American Energy Cinema

Robert Lifset is the Donald Keith Jones Associate Professor of History in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism. Raechel Lutz teaches history and civics at the Wardlaw+Hartridge School. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is assistant professor of engineering, ethics, and society at the University of Colorado Boulder.

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part 1: When Disaster Strikes
1. Blackouts, Bad Guys, and Belly Laughs: Exploring America’s First Cascading Power Failure in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968)
Julie A. Cohn
2. Meltdown: Nuclear Cinema and the Martha Mitchell Effect in The China Syndrome (1979) and SilkwoodCaroline Peyton
3. “The Juice”: The Road Warrior (1981) and the Cultural Logic of Energy Denial in the Early Days of Modern Globalization
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
4. Built for Pyro: A Perfect Inferno on the Deepwater Horizon (2016)
Tyler Priest
5. Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered Thirty-Three Years Late
Kate Brown
Part 2: Energy and Nature
6. Wings (1927): Aviation, War, and Energy
Conevery Bolton Valencius
7. Derricks and Skulls: Filming and Promoting the Extractive Landscapes of Boom Town (1940)
Michaela Rife
8. Petrodocumentary in the 1940s: The Standard Oil Photography Project, Louisiana Story (1948), and the Domestication of the US Oil Industry
Emily Roehl
9. TVA and the Price of Progress: Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960)
Donald C. Jackson
10. Do Action Movies and an Environmental Message Mix? About as Much as Oil and Water: On Deadly Ground (1994)
Teresa Sabol Spezio
Part 3: Critiquing the Western
11. Selling the American “Oil Frontier”: Tulsa (1949), Giant (1956), and American Resource Politics during the Early Cold War
Sarah Stanford-McIntyre
12. Ranches to Oil Wells: Reconfiguring the Western Hero in Hellfighters (1968) anFires of Kuwait (1992)
Ila Tyagi
13. Revisiting Matewan (1987): Upending the Appalachian “Western” and Broadening an Old Labor Tale
James R. Allison III
14. “This Is the Third World”: Coal-Fired America in Montana (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989)
Ryan Driskell Tate
15. Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water (2016)
Mark Boxell
Part 4: Energy and Morality
16. Control of the Industry: Nineteenth-Century Oil and Capitalism in High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
Alexander Finkelstein
17. The Formula (1980): Corporate Villains, Synthetic Fuel, and Environmental Fantasies
Raechel Lutz
18. “Keep Moving”: Convoy (1978), Car Films, and Petropopulism in the 1970s
Caleb Wellum
19. There Will Be Petroleum Cinema: Portraying the Corrosion of Oil Addiction in There Will Be Blood (2007)
Brian C. Black
Part 5: Energy and the State
20. There’s No Business Like Oil Business: The Allure of Tax-Sheltered Oil Income to Hollywood’s Wealthy
Yuxun Willy Tan
21. “Limitless Power at Man’s Command” A Is for Atom (1953), the Cold War, and Visions of the Nuclear Future in the 1950s
Sarah E. Robey
22. Syriana (2005): The Oil Curse and Hollywood’s 9/11 Film
Robert Lifset
23. Hoover Dam in Hollywood: Energy Anxiety in Superman (1978), Transformers (2007), and San Andreas (2015)
Daniel Macfarlane
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index