The new “Just Stop Oil” documentary is (yet) another missed opportunity to get an important conversation started about social movements, our crises and complicities, and what needs to change.
Early on in “The Line We Crossed” the new and overlong documentary following a group of Just Stop Oil activists as they slow march their way around London in 2023, one of them says “context is massively important.” He’s referring to defences in criminal cases for obstruction and the like, but it occurred to me that this very much applies to the film. It was only ten minutes or so in, but already my forebodings were proving true. There was no context whatsoever, not even as far back as 2018, when Extinction Rebellion (it got one scant mention) burst onto the scene, promising to force the government to make the UK zero carbon by 2025.
There was no explanation of what climate change IS and what is causing it (we’ll come back to my encounter with a taxi driver on my way home, in another post.).
There was no context about the way the British state acts when it…
Look, I could go on for a loooong time about the failings of this film (in its defence, it’s mostly competently made, and doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t). I don’t have the energy, patience or inclination to write all that, you don’t have those to read all that, and it will come across as patriarchal bullying if I do.
So instead, I want to see this film as a symptom of a much much wider problem (previously I’ve used words like Smugosphere and Emotacycle – they may get a run below).
I am going to try to answer a few questions about what social movements (made up of individuals, groups, NGOs etc) need, (don’t) get and ways forward. The list of questions is here –
- What is it that we get (from documentaries, but also books etc) again and again. And again.
WHY do we get that (beyond morality tales about laziness/complicity etc)
- Why does that matter?
- What do we need?
- Why don’t we get it?
- (Bonus – ignore if you’re so inclined) Why it wouldn’t matter, even if we did get it.
- What is to be done?
I have tackled (ranted) about this before.
What we get time and again – “hooray for our side”
What a field day for the heat.
A thousand people in the street,
Singing songs and carrying signs,
Mostly say, “Hooray for our side.”
Buffalo Springfield “For What It’s Worth”
I’ve been in/around environmental protest/dissent/resistance most of my adult life; the first time I can say I was properly involved was the late 1990s. I say this not for brownie points, or claims of expertise, but just to point out that if you stick around long enough, you see the same film pop up again and again. The title and participants change, but the song remains the same.
I saw it around the time of Indymedia, I saw it as the 2006-2010 wave wound down (“Just Do It”). It was there during fracking (have tried to expunge that one, and am not inclined to go looking). It was there during the beginning of the “youth strike” – “Meet the Wild Things” and “The Giants.”
What these (and other films) have in common is that they are largely cheap, unreflective decontextualised hagiography (= “the making of saints”), following individuals or individuals-within-a-group as they “try to make a difference.”
Why we get that
Here’s where I need to not get personal (!), or rather, engage in the Fundamental Attribution Error. These films aren’t the way they are because of any personal failings/perspectives of the film-makers (whom I’ve not met).
We also need to get away from cheap/easy cynicism that the documentaries are what they are because they are planned only a recruiting tool (though they often arrive too late for that, and in the case of TLWC, wouldn’t work on multiple levels) or that they are merely CV points for the film maker.
We need to think in terms of systems, incentives, pressures (understood and ‘invisible’). Here’s a non-exhaustive list
- Film-makers need for access to present and future subjects, and if word gets around that they are “neutral” or “questioning” they will be lumped in with the mass media, which, by and large is quite rightly mistrusted/loathed.
- Film-makers also have a need for “hope” as a narrative
- Film-makers need to keep funders happy (especially an issue around crowdfunding, I’d guess, but also foundations don’t like their hands bitten when they are feeding).
Ultimately, for a host of reasons – psychological, social, financial etc – hopey-changey hagiography is path of least resistance. It is what everyone expects, and what almost everyone wants most/all of the time (I am an outlier, I know, “But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll…”)
Why does that matter?
“Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin, 1962
We are in the shit. We have no idea what we are into here. When “the greenhouse effect” finally became a public issue in 1988, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were roughly 352 parts per million. Emissions spiralled upwards since then (roughly 70% higher than they were then) and atmospheric concentrations are now at 428ppm and surging annually.)
Most importantly for my purposes, the simple fact is that civil society has been mostly asleep at the wheel, until it is jolted into periodic half-wakefulness by brave and determined activists who demand action. Then, for various reasons, the “issue attention cycle” kicks in, the activists burn out and lick their wounds and prison sentences, technophilia reasserts itself and almost everyone goes back to sleep.
So what we need is individuals and groups who are able to see this pattern, and prepare for it, and sustain themselves. I wrote about this here, in 2017.
Hagiography, where you spend far more time than you need to in the company of naive well-meaning people who learn tough lessons in the strategic and tactical capacity of the states and corporations is not helping. There is an argument to be made that – beyond the taking-up-of-bandwidth problem – it is actually harmful, but I am not going to go there today.
What we need
What we need is, therefore “sense-making”
Sensemaking or sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). The concept was introduced to organizational studies by Karl E. Weick in the late 1960’s and has affected both theory and practice.
We need cognitive maps so people know where they are, what the stakes are, what has and hasn’t ‘worked’ in the past, etc etc.
I will use TLWC as an example, but again, it is not uniquely inadequate, it’s merely the latest (and for me last) example of the genre.
We need films that explain, in simple terms, what climate change is (the duvet analogy works really well, in my experience). If you can find an actual climate scientist willing to say it, all the better, but they’ll probably fear for their precious reputation and “trivialising” the science. That’s just them bowing to the institutional pressure within their tribe. Mostly, they can’t help themselves. So it goes.
We need films that explain what the state (British in this case) actually IS and what it is FOR and what it has DONE historically to those people who organise to try to get it to do something other than protect the perceived short-term interests of the people who run the State/who are protected by the state.
People think the state is Santa Claus – a kindly old gent who will reward you if you can prove that you have been good for long enough. Documentaries like TLWC don’t do anything about this, ah, “misapprehension.” There is a glancing reference to the suffragettes, but nothing on how the State mobilised to demonise and punish those activists. If the JSo crew knew the history of the suffragettes, beyond Pankhurst #1 and #2 and perhaps Emily Davison, then they wouldn’t have been so surprised as they were by the end of the film (actually, I missed the last few minutes – a bus to catch).
TLWC could have done even a brief job on the flurry of laws passed in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution began to kick in. It could have talked about Spycops (an astonishing oversight) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2000. It could have… Note, I am NOT saying you have to go into exhaustive detail, but “context is massively important.”
We need films that include supportive critical voices – people who are equally concerned about “The Issue”, but disagree with the particular tactics (or “strategy” if you’re being unduly generous) being pursued.
I can’t believe I am typing this, because I am one of the most cynical people I know on the role and function of academics, but even I would – through gritted teeth – admit that some of them do have something to add and if you film say an hour you might get as much as 45 seconds of useable material out of them. Get them talking about the history, the politics, the nature of social movements, the nature of issue-attention cycles etc etc etc.
Basically, making an entire film out of a-roll and (quite a lot of) b-roll of activists “on the ground” is cloying, claustrophobic and senseless-making. TLWC had only a handful of “outsiders” – Suella Braverman, Jocelyn Maugham, someone from Liberty and a semi-outsider, Tim from Defend Our Juries.
We need films that ask activists to expound on some of the challenges – pushback from family and friends (and how they handle it), how they deal with hostility from the General Public (there’s footage in TLWC of an enraged motorist snatching banners and smacking mobiles out of activists hands. I am not saying he was right, or that he should necessarily be given “air time” to explain his views, but how about at least getting the JSO people to reflect on that?)
We need films (and groups) to talk about why people don’t stay involved (and they largely don’t, through little/no fault of their own. The way organisations are, they’re basically decruitment engines. Irony – at least three people in the audience gave up on the film before I had to leave).
Why we won’t get it (see also “why we get that” above)
The kind of film I am talking about is not going to get made (though I would be genuinely delighted to be proved wrong – have at me in the comments.
Basically, in these late days of late capitalism, at the beginning of (the rich Westerner bit of, anyway) the Fafocene, we are clinging to hope and the idea that social movement are bold entrepreneurs with power much as Linus clings to his security blanket in Peanuts – it’s a classic transitional object, rather like transition theory itself.
To put it in blunt terms – nobody likes Debbie Downers, buzzkills. Nobody is happy if you piss on their chips if chips is all they have to eat.
For psychological, cognitive, social and financial reasons, hagiography is easier and safer.
These documentaries are the equivalent of the stage-managed top down meeting where those in the cliques talk and preen but nothing gets achieved, and those came in the hope of getting information, opportunities for connection and action or all of the above slink out and are never seen again.
Bonus (skip if you like – fmdidgad)
Why it wouldn’t matter even if we did get it
Beyond the temporal factor – these documentaries usually appear too late anyway even to be “recruiting tools” – there are deeper problems. The streets have emptied
“We” don’t have the absorptive capacity to take on new ideas, new numbers (of people who can’t get arrested, who can’t drop everything for The Cause).
We are prisoners of our pasts – as the adage goes, past performance is the best indicator of past performance, and our past performance sucks; decades of failure
There’s a (not very good) film adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel “The Honorary Consul.” In it, there’s a prison breakout and someone who was held below ground for ages comes out, blinking in the harsh sun. If he had legged it straight away, he might have avoided the guard’s bullets. But he simply doesn’t have the capacity. He has been a prisoner too long and… You can tell I need to wrap this up, can’t you? I’ll do a post about the taxi-driver and me another day. Perhaps – it’s mostly about the efficacy of the duvet analogy, anyway.
The Ways Forward (my heart isn’t in this)
If civil society were going to get up on its hind legs it would have done so by now. I have used the line “the time to stamp on the brakes is before the bus goes off the cliff. Once it has you can stamp that pedal all you like, but it won’t change the outcome. And moving ripped up seat foam to the front in the hope of softening impact is fine to keep you busy, but, well, see above…
However, I said there were be a “ways forward” bit. So here it is. But it’s based on some “ifs…”
IF we had spaces where people could meet free from commercial and surveillance imperatives
IF we had norms around the design and facilitation of meetings that were enforceable, and (collectively) enforced so that issues were properly and thoroughly aired, and the meetings not dominated by the most high status within the subculture, by the most confident etc…
IF we had a universal basic income so more people had bandwidth to even have the time and energy to participate in civil society/social movements activity
IF we had states (local, national) that were responsive to popular pressure in meaningful ways (NB Santa Claus model)
IF we understood, collectively, the planet-wide catastrophes that are hoving into view as the consequences of a demented model of growth and a mismeasure of what is “sustainable”
And
IF we had giant machines that could cost-free suck billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store them safely, bringing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide back to, say, 350ppm
Well, in that case….
“I still don’t see how we can survive.“
Further reading I couldn’t be bothered to hyperlink within this above
Extinction Rebellion says ‘we quit’ – why radical eco-activism has a short shelf life
JSO – why are you trashing your brand for pennies?
Just Stop Oil – anthropologically fascinating but politically terrifying | manchester climate monthly
Dear ‘new’ #climate activist. Unsolicited advice, #oldfartclimateadvice
Cher, incentive structures and our inevitable doom
Has Extinction Rebellion got the right tactics? | New Internationalist
From the book of Roger | manchester climate monthly (This one I am quite fond of, proud of)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check