How to Strike a Nerve: Pipeline in Perspective

by Trey Sorensen

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?”

I looked. I still remember the feeling of my eyes flashing, the blacks of my pupils almost spilling out across my irises as I took in what I saw with great surprise: an advertisement for the film society’s upcoming screening of How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

On an intuition, I went to the business next door and checked its bulletin. Sure enough, there it was: the same marked-up flyer, advertising our event.

Unaffiliated, unauthorized and unapproved.

And so began this new and recent chapter of my life–the story of the movie that took on a life of its own and of a well-meaning non-profit that would come to know what it would mean to be in over its head. What has followed has been weeks of controversy and hardship. There are looks of shock and disbelief as I go about town telling people even just the name of the film. Local businesses, long willing to put up any flyer I give them, now deny this film that same chance–or in one case, asking that I provide a statement, a script for the shopkeepers to refer to should there be any grief.

Then there were the complaints. Some made directly to the film society, others circulating across social media, and others still made even to our season sponsors. “You gotta hit them where they get the money,” I saw posted on Facebook.

It has all been so much for some of our board that one member even stated they “wished we had never chosen to screen the film in the first place.” Such an expression is somewhat unheard of here at BAFS.

For those of you not in the know–say, locals living under rocks or Internet surfers “just passing by”–the Chequamegon Bay Area is pipeline country. Enbridge’s Line 5 currently runs across Northwest Wisconsin and through the Bad River Reservation. The band won a legal battle against Enbridge, forcing the company to reroute the line with the band’s final approval.

And apparently it’s a very big deal and people get very upset and have very strong opinions about it and we should have known better. Go figure.

Now, deep breath in. I’d just like to take a calm, collected moment to write about the film. Full spoilers ahead.

First, to the defense of the detractors: I admit that elements of Pipeline are propagandist in nature. It has an agenda, and opponents to that agenda, as they are represented in the film, are framed in unintimate wide shots, a way to literally distance them from you and the experiences you share with the main characters. This enemy is faceless, resourceful, and technologically superior through their use of drones and firearms and by the latter also far more eager to employ violence than our heroes, the underdogs.

Indeed, though they are saboteurs, it should be pointed out that our protagonists are not killers. This is a moral victory. Their violence, if it can be called that, is against property and against societal structures and systems–inanimate things. In a tale of ends justifying means, then, immediate and practical repercussions of their actions against these non living entities and how this may affect those living entities that depend on these systems are not considered or explored seriously. A “middle ground, voice of reason” type of character does present itself in the government agent who has compromised one of our leads, but this character does not exist so much as to provide complexity to the film’s opinion as it does to be another point to be attacked, another pillar to be destroyed.

Then there are those elements of Pipeline which provide it with more nuance, sense of irony and ground it to a reality of consequences. The status quo of law and order is maintained; though successful in their mission, several of those responsible for the subject sabotage are arrested and charged. Some are gruesomely maimed. It’s good work (as the film presents it) but it is not without sacrifice. This sort of brutal honesty is what stops me from calling the film propaganda outright, as traditional examples of the phenomena are noted for their obfuscation or omission of unsavory elements.

One complaint that the film society received regarding Pipeline mentioned how our films “promote a culture.” While that may be true, I think then it would also be just as true and just as fair to say that our films promote discussion. There is an expectation that our audiences conduct themselves respectably and, though it is not guaranteed, it is ultimately each individual audience member’s responsibility that they engage critically and safely with the films they come to see.

It has been a privilege that the film society has been able to hold our screenings these many years peacefully, without disruption or incident. We will continue to advertise any and all of our films widely and effectively, for the sake of building the most supportive and open-minded audience possible.

But a line was crossed just a day before the screening. As is routine, the Bay Theater promoted our film’s screening directly to their Facebook–no endorsement of agenda, just a simple advertisement. There were calls to boycott the theater out of business, or to even block the doors to keep people from entering. Individuals of theater management were called out specifically by name, and in one particularly frightening case an individual publicly entertained the idea of “making a movie called How to Blow Up a Theater Filled with Liberals.”

The police were promptly notified, and I personally had reached out to community members belonging to local activist groups to be on stand-by, should there be any need for a body of support or even the organization of a counter-protest against this bad element. Thankfully, however, the screenings proceeded without incident and, if anything, all the public negative attention the event had stirred actually brought out a number of new faces of support. We did very well with membership and sponsorship sales.

One immediate consequence of this whole episode has been a change of policy: the Bay Theater will no longer advertise our events through any of their channels as a means of distancing their business from our organization. This is an unfortunate development, but understandable given that, perceivably, it was the Bay that received the most flack for these screenings, not BAFS.

I am proud of how both the film society and the Bay Theater refused to back down in the face of this antagonism, because if we were to allow these bullies to win, then they wouldn’t stop at the films we want to watch–next they’d come for the books we want to read, the gods we want to worship, and the people we want to love. We are not backing down. Not now, not ever.

See you at the movies.