ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes three documentaries on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill: The Big Fix, Vanishing Pearls, and The Great Invisible. The films vary in scope, perspective, and focus, but they all were released within four years after the spill and show how the impacts of the spill were complex and interlinked. I look to the driving concerns and tensions of the environmental justice movement as a starting point for examining the spill and its effects. Reading these films rhetorically for oil’s visibility and invisibility, I argue that they show some hints of influence of modern environmentalist wilderness concerns in their depictions of oiled wildlife. However, human health and toxicity are foregrounded, as all three films audiovisually construct, sometimes through the invocation of other senses, petroleum’s impacts on the Gulf Coast through representations of sickness and toxicity. I also argue that the films have varying degrees of engagement with racial justice, though more could be done to highlight the impact of the spill, and the oil industry in general, on minority communities. Finally, I show that religious belief is a subterranean theme across the films, one that merits deeper consideration in light of the environmental justice movement’s spiritual impetus.
