How to Strike a Nerve: Pipeline in Perspective

November 20, 2023/by The Bay Area Film Society

I knew something was up when my coworker came into my office with the flyer.

“At first I didn’t know what this was” he said, and admittedly when he showed it to me I didn’t know at first either. It was some sort of document, typeset in an accessible print, but marked-up in red with these freehand doodles and caustic comments and vulgar language.

In the moment it took for these images to settle in my mind, I realized what it was I was looking at. Buried underneath the colorful annotations was an open letter to the Bad River Band, written and distributed by representatives of the oil company Enbridge. The mark-ups appeared to have been some individual’s open response. I acknowledged the thing with some few words of amusement.

“Yeah, but,” my coworker’s finger flew to a corner of the flyer, “what about this?”