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Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-12-15 19:10:36 +0000 UTC
In certain respects, Dark Waters occupies the place in Todd Haynes' filmography that something like Milk occupies in Gus Van Sant's. That's to say, this is not on par with a no-personality cash grab like Good Will Hunting. Rather, it's an instance of an artist making a conscious decision to adapt his primary artistic concerns to a more popular / populist format. Of course those ideas change in the translation. This isn't [SAFE] or Poison, much less Superstar. But there are obvious points of comparison.
In all of those previous films, Haynes considered ways in which the body was under attack from the larger world, and how that battle was largely invisible because the physical or ideological toxin -- women's beauty standards, the AIDS virus, or late capitalism itself -- had been thoroughly internalized. Dark Waters is based on a real-world instance of this problem, and so its appeal to Haynes is obvious. It's not just that the town of Parkersburg, WV, is being literally poisoned by DuPont. It's that the town relies on DuPont for its economic sustenance, and has been ideologically "duped" by the chemical giant. They believe the corporation cares about them. Likewise, Robert Billot (Mark Ruffalo) has made a career as an attorney helping chemical companies beat the rap from the EPA and other regulators. Billot himself is a toxin in the system, until he "mutates."
It's only a member of the organic, Gramscian working class, in the form of cattle farmer Wilber Tennant (Bill Camp), who can see what is in plain sight. Everything is dying, and the lone common denominator is the water that DuPont pollutes. Dark Waters has a very subtle theme throughout, which is patent obviousness, the lie that hides out in the open. Corporate capitalism achieves much of its dominance not through deception but through an arrogance of power. Tennant's videotapes are a self-made catalogue of visible effects, but who would believe him or care? The "scientists" will just provide an official lie, saying the cattle deaths were his fault. DuPont will turn all their internal documents over to Billot, as required by discovery, on the assumption that he would never be able to find what he's looking for, or would just give up. All of this underscores the basic revealed truth of the PFOA case, which is that the hidden killer (Teflon) was in fact everywhere.
This dialectic between the hidden and the disclosed is mirrored in Haynes' adoption of an accessible form for Dark Waters itself. The film hints at a mystery, but its revelation is bracing in its obviousness. But more than this, Dark Waters lays its cards on the table to tell us something we probably already know, but using the cinematic language of the courtroom drama, or at times even the action thriller. Think of it this way. The goddamned New York Times has run dozens of horrible articles profiling ordinary people in Trump Country, asking us to consider their racist, xenophobic feelings. Todd Haynes does something entirely different. He shows many of those same people as flesh-and-blood human beings in the grip of false consciousness, being reluctantly helped by one of their own. We can care for our fellow citizens, and want their lives to be better, and still understand that they are wrong, that DuPont, or Trump, does not have their best interests at heart, and that saying so is not elitism, but necessity.
