This review is a special one, it is a dual review of How to Blow Up a Pipeline and also the movie the book is based on. I thought it would be fun to read the book, watch the movie and then do a review of both in the same review. A bit of a compare and contrast like I was taught to do back in high school English class.
I bought a physical copy of Malm’s book a few months ago from a lovely local indie book store and didn’t get around to reading it until this month. So without further ado, let’s get into the reviews.
The Book
The first thing you’ll notice about How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the striking design of the cover. The bright orange-red cover with its white bold text. This is a book that wants you to judge it by its cover. Even the title of the book itself is provocative. It makes one curious. Well, how does anyone blow up a pipeline anyways?
Once you actually start reading the book you’ll realize immediately that a more apt title for the book is “Why blow up a pipeline?”. This book is not a instructional manual on how to actually blow up a pipeline. It is a strategy guide for anti-fossil fuel action combined with a history lesson about the environmental movements of the past – their actions and strategic failures.
At 163 pages, this is a short read and I think it should be read in its entirety. Personally, however I found the last chapter “Fighting Despair” to be the most instructive and useful. That chapter is about fighting the kind of self-serving nihilism that is present within some sectors of the discourse about climate change.
It is hard to say what the long term impact of this book will have on my personal philosophies and actions but it did get me thinking about direct action more strategically and just for that I can recommend it.
The Movie
The movie adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is I think in many ways what one would expect such a adaptation to be. Multiple characters all of whose lives have been negatively affected by the fossil fuel extraction industry in some way or the other band together to build an improvised explosive device to blow up a pipeline which ends in a explosive finale.
The movie has a good combination of both the “how” and also the “why” of blowing up a finale. We get snippets of the character backstories through these flashback sequences for each character interspersed with scenes of them in the process of sabotaging a oil pipeline. I think the movie is…fine. It works well as a companion piece to the book but I don’t think it is particularly exceptional.
I did find the scene where one of the characters reads a copy of the book in a library hilarious. And also another scene where a character shouts “Jesus was a terrorist!”. Very funny. I do appreciate the movie trying to balance the tense mood with a bit of levity. I also appreciate that this movie doesn’t become the extremely cringe movie it could easily have been. I almost expected some Rage Against the Machine to start playing in the background at some point but the movie thankfully avoids such pithy things.
Conclusion
I have been thinking about the use of violence in direct action movements since I first read Babel by RF Kuang and then of course Fanon’s The Wretched in the Earth. Malm himself refers to Fanon in the book. So this book and its companion movie are just additions to the “sometimes you just need to blow some shit up to get things done” canon for me.
I think the book is informative enough on direct action strategy to be worth reading and the movie is a fun one to watch after you’ve read the book. It did feel to me that I should have read this before I read Fanon because this book feels like the gateway drug to more revolutionary thought but hey that’s not the book’s fault.
I like to end non-fiction book reviews with a quote but Malm isn’t a particularly quotable author; that isn’t meant to be a criticism, his writing style doesn’t make for good quotes.
Until next time comrades.
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