Deepwater Horizon REVIEW
Neither the oil company BP nor its investors will be promoting this film. Its simplification of the causes of the Deepwater Horizon explosion make it fit in nicely with a world view that sees good and evil in Marxist terms (“Four legs good; Two legs bad” as George Orwell puts it in Animal Farm.) The managers at BP wear clean blue button down shirts and take risks with people’s lives to save money. The grime besmeared working men on the rig all wear oil stained jumpsuits and live for their families. You could probably determine how good or evil any character in the film is by the amount of grunge under their finger nails. And yet there are so many pyrotechnical explosions in the course of the movie that you wonder if an entire oil well had to be dedicated to supplying the fuel for them.
All of the reading that I have ever done on the Deepwater Horizon explosion suggests that the causes were complicated. You can learn more about the technological failures in layman’s terms HERE. I am not an engineer but this presentation made sense to me.
What the well drilling company was doing was exploratory and cutting edge. What the oil company was asking them to do was risky. They were pushing the envelope on what could and could not be done in deep water and doing so in ways that implied more risk than I generally take in life. I am not sure anyone could know what was likely to happen because the endeavor had not been tried before at that depth. Just the name of the well – Deepwater Horizon - suggests that this was a venture on the margins. One commentator calls what was happening in the Gulf of Mexico that April of 2010 “risk creep” – the process whereby risky choices that do not end in disaster become the evidentiary foundation upon which an even riskier choice is made. All the companies involved in this “well from hell” were “running until they were tackled. The men and women working on the rig were doing the same – taking what they thought were calculated but safe risks. And nature tackled them in the form of billions of squashed flammable dinosaur plants we call “gas.”
Diane Vaughn, author of the book The Challenger Launch Decision, calls this process that one sees in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “the normalization of deviance.” It is the process by which some risky behavior or other becomes accepted as not risky. Bet your house on your belief that you will shake the dice and not roll a six. After fifteen throws not throwing a six, you begin to stop seeing what you’re doing as risky. Realistic fears are naturalized. You up the anti and throw in a kid or two. Do a google search for quotes on “risk” and note just how many of them are written by people who see risk taking as a virtuous behavior.
It is easy for movie directors in hindsight to say that they were not careful enough. The movie makes that obvious and no one is disagreeing. I have no doubt that BP’s movie on their disaster would look different than this one. It might even include American citizens demanding more energy, less dependence on foreign sources of oil, and lower gas prices.
Question for Comment: At the beginning of the film, there is a moment of foreshadowing at the main character’s breakfast table. Mike’s daughter stages a little experiment by sticking a straw into a soda can and then pouring honey into it to “cap” the explosion. Mike’s wife mentions that one of their daughter’s classmates who works at a zoo brought in a real live penguin. A penguin! Mile exclaims. How can you compete with that? There should be rules.” Then the can explodes all over the table.
The point may be too subtle for many movie goers to get but it seems clear enough to me. In a world where competition will drive people to take risks, there needs to be rules and regulations to counter the pressure of that competition. What do you think? This policy suggestion of getting to pass a regulation only at the expense of getting rid of two existing ones. Good idea or bad?
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