Review of Gasland (2010) by Jim H — 01 Feb 2011

Stop reading this review. Go to your faucet and see if you can light your water on fire. Seriously - people in the U.S. can light their fucking water on fire! Come back and read the rest if your house hasn't blown up.

There are some documentaries - Food Inc. comes to mind - that very simply scare the shit out of me, and Gasland is one of them. As a young obsessive-compulsive, I took refuge in the fact that even though the world was germ-ridden, I could always wash away those nasty little buggers. Now Josh Fox proved that the water table in my area (if you live in civilization, don't rest too easily because the same shit may be coming your way) may have been poisoned, and the culprit is the processes currently used to extract natural gas (there's a euphemism if I've ever heard one; who could argue with using natural gas? It's natural; what's the big deal?). Now I can't drink water or wash my hands without thinking about a shit-load of chemicals ending in "-ene" being absorbed in my skin.

One moment that particularly struck me: after Fox first lights a faucet on fire, you can see his face go from "That's was pretty cool" to "That's fucked up. This is not how life should be." It's a transition that is so natural that I don't think an actor could have pulled it off.

The film itself needed some work here and there. I would have liked to see some more ethos arguments. Give me an expert on "fracking," the process used to extract the gas, to lay out how all of this works. Hopefully s/he'd would pick better diagrams than Michelle Bachman. If they exist, what are the alternatives to the process? What is the extent of the current damage, and how can we correct it? Questions like these, and many more, are relevant, but Fox spends most of the film on pathos arguments. Our heartstrings are tugged by poisoned animals and people whose livelihoods have been destroyed. These stories are no doubt effective, but they're only part of a bigger argument.

Overall, despite the flaws in its argumentation, Fox succeeded in scaring the shit out of me. No movie since Psycho has made a shower this risky.