“The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.” Robert Brustein.
This week I had planned on going on the Saturday outing of my hiking group as usual, but I woke up at 4 a.m. and realized I might be on the verge of a scratchy throat. A little voice inside my head told me to forgo this week, and so I rose early and sent a message to the group organizer that I would see them next week probably.
Instead I decided to rest from the stress of the week, which had been more than usual. Still I needed something to get out of the house for, and perusing Facebook I noticed a status update from Occupy Boulder suggesting that people see the movie The Big Fix, which was showing this weekend as part of the Boulder International Film Festival.
The post had a link to the Youtube trailer for the movie (link) (which is not to be confused with the 1978 Richard Dreyfuss detective movie).When I clicked on the Youtube link, I was a little suspicious, because it was from a "green" organization and mentioned the threat of "climate change," which made my eyes roll. I'm still very much a supporter of legitimate environmental causes, but from my perspective the theory of man-made climate change is way, way overblown to the point of being, well, bunk. Most of the people I know working in anything related to "climate science" actually share this belief to some degree. Something really rotten is going on, if you ask me.
Fortunately it turned out the movie was not a documentary about climate change, but rather about the fiasco of the BP Deepwater Horizon well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the injustice of it, and how big money has corrupted politics. Now that's a subject I can sink my teeth into, especially in regard to BP (formerly British Petroleum), which has close connections to a subject I've been researching for several years.
I had never heard of the Boulder International Film Festival, so naturally I was intrigued and went to their website (link), where I could buy tickets to the movie. Looking at the listings, I wished I had known about the festival sooner, but I thought it was good enough to catch a least one movie. Although I could have seen a different movie than The Big Fix, I thought it was appropriate to follow through on the initial random suggestion. Besides, how often do I get a chance to see a bona fide hippie-style environmental documentary in Boulder?
Much of the BIFF was taking place at the Boulder Theater, a nice venue to see movies downtown (and with a great neon sign), but The Big Fix was showing in the auditorium of Boulder High School. Since I'd recently been back to my own high school for productions (both the building I went to, as well as the new and inferior structure), I thought this would a nice continuation and contrast.
The high school was swarming with people with festival badges when I got there in the late afternoon. I went into the lobby and picked up my ticket at Will Call. One of the fun things about film festivals is that they are sort of a halfway phenomenon between live theater and movies.
Before the screening, I killed a few moments wandering down the hallway perusing the glass cases full of trophies from decades ago. It was nearly a carbon copy of a trophy case from my own high school just forty miles away, in a rather pleasingly fun way. Even the school colors are the same, but with the letter "B" instead of "C." It felt almost like being in a parallel universe (except our mascot was waaaayyyyy cooler, for the record).
The auditorium was about the same size as the one in my own high school as well. The ellipsoid lights hanging from the side brought a smile to my face.
Before the screening a guy from the festival came out and introduced it, and let the director (I think) speak for a few minutes. The guy from the festival said the movie was painful for him to watch, because he had been part of the Obama White House during the whole crisis, and could vouch for the truthfulness of some of the criticisms in the movie. Fortunately he made only passing mention of "climate change" and the need for "carbon solutions," which have nothing to do with the subject of real pollution and environmental degradation caused by high-level corruption.
The movie began with a short history of British Petroleum, which basically is synonymous with the history of 20th Century Iran. I was extremely pleased at the short history of the Iranian coup of 1953 and the involvement of western intelligence services. Like I said, it's a subject that I have been researching very heavily for a number of years now in connection to a particular historical individual.
The movie itself was well-produced and professional. It was presented from a highly personal viewpoint, since the film maker was from Louisiana. The suffering of the residents was portrayed very poignantly, as was the malfeasance and indifference of the corporations and the government. I was fun sitting there watching a movie criticizing a Democrat president surrounded by a bunch of people who no doubt voted for him with great enthusiasm in 2008.
Still I thought the film felt short. It didn't really tell me much I didn't already know. For all its power, the paradigm of the movie was still wallowed in the old-school "oil companies are evil" thing. Why can't the government do something? In many ways, things are far worse, and far more corrupt, than were portrayed in the movie.
What was shown was only the tip of the iceberg, or the top of the oil slick, one might say. The message could have gone a lot further, but it was probably at exactly the right temperature for the aging hippie crowd of BIFF, which sees the world in a certain way where "oil companies" are the enemy. They openly booed at the mention of the infamous Koch Brothers, who have become a convenient stalking horse for the liberals. If only we get out these bad apple rich guys...
The movie indeed hinted at the wider level of corruption, but really didn't explore it much. In the end, I thought the first few minutes of the history of Iran at the beginning were the most powerful. I wished the whole movie had been about that.
After the film, there was the normal question-and-answer session with the director. People from the audience came up to the microphone in front of the stage one after another. The level of the questions was about what I expected from a Boulder audience, and included things like: "how about the green organizations get together and endorse candidates in the upcoming election?" and "why can't the Pentagon get its gasoline from some other oil company than BP?" and "how can I boycott gas stations that use BP gasoline?"
From my seat in the auditorium, I wanted to go up to the microphone and say: "It's all way too late for any other these things. We are way past the point of no-return. We are just about to have a huge disastrous war with Iran, which no one here is mentioning, and all we can really do is spread the message of what is happening so that we can pick up the pieces after the disaster that is about to befall the entire nation."
But of course I didn't say any of those things. I didn't want to be a Cassandra. Maybe I should have said it, but I didn't.
At the end of the question-and-answer, the guy from the festival said that since this was a "Call to Action" movie, there would be a continuation of the discussion in one of the classrooms down the hallway.
I thought it would be fun to go, so on the way out of the auditorium, after depositing my ballot (I gave the movie 5 out of 5---why not?), I followed the signs down the hallway, and into a small classroom that appeared to be part of the English department of Boulder High School, or more specifically, the drama program, since the ceiling was covered with quotes about theater, including the one I cited at the top of this write-up.
I took a seat by a large poster of William Shakespeare from the 1993 Colorado Shakespeare Festival. A discussion was led by a local woman who elicited possible political actions from the people in the room, all of which seemed as quaint and old fashioned as the ones that people had brought up in the auditorium.
Everyone there seemed very concerned about defeating the pipeline that was to bring oil form the Canadian tar sands. It was the most important thing to them, it seemed. I wanted to ask why, because I don't really understand this issue. Aren't they going to drill up that oil anyway? Doesn't this just mean we'll get more of our oil from overseas, shipped by water, instead of over land?
But I kept my mouth shut of course, and my mind started to drift, like a bad high school student. After a while I noticed that on the wall in back of me, beside the Shakespeare poster, were, much to my surprise, small drawings of Ancient Greek triremes, as well as one of the Trojan Horse. On the shelf next to me was a thick text book labeled "Mythology." As the people in the room debated about a letter-writing campaign to stop the pipeline they hated, I flipped open the book and read a few paragraphs about the aftermath of the Trojan War.
End note: looking up that quote from the ceiling, I found this other one from Robert Brustein: “Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.”
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