For the official version of record, see here:
Calmes, D. (2025). Violent Labour and the Labour of a Violent Genre: Hell or High Water (2016) and the Contemporary Western. Media Theory, 9(1), 59–84. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1165
Violent Labour and the Labour of a Violent Genre: Hell or High Water (2016) and the Contemporary Western
DYLAN CALMES
University of Alberta, CANADA
Abstract
This article offers a symptomatic reading of the 2016 Western genre film Hell or High Water, analyzing first the film’s narration of the changes to the oil-based nuclear family in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. The article finds in this version of the family a key example of grieving for modernity itself, the condition Stephanie LeMeneger defines as ‘petromelancholia’. Next the article scrutinizes the bank robber archetype as it finds purchase as Western hero once again in the labour defeat following the recession. Finally, the article looks to the rhythms of the Western genre form as a way to understand Hannah Appel’s infrastructural time and oil time. Each interpretive level in the article foregrounds the violent labour of the Western genre itself.
Keywords
Genre, Family, Oil, Violent Labour
Hell or High Water is a 2016 Western genre film set in a post housing bubble West Texas. In this precarious environment, brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) must acquire forty-three thousand dollars by week’s end to pay off a reverse mortgage and back taxes on their family ranch before it is foreclosed on and taken by the bank. The brothers drive through a blighted Texas going from small town to small town robbing tiny local West Midland bank branches of their small, less traceable bills. This is a West Texas seen mostly in the mirrors of getaway cars (usually ones from recently defunct American auto brands: Pontiacs and Mercurys), hidden behind billboards for payday loans and debt relief, screened by pumpjacks whirling away or DOT-111 oil tank cars running along train tracks. It is oil that makes the ranch worth robbing for as it has been discovered on the family farm and will, once developed, ensure a life removed from Great Recession austerity. Texas Rangers Marcus and Alberto (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) hunt the brothers and the tension in the film is generated by the open question of whether Toby and Tanner will be able to rob enough banks in time to ensure they benefit from permanent oil prosperity. The question is not whether the oil will be developed but whether it’s the bank or the brothers who get the benefit. Despite several Academy Award nominations, box office success and reviewer praise, Hell or High Water has not received much in the way of critical commentary from within the academy[1].
This paper will read the film in light of the Western genre and employ a reading hermeneutic influenced by Fredric Jameson (1981). It begins with the film’s narrative, placing Hell or High Water within Daniel Worden’s oil Western periodizing framework, noting how the film, at least by what it omits, recognizes the violence necessary to maintain the oil constituted “petrofamily,” the term this paper uses to describe the post-war nuclear family. The paper will then recede a bit further from the film’s story to discuss the film’s use of bank robbery and social banditry and investigate what this Western labourer-hero and violent labourer has become in the post-recession Western. Zoomed out most fully, this paper will look at the film’s relationship to genre seriality and seriality’s relationship to Hannah Appel’s (2018) idea of infrastructural time. Hell or High Water can be viewed, on the level of its narrative (or as a single filmic instance), as allegorizing developmental time, where the film advances progressively from scene to scene while the brothers’ aim is to work hard and then profit in a utopian future. However, on the level of genre, this progressive narrative is complicated. Genre implies seriality, and the film’s ending plays on the possibility of a sequel. As it turns out, the violent, repetitive cyclicality of genre time looks a lot like oil time but given its constitutive and unstable mix, genre time looks like Appel’s infrastructural time, too. Taken together, on each hermeneutic level, the film shows an ideologically confused mix where, importantly, each interpretive level shows a denuded copy of some previously more compelling dynamic.
Moreover, Hell or High Water offers different insights into violent labour at these various levels of interpretation. Violent labour denotes an expansive category in this paper, a term that links the labours necessary for the creation and upkeep of the nuclear family to the various character archetypes of the Western genre—labourers that rely on violence for their role in Western narratives, such as lawmen and outlaws. Finally, this term defines the imaginative work that oil does as it comes to stand in for development and modernity more generally. This exploration of violent labour all comes through the discussion of the Western genre, a genre inextricably linked to violence as a form of labour. Indeed, from the earliest days of the Western as an object for critical appraisal it has been viewed as a genre uniquely defined by its relationship to violence.[2] So too is the genre inexorably connected to the violent dispossession and genocide of the native peoples of North America, as well as the colonial project of justifying and erasing the specificity of this history. This is to say nothing of the violence depicted in Western films and the violence that must be watched by audiences and critics studying Western texts, much less the quite literal violence involved in filming the recent Western, Rust (2024). Violence is so crucial to the genre in all facets of its existence that this paper views the Western as its own sort of violent labour.
Lastly, it is important to foreground that in interpreting a contemporary film, the question of mediation is unavoidable. For Annie McClanahan (2017: 24-25) the key difficulty faced by post-recession works of art is specifically one of mediation. In writing stories about the financial crisis, these texts attempt “to move between the small scale of the individual and the larger scale of the social and historical whole”—the story of the financier as an attempt to tell the story of the financial collapse (2017: 42). The works she analyzes are interesting for the ways they fail to make this movement. Indeed, the complexity and inscrutability, the sheer inability for one person to get a wide enough view to glimpse this social totality is, of course, one of the conditions Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies in Postmodernism. But it can help to remember that this difficulty is in some ways fundamental. Jameson (1988: 75-76) also writes that “the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey…is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge.” Mediation is a difficult, perhaps even impossible problem, but it is the one that works of art are meant to investigate. They are the way we work on the problem that we live all our lives with, and it is why a broader discussion of peak oil, the Great Recession, and violent labour is best conducted through what a film like Hell or High Water knows, intuits and reveals by not knowing.
This paper is then primarily a symptomatic reading of Hell or High Water; but it also wishes to test the limits of this sort of reading. A discussion of the film is an opportunity to outline a larger dynamic at work in contemporary Western genre texts. Thus, in the conclusion, this paper wants to take stock of the contemporary Western genre and suggest how, beyond symptom, what the contemporary Western can do is give one the experience of the transformation of the violent utilizing resource logic of capitalism into its opposite. In the dialectical interaction of the contemporary Western genre and the contemporary work of art, this paper eventually identifies this experience as one offering just the sort of mediation that is so difficult for post-recession texts to accomplish.
Hydrocarbon nostalgia or petromelancholia?
Mark Boxell (2023) writes one of the only sustained academic treatments of Hell or High Water[3] in the useful essay, ‘Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water’ (2016). Boxell (2023: 222) argues the film fails at the stated goals of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan which were to write a film articulating the connection between finance and banking, and rural, blue-collar poverty. The film makes no mention of climate change, even though it was written, in part, as a direct response to unprecedented drought affecting its West Texas setting. The film cannot then connect the oil industry to the economic and environmental destruction of the West Texas communities it is interested in. Ultimately, the film takes hydrocarbon extraction as the one bulwark available during economic downturn and still a viable, if lucky, means out of poverty for some rural labourers. Hell or High Water accesses older “antimonopoly Populist [and] late-twentieth century antifederal sagebrush rebel” narratives in its attempted critique of financial institutions in the wake of the Great Recession (2023: 225). Yet the film’s narrative operates only because it engages in the “black gold” trope of the lucky strike enriching a small landowner. In the present, this trope is an example of “hydrocarbon nostalgia” (2023: 223), a term Boxell (2023: 218) uses to denote the “resurrect[ion of] longstanding myths about the power of ‘black gold’ to enrich rural communities and reinforc[e] popular conservative tropes centered on the liberation of poor, white Americans through collaboration with fossil fuel producers.” Boxell points out that this sort of wealth is anachronistic in a contemporary world where landowners often lack the mineral rights to their own properties (not to mention the environmental destruction extraction brings which endanger the only other ways of life available to the West Texan—ranching and farming). Ultimately, for Boxell, the film points out how much we need newer narratives that go beyond those of the 19th century. What the film shows is that there is an opening for a narrative that can transcend hydrocarbon nostalgia by linking finance and climate change to economic hardship.[4]
Boxell’s work is extremely useful for historicizing the development of the film, and for showing a key error in the film’s thinking, but this paper is less convinced that there is very much of a positive portrayal of the oil strike in Hell or High Water. The film convincingly shows how, while the “black gold” narrative might still be alive, what it delivers is significantly less than what it once promised. Not only that, but the film shows the grave personal stakes of even this modest delivery. This paper will show how, while the film certainly engages in hydrocarbon nostalgia, this feeling is better understood as an instance of what Stephanie LeMenager (2014) calls “petromelancholia.”This is the affect LeMenager (2014: 104) uses to describe the contemporary condition of “an unresolvable grieving of modernity itself.” The distinction is between a nostalgia that must be overcome and replaced by a new narrative type, and a feeling providing information about the present condition of our society’s attachment to oil. Lastly, beyond further dialing in the specifics of what the film symptomatically shows, this paper has greater ambitions for the Western genre and, as it will show much later, there is a dynamic at play in contemporary Western genre work that non-narratively holds some of the potential Boxell calls out for.
Fossil fuel futurity in Great Recession Texas
To rethink hydrocarbon nostalgia, one must first see how Hell or High Water can be added to the Western genre schema presented in Daniel Worden’s (2012) essay ‘Fossil Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant.’ In his paper, Worden closely reads three Westerns from three different eras (and three formative moments for oil) to see how each one symptomatically exhibits its time’s relationship to oil futurity and how this futurity underwrites and determines a particular kind of family. Worden offers a way to periodize Westerns while showing the kind of oil imaginary these texts exhibit. According to Worden, the Western genre novel Giant articulates a pluralistic and multicultural American future by rejecting the avaricious life of the oil baron. However, the novel cannot see that it can only reject 19th century magnates by proposing the nineteen-fifties middle-class family, a family that is totally dependent on oil for the mobility that constitutes this kind of family. The “family ideal,” Worden (2012: 460) writes, “is premised on the consumption of…oil and consolidated through the use of the family automobile, a sign of middle-class prosperity.” Oil is hidden but necessary in Giant’s fossil fuel future vision of the family, making Giant emblematic of the sort of futurity available in the postwar boom times (where oil profits allow for a more pluralistic authority within the family and also underwrite a middle-class prosperous enough to reject 19th century monopoly capitalism). Worden (2012: 460) then looks at the soap opera Dallas where “oil is inextricable from and incapable of being subsumed within the…family.” Oil in the 70s and 80s is destabilizing and dangerous, both for the political and economic world and for the family. Yet, as the family is still constituted by oil, there is no future in Dallas without it. The Ewings must live with constant melodramatic collapse and recurrent temporary renewal pairing family vicissitudes with the destructive rhythms of oil.
The final text Worden examines is There Will Be Blood. In his schema, the film represents a fossil fuel futurity present during the Bush administration, where family has become impossible and “the oil business undoes family altogether” (2012: 460). There Will Be Blood is the only text Worden looks at that seems to offer a vision of a future that is not wholly determined by its relationship to oil. “The way to imagine life without oil,” Worden (2012: 460) writes, “might be to do what H.W. does: stop listening to oil’s claims on us; turn a deaf ear to the intimate connection forged between oil, the American family, and futurity.” The Bush administration is then a final desperate attempt to delay the oil reckoning coming for and to the American family. The administration’s myriad failures allow There Will Be Blood toanticipate and envision a future moment of conscious uncoupling from oil. Unfortunately, Hell or High Water showsWorden’s hopeful ending to be premature, offering instead a further entry into his series of Western fictions at pivotal moments in oil’s development. Memorably, Hell or High Water finds itself in an especially propitious moment in oil’s history. The filmtakes place at the interstices of the Great Recession and the moment of oil capitalism’s overcoming of the crisis of “Peak Oil.”[5]
In this way, Hell or High Water can be seen to investigate oil’s relationship to the family and futurity after the Great Recession of 2008. If There Will Be Blood is Worden’s contemporary text that finds oil in its neoliberal capitalist heyday, Hell or High Water looks at this context after the housing bubble and subsequent economic collapse. One would expect that if There Will Be Blood anticipates the rejection of oil and self-conscious dismantling of the petrofamily, then Hell or High Water might show this process in action, and in a way it does. However, in the film, the old world is dying, and yet the new world lives on as a zombified version of the old. Worden’s periodizing account pursues what amounts to an argument about ideology and how, as the family learns more about its situation regarding oil, it comes into an oil consciousness and must then choose to dissolve itself. Hell or High Water takes up this dissolution of the family, which has now happened, yet the outcome does not lead to an abandonment of oil, in fact, it leads to a retrenchment of oil.[6] What becomes clear is that the hold that both the family and oil have over the future is far more durable than the damage caused by any simple ideological unmasking, and even the acknowledgment that a particular future is impossible in itself is not enough to guarantee any new arrangement. As we will see, what this unmasking accomplishes instead is to generate melancholy and an even more tenacious clinging to the increasingly limited charms of the petrofamily.
This is not to say that the film is consciously aware of Worden’s schema or is even particularly aware how it positions the family vis-à-vis the oil fortune that accounts for the film’s plot. Nevertheless, it is instructive that family is already undone prior to any direct plot-driven intervention of the oil business in Hell or High Water. Most of the principal characters are single men. Toby is divorced and estranged from his kids, Tanner never had a chance at a family, spending most of his life in prison (for murdering his abusive father—in another instance of dissolving and impossible family in the film). The Texas Ranger pursuing them is a widower. The only character with a middle-class family that would be recognizable in Giant is killed during the course of the film. Despite no Giant-like family existing or seemingly being possible within the film, family still is presented as the chief motivation for Toby and Tanner’s decision to rob banks and save their ranch. Toby plans to create a trust with the farm’s oil revenue and sign over that trust and his land to his sons. Toby intends to have no direct material benefit from the robberies and the oil; he only wants to secure a future out of poverty for his children. Tanner, when asked why he’s helping Toby, reveals it is no more complex than that his brother asked him to do it. The question of whether the characters are motivated by the oil or by the family becomes impossible to answer, as there is no distinction between the two. But crucially, both Toby and Tanner are aware they will neither reap the benefit of a family or of the oil revenue, at least not directly.
Indeed, the film is quick to foreclose any possibility of Toby reuniting with his ex-wife and kids even when the oil resources on the ranch are developed. The family exists as a thing worth risking everything for, but not something that can be reconstituted. The family from Giant is gone in post-recession America and even oil fortune cannot bring it back. Yet this melancholic realization is made worse by the extent to which the future itself is still only seen in some version of the oil family. This means that oil must be pursued even if it cannot bring back what it once promised, and that Worden is mistaken in thinking that a dissolution of the family might lead directly to an abandonment of oil. Instead, the dissolution leads only to a longing and an attempt to reignite the affective charge of the oil-backed family. Hell or High Water,then, is one instance of the kind of “grieving of modernity itself” that Stephanie LeMenager defines as “petromelancholia” (2014: 104). Petromelancholia is, for LeMenager (2014: 105), a denial of the normal function of grief and so not part of a process of moving on from a lost attachment to a new one, but rather a politicized preservation of the beloved object. Rather than any kind of catharsis, LeMenager shows how cultural products are left simply to demonstrate this melancholic preservation. The film, then, may be engaging in nostalgic myths of oil’s prosperity as Boxell argues, but the way these myths are lived in the film reveals how hard people will fight simply to grieve for modernity, a grief that doesn’t move one any further towards acceptance of a new energy or family system. The film conclusively shows that in post-recession America, the compensatory middle-class family is no longer available, yet because there are no alternative proposals for living without oil and without the kind of family oil makes possible, an attenuated oil family is still worth bank robbing, killing, and dying for.
It is the lengths that Hell or High Water shows the characters going to that I am most interested in. Beyond being a very clear articulation of petromelancholia, it is the violence, the gambling, the risk necessary to achieve even a state of oil melancholy, to even be in a place to grieve for modernity, that makes the film worth watching and worthy of critical analysis. A pursuit of the oil futurity of the 1950s is, in the film, a cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) where it is more painful to abandon the idea of the family than it is to pursue it, even with full knowledge of the family’s impossibility. In this impossible position, all manner of violence is permissible to keep the cruel optimism going. Yet, the film narrates the stakes of this clinch. Hell or High Water shows the affective power that petromodernity in the form of the family still possesses. Yet, in keeping with the periodizing nature of Worden’s analysis it might be fairer to say that what Hell or High Water’s family narrative shows is how hard it is to pursue this kind of modernity in a post-recession world, and the ever-narrowing rewards for its pursuit.
Another way to put this is to modify Jennifer Wenzel’s (2022: 170) invocation in the essay ‘Forms of Life’ where she repeats the phrase “how much has to happen for nothing to happen.” Wenzel is reflecting on all the infrastructure, all the oil pumped, all the stuff that makes flicking a light switch work to light a room—all the story left out before the most quotidian story can begin. Once you hear Wenzel’s invocation, it is hard not to hear it everywhere. Hell or High Water as an index to the post-recession family seems to ask, “how much has to happen for nothing to happen to the petrofamily?” The bank robbing, the deaths, the outlaw and Texas Ranger cat-and-mouse-games become the normally invizibilized story that is prelude to the one viewed as mundane, the middle-class nuclear family. Yet, again what is striking in the film is that this mundane story is still a fractured family (fractured further by Tanner’s death), and an oil income that, while significant, is presented only as ensuring that Toby’s children can go to college and work as white-collar labourers rather than blue. The oil revenue may provide a middle-class life for some of the characters. That is it. It doesn’t even provide Toby with a home—he’s renting a small place at the end of the film. One is left wondering, at what point does this all cease to be enough? Hell or High Water functions thus as an allegory for the violent labour that lays the groundwork for Worden’s oil-soaked family. The film’s narrative is the normally invisible (and violent) story that serves as a prelude to switching on the light for the petrofamily. Everything that comes next is all contemporary family drama. To overstate the point a bit, the film argues that bank robbery and death, the violent labours of the outlaw, are the hidden preconditions of all family stories. They are at least the preconditions of family stories for recent entries in the Western genre. While the film shows that the kind of productive dissolution Daniel Worden sees the family coming to grips with in There Will be Blood is much further from happening, it does still make it hard to see how it can continue forever. Just like peak oil, it will come at some point. At some future date, surely, too much will have to happen for nothing to happen.
On this level of the text, the film mediates between a specific tale of bank robbery to the larger social life of the petrofamily. What one learns is that the family has collapsed post-recession, and yet a future determined by oil keeps the feeling of the family alive, so much so that it is worth killing and dying for. It is not much of a future, and one that can’t continue indefinitely. Yet one may still wonder, if the destruction of the family only reinforces a commitment to the idea of the oil family, is there any proposal in the film that offers the ability to shake one out of the petromelancholic status quo? The film can be seen as looking at one option and it is thus worth investigating how the film treats the most iconic of violent labourers of the Western: the road agent and social bandit.
Genre figures in the post-recession Western
Boxell finds in Hell or High Water a hydrocarbon nostalgia that serves as an obstacle to a changing society’s relationship to fossil fuels, while this paper reads a similar feeling as petromelancholia, finding hints of exhaustion in the maintenance of the status quo. Both formulations exist if not in synthesis, then at least together and in the same places. Essentially, the film is politically mixed up and ideologically unsorted. The film advances what might be seen as a left-wing critique of finance and banking, but pursues this critique in the form of the Western. A genre that, as Worden (2009: 222) summarizes the two critical consensuses in ‘Neoliberalism and the Western,’ is most commonly conceived as offering “a set of tropes about individualism, violence, and morality” or “as a symptom of US hegemony [in] that the Western reinforces conservative values regarding nationalism, racial identity, the necessity of violence, and American exceptionalism.” As shown previously, the family, too, is a site of indeterminacy in Hell or High Water—it must be pursued, and it cannot be had. This ambivalence leads less to an explicit critique of oil or the nuclear family as to an elucidation of petromelancholia and the violent labour necessary for this very limited satisfaction. The triumphal neoliberalism in the form of Fukuyama’s end of history is gone, but what comes next is not yet known in the film. In the film, a critique of neoliberalism can reside in a genre that could serve as a bulwark for it. Characters in the film display a strange version of this conflict, too. As the Howards rob banks, onlookers (regular citizens of West Texas) both attempt to stop them by shooting at them or forming posses to chase them, and at the same time express admiration for the brothers’ fight against the bank. Even the Texas Rangers pursuing the brothers exhibit this internal conflict. Ideologically, how a critique of banking will sort electorally is not yet known by the film, and characters are compelled both by a liberal desire to maintain rules, a neoliberal desire to both despise rule breakers and appreciate a rule breaker’s individual determination, and a yearning for something new and different in an undirected critique of banking. This mix is then, of course, all wrapped in the regressive trappings of the Western genre. This muddle is neatly articulated by the film in its use of the Western genre figure of the bank robber, a figure charged by a real past as social bandit or Robin Hood, but one whose energy ultimately dissipates like any other past cultural form metabolized by neoliberal capitalism.
One way to begin to investigate this quintessential violent labourer of the Western is to look to Michael Denning’s (1987) book Mechanic Accents. Denning (1987: 157) shows how “the year of the national railroad strike, 1877, saw the appearance of another figure of class conflict, a figure that was to cause more controversy than any other dime novel character: the road agent, the outlaw.” Bill Brown (1997: 38), in his introduction to Western dime novels, deepens this understanding, writing how the James brothers, the archetype for all future bank robbers, “achieved iconic status as a force that could interrupt capitalists (the bank) and the institutions of modernization (the train).” Hell or High Water would appear to be in a position to revitalize the outlaw figure with this image of fighting capitalists (the bank, especially one engaged in foreclosure) and modernity (oil). Yet, that is not what happens. Instead, the bank robbers do not exactly fight the bank, as we will see in a moment, and fight for oil. For Boxell, this as an individual failing of Sheridan, yet we might read the figure as hinting at a larger problem for the political potential of this sort of icon updated for the present, while also still reading the figure symptomatically for insights it is still able to offer.
One possibility the road agent’s reappearance in the film helps to remind us of is that the Great Recession was a labour defeat. As we just saw, the outlaw figure originated as an identifiable trope of the Western in the wake of the failure of the 1877 railroad strike and was a way to aesthetically seek redress for this defeat by striking at modernity and banking in one move. That the film conceives of the recession as a labour defeat (and that there was perhaps more popular understanding of this than is commonly acknowledged) is indicated in the graffiti that is framed in the opening scene of the film. It reads, “3 tours in Iraq but no bailout for people like us” (2016: 1:27). The work of imperial maintenance was done by violent labourers, regular “people like us” who, when faced with the consequences of neoliberal economic bust, get nothing for their labour. The housing bubble’s collapse provided the opportunity to redress individual homeowners, yet money was directed at banks instead, and in the wake of this defeat, a reappearance of the road agent Western character seems appropriate. Moreover, underlying this small insight, is the near constant reminder in our society of who will be seen as a violent labourer. It seems like a more readily available label for the outlaw or road agent, or the imperial soldier. The architects of the labour defeat, the Timothy Geithners and Jamie Dimons of the world are not viewed as violent labourers, only those who react when defeated by them.
Denning (1987) writes that the original appearance of the outlaw was a way to settle grudges and get revenge on the forces that defeated labour. The utopian side of this sort of violent labourer is the social bandit. Denning quotes Eric Hobsbawn’s definition of social bandit as essentially criminal in the eyes of the state and freedom fighter in the eyes of a peasantry (Denning, 1987: 162). Of course, the Western outlaw in dime novels is not part of a peasant society, but Denning (1987: 163), again quoting Hobsbawn, notes: “the period which turns institutions like banks into quintessential public villains and bank robbery into the most readily understood form of robbing the rich marks the adaptation of social banditry to capitalism.” Yet, in the case of Hell or High Water, the pursuit of the Howard brothers by not only the law, but by West Texan citizenry, puts their role as social bandits in doubt. It is a mantle the brothers seem to flirt with as well but never quite embrace either (one can think especially of Tanner’s problematic self-association with the Comanches—in his words, the “lord of the plains” (2016: 1:22:25). The rejection is stern enough that the film raises the question of whether social banditry in the form of bank robbing can be adapted to the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. As it turns out, the bandit under the sign of collapsing but still existing neoliberalism, is again an ambiguous figure. Despite the overwhelming critical feeling the West Texans have for the banks, they cannot imagine a non-selfish and non-individual reason for robbing one. The citizens are probably right in general, but they are certainly right in the particular case of the film. Noted earlier are the extremely minimal aspirations of the bank robbers. The robbery is a temporary condition to get a set (and relatively small amount) of money to pursue the discrete goal of securing future oil revenue for the brothers and not for the bank. It is an individual fight for an individual ambition. The robberies that take place are not even exactly harmful to the banks as the brothers only rob the smallest bills from the bank’s tellers. Each robbery only nets them several thousand dollars and there is no dipping into bank vaults or bundles of 100s or 20s. In the film, those big bills are “the bank’s money” (2016: 17:13). It is smart, as the money they do steal is untraceable, but it is, of course, not a real strike at the rich.
This is all eerily familiar, as Denning (1987: 161) shows, narrating the diminution of the original bank robber dime novel character from social bandit into an ambiguous figure by the late 1880s. In the dime novel genealogy, the outlaw slowly morphed into the detective and began to work with capital instead of against it, all while subsuming some of the affective charge of the original road agent. What is notable about the reentry of the outlaw in a new moment of labour failure is that the figure enters into the discourse as an already ambiguous figure, already circumscribed by its adaptation to capitalism. The neoliberal outlaw is always-already not a revolutionary. The outlaw bank robber serves as a reference to its social bandit past but is not a social bandit in the present.
It is worth dialing in why this neoliberal outlaw fails to become a social bandit, as I believe the failure explains some of what is unique in Hell or High Water. In her account of debt culture after the Great Recession, Annie McClanahan (2017) in Dead Pledges finds all sorts of successful debt revengers in her survey of post-recession horror film. “The righteous revenge exacted by the films’ debtors,” she writes, “is not simply vengeance against their particular creditors. It is also an attempt to get payback on the entire economy of private property underwritten by credit and debt, an act that refuses both calculation and closure” (2017: 183). These revenging debtors sound much more like Denning’s grudge-settling outlaws than the Howard brothers. However, what makes Hell or High Water very much not part of McClanahan’s collection of post-recession filmsis not incidental: it is of course because of its genre (Western and not horror), but also, critically, because of its relationship to oil. Disruption of the financial debt system in the refusal of closure and the enactment of revenge seems possible in both the films McClanahan examines and in the debt strikes and capital circulation sabotage she proposes at the end of her book. Yet, Hell or High Water complicates these disruptive strategies by adding the even more secret abode of capital into the post-recession imaginary—mainly, our fossil fueled energy system. Hell or High Water shows that taking revenge on banking is not the same thing as taking revenge on oil. In fact, leaving oil in place makes it possible to take revenge on banking. In the film, Toby gets away with his robberies because of his producing wells.[7] What one can read in the film is the way that our ecological debt (symbolized in this film by petromelancholia and the sad continued attachment to the petrofamily) has no easy debt jubilee. There is no fight that can lead to a moment of total forgiveness, where things can begin again anew. The carbon has been burned; it is in the atmosphere and it is in modernity itself. Some of the work of this paper then is to renew Patricia Yaeger’s (2011: 310) call for a literary critical methodology that takes into account energy both in the way that it is invisiblized behind literary narrative but also how energy works as “fields of force” determining its own phenomenological renderings of the world. This is what she calls (after Jameson) reading for a text’s “energy unconscious.” Including energy in its interpretation of Hell or High Water is crucial because it turns the family into the petrofamily, turns an oil fortune into petromelancholia, and changes revenge against finance into support for oil extraction. The final section of this paper will contend that what the film says about energy has everything to do with the film’s primary subject: oil. At the same time, because of its commitment to the Western genre, the film comes to be about its status as a work of art. The film does not offer a type of revenge that is able to take out oil at the same time as banking, but it does offer a new way to mediate and thus think about oil and finance in the same moment. Before this understanding can be developed, though, the next section needs to explain genre and genre’s most crucial feature—seriality. It is genre that helps an analysis of the film move from single instance to historicized sequence, and thus from oil to the social system more generally.
Seriality, oil time and infrastructural time
Dime novels not only help identify the history of genre figures and genre conventions; they also allow us to better see the stakes as those conventions are adopted in current Westerns. Discussions of dime novels also show the history of one of the most salient features of any genre text, mainly that of seriality. Bill Brown (1997: 22) writes that “this proliferation of series is the crucial aspect of the dime novel’s promotion that is part of a history of promotional culture wherein manufacturers orchestrate consistency and change, the effect of stability and the effect of novelty.” Genre works are successful commodities both because consumers know what they are seeing, giving genre films a ready-built audience, and because genre films themselves can, in turn, push against genre rules to create readily consumable yet apparently novel narratives and characters. Brown (1997: 27) connects this to the physical machinery of the dime novel press, writing “the technology that produced the Western was completed by the narrative technology of the Western itself—a set of interchangeable parts, a standardized structure, and a regularized rhythm of crisis and resolution, event and explanation.” The mechanical reproducibility of genre books is backed by a mechanical reproducibility of genre structures and events, where each genre text contains a “rhythm of crisis and resolution” (1997: 27). What is important for this paper to note is that this mechanical rhythm is repeated not just in texts but in the serial nature of genre itself. No single genre text can stand in for a totality, lest it jeopardize its genre character. A genre text exists in reference to the genre texts that came before it; its recognizability as a genre is dependent on this relation. Any discussion of genre necessarily involves the genre rhythms of a text in combination with the genre rhythms of the genre overall. This is essentially how Timothy Martin (2019) defines genre in his book Contemporary Drift. For Martin:
Genre, as I understand it…describes how aesthetic forms move cumulatively through history. The accretive history of genre is a measure of both change and continuity, diachrony and synchrony, pastness and presentness. Genres explain how aesthetic and cultural categories become recognizable as well as reproducible in a given moment, and they demonstrate how the conventions and expectations that make up those categories are sedimented over time (2019: 6).
Combining these definitions, genre is a serial form that exists as something that helps consumers find a recognizable product and helps authors and filmmakers provide the appearance of novelty in the modulation of a stable of reproducible genre parts. How these genre parts change over time provides a way to read the present without decontextualizing it from history. This is all to say that it is the Western genre that makes a film like Hell or High Water both writable and marketable, and that makes the violence of oil and the family (or the politics of the violent labourer) legible in the text. Essentially, a Western becomes a commodity under the same processes that it finds itself able to talk about the present in historical context. In this way, genre is an especially dense mediator of the contemporary. Thus, an attention to the adoption of the Western genre in the post-recession moment (especially an attention to the seriality of genre) can tell us quite a lot more about the themes already articulated in the film.
Thinking through genre more generally, we can make a connection between Hell or High Water and Hannah Appel’s (2018) investigation of oil time, developmental time and infrastructural time in her article ‘Infrastructural Time.’ Appel is writing in a very different context (the actual experience of living and working in Equatorial Guinea), yet she comes up with simple definitions of temporal conditions of relevance to film and genre critique. Appel (2018: 44) defines developmental time as “linearity, progress, teleology” and oil time as “repetition and cyclicality; serial frontiers; abandonment, decommission, and ruins.” Appel’s interest is in investigating infrastructural time, which she defines as the mix of developmental time and oil time. In oil producing nations, infrastructure comes to stand in for development overall as oil revenue is used to build new, tangible structures (from roads to oil rigs to modern apartment buildings for government officials and visiting oil executives). This gleaming infrastructure becomes synonymous with modernity. Development condenses into infrastructure which itself then becomes modernity, in a process that removes future options with each narrowing. This narrowing of future options is especially clear when looking at examples of specific oil producing nations as the nature of all the constructed infrastructure is that it will be abandoned, and then redeveloped and abandoned all over again. Infrastructure must continually be redone as it allows for graft and corruption and new rounds of violent dispossession. This is the reality of ‘development’ under the sign of oil time. Appel demonstrates that the nature of infrastructural time is the mix of oil’s very material disruptions and the narrative futurity of developmental time.
An analogy can be made to genre, where developmental time looks like the individual narrative of a particular genre text. Hell or High Water progresses from one robbery to the next as the stakes of the robberies become apparent and tension builds as the consequences of the robberies are revealed, and the audience waits to see if the brothers can save their ranch. On the other hand, the serial nature of the violent Western genre looks like oil time—“repetition and cyclicality; serial frontiers; abandonment, decommission, and ruins,” is nearly as good a definition of the Western as it is of oil (Appel, 2018: 44). Hell or High Water functions because of the violent repetitions of past Westerns with the end of the film leaving itself open to a continuation of the genre. Each successful Western begets another Western. This repetitive, and cyclical violence, in fact, is deliberately toyed with at the end of the film.
One genre convention that Hell or High Water fails to deliver on is a duel between a Texas Ranger and one of the brothers. However, the film acknowledges this in what amounts to an epilogue. Marcus, the Texas Ranger, comes to visit Toby on the now-saved ranch. Toby is renovating his mother’s former home and new pumpjacks whirl and rhythmically dip their beaks beside the house. In a tense exchange Toby tells Marcus, “See if you can grab that pistol before I blast you off this porch” (2016: 1:34:42). The camera then cuts between Toby’s and Marcus’s eyes in classic genre fashion as the inevitable duel seems to finally be at hand. Yet the duel must be deferred as Toby’s ex-wife and son conveniently return to the ranch at that moment. As we know, Toby no longer owns the family ranch as he’s deeded it to his children and is just there to supervise a remodel. As Marcus walks away Toby says, “Hey, I’m renting a little house in town, if you want to stop by and finish this conversation, you’re welcome anytime.” Marcus says, “I’ll be seeing you,” as the movie ends and credits roll (2016: 1:36:19). The duel promised by camerawork and genre expectations has been deferred into the time after the film’s end. This implies the potential of a sequel (delivering a promise of seriality the genre text has come to demand) and yet the presentation is partially ironic, as though the characters know no sequel is coming and what they are actually doing is referencing and then delaying a genre promise. There are several possibilities latent in this moment that this paper would like to examine as a way to build on the contention that the relationship between film and genre can stand in allegorically for the relationship of developmental time to oil time.
Firstly, the deferral of a duel, and the self-referentiality in the film to its serial form sheds some light on Appel’s oil time/developmental time dynamic. An attention to genre’s seriality opens a critique to the central myth upholding developmental time (i.e. that development takes place in a steady progress of advancement, it is teleological and unidirectional). Genre shows that development is not exactly linear, but punctuated, taking place always in reference to past events and informed by a relationship between conventions established in previous iterations. The difference is a smooth progress versus a dialectical relationship, one that is contingent and always being renegotiated. Each new genre text is both in reference to the genre texts of the past, but also refigures the history of the genre, only to await being refigured itself by the next genre text. What this means for our analogy is that development is dialectical and not linear, and the modernizing myth that there is such a thing as step-by-step sequential development, a myth that ensures all oil will be extracted in the name of progress, the ideological framework that allows for the continuation of ruthless oil time, is predicated on a misunderstanding. This is perhaps not new information, but genre allows for a new way to observe this error.
To continue with the allegory, one can remember that the charge genre texts work with is generated by playing with past genre rules. This creates the recognizable genre text and makes it marketable, but playing with conventions also generates the particular pleasures of genre.[8] In Hell or High Water, the tension of the film’s final scene exists due to a stable of past genre productions, and one of the pleasures of the film is that it winkingly does not deliver on its genre promise. This suggests that one way developmental time continues as such an effective economic fiction is not through the actuality of any past success of development. Appel’s (2018: 54-55) article deftly compares the current ‘development’ taking place in Equatorial Guinea with the now collapsing past ‘development’ in neighboring Gabon. Equatorial Guinea has producing oil wells and ongoing oil exploration. Gabon’s oil has been exploited and the oil companies have moved on, leaving once modern buildings to age into ruin. Anyone crossing the border of the two nations can read the future of Equatorial Guinea in the present of Gabon, yet building continues anyway as Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth is converted into infrastructure. One could view this as another sort of petromelancholic action, the pursuit of a future in Equatorial Guinea already written in Gabon, the melancholia of working towards a future that is already a ruin. However, the analogy with genre reveals another aspect of this relationship. The pleasures of developmental time can be seen as a sort of genre pleasure, where development can reference both past developments (fictional or otherwise) and also suggest that more is to come, but crucially, it can cultivate our desire by winkingly not delivering on its promise as well. Deferral, through the lens of genre, can be seen as an organizing pleasure of development. Development as an ideology compels individuals, companies, and nations to exploit all available oil resources regardless of any actual successes, as the pleasures it generates are genre pleasures; that is, pleasures defined by their winking relationship to the past and ability to generate desire even when they deliver nothing. Furthermore, and productively suggestive, it is important to remember that what is deferred in the Western is violence; and so deferral is a pleasure of imagined future violence. This is pleasurable in genre works but perhaps this analogy can also add the violence back into development, where rather than a dream of future prosperity, development is a delay tactic with an implicit threat. What we hear is that oil time will proceed apace, that it is out of our hands and so we should find enjoyment where we can. We should enjoy the new construction while it happens and find some joy in imagining future gunfights, as what has happened there will happen here, and will move on to happen elsewhere. The pleasure of seriality, the ‘aesthete’s wink’ at knowing what is to come, is one of the few pleasures left of a modernity that can be grieved for but not moved on from.
Lastly, on this formulation of the analogy, working through developmental time/oil time’s association with genre provides the opportunity to more clearly define the stakes that this paper has already identified. Oil’s upholding of the family is shown as an extremely limited and denuded future option in post-recession West Texas, one that increasingly fails to hide the violent labour necessary for its creation and maintenance. However, when this violent labour is turned outward, from the family into the exterior or political realm, the film can only serve up the neoliberal bank robber who fails at any kind of social banditry, whose strike at finance ends in a promotion of oil. The analogy of the preceding paragraphs helps to disrupt the smooth narrative of development and attempts to glimpse the lurking violence implicit in developmental time, yet I think the analogy with Appel might also ask that we think even more seriously about infrastructure. Appel sees in infrastructure the physical manifestation of the mixture of oil time and developmental time in a particularly denuded version that constellates the failed future promises of oil more generally. There is a sense in which this paper, and the analogy pursued in the proceeding paragraphs, views the film and the Western genre as just this sort of depressing mixture. Genre is, of course, a type of infrastructure, too. However, there is a more active and much more positive way to view genre as infrastructure which inspires the final section of this paper. This final section will attempt to define the de-instrumentalizing potential of the contemporary Western work of art. This more optimistic look has the effect of undermining the mostly conventional way this paper has viewed violent labour; where previously it was mostly something to avoid, it becomes something to embrace.
De-instrumentalizing the contemporary Western
As this paper has argued in the prior sections, the narrative and genre features of Hell or High Water can be read symptomatically. There is a great deal of value in this reading. The film uncovers the violent labour that precedes and is hidden backstory for the contemporary family. This reading marks in the film its petromelancholia and reveals the family as a cruel optimism. It also shows that even when the family becomes impossible, it will still be pursued for nostalgic reasons, and also pursued because there is no ready option to replace what it narratively offers. The film helps reveal that the Great Recession was a labour defeat, and also shows the limits to the archetypal violent labourer of the Western, the outlaw figure, as a response to that defeat. Both levels of analysis show the necessity of reading for the political and energy unconscious of the film.
In the previous section, this paper looked at what combining an understanding of genre with an understanding of energy could tell us about the present moment. This section found a way to read the rhythms of the Western genre as analogous to the extremely violent and destructive single instances of oil time, all while existing, on a longer time scale, as narratively static—a repetitive cycle of destruction that, from a global perspective, or from the perspective of an oil company, looks like only minor change in an unchanging system. This was an attempt to ask whether adding genre insights into oil time helps reveal the longer ‘unchanging’ oil narrative as a series of constant referential change. In effect, thinking of oil time as a genre is an attempt to re-narrativize oil time, not on the level of single instance, but over its cyclical history. What actions this re-narrativization might lead to, however, are somewhat murky.
This murkiness is shared by the other conclusions in the paper such that much of this paper can be seen to be dealing with the issue of pastiche, famously explained by Jameson in his various works on postmodernism. Postmodern works are “a virtual grab bag or lumber room of disjoined subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds” that stress disunity over any sort of artistic totality (Jameson, 1991: 31). In one sense the Western genre of Hell or High Water represents an accretion of denuded objects tossed together as contextless references to the past. Of course, a close interpretation of various genre features ultimately ends in some sort of ambiguous constellation of affect and politics. That itself might be one way to define postmodernism. However, I do not think this this is exactly the position of contemporary genre works, especially not in the case of contemporary Westerns. Thus, I’d like to end this paper with a provocation, an argument for the contemporary Western genre (and implicitly an argument for more violent labour and violent labourers), not as a newly valuable narrative able to do Jameson’s cognitive mapping, but rather as a place to experience the de-instrumentalization of the world. A sort of mediation in an instant. It begins with what looks like a contradiction.
Nicholas Brown (2019: 8), in his book Autonomy,argues against the complete commodification of some contemporary works of art, essentially showing that autonomous artwork is still possible. It is possible when works confront and “suspend [their] commodity character.” This means revealing themselves as something other than merely any other commodity in the marketplace, which means following the Kantian schema for the work of art, exhibiting “purposiveness without external purpose” (2019: 13). Being a commodity means having a purpose, being instrumentalized. Contemporary works of art de-instrumentalize themselves by viewing their commodity character as a problem to be overcome, as a painter may have once sought to overcome the flatness of a canvas. In many cases this is a self-conscious reference to their commodity character and perhaps even an attempt to damage that character. In the case of popular genre works, this confrontation is subtler and seemingly easier to do. Genre works can, according to Nicholas Brown (2019: 32-33), “derive their coherence from possibilities immanent to the logic of the genre rather than by demands attributed to consumers.” So, by solving genre specific problems, genre works can establish their autonomy. This seems like a contradiction because genre works, as we have seen, also attain their marketability by the way that they expand, subvert, renew, or reference their genre. The specifics matter here, though, as fan service does not make a work of art, but a creative reworking of the road agent and bank robber, might. Basically, in the case of genre works, there can be instances of being a good commodity while being a good work of autonomous art, and for very similar reasons.
Brown’s more general insights about artwork or artwork in a popular genre are slightly tangential to this paper’s point about the Western in particular. However, one last minor digression is required before weaving together Brown’s insights about autonomy and this paper’s interest in the Western. I write this paper on a relatively recent Western during a moment of Western genre resurgence.[9] I think this can be partially attributed to a similar action that is also described in Jennifer Wenzel’s (2022) essay ‘Forms of Life’ referenced earlier. Wenzel’s (2022: 159) task in that essay was to reveal the drama of infrastructure by instigating a “figure-ground reversal.” Wenzel shows the narrative of infrastructure itself: the story of the pipeline rather than the road story the pipeline’s oil makes possible. Recent Westerns have made a similar move. Contemporary Westerns have created compelling, and (more importantly) popular narratives by turning the traditional Western setting into subject. The Western setting has, of course, always been important to Western genre narratives but almost always as the ground for dramas of moral education or civic creation. What this reversal has meant in practice is a more overt exploration of the uses of the Western landscape. The uses of the setting in the Western are as locations for oil extraction, cattle raising, gold mining, water, or the enclosure of land into real estate. In other words, the resources of the West as valued by capital, or the world instrumentalized for the valorization of capital. Thus, in a somewhat roundabout way, resources have become the subject of contemporary Westerns, and so Westerns can be seen to be investigating the way the world is instrumentalized to a particular capitalist end. As Mark Boxell shows, Hell or High Water essentially approves of this kind of instrumentalization, and talking about something does not automatically produce any sort of critique, still, what I am arguing here is that the contemporary Western work of art is somehow working on the problem of instrumentalization from both ends.
The contemporary Western can establish for itself a moment of autonomy from the market by producing narratives about instrumentalization. Somewhat ironically the Western produces a moment of de-instrumentalization (autonomous artwork) within and because of a narrative of instrumentalization (uses of the Western setting). An engagement with resources (one that can even be an engagement that supports the current capitalist organization of resources) in a flash becomes its opposite. The possibility of the contemporary Western is thus the possibility of experiencing in real time[10] the valence change between a world organized around utility, into a world de-instrumentalized, a world no longer governed by the resource logic of capitalism.
This experience is an argument for wedding an understanding of commodity and artwork to an understanding of resource and energy. It is also an argument for the Western genre. In the current moment, the genre is both a place to glimpse another way to organize the world and a way to mediate, and so view dialectically, the relation of oil to family, modernity to petromelancholia, finance to resource extraction, and oil time to developmental time. Perhaps confusingly, what this means for violent labour, since we are arguing that the Western is a violent labour, is that we need more of it.
References
Appel, H. (2018) ‘Infrastructural Time’, in N. Anand, A. Gupta, and H. Appel (eds.) The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 41-61.
Canavan, G. (2018) ‘Peak Oil after Hydrofracking’, in B. Bellamy, J. Diamanti (eds.) Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Chicago and Alberta: MCM Publishing, pp. 289-313.
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993) ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, in R. Johnson (ed.) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 112-141.
Boxell, M. (2023) ‘Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water (2016)’, in R. Lifset, R. Lutz, and S. Stanford-McIntyre (eds.) American Energy Cinema. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, pp. 217-228.
Brown, B. (1997) ‘Reading the West: Cultural and Historical Background’, in B. Brown (ed.) Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Boston: Bedford Books.
Brown, N. (2019) Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Denning, M. (1987) Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso.
Hell or High Water (2016). David Mackenzie [DVD]. Los Angeles: CBS Films.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso.
Jameson, F. (1988) The Ideologies of Theory Essays 1971-1986: Volume 1 Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell Ithaca: University Press.
LeMenager, S. (2014) Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Martin, T. (2019) Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press.
McClanahan, A. (2017) Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mitchell, L. (2018) Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wenzel, J. (2022) ‘Forms of Life’, Social Text 40(4): 153–179.
Worden, D. (2009) ‘Neo-Liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory’, Canadian Review of American Studies 39(2): 221–246.
Worden, D. (2012) ‘Fossil Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant’, Journal of American Studies 46(2): 441-460.
Yaeger, P. (2011) ‘Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale-Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power and Other Energy Sources’, PMLA 126(2): 305-310.
Notes
[1] We will note the major exception in a moment.
[2] A view established by Robert Warshow’s now iconic 1955 text ‘Movie Chronicle: The Westerner’.
[3] Hell or High Water is somewhat confusingly mentioned in Lee Clark Mitchell’s (2018: 242-243) otherwise extremely useful Late Westerns in a list of films that cynically fail by using tired Western genre semantics with “plots situated in Texas and the Rocky Mountain states in the period 1840-1890 with horse-riding outlaws and small-town citizenries involved in standoffs and shootdowns”.
[4] “What is clear is that stories of grassroots justice amid corporate-induced environmental breakdowns provide one avenue through which climate equity might become common sense” (Boxell, 2023: 225).
[5] “Peak Oil” as explained by Gerry Canavan (2018: 292) is a concept originally developed by M. King Hubbert and “represents…the moment when oil production…ceases to grow—the apex of the curve when you are, roughly speaking, halfway through your total extractable reserves.” This has taken place in many specific locations (notably the United States, at least when it comes to traditional oil reserves) yet the concept of peak oil is about the fear of this inflection point on a global scale. As Canavan narrates, this fear was also a structuring optimism for those hoping for an energy transition away from carbon-intensive forms of energy production. Unfortunately, the rise of hydrofracking at exactly the predicted moment of peak oil “has, in just a few years, utterly reversed the moods and discourses previously associated with oil capitalism: rather than seen as the exhausted token of capitalism whose internal vitalism is slowly wearing down…oil is once again seen as plentiful and ubiquitous…Capitalism has been saved” (2018: 301). Canavan (2018: 295) also points out that peak oil was the “paranoiac key” to explaining the Great Recession. The discourse around peak oil thus parallels the family narrative we have been tracking. The Great Recession saves rather than finally does away with the petrofamily, but it saves it in denuded form just as hydrofracking saves capitalism from peak oil with especially polluting and expensive oil. Everything is fine, everything is worse.
[6] Again, this echoes discussions of peak oil where the coming end of the non-renewable resource leads not to its replacement with other fuel sources but to the expansion of oil extraction into ever more expensive and polluting reserves – so called “tough oils” extracted from tar sands and shale. The oil on the Howard ranch is a different sort of tough oil.
[7] Part of the MAGA movement’s success can probably to be attributed to the mostly rhetorical revenge against banking available because of the movement’s promotion of oil and other extractive industries.
[8] In a passage about the Western, Bourdieu (1993: 128) calls this “the aesthete’s wink.”
[9] One can think of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), the TV empire Taylor Sheridan created after Hell or High Water (2016)with Yellowstone (2018-2024) and its many spin-offs (the related Landman (2024), or the just released (and consciously positioned against the Sheridan properties) American Primeval (2025)), among many others.
[10] Brown (2019: 24-25) argues “the only way to demonstrate the autonomy of art from its commodity character is to catch it in the act.”
Dylan Calmes is a PhD student at the University of Alberta’s department of English and Film Studies. His work focuses on contemporary fiction and film, energy, aesthetics, and popular genre. His dissertation, The Resource Genre: Resource Aesthetics and the Contemporary Western, examines resources as the much more than material inputs that have come to define the contemporary Western. He received his MFA in fiction from University of Massachusetts Boston in 2022.
Email: dcalmes@ualberta.ca
Conflicts of interest
None declared
Funding
None declared
Article history
Article submitted: 24/10/2024
Date of original decision: 31/10/2024
Revised article submitted: 10/3/2025
Article accepted: 18/4/2025
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