Safe (1995), engage critically with the nature of heteronormativity and the nuclear home.
Figs 3-5. The post-war commodification of PFOA as Teflon in Dark Waters.
Genre, embodied spectatorship, and ecological relationality
Haynes’ Safe focuses on a housewife, Carol White (Julianne Moore), who is struck by a mysterious environmental illness manifesting as extreme chemical sensitivity to everyday toxins, such as those found in household furniture, fragrances, and various foods. For Joshua Trey Barnett, Carol’s entanglements with her more-than-human environments demonstrate that ‘to live on Earth is to engage in messy forms of relationality that cannot be completely controlled, cleansed, or purified’.[28] Like Safe, Dark Waters generates a sense of spectatorial unease in its similar detailing of this ecological relationality, yet this unease is elicited with the hopes of provoking viewers to take action. The film’s interplay of genre, recalling Nixon’s observation that sentimentality often inflects narratives of slow violence in order to compensate for their lack of spectacle, is also crucial to this film-viewer relation.
Indeed, Dark Waters perhaps draws on this sentimentality – a feature often associated with melodrama – to highlight the magnitude of the toxic relationalities discussed above. Bilott’s aforementioned monologue to his wife Sarah induces – for both her and, by extension, the viewer – a contemplation of the toxicities that pervade the domestic space of the home:
They [DuPont] knew that the consumers too were being exposed and not just in Teflon. In paints, in fabrics, in raincoats, boots. To this day.
Shots of Sarah’s horrified, tear-marked face register her fear of the widespread reach of these forever chemicals (Figure 6). And although the depiction of a particular emotion of a character on screen does not necessarily evoke that same emotion in audiences,[29] Sarah’s function as a kind of audience surrogate in various moments of the film, in which she experiences sadness and fear, foregrounds how the film’s affective framework is structured around the question of embodiment – on the part of the characters on screen as well as audiences. In her well-known writing on embodiment and cinematic genres, Williams suggests that alongside pornography and horror, melodrama can be characterised by its affective capacities. As she writes, melodrama spans a broad category of films, functioning as a ‘filmic mode of stylistic and/or emotional excess’, in contrast to more ‘realistic’ examples of narrative cinema.[30]
For Williams, melodrama has often been associated with ‘the woman’s film’ and the ‘weepie’ – films addressed to women ‘in traditional status under patriarchy’,[31] a theme that has pervaded Haynes’ previous films. If the melodrama evokes the gendered dimensions of ‘weeping’ as one of the ‘pertinent features of bodily excess’,[32] it is notable that the emotional crux of the film is centred on Sarah’s tearful response to Bilott’s monologue. Yet rather than merely aiming to evoke tears in the audience through this attention to embodiment, Sarah’s emotional responses throughout the film, I argue, serve to facilitate the audience’s understanding of the stakes of PFOA. Indeed, elsewhere in the film, the gendered impact of PFOA on the body is conveyed in a scene in which the Bilotts visit Darlene Kiger (Mare Winningham), the former wife of a DuPont chemist. Sarah, with her newborn by her side, tears up again as Darlene recounts how her desire for another child was thwarted by the emergency hysterectomy she was forced to undergo as a result of her exposure to the forever chemicals brought into her home by her husband.[33] If, as Williams discusses, the ‘overwhelming pathos’ of the ‘weepie’ is necessarily tied to the ‘features of bodily excess’ that characterise the melodrama and the horror film, then here we also see how these gendered dynamics are channelled within the film to articulate the nature of embodied relations to the slow violence caused by forever chemicals.
Fig. 6: Sarah learns the truth about DuPont and forever chemicals in Dark Waters.
The sense of horror and melodrama evoked here is also entangled within the conventions of Hollywood legal thrillers. In Williams’ analysis, melodrama ‘defines a broad category of moving pictures that move us to pathos for protagonists beset by forces more powerful than they are and who are perceived as victims’.[34] Following the tradition of Hollywood political or legal thrillers, and whistleblower narratives – such as All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) and Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983), which are cited by Haynes as inspiration for Dark Waters[35] – the David-Goliath dynamics of the narrative and its victim-heroes demonstrate Williams’ suggestion that melodrama is ‘not a specific genre like the western or horror film’ but rather a ‘peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action’.[36] Or as Jonathan Goldberg writes, discussing Peter Brooks’ theorisations of the term, melodrama ‘pits exaggerated forms of good and evil in Manichean struggle’.[37]
Crucially, Williams traces how melodrama’s perceived excesses – ‘emotional manipulativeness and association with femininity’ – are recuperated through the interpretation of these qualities as ‘ironic and thus subversive of the coherence of mainstream cinema’,[38] such as the cinema of Douglas Sirk, whose melodramas have a storied influence on Haynes’ work, most explicitly in the insistent citational regimes that structure his film Far from Heaven (2002), centred on a 1950s American housewife. In light of the irony and subversion in Haynes’ broader oeuvre, the melodramatic tonalities of Dark Waters might spur the viewer to question the film in relation to his previous work. Indeed, many critics noted the film’s adherence to ‘conventional’ genre and narrative tropes, seemingly ‘played straight’, in contrast to Haynes’ often ironic and stylistically challenging earlier films.[39] The Sirkian model of melodrama, Williams writes, ultimately served to ‘[render] taboo the most crucial element of the study of melodrama: its capacity to generate emotion in audiences’.[40] It is precisely this capacity that Dark Waters, functioning as SIE, relies on to produce an informed spectator.[41]
Returning to the film’s centrepiece sequence, I suggest these dynamics are discernible when Sarah surveys her immediate surroundings, the camera slowly tracking across the home, disclosing new dimensions to the various household items that she now recognises as potentially carcinogenic. The familiar, quotidian items of the home, once seemingly innocuous, become portentous harbingers of death. We might here draw connections between Safe and Dark Waters in the ways in which the interior spaces of the nuclear home and its putative safety are encroached upon by external dangers. As Nicole Seymour suggests in her analysis of Safe, the domestic space of the house is
safe, rational, and just, whereas nature is threatening, irrational, and amoral. Houses are thus understood as ‘inside’, and the outside is then ‘the environment’, or ‘nature’.[42]
Like Safe before it, Dark Waters thus draws attention to the issues of visual epistemology that are foregrounded by Haynes to encourage reflection on the seemingly invisible nature of slow violence and its operations. In the case of Dark Waters, viewers may, like Sarah, similarly recontextualise the quotidian objects that constitute the interior spaces of the home, perhaps in turn questioning their own consumer practices. And indeed, a core component of the film’s outreach campaign, as I discuss shortly, implores viewers to avoid purchasing household products containing forever chemicals.
The embodied nature of the film-viewer relation here is thus, ultimately, rooted in ecological consciousness. This consciousness is also detailed through a disclosure of the shared vulnerability of the gendered, reproductive body across species lines. Indeed, as Bilott reveals DuPont’s history to Sarah, shots of Sarah in the hospital delivering her baby are interspersed with images of DuPont’s experiments on pregnant, nonhuman animals. Bilott explains that DuPont carried out chemical tests on pregnant rats and ‘watched them give birth to pups with deformed eyes.’ Archival photographs of dissected rats on laboratory trays are shown as Sarah is wheeled into the delivery room, creating an associative link between human and nonhuman morphologies, a link that is confirmed as Bilott recounts the effects of PFOA on DuPont’s pregnant factory workers. One pregnant employee, Bilott notes, gave birth to a son with ‘one nostril and a deformed eye’. Real-life photographs of the son, Bucky Bailey (who appears briefly in a cameo role as himself later in the film), index the material effects of PFOA on the body. After Sarah gives birth towards the end of the montage sequence, Bilott persistently asks the midwives if their baby is ‘normal’ – they reassuringly tell him that their newborn is ‘perfect’. The scene mobilises collective parental fears concerning the health of newborns to emphasise the material dangers of PFOA.
In relation to new materialist discourses, Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality serves as a useful tool for thinking through cinema’s engagements with these material dangers and their attendant questions of environmental justice. As Alaimo writes, ‘trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors’.[43] For Alaimo, although an awareness of one’s own body and the processes by which it is marked by toxins may be perceived as a ‘stunning illumination’, it is important that this awareness be fashioned into a ‘politicized knowledge practice’ in order to develop an environmental justice ethic.[44] Yet if the question of environmental justice that emerges here necessitates thinking in collective terms about how we might respond to the political and ecological implications of forever chemicals, the film’s rhetorical strategies, particularly its use of sentimentality, are worth further scrutiny. Indeed, the sentimentality with which the film deploys the figure of the imperiled human infant to foreground collective fears surrounding forever chemicals recalls common rhetorical tactics within mainstream environmentalism. In a discussion of an anti-mercury pollution ad campaign by the Sierra Club, a non-profit environmental organisation, Seymour reflects critically upon the campaign’s images of pregnant bellies with captions such as ‘This little bundle of joy is now a reservoir of mercury.’[45]For Seymour, what often remains unremarked upon in analyses of these ads are the ‘specific affective appeals of such campaigns – their sentimentality, their reverence, their serious fearmongering – as well as the existence of alternatives to such appeals’.[46]
Thus, in foregrounding the dangers of forever chemicals through a sentimental depiction of their encroachment on the heteronormative nuclear family, Dark Waters perhaps relies on the logic of reproductive futurism and sits in tension alongside Haynes’ wider oeuvre, often characterised by its engagement with irreverent queer politics.[47] Evoking the picture-perfect portraits of the white, suburban nuclear family in DuPont’s postwar Teflon ads, Haynes’ films, such as the aforementioned Safe, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Far from Heaven, and his television adaptation of Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011), critically examine the fault lines of the postwar nuclear family. Intertextual considerations of Haynes’ work thus may invite viewers to question the sincerity of the portrayal of the nuclear family to foreground the dangers of forever chemicals in Dark Waters. I suggest, however, that although the film centres the nuclear family to foreground this danger, the film also gestures towards the ways in which an environmental justice ethic necessarily entails forms of intersubjective care beyond the family, not least exemplified by the actions of Bilott himself, who risks his career to help the residents of Parkersburg. Yet this depiction of intersubjective care is to some extent contradicted by elements of the film’s outreach campaign, which arguably privileges the privatised care within the family. If the expansionist logic of forever chemicals constitutes an environmental crisis that can be understood as a hyperobject,[48] then the campaign’s emphasis on the individualised and familial responses to this global crisis represent an atomised response, capitulating to the neoliberal organisation of the family that pervades our contemporary late capitalist moment.
Social impact entertainment and the politics of care
Alongside the release of Dark Waters in 2019, Participant launched a campaign called ‘Fight Forever Chemicals’, with a website centred on the ways in which audiences may resist corporate power.[49] While the campaign’s website features testimonial videos from real-life Parkersburg residents and encourages audiences to take action by writing to their elected members of Congress, the campaign’s rhetoric is largely framed around individualised action, such as how one may avoid consumer products containing forever chemicals. Furthermore, the campaign’s central appeals turn on the question of familial protection, foregrounding the family as a structuring anchor amidst the uncertainty and indiscriminating reach of forever chemicals. As the web page’s central text reads: ‘Protect yourself and your family’ (Figure 7). The environmental justice ethic that Alaimo posits, emphasising how wider communities, ecosystems, and the more-than-human are too embroiled within this crisis, is instead displaced by atomised responses within the confines of the family. Notably, among the environmental organisations in partnership with the campaign, as we see at the bottom of the page, is the aforementioned Sierra Club, whose rhetoric, critiqued above by Seymour, draws on stereotypes associated with mainstream environmentalism and is often viewed negatively by audiences.[50]
Fig. 7: Fight Forever Chemicals: Participant’s outreach campaign for Dark Waters.
Amidst the growing discourses pertaining to care in our contemporary neoliberal era, Maurice Hamington and Michael Flower offer a working definition that foregrounds
responsive inquiry, empathy, and action […] The circumstances of precarity constitute a state wherein a caring response is called for.[51]
In the film, we see that Bilott’s decades-long fight against DuPont causes strain on his wife and family, yet he continues to work empathically, aiding the Parkersburg residents in navigating the intricacies of the class-action lawsuit, such as the lawsuit’s condition that contaminated residents may only receive their individual settlement money if they donate blood samples for testing. As we learn, approximately 70,000 residents from Parkersburg and neighbouring areas donated their blood to the study. Here, then, what we see in the broader Parkersburg community’s collective navigation of the class-action lawsuit is how the crisis caused by forever chemicals cannot be responded to within the confines of the nuclear family. As Nixon puts it, impoverished communities ‘typically have to patch together threadbare improvised alliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces’.[52]
The film reflects on these questions of family and community in a scene in which an aggrieved Parkersburg resident interrupts Bilott and his wife, who have taken their three young sons to dine at a restaurant. The resident expresses his frustrations to Bilott regarding the drawn-out process of the lawsuit following the collection of blood samples from the Parkersburg community. When Bilott reassures him that he is ‘working on it’, the man resentfully informs Bilott that it is too late, as the man’s brother has already died of testicular cancer: ‘[He] left three little boys younger than yours. But you enjoy your family.’ In light of the film’s attention to the wider community of Parkersburg, Participant’s campaign, centred on the privatised care of the family, perhaps seems at odds with the film in its capitulation to the neoliberal organisation of the private sphere. Yet structuring a social action campaign around individual actions that can be taken by audiences and their family members may also be a strategic decision in the hopes of achieving more sustained engagement, as Caty Borum Chattoo has demonstrated in relation to documentaries such as Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013). As Chattoo writes, while the question of how to inspire audiences may be difficult, ‘offering concrete individual ways to get involved in the documentary’s core social issue – even in small, incremental fashion – can help inspire audiences in the short term and over time’.[53]
With these questions in mind, then, I conclude with a consideration of the political impact of Dark Waters and its activist campaign. Zach Vasquez, for instance, references a report by a Wall Street analyst speculating whether the film, were it to be successful, would potentiate a drop in DuPont’s stock price: ‘In an appropriate bit of self-fulfilling prophecy, this speculation already caused DuPont shares to take a 2.7% hit the week before release.’[54] Indeed, previous Hollywood films with environmental themes, such as Silkwood and Erin Brockovich, also caused the real-life corporation depicted in each film to be subjected to public scrutiny following their releases.[55] It is often difficult, however, to measure any long-term political impact, as this scrutiny in many cases amounts to no more than a minor PR inconvenience for the corporations involved.[56] Ultimately, Vasquez suggests, ‘the notion that a muted adult drama about an environmental scandal from several years back could capture the zeitgeist and hold it long enough to cause an industry titan like DuPont any long lasting damage is questionable’. And as Rich writes, DuPont continues to produce unregulated chemicals.[57]
This difficulty to measure SIE films’ broader impact is, however, entwined with the issue of challenging the status quo, an aim that many of Participant’s campaigns tend to avoid. Discussing Participant’s social action campaigns, Sherry B. Ortner writes that many of these campaigns tend to be driven by aims to ‘create impact without articulating critique: social impact without social justice’.[58] And as Jens Eder suggests, the issue of measuring impact raises complex implications, both on spatial and temporal levels. As he writes, ‘a growing body of empirical studies provides evidence for significant effects, which can be direct, local, and short-term, or indirect, global, and long-term’.[59]
These complexities are hinted at in Dark Waters and in Haynes’ discussions of the film in interviews. For instance, a closing intertitle in the film informs viewers that PFOA is ‘believed to be in the blood of virtually every living creature on the planet, including 99% of humans’ and that there are growing movements to investigate around 600 related forever chemicals. Thus, rather than concluding ‘with the rewards of a win’, as Haynes puts it, the film foregrounds the necessity of ‘the act of fighting as an ongoing struggle, a primer for living imperfectly between knowledge and despair’.[60]Haynes’ words here resonate with Liboiron’s (et al.) aforementioned discussion of slow activism in the sense that Haynes similarly draws attention to the lack of resolution that characterises slow activism, a view that perhaps pushes against Participant’s more measurable and technocratic social impact agenda, which Ortner suggests is one that sees ‘social problems as technical problems to be fixed’.[61] For Liboiron et al., this slow activism responds to slow violence by foregrounding an ethics-based approach to environmental violence that ‘does not have to be immediately affective or effective, premised on an anticipated result. It can just be good.’[62]
Conclusion
Cinema has been a crucial tool for aiding audiences in grasping the ecological stakes of intermingling human-nonhuman agencies, as seen, for instance, in the case of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) and Haynes’ Safe, which both received renewed attention at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.[63] In this article, I have explored the ways in which Dark Waters thematises similar ecological issues, particularly as they pertain to more-than-human agencies, corporate capitalism, questions of community, and the political impact of environmental film in holding ecocidal corporations to account for their enabling of slow violence. Yet cinematic depictions of slow violence are met with representational challenges. As Nixon writes, representing slow violence ‘entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency’.[64] The film’s deployment of melodrama and sentimentality, as I have discussed, underscores the material impact of slow violence and instrumentalises the figure of the white nuclear family to enable the urgency of this slow violence to resound as forcefully as possible for audiences. This reading, however, is troubled by intertextual engagements with Haynes’ previous works, which reflect critically on the nuclear family and, in Safe, the ultimately oppressive nature of capitalist consumerism – a critique that is also evoked in Dark Waters through the film’s depiction of household products as potentially toxic. Further, certain scenes of Dark Waters gesture towards community beyond familial confines, as we see in the narrative’s depiction of the drawn-out processes of the class-action lawsuit.
This article has also engaged with the broader question of SIE and commerciality, a core concern since Participant’s inception. However, following financial troubles and various economic developments in the film industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hollywood labour strikes of 2023, Participant ceased operations in April 2024. As Matthew Donnelly writes, ‘The studios are just not making as many movies for adults, especially ones with a conscience.’[65] Prior to Participant’s closure, an article in The New York Times had questioned the long-term success of the company following underwhelming profit margins in 2011, reporting concerns that screening alarming environmental and societal problems may be a turn off for potential viewers ‘who usually are not looking for new worries when buying a ticket’.[66] This ultimately draws attention to the heterogenous mental dispositions of audiences and the varying responses to the emotional cues screened in SIE films. As Ortner writes, a film’s impact is ‘unpredictable for many reasons, but one of them is surely that film works at many levels and says different things to different people, individually and collectively’.[67] In contrast to Dark Waters, other films depicting environmental pollution utilise genres such as comedy. Analysing Erin Brockovich, for instance, Alexa Weik von Mossner notes that the film’s comic moments ‘provide the much needed relief from melodramatic suffering and thereby counterbalance negative emotions with more positive and pleasurable ones’.[68]
Yet regarding the issue of genre and style in Dark Waters, my aim here has not been to criticise the film’s use of melodrama and sentimentality, but rather to consider how these aesthetic strategies function rhetorically in the film as well as how they sit alongside Haynes’ previous works and the wider landscape of visual media, particularly concerning issues of social impact and activism. For Carl Plantinga, sentimentality and melodrama’s ‘depictions of virtue or political action may be idealized but nonetheless serve as worthy goals for emulation’.[69] The discursive positioning of melodrama in relation to the broader field of visual media narratives is thus significant. If we ultimately view Dark Waters as embodying tropes associated with more ‘reformist’ rather than ‘radical’ political films, it is important that we recognise the differing functions of the range of political media that sit between these two poles, as well as the various genres and styles these media deploy. Indeed, as Eder writes, ‘we need the whole variety of films to support social change’.[70]
Returning to the issue of measurable success and impact, it is crucial to note the temporal complexities regarding the question of legislative change. In the case of the aforementioned Roma, for instance, the film’s campaign to highlight the struggles of domestic workers in Mexico was only one component of broader networks of sustained activism. As Kristin Toussaint writes, although legislation passed in Mexico’s Congress to support the rights and working conditions of domestic workers, the legislation ‘didn’t pop up overnight because of the film […] What Roma and Participant’s work did was put a bigger spotlight on the issue.’[71] The legislative impact that has been demonstrated by a number of SIE films, therefore, indicates the role of film as a potential lobbying tool. For Dark Waters, specifically, this question of deploying Hollywood films as a means of lobbying has been met with contention by Republican lawmakers critical of contemporary Hollywood’s predominantly left-leaning politics. During a congressional committee hearing pertaining to forever chemicals, for example, Ruffalo was invited to speak about the film, receiving pushback from a Republican member of Congress, who criticised the Democratic Party for calling on their ‘allies’ in Hollywood to promote a film that ‘attacks private sector job creators with loose facts and hyped-up emotional rhetoric’.[72]
In a video posted on YouTube by Participant, some of the Fight Forever Chemicals campaign’s more concrete political achievements before and after the hearing are detailed.[73] The video enumerates the campaign’s successes, including the organisation of meetings between campaign representatives (such as Ruffalo, Haynes, and Bilott) and lawmakers in Washington DC and elsewhere. The film, as we learn, aided members of Congress in recognising the importance of adding protections against forever chemicals in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in 2020. The video, importantly, details the campaign’s activity beyond the United States. Indeed, the film was also presented to the European Parliament to facilitate discussions of environmental policy in the European Union. This opens up further avenues of research regarding SIE beyond Participant and Hollywood more generally, as recent European films – such as the French films Rouge / Red Soil (Farid Bentoumi, 2020) and Goliath (Frédéric Tellier, 2022), to name just two examples – have also thematised the slow violence of chemical contamination.
Amidst the ungraspable geological and planetary stakes of forever chemicals, the lingering implication of Dark Waters – and perhaps Participant’s broader slate of environmental SIE films – is ultimately one that is inextricable from a particular trope that contours mainstream environmentalism, as I have broached throughout this article: the question of knowledge and its transmission to audiences, a key issue for both SIE’s social action campaigns as well as ethics-based approaches that align with forms of slow activism. As Seymour suggests, whereas knowledge is presented in mainstream and conventional environmentalist media as ‘key’ to addressing environmental crises, including the climate crisis and, as examined here, the crisis of forever chemicals, more ‘irreverent’ environmentalist media – such as recent environmental documentaries and comedy films deploying irony and parody – demonstrate that it is ‘possible to “do” environmentalism’ without knowledge.[74] Meanwhile, Timothy Morton also broaches this question of knowledge in relation to environmentalism:
Should we stop drinking water? Should we stop drinking cow’s milk because cows eat grass, which drinks rainwater? The more we know, the harder it is to make a one-sided decision about anything.[75]
However, for Carson, writing in the 1960s, this emphasis on knowledge constitutes the primary rhetorical appeal of her influential nonfiction book Silent Spring, centred on the forever chemical DDT: ‘If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals – eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power.’[76] Over six decades later, Haynes communicates a similar sentiment, noting that a commitment to knowledge, a core tenet of SIE films, is what binds us all: ‘[I]n the massiveness of this manmade catastrophe we are invariably linked, and our knowledge and awareness are what connect us to one another […] in what is both an unending struggle for justice and a fight for our lives.’[77]
Author
Karim Townsend is a researcher at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in Film and Screen Studies. His research centres broadly on American and European film and television, with a particular focus on environmental cinema in relation to contemporary neoliberal cultural contexts. His writing has been published in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and European Journal of American Culture.
Acknowledgements
I thank Laura McMahon for her generous feedback on previous versions of this material. I also extend my gratitude to the two anonymous readers and the editorial board for their helpful comments.
References
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Chattoo, C. Story movements: How documentaries empower people and inspire social change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
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[1] See the SIE Society’s website: https://siesociety.org/what-is-sie-sbcc-csr-getting-started/.
[2] Lashinsky 2010.
[3] See Bisanz 2019.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Toussaint 2020.
[6] A term used to denote forms of philanthropy within the framework of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its emphasis on profitability. For a more in-depth critique of how Participant operates within the ‘neoliberal landscape’, see Ortner 2017.
[7] For a broader survey of environmental activism in documentary rather than fiction film, see Duvall 2017.
[8] Nixon 2011, p. 2.
[9] Ibid., p. 6.
[10] Ibid., p. 52.
[11] Simal-González 2023, p. 12.
[12] Porton & Haynes 2020, p. 6.
[13] Liboiron et al. 2018, p. 340.
[14] Ibid., p. 341.
[15] While footage from the real VHS tapes is shown in Dark Waters, the real-life Tennant’s voiceover is replaced with Camp’s voice. The videos are also shown in the documentary The Devil We Know (Stephanie Soechtig and Jeremy Seifert, 2018), which similarly depicts the history of DuPont’s activity in Parkersburg.
[16] Rich 2016.
[17] Davies 2019, p. 10
[18] Ibid., p. 11.
[19] The close-up of the cow’s eye perhaps also recalls the canonical moment of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), in which the young woman’s eye is famously slit, with a dead calf’s eye used in place of the woman’s eye for the close-up shot.
[20] Mulvey 2006, p. 11.
[21] Rich 2016.
[22] Nixon 2011, p. 4.
[23] Ibid., p. 16.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., p. xi.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Mighetto 2021, p. 341.
[28] Barnett 2017, p. 203.
[29] In other words, audiences may either accept or reject – in whole or in part – the emotional cues presented on screen. See, for example, Smith 2003, p. 12.
[30] Williams 1991, p. 3.
[31] Ibid., p. 4.
[32] Ibid.
[33] The fertility difficulties experienced by the women of Parkersburg are also depicted in the aforementioned The Devil We Know, which uses conventional extra-diegetic music cues as emotional triggers to underscore the harrowing nature of the women’s experiences.
[34] Williams 1998, p. 42.
[35] Porton & Haynes 2020, p. 6.
[36] Williams 1998, p. 42.
[37] Goldberg 2016, p. ix.
[38] Williams 1998, p. 43.
[39] Richard Lawson, for instance, calls the film a ‘fairly conventional film from an unconventional director’. See Lawson 2019.
[40] Williams 1998, p. 44.
[41] As Alexa Weik von Mossner suggests, Steven Soderbergh’s film Erin Brockovich (2000) also demonstrates the role of melodrama in inspiring ‘viewers to share [the protagonist’s] activist stance in cases of environmental injustice that affect the suffering bodies of others’. See Weik von Mossner 2014, p. 292.
[42] Seymour 2013, pp. 99-100.
[43] Alaimo 2010, p. 2.
[44] Ibid., p. 98.
[45] Seymour 2018, p. 5.
[46] Ibid. (original emphasis).
[47] For more on reproductive futurism, see Edelman 2004.
[48] See Morton 2013.
[49] The FightForeverChemicals.com website is now inactive but redirects to Participant’s main website, where information about the film and the campaign remains accessible. See https://participant.com/campaigns/Dark-Waters.
[50] For more on critical debates surrounding the Sierra Club, see Sze 2020, p. 15.
[51] Hamington & Flower 2021, p. 6.
[52] Nixon 2011, p. 4.
[53] Chattoo 2020, p. 114.
[54] Vasquez 2019.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Rich 2016.
[58] Ortner 2017, p. 536.
[59] Eder 2023, p. 104.
[60] As cited in the film’s production notes, available here: https://www.herrie.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Dark-Waters_persmap.pdf, p. 5.
[61] Ortner 2017, p. 531.
[62] Liboiron et al. 2018, p. 341.
[63] See Kritz 2020 and Geller 2022, p. 2.
[64] Nixon 2011, p. 10.
[65] Donnelly 2024.
[66] Cipley 2011.
[67] Ortner 2017, p. 537.
[68] See also Eder 2023, pp. 107-108, in which Eder provides an overview of the ‘various aesthetic, narrative, and rhetorical strategies to evoke political emotions and communicate political values’.
[69] Plantinga 2009, p. 195.
[70] Eder 2023, p. 111.
[71] Toussaint 2020.
[72] See the 2019 Congressional report ‘Toxic, Forever Chamicals [sic]: A Call for Immediate Federal Action on PFAS’, available here: https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/LC64712/text
[73] Available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx89Ys2O8wQ
[74] Seymour 2018, p. 5.
[75] Morton 2013, p. 130.
[76] Carson 2000 (orig. in 1962), p. 14.
[77] Cited in the aforementioned production notes for Dark Waters, p. 5.