March 30, 2001

'Green' daze Dunn exposes the horrors of pollution
A church faces one of the industrial plants that contributes to the pollution of the town in which it is located.
By Ben Trollinger

The mighty Mississippi has been in a bad way since Mark Twain elegiacly described it in Life on the Mississippi. But even then, Big-I Industry was chugging along like a steamboat with a staggering inertia. Today, the 100-mile stretch of the Mississippi that runs from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, known as Cancer Alley, is corridored by over 150 petrochemical plants. These plants churn out one fourth of the United States' petrochemicals, which are used in almost every product imaginable from clothing to videotapes. They collectively produce the highest amounts of toxic waste and emissions in the country in a given area. Green, a documentary directed by Yale grad and now UT film student Laura Dunn, allows the haunted communities living in the spaces between the monolithic factories to tell their story.

"I read an article," said Dunn, recounting how she first came to be interested in this subject, "in The Wall Street Journal about the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and their fight with the community against Shentech [a Japanese petrochemical giant]. It was a big precedent case with the [Environmental Protection Agency]. So I was really interested in that. And the Supreme Court of Louisiana, right after Tulane had the successful victory with the community group, amended a student law practice rule that basically killed the law clinic. I was interested in that story and ended up finding all these other stories that interwove with that story. Meeting the people [in Cancer Alley] galvanized the project. The power of their stories deserves amplification." Shot on video and buttressed by the 16mm aerial footage of the vast tracts of billowing smoke stacks and white industrial domes, Green has a distinctly nightmarish quality. The aerial shots of the dehumanizing refineries are contrasted with the painfully human stories told by the predominantly poor African American residents, who have all been touched in way by industry's poison. In the film, a man named Don Lewis recounts how he had to stop maintaining his prize-winning garden because the vegetables were unsafe to eat. His daughter died of a rare form of lymphoma. "This one woman," said Dunn, "after the screening in Gonzales the other night ... spoke up ... She said, 'I grew up right in north Baton Rouge right by Exxon. And a few years ago a bunch of girlfriends from sixth grade all got together and we figured out that each one of us had some female problem, either a miscarriage, or couldn't bear children, or had children with deformities.' It was 100 percent. All of them had had some kind of female problem ... I had a criticism that we want more scientific proof in the film. And upon that criticism I started to look at the film in a different way. I see a lot of facts. I believe the victims' stories as fact."

Cancer Alley has an alarming number of cases of rare forms of cancer, severe asthma and various reproductive difficulties, all of which are represented in Green. The numbers are not in question. But industry magnates and state government officials are not convinced that there is a one-to-one correlation with toxic emissions and epidemic illness. In one scene in the film, the head of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development tells Dunn that cancer is only a product of Louisiana's preoccupation with drinking and smoking. The camera pans over to another man sitting close by who intones 'and spicy food.' This man is none other than Dale Givens, head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. With a frightening ignorance, or worse yet, a feigned naivete, Givens doesn't take into account the high numbers of children (or non-smokers) with cancer or asthma. Scenes like this are public services, which is precisely Dunn's intention. Instead of screening the film exclusively on the film-festival circuit or searching out a distributor, Dunn has utilized two of the last bastions for disseminating information independently, one new and one old: the Internet (the Web site for Green can be found at www.twobirdsfilm.com) and grassroots touring.

Dunn recently completed a tour of the cities on Cancer Alley that were depicted in the film starting with Baton Rouge and moving through Plaquemine, Gonzales, Convent, Norco and New Orleans. Dunn has already started her Texas tour and will screen the film in Austin on March 31 at 7 p.m. at Mexican American Cultural Center, in affiliation with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and the East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood Association. Dunn also sells the film on her Web site. "We could get a distributor in some way or another," Dunn explained."A lot of people said, 'Oh yeah, we could get you a connection with Sundance channel.' I'm trying to make media that challenges the status quo, which is collaboration between corporations and the media to control our politics and imagination about what's possible. So if I'm making films that directly criticize and challenge the media streams and the corporate models, how could I operate? It's like Rage Against the Machine being released by Sony Records. How could I do that? It wouldn't work. South by Southwest celebrates itself for celebrating all this independent filmmaking, but it's not independent. You're there to get a distributor. I don't know why independent filmmaking is a concept that doesn't consider distribution. You're an independent filmmaker if you what? Work from a patchwork of funds and different kinds of sources? And then you screen it at a festival. And then someone picks it up. That's independent filmmaking? Not really."

Green was but one more adjunct to this past South by Southwest; one more badge of film savvy to wear on the petroleum-treated sleeve at industry soirees and power cocktail parties; one more anecdote to emblematize one's soul-food film diet. The film represents just another product for South by Southwest to contextualize into meaninglessness. Fortunately, to permute environmental stalwart George W. Bush's phrase, South by Southwest "is not the fount of all knowledge." "Really, NPR, and The New York Times and South by Southwest and all these visible ways of distributing media are meaningless to me. Now, I'm probably not going to be thinking this way next week," said Dunn referring to the then-future, now-past screening at the Paramount for South by Southwest. "But I feel this way right now because the reality now is in Plaquemine, Louisiana. They've got Dow Chemical there. Shentech just built a polyvinyl chloride plant there. They're screwed and there are really only two women in the whole goddamn town who are awake and alert enough to bring awareness. These people are being poisoned. What we need to do is spend weeks in Plaquemine doing on-the-ground organizing, trying to use media to educate people. We've already screened at the Alamo, we've screened at South by Southwest. We need to reach out to new media channels, because [the established channels] get bored with us. They always say, 'Oh, we've done that.' It doesn't matter that people are still dying and the situation is getting worse. It's just an old story."

Contrary to the logic of self-aggrandizement and film inbreeding, ubiquitous at South by Southwest, Laura Dunn does not want to become the story.But truly, what's more interesting: A film about environmental injustice, or a cute, young, female Yale graduate making a film about environmental injustice? To put it another way: What would National Public Radio or The New York Times or South by Southwest denizens find more interesting? If the recent atrociously sycophantic profile on artist Julian Schnabel in the New York Times Magazine, which focused more on his ambition and long list of famous friends than on his actual art, indicates anything it's that the media now finds the producer more interesting than the product. The artist's life, the artists themselves, are commodities, too. Is Schnabel a worthy artist? Who knows? He must be. The New York Times photo-shopped his face larger than life on the cover.

Ostensibly, Laura Dunn fights against the petrochemical industry but now finds herself up against the industry of personality the media. "At the beginning of this month when we set out on the Louisiana tour, we had with us a journalist who writes for the Texas Observer and the Atlantic Monthly and who is based out of Austin," Dunn said. "He wanted to travel with us and do a piece on the tour. And he was with us for three-and-a-half days. 24-7. And this guy, when he's in the car and we're on our way says, basically, that he's not interested in the petrochemical industry story. He's interested in the story of Laura Dunn. That's not interesting to me at all. At the beginning of the month I was aware that stuff had made me really self-conscious. How everyone wanted to focus on Laura Dunn. "Wade Goodwin from NPR told me that his editor was interested in the Laura Dunn story but not the rest of it. And then the Austin Chronicle article: They wanted to take a picture of me for that. Why? Take stills from the film instead. But they insisted. This girl comes over. She takes five roles of film! She asked me to go in the backyard and pose in the bamboo. That wasn't my idea. And I've been criticized for that photo ,and I've also been flattered by that photo. Some guy called me and asked me out because of that photo. "Goddammit, it's not about any of that. I was feeling like I'm not going to interact with the media at all anymore. All they want to do is commodify me. But I realized that if I could get over that self-consciousness and say 'fuck it,' as long as I'm not compromised in some way, I think if that's what gets people's attention to the story, then lose the self-consciousness. If people want to write an article and write about Laura Dunn, that's fine. I don't care as long as we can use that to focus people on the issues. It can be a good collaboration with someone who's writing an article. It's all just about informing the public."