Josh Fox is a man with a personal story to tell, and he does a fine job telling it in his documentary film, Gasland. Over the course of the film, Mr. Fox lays out an argument against Hydraulic Fracturing, gathering anecdotal evidence as he travels across the United States interviewing people who can light their tap water on fire, people who have lost relatives to cancer after their ground water was allegedly contaminated.
The film is a strange combination of fascinating components: artful amateur cinematography, lengthy editorial stretches of voice over, tastes of american banjo music, documentation of a public hearing involving representatives of the major natural gas companies and some regurgitations of science. Gasland doubles as a political film and a portrait of a part of rural America that exists in every state and is often unseen in the films and TV shows which we allow to define our culture, save the occasional Winter’s Bone. We see interviews with true American characters: a man in a cowboy hat with buffalo upholstered couches in his living room, a third generation cattle farmer with a wife and children to worry about, a woman who preserved the birds and rabbits that she found dead in a creek by her house after a gas spill by tying them up in walmart bags and storing them in her freezer. We even hear from the mayor of the town of Dish, Texas, home to free Dish Network for all of it’s residents for the next ten years.
Fox was first a man with a cause, before he became a man with a camera. His film is intended to be a piece of propaganda, a call to arms for more investigation to be done into fracking and the threats it could pose to America’s drinking water and natural lands. This is all too apparent in his highly personal style of communication. The audience cannot help but like the man they see and hear talking about growing up in a hippy family in the Pennsylvania woods. The film is effective in creating a sense of unease about what the government and the gas companies are not doing to protect the public. However, the film is not a diligently researched or competently investigated examination of the situation. I have my own, largely negative, opinions of the practice of Hydraulic Fracturing and the risks it poses, and I hope that Mr. Fox’s film will help raise awareness about the issue to the point where several better researched and more thoroughly scientific accounts of what is happening in the US natural gas industry become mainstream.
That said, please see this movie.
