Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy.

American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their history.

The essays in this collection show how film provides a unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing films that prominently feature energy within historical context and analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal changes and global politics.

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1: When Disaster Strikes
• 1. Blackouts, Bad Guys, and Belly Laughs: Exploring America’
  s First Cascading Power Failure in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968)
• Julie A. Cohn
• 2. Meltdown: Nuclear Cinema and the Martha Mitchell Effect in The China Syndrome (1979) and Silkwood(1983)
• Caroline Peyton
• 3. “
  The Juice”
  : The Road Warrior (1981) and the Cultural Logic of Energy Denial in the Early Days of Modern Globalization
• Christopher R. W. Dietrich
• 4. Built for Pyro: A Perfect Inferno on the Deepwater Horizon (2016)
• Tyler Priest
• 5. Chernobyl (2019): A Soviet Propaganda Win Delivered Thirty-Three Years Late
• Kate Brown
• Part 2: Energy and Nature
• 6. Wings (1927): Aviation, War, and Energy
• Conevery Bolton Valencius
• 7. Derricks and Skulls: Filming and Promoting the Extractive Landscapes of Boom Town (1940)
• Michaela Rife
• 8. Petrodocumentary in the 1940s: The Standard Oil Photography Project, Louisiana Story (1948), and the Domestication of the US Oil Industry
• Emily Roehl
• 9. TVA and the Price of Progress: Elia Kazan’
  s Wild River (1960)
• Donald C. Jackson
• 10. Do Action Movies and an Environmental Message Mix? About as Much as Oil and Water: On Deadly Ground (1994)
• Teresa Sabol Spezio
• Part 3: Critiquing the Western
• 11. Selling the American “
  Oil Frontier”
  : Tulsa (1949), Giant (1956), and American Resource Politics during the Early Cold War
• Sarah Stanford-McIntyre
• 12. Ranches to Oil Wells: Reconfiguring the Western Hero in Hellfighters (1968) anFires of Kuwait (1992)
• Ila Tyagi
• 13. Revisiting Matewan (1987): Upending the Appalachian “
  Western”
  and Broadening an Old Labor Tale
• James R. Allison III
• 14. “
  This Is the Third World”
  : Coal-Fired America in Montana (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989)
• Ryan Driskell Tate
• 15. Hydrocarbon Nostalgia and Climate Disaster: An Environmental History of Hell or High Water (2016)
• Mark Boxell
• Part 4: Energy and Morality
• 16. Control of the Industry: Nineteenth-Century Oil and Capitalism in High, Wide and Handsome (1937)
• Alexander Finkelstein
• 17. The Formula (1980): Corporate Villains, Synthetic Fuel, and Environmental Fantasies
• Raechel Lutz
• 18. “
  Keep Moving”
  : Convoy (1978), Car Films, and Petropopulism in the 1970s
• Caleb Wellum
• 19. There Will Be Petroleum Cinema: Portraying the Corrosion of Oil Addiction in There Will Be Blood (2007)
• Brian C. Black
• Part 5: Energy and the State
• 20. There’
  s No Business Like Oil Business: The Allure of Tax-Sheltered Oil Income to Hollywood’
  s Wealthy
• Yuxun Willy Tan
• 21. “
  Limitless Power at Man’
  s Command”
  A Is for Atom (1953), the Cold War, and Visions of the Nuclear Future in the 1950s
• Sarah E. Robey
• 22. Syriana (2005): The Oil Curse and Hollywood’
  s 9/11 Film
• Robert Lifset
• 23. Hoover Dam in Hollywood: Energy Anxiety in Superman (1978), Transformers (2007), and San Andreas (2015)
• Daniel Macfarlane
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index