The Mission of CoLLapse

Jenna Orkin


"Only be interesting," the writer Charles Simmons once said. In the temporal arts, in other words - literature, music, dance or drama - considerations of beauty, balance or unity are all outweighed by the bottom line: If you're boring, the operation may be a success but the patient will die.

By this measure CoLLapse is a triumph. It never lags, even for those of us who have heard its message a hundred times. (I was glad to be reminded about the thousand monkeys, however;) It is, if anything, all too interesting in the way that approaching headlights are all too interesting to a deer.

I had wondered, particularly hearing advance reactions to the film, whether it was biased one way or the other, pro or con Mike and his ideas. It is not. It is wysiwyg Mike. He does not play to the camera, at least any more than he would to a gathering of friends over dinner. In an important way, however subconsciously, he has been waiting for this moment most of his adult life. For I am not the only person to have mused with him about who should play him when the movie was made of his career. (I said Anthony Hopkins if he wasn't so old. Mike preferred William Hurt.)

That day may yet come. Meanwhile, Mike does a superb job of playing himself. His role as prophet of the collapse of civilization is the one for which he was cut out as he surely realized when Chris came calling with a camera and a notion of throwing Mike's findings about the CIA up on Youtube.

"He had other ideas," reads the slug line in the movie's introduction. And how. For anyone who has followed Mike's work closely, there's something so fitting about this project that one marvels. For how often does life fulfill one's fantasies more or less exactly as one had imagined them? And an indie movie with the commercial possibilities of a theatrical release coupled with VOD is just that deus ex machina, and not a moment too soon.

As one of those most closely associated with Mike's work, I won't even try to be an impartial judge of this movie. Besides, I am at least as interested in people's reactions to it as I am in the film itself. For this movie is not simply a work of art to be appreciated; it has a mission whose success is the most important measure of the film itself.

On that score, so far so great. Media such as the New York Times which studiously ignored the Peak Oil conferences held here in 2005 and 2006 are now respectfully acknowledging the most controversial of Peak Oil advocates. (The Times sent a researcher, though not a reporter, to Petrocollapse in 2005; presumably his main research function was to count the house and report back to The Powers That Be on how big the movement was in NYC and how much they had to worry.)

I also wasn't sure how the onslaught of information in the movie would go over with a general audience. It has aspects of the lecture however jazzed up with cartoons and archive footage. But one of my students who saw it in New York said it was easily comprehensible. Given that she's new to the topic as well as to the English language, this is a relief. And most of the reviews of the "scariest movie ever" genre indicate that people are getting the message.

So what's the down side?

The movie needed more definition. Was it an exposee of Peak Oil, a portrait of Mike or both? If the first, it needed at least a shot of the plethora of books, reports and conferences on the subject, thereby revealing the impressive array of experts from various disciplines who are 'concerned.'

But according to interviews of the director, Chris Smith, with Laura Flanders, among others, it was intended to be the second, a portrait of Mike the man.

In that case too, it needed some fleshing out. Not a lot; the great thing about movies is that a picture is worth a thousand words and when you have words as well, you can really cover ground. There's a clear effort to explicate this doomsday prophet. Who is he to be telling us all this? Where does he come from? What are his credentials?

These questions are dutifully addressed but others are skirted and not, I think, out of discretion. Anyone concerned with niceties wouldn't have conducted the interview in a meatpacking warehouse to create the atmosphere of an interrogation. (I can only imagine how Mike reacted to that. Let's just say that cold isn't his favorite environment.) His personal life is alluded to in the person of Rags. But surely, the director might have asked, that's not the whole story, but only the latest chapter.

On that score, the Rosetta Stone is a throw-away line where Mike is talking about how early in his career, people would ask him why he didn't give up his crusade and get a more balanced life. He answers to the effect that he tried but looking around, he saw that there was, in fact, nothing else in his life. So he had no choice but to go on with his investigative work.

A shot of his article, "New Year's at Bellevue," would have thrown into relief that history as well as the emotional moments he is both generous and helpless enough to share with the world. It would also have conveyed the putative personal collapse alluded to in the title.

The movie will doubtless usher in a whole new chapter of his life. My foreign student was moved to want to comfort "that man" who seemed so lonely with only his loping dog for companionship. And the New York Times reviewer seemed to want to protect him from the "cruel" director interrogating him with his "predatory" camera and "[un]sympathetic... embrace."

It also ushers in the next chapter for us all.