Fifteen days later Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, here is Sabotage, by Daniel Goldhaber. Another film with too much music. It’s less serious because the second is less good than the first. In both cases, our heroes wonder how to save humanity and find nothing better than setting off bombs. In Sabotage, half a dozen retarded teenagers, sensitive to the misdeeds of industrialization and powerless to make things happen, decide to sabotage an oil pipeline crossing Texas. It is derisory, therefore symbolic.
As always with American cinema, we don’t understand everything. In this case, why are two separate explosions necessary, one in the basement the other in the open air, and why is it necessary, just before triggering these explosions, to close the big tap lost in the middle of the desert? We can, if we know any, question specialists in the oil industry and the chemistry of explosives, like the eminent jurists I consulted to shed light on the obscurities of the judicial series. Suits : they’ll explain to you that there’s nothing to understand, nothing you see on the screen holds up, it’s just the imaginary tinkering of the screenwriters who, knees under their little desks, fantasize about two eco-lovers, young and handsome, in charge of closing the big tap and who, so excited by their mission, can’t help but fire their shot, there, behind a bush while the countdown fixed on the detonators tick tock, tick tock.
Sabotage is very loosely adapted from Andreas Malm’s bestseller, How to sabotage a pipeline. Without fear or scruple, the screenwriters reduce the author’s theories to a rhetorical scoubidou woven from the threads of the characters’ infantile disputes, half babas half grunge. This does not prevent Andreas Malm from saying he is delighted with the result, betting that this film will encourage young people to blow up pipelines. A tutorial, of sorts. For the “Lenin of ecology”, Sabotage would be both What do I know? and the What to do ? of the energy transition.
The desire for power
Malm is the inventor of the concepts of “fossil capitalism” and its corollary the “capitalocene” which consist in placing the responsibility for the deterioration of the planet no longer on Man, as the Anthropocene does, but on the planet. man, abandoning hydraulic energy to invent the steam engine, first powered by wood, then coal, then oil, gas, etc. There would have been, in the middle of the 19th century, in England, a clan of ugly wealthy gentlemen who would later be called capitalists who, to satisfy their desire for enrichment, would have decided to produce more, faster, worse and for less, anything and everything, even if it means accelerating the obsolescence of products, while reducing millions of human beings to a kind of consensual slavery, riveted to production chains that are more degrading than chains on their feet convicts.
But instinct prevails over intelligence, reflex over calculation, and in this case, if we are to believe the state of the planet, it was not the instinct of self-preservation that inspired these naughty gentlemen. , but what they shared with all those of their time and ours: the desire for power. Power in its verbal sense of the ability to do, to do more, more than oneself, and more than others. It is unclear whether it is rivalry that leads to violence, or violence, eldest daughter of energy, which seeks expression in memetic crises. Let’s say it’s a circle, and very clever the ecologist who will be able to lead humans on the steep paths of deceleration, make them beat records for slowness and give up doing more than the others, while dissuading them from engaging in a bomb contest: they warm the planet.