There are at least three potentially good movies in The Last Mountain, Bill Haney’s documentary about environmentalists’ fight against mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia: the story of how Don Blankenship became a twenty-first century Gilded Age baron, and how coal companies built a business model that included paying fines rather than avoiding violations; a look at what it means for people in Appalachia to demand accountability from the West Virginia government; and a history of the Kennedys and the environmental movement. But The Last Mountain is just one movie, and while it does a valuable service in laying out some of the environmental impacts of the coal industry and spotlighting the work of Appalachian activists, it never quite knits those stories together, leaving them competing with each other for time.

It’s incredibly striking to see what the mountaintop removal process actually looks like. “If you blew up one mountain in the Berkshires, you wouldn’t be put in jail,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who stars in the movie along with local activists, told me. “You’d be put in an asylum for the criminally insane.” After seeing the explosions and the scale of the projects, it’s hard not to agree with him. It’s a reminder of how isolated the Appalachians are that tearing down mountains and rebuilding them can be a regular business procedure rather than a major news story or public spectacle, and the explanation of the actual mining process is one of the most effective parts of the movie.
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A week when 116 people were killed by tornadoes is perhaps not the best of all possible weeks to release a trailer for a movie that implies fear of extreme weather is a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia:

That said, while we have a lot of movies about apocalyptic disasters, ranging from alien invasion to Mayan prophecy, we have much less art about the way people respond to their fears of disaster and apocalypse. Obviously we don’t live in an age of mass preparedness in the same way we did in the fifties and sixties: air raid drills aren’t a regular part of school days, in areas of the country not affected by extreme weather, there are periodic runs on supermarkets, but with a sense of sheepishness attached, and I don’t know that people watch the Doomsday Clock with the same trepidation that they once might have. When something like a projected date for the Rapture comes due, the mainstream reaction is a combination of mockery and pity, even as we consume art about the end of the world, from The Passage, to 2012, to The Walking Dead, like it’s candy. Maybe absorbing ourselves in baroque fantasies of the end of the world (I am reasonably confident that we’re not going to breed twelve tribes of super-vampires in Colorado, but who knows!) lets us convince ourselves that they’ll never happen, while focusing instead on the fear of utter destruction is a little too close to an acknowledgement that things could really end badly.

Via Andrew Sullivan, I clicked on over to a gallery of the photos from Debbie Grossman’s “My Pie Town” project, in which she alters a series of images Russell Lee took for the Farm Security Administration so that some pictures of men doing things like farm work are now images of women, and pictures of heterosexual couples are now pictures of same-sex couples. Grossman told the Morning News that “The main reason for doing so was to give us the unusual experience of getting to see a contemporary idea of family (female married couples as parents, for example) as if it were historical.”

This is exactly why I think Kings‘ depiction of health care reform is so important, why Tamora Pierce’s integration of dual responsibility for birth control into her fantasy novels matters so much. There’s something so audacious about just presenting the world the way you want it to be, about letting your readers, or your viewers, draw their own conclusions about what it would be like to live in a world with effective herbal male contraceptives, or where environmental stewardship was a form of religious worship. Imagination is key fuel to hope. I’m not saying Avatar‘s going to spur a massive global environmental movement. But making progressive values aspirational through art is important, long-term work.