Enemies of the People

The people, in An Enemy of the People and the toxic melodramas it anticipates, tolerate poisoning (there being something in the water) better than its communication through toxic discourse, for such communication imperils, among other fantasies, that of attaining economic privilege. Over five acts, the play indexes “public opinion[’s]” gradual aversion to Stockmann, who comes to be perceived as greater a danger to “the town’s welfare” than the bacteria he has uncovered. Stockmann remains evasive about the study’s content until he receives a letter confirming “a great discovery”: that the spa he previously called “the ‘main artery of the town’s life-blood’” and “the ‘nerve-centre of [the] town’” is in fact “a pest-house.” Hovstad, the editor of the People’s Messenger, estimates at first that “it is very desirable that the public should be informed…without delay.” However, Hovstad betrays his ambitions both to inform the public and to expose governmental corruption (“the morass that the whole life of our town is built on and is rotting in”) when he runs a piece ascertaining the baths’ safety. The piece’s author, the mayor of the town, is Dr. Stockmann’s own brother, Peter.

The mayor plays a significant role in imposing the profit rate as the abstract criterion against which the doctor may be deemed “cantankerous,” and his actions “[in]temperate.” In one exchange, Peter tallies the costs of closing the baths for two years to decontaminate and revamp them:

Dr. Stockmann reacts with surprise and indignation to the accusation that he is robbing the town of its future, but soon enough the mayor’s view spreads to the townspeople. To declare the doctor an “enemy of the people,” as the attendees of a town meeting do, is to limit to a single household the economic loss incurred by the revelation of an inconvenient “truth” about contamination. By the final act, Thomas’s daughter, Petra, is fired from her job as a schoolteacher; the family’s landlord mails an eviction notice (“Does not dare do otherwise, he says. Doesn’t like doing it, but dare not do otherwise—on account of his fellow-citizens”); and Kiil purchases shares in the baths with the money intended for his daughter and grandchildren. A patriarchal downfall is hastened in hopes of preventing a collective one.

The townspeople’s rejection of Dr. Stockmann’s expertise does nothing to shake his confidence in science, or himself. He delights in “drinking in” the “lovely spring air,” picturing himself able to discriminate between fluid purity and impurity. He even comes to wear the charges laid against him (“enemy,” “revolutionary”) like badges of honor. Stockmann trades his altruistic agenda for an antipopulist and antidemocratic one, convinced that “an independent, intelligent man” ought to “wage war” against the notion that “the majority…has right on its side” and “has the monopoly of the truth.”²³

An artifact of what Ed Cohen recounts as “immunity’s transubstantiation into a biological function at the end of the nineteenth century,” the play stages the elaboration, and then the distortion, of a discourse of the “body worth defending.”²⁴ Before he expresses any distrust of the majority, Dr. Stockmann considers it his “duty towards the public” to advocate “purify[ing] and disinfect[ing]” the baths. The townspeople, in what is reminiscent of an autoimmune response, reject their medical officer when he imparts facts that, by contaminating the fantasy of wealth’s conversion into health, prove unassimilable by the body politic. Refusing the constitution of acceptable forms of knowledge by scientific rationality, Ibsen’s townspeople twist the hyphen or the slash of Foucault’s “power-knowledge” or “power/knowledge” into a disjunctive punctuation—the mark of a clash between irreconcilables.²⁵

Robert is Dr. Stockmann’s analogue in Dark Waters. That an attorney would occupy in one text a function similar to one occupied by a doctor in the other is amusing, given David Bronsen’s observation, in an enduring reading of Ibsen’s play and its many adaptations, that “the sum total of [Stockmann’s] thoughts and actions amounts to less than the cogent unity of a lawyer’s brief.”²⁶ While Robert is more invested than Stockmann in a coherence of thoughts and actions that could withstand cross-examination, both characters, when we meet them, idealize knowledge, believing inertia in the face of danger to be caused by a dearth of quality information, and therefore remediable through additional, and better, data.²⁷ Robert convinces Taft to let him file a “targeted” lawsuit regarding a “property dispute” (“routine stuff”) on the basis that “we know DuPont: they’re going to want to hear if some of their local guys are screwing something up.” Yet the protagonists of An Enemy of the People and Dark Waters respond differently to the realization that actors within corporations, legislative bodies, and media organizations are unwilling to speak, and varyingly implicated groups and crowds unwilling to listen. Stockmann turns outward, opting for heroic self-inflation. Robert demonstrates more prudence and introspection than his Ibsenian counterpart; the character based on Bilott hesitates to fuel enmity and shows a propensity for highly researched and rehearsed statements at home and at work.

A lengthy expository sequence piecing together two monologues by Robert—one that he delivers to his wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway), the other that he delivers to a supervising partner, Tom Terp (Tim Robbins)—unveils the deliberate and systematic contamination that permitted PFOA’s emergence as a symbol of “American ingenuity,” from its military origins in the Manhattan Project to its renaming as C8 and entry into the domestic sphere through mass-marketed commodities.²⁸ “Right from the start,” says Robert, “something wasn’t right”: employees assigned to the Teflon line quickly displayed grave symptoms that internal studies found had been caused by the chemical. DuPont’s crime, in Robert’s eyes, isn’t that it failed to ensure the safety of Teflon before manufacturing and marketing it but, rather, that the company’s knowledge of unsafety never yielded mitigative actions. For decades, DuPont continued testing the chemical on animals and recording several illnesses and deformations, all the while releasing PFOA dust into the air and dumping the sludge into ditches and waterways. Robert repeatedly underscores this knowledge in his monologues: “That’s 1963, one year after Teflon launched and already DuPont knew”; “It wasn’t like DuPont didn’t know”; “DuPont knew everything. They knew that the C8 they put into the air and buried into the ground for decades was causing cancers. They knew that their own workers were getting these cancers. They knew that the consumers, too, were being exposed.” A third monologue supplementing the findings with financial analysis swaps the third person for the second. Robert now accuses DuPont attorney—and DuPont stand-in—Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber), on whose strained expression the camera stays put: “For forty years you knew C8 was poison.…And you knew exactly why. Because C-8, it stays in us forever. Our bodies are incapable of breaking it down. And knowing all of this, still you did nothing.”

Robert assembles this timeline by digging through the hundreds of haphazard file boxes contained in a “court-ordered discovery.” The tall columns of scattered evidence that surround him amount to an architecture of paranoia (fig. 2). One colleague, worried about the “archive fever” that dust and mold could engender, warns him, “You shouldn’t be around this stuff.”²⁹ Another: “You know you look like a crazy person, right?” Everywhere Robert looks, he finds cause for action but no action—in his own words, “everything” and “nothing.”

The three monologues admonish DuPont decisionmakers for exceeding, and thus skewing, Robert’s essentially liberal vision. In Rawlsian political liberalism, citizens must be rational and reasonable. An “individual or corporate person…with the powers of judgment and deliberation” qualifies as rational but unreasonable by “seeking ends and interests peculiarly its own” yet refusing terms that would encourage the cooperation and well-being of all.³⁰ It may seem odd to liken Robert, an apostle of knowledge, to Rawls, whose most famous export is the “veil of ignorance.”³¹ But Rawls’s spin on the social contract does not detach decision-making from knowledge. In order to react rationally and reasonably to what we do know, we rely on political and economic structures that, according to Rawls, are best devised from an “original position” that leaves out the particulars of our individual class position or social status, our conception of the good, the features of our psychology, and the exact circumstances of our society in favor of “whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice.”³² What for Robert registers as DuPont executives’ failure to remember (a relinquishing of responsibility in the face of actionable knowledge) becomes, through a Rawlsian lens, the same executives’ failure to forget (a suspension of the principles of fairness to which anyone without specific knowledge would adhere).

The liberal dicta that we react coherently to what we know, and that we wish to live in a world in which others do too, are, of course, fantasies. They are so because of the load-bearing capacity they demonstrate in the construction of attachments to various objects, including, in Robert’s case, corporate law, regulatory frameworks, and industrial capitalism.³³ As Lauren Berlant notes, we do not willingly relinquish our attachments, even those to lives of attrition or suffering.³⁴ Traumatic encounters with the lie of liberalism qualify as merely a series of glitches for Robert as well as for Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), the antiheroine of the television series Enlightened (2011–13), which was created by Dern and Mike White, and of which Haynes directed a pivotal episode. In the pilot’s cold open, Amy, a buyer for the pharmaceutical conglomerate Abaddon (a Biblical term for, alternately, the depths of hell and the angel of destruction), suffers a nervous breakdown upon being transferred from Health and Beauty to Cleaning Supplies as a casualty of an intraoffice affair. To avoid a wrongful termination lawsuit, Abaddon welcomes Amy back after her stint in a rehabilitation clinic but demotes her again, this time to Cogentiva, a data compilation initiative located in the headquarters’ basement—below the depths of hell, that is. The employees assigned to Cogentiva, generally as a sanction, labor toward their obsolescence. They supply the cause of their inevitable dismissal: the department’s dissolution as a result of its operations’ automation. Bored and vexed, Amy improvises herself as a whistleblower, delivering to a major newspaper the evidence of bribing she collects by hacking, with the help of a coworker, into the Abaddon CEO’s personal email account. Whistleblowing, optimistically defined by Tatiana Bazzichelli as “a disruption that comes from within closed systems with the aim to open them up and to provoke a change,” marks a new strategy for Amy, who otherwise prefers softer means of implementing change from within.³⁵ Until the very end, she is guided by the assumption that her colleagues would do their job differently, or think differently about it, if only they were aware of Abaddon’s bleak environmental record. She compiles news clippings documenting corporate horrors and asks to be appointed as an ethical “watchdog.” While the position is almost authorized in an unlikely turn of events, most colleagues brush off Amy’s concerns, and they decline the alibi she gifts them of having simply not known about their complicity. They sigh, raise their eyebrows, roll their eyes, grimace, and wince. Amy emerges as an enemy of the people through the affective and gestural repertoire of cringe comedy.

In Dark Waters, Robert’s alienation plays out as an accumulation of minor betrayals by the people and institutions he used to trust. His work as an “informant”—what fellow Taft partner James Ross (William Jackson Harper) calls him for mobilizing a preferential grasp of chemical corporations’ operations toward “a shakedown of an iconic American company”—comes at a cost. Robert incurs successive pay cuts. Moreover, the Appalachian roots of his family prove problematic once he dissents from the decorum of corporate law. At the banquet of the Ohio Chemical Alliance, Phil shouts in his direction, “Hick!” The percussive insult reminds him that his upward mobility is conditional, provisional, and reversible. In West Virginia, too, although for distinct reasons, Robert struggles to gather public support beyond that pledged by the Tennant family. A montage sequence hints at DuPont’s virtual ownership of Parkersburg. The camera’s attention is diverted by corporate iconography as Robert drives by DuPont Circle, the DuPont Community Center, a “DuPont: Better Things for Better Living” banner near a school, and DuPont-emblazoned trash cans.

It is largely on his own that Robert bears the disappointment he now feels toward a legal framework he nevertheless continues to defend when not working on the Tennant case. The adverse reactions to Robert’s disclosure reveal as an aspiration, rather than a rule, James R. Martel’s formula for a transition out of the hierarchical power he names “archism.”³⁶ In this formula, the disappointed prophet hands out a “truth” to the “community”; the transaction both spreads disappointment to the masses and turns it into a revolutionary force.³⁷ Robert does “show how untruths are constructed around human bodies…that become sites of archist projection,” yet here “the effects of disappointment” do not “occur at the level of the community as a whole.”³⁸ Martel’s community is a cross between epistemophilic idealization and new-materialist wish fulfillment: it is merely an affective adjustment away from recovering from the ruins of archism a unified self that is open to pedagogy, allergic to stratification, and capable of transmogrifying its nervous energy into a regime change. Running athwart Martel’s idyll of emotional depersonalization qua power redistribution, Dark Waters presents Robert’s disappointment as irreducibly his own. As Robert’s isolation and, in Enlightened, Amy’s exclusion from the cringing mass suggest, there is, pace the utopian advocates of disappointed solidarities, nothing inherent to the depressive position that guarantees its reticulation.³⁹ The disappointment carried by characters who oppose archism but about whom there is nothing anarchist, however vaguely we define the term, never becomes positive relational or social content.

Robert’s decline manifests through a range of symptoms, the worst of which is a transient ischemic attack, a temporary disruption of the blood flow to the brain that resembles a stroke. The incident leaves Sarah, who at this late stage of the film has been converted into a paranoid subject, wondering whether Robert has been poisoned. At the hospital, she implores Tom to reverse the gradual exclusion of her husband from the professional and productive class, membership in which signifies health in capitalist societies:⁴⁰ “I need you to stop making him feel like a failure. Taft, it’s not just a job. To him it’s…it’s home. And he was willing to risk it all for a stranger who needed his help. Now, you and I may not know what that is, but it’s not failure.” The demand for a recategorization of Robert’s pursuits confirms Sarah’s about-face, initiated about midway through Dark Waters, when the character is somewhat relieved from the duty of personifying the inadmissibility of toxic discourse to the couple and family units. The next section considers this inadmissibility.

Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 New York Times profile of Bilott, on which Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan’s Dark Waters screenplay is based, and Bilott’s own 2019 memoir, released alongside the film, both appraise generously Bilott’s professional and domestic life. Rich reports that “Taft did not waver in its support of the case.”⁴¹ For his part, Bilott writes that “the firm’s ethos”—to do “whatever was necessary to pursue the best interest of [a] client”—was at once “unforgiving” and “one of the reasons [Taft] continued to back [him] in the Tennant case.”⁴² In a passage packed with military analogies, Bilott credits his wife, and what he ventriloquizes as her domestic bliss, for his ability to apply a zealous work ethic:

Dark Waters tells a different story. Early on, the film establishes Robert’s decision to represent a plaintiff as a breach of marital customs and commitments. As an attorney, Sarah represented employers in workers’ compensation disputes. She chose to stay at home in part because she assumed that Robert would keep siding with corporations, and knew that doing so was lucrative. After the Ohio Chemical Alliance showdown, Sarah punctuates an otherwise silent car ride by warning Robert, “You’re not the only one who sacrificed. I just hope you know what you’re doing.” When he wonders if they can still afford to enroll their children in Catholic school, she poses questions of her own: “Have I ever complained?…If you want to start accounting—can our marriage afford thirteen years of this?” The playwright Amy Herzog, who adapted An Enemy of the People ahead of a 2024 Broadway production, subtracted Dr. Stockmann’s wife, deeming the character, as an interviewer puts it, “a shrill foil for the doctor to rail against.”⁴⁴Dark Waters shows greater fascination for the stereotype.

I don’t mean to imply that Rich’s profile and Bilott’s memoir downplay interpersonal friction, whether naively or hypocritically. Nor do I think the opposite: that Correa and Carnahan’s screenplay unduly sensationalizes Bilott’s life, or at least the version available in the source material. My point is that these are separate objects, with diverging ambitions and effects. Dark Waters does something that other iterations of Bilott’s story, for whatever reason, don’t: it positions Robert’s defection from the ranks of corporate defense and his crusade against the propagation of a noxious substance as hazards to the institutions of marriage and family. Robert is confined to an “impasse” around which he can move only by transgressing social norms and historical constraints.⁴⁵ This is to say that the film reframes Bilott’s life as a melodrama.

Critics have by and large received Dark Waters as a minor addition to Haynes’s filmography. They have noted its thematic resonance with Safe (1995), the celebrated horror tale of life in a late industrial “world…dangerously alien to its human subjects,”⁴⁶ but have deemed it a far cry from such queer melodramas as the Douglas Sirk pastiche Far from Heaven (2002), the James M. Cain adaptation Mildred Pierce (2011), the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol (2015), and, more recently, the true-crime satire May December (2023). Peter Travers, for instance, begins his review by musing, “It seems odd at first that Todd Haynes, the artful creator of…classic queer cinema,…would be drawn to such a just-the-facts legal barnburner like Dark Waters.”⁴⁷ And in the introduction to an edited volume spanning Haynes’s oeuvre, Theresa L. Geller observes that the “docudrama thriller,” “his first official studio movie,” marks a “new direction[].”⁴⁸ The idiosyncrasy of Dark Waters on Haynes’s résumé may be overstated. That the film appears conventional should hardly come as a surprise, given that Haynes has long displayed an obsession, one I’ve documented elsewhere, for generic and social conventions.⁴⁹ That the protagonist of Dark Waters isn’t a “social outcast[]” with a “‘subversive’ identity and ‘abnormal’ sexuality” seems just as consistent with Haynes’s modus operandi;⁵⁰ as I’ve also posited, the queerness of his films, whether or not they feature homosexual characters, lies in formal gestures like repetition, identification, or imitation.⁵¹ By exposing a toxicity at home within the upwardly mobile couple and family, Dark Waters imposes itself as a fitting object for a queer theory devoted to denaturalizing mating and parenting rituals. I would go so far as to suggest that Dark Waters constitutes Haynes’s most eccentric experiment with the queer melodrama, for it rests an investigation of sexual existence onto the shoulders of a character who oscillates between properly melodramatic emotional eruptions and the flatness of nondescript white masculinity.⁵²

Marital tension overflows into conflict around the film’s halfway mark. Although she will continue to express some discomfort about the amplitude of the Tennant case, Sarah inherits from the exchange some of Robert’s fear, and some of his outrage, as well. The sequence begins in the Taft office. Robert is kneeling on the floor and perusing files that appear increasingly organized when he comes across magazine ads for two products that, he figures out, contain PFOA: nonstick pans (“Happy Pans! It will keep the sparkle in her smile!”) and a carpet protector (“Achieving your dream of domestic bliss”). He rushes to stand up and step back, as if to seal himself off. The distinction between the perfluorochemical and its representation evaporates once Robert realizes that his family has been living the dream sold by the ads. At home, the camera occupies the side of the bed that Robert has left vacant again. Sarah wakes up, frightened, upon hearing clamor. She cautiously tiptoes toward the kitchen, where her husband has pulled the carpet and is rummaging through pots and pans. She breathes a sigh of relief before reprimanding Robert for causing her to believe that someone had broken in. No one has entered the home, he will correct her, but something has.

In their dialogue, quoted below, Sarah pictures herself a protector of the family against a danger personified by Robert—even if he understands himself to be acting in the name of that very family (as a favor to his grandmother, or toward a purer future for his children):

Robert attempts de-escalation by offering to explain “all of it.” “And if you still think I’m crazy,” he swears, “I’ll drop it.” A wide shot releasing some of the tension hoarded by a prior string of medium close-ups shows Sarah’s pregnant belly as she sits at the dinner table. She agrees to listen, and Robert begins the first of the monologues on DuPont’s calculated poisoning to which I referred in the previous section. Affonso Gonçalves’s restless editing shuttles us between the Bilotts’ home, the Taft office, the Tennants’ farm, and a hospital where, sometime in the future, Sarah gives birth to their child. The nurse assures Robert that the baby is “perfect” after he inquires about deformations or abnormalities. We eventually return to the Bilotts’ kitchen. Sarah is for the first time taking in the troubling information. The camera, tracking her gaze, pans across manufactured commodities and processed foods (figs. 3 and 4) as Robert inventories common uses of PFOA: “paints,” “fabrics,” “raincoats,” “boots.” Sarah can no longer ignore the contamination of bourgeois domesticity’s consumptive lifestyle.

How could anyone fend off this information, if doing so meant stretching the temporality of exposure? The question, as I see it, demands not a psychological answer, which would imply the possibility of limiting risk by relinquishing so-called toxic attitudes and desires, but a psychoanalytic one: an account of the structures that render “emotional toxins and nourishment…so mixed as to be indistinguishable.”⁵³ Let us first look at Mel Y. Chen’s decidedly nonpsychoanalytic theory of the linguistic and phantasmatic management of toxicity. This theory’s paradigmatic—though not sole—case study is the 2007 US “lead panic,” sparked by the recall of children’s toys containing traces of the metal. Chen remembers the lead panic as fusing the threat of contamination with Chinese identity: “Mass media stories pitched Chinese environmental threats neither as harmful to actual Chinese people or landscapes, nor as products of a global industrialization that the United States itself eagerly promotes, but as invasive dangers to the U.S. territory from other national territories. These environmental toxins were supposed to be ‘there’ but were found ‘here.’”⁵⁴ In this context, a racial “animacy hierarchy” secures a domestic sovereignty that conflates home and nation.⁵⁵ Tautologically, the life and aliveness of the white US child as archetypal victim are protected through the expulsion of a menacing Asianness that seems less alive in comparison due to its proximity to lead, a material that carries death as a transitive property. “If viruses, also nonliving, nevertheless seem ‘closer’ to life because they require living cells for their own continued existence,” Chen explains, “lead seems more uncontroversially ‘dead’ and is imagined as more molecular than cellular.”⁵⁶ For Chen, as well as for other scholars of pollution and waste,⁵⁷ the banishment of toxic matter has to do with the “deceleration[] of racialized chemical intimacies,” or the prevention of a speculated interracial contact that doubles as the uncomfortable cohabitation of life and death.⁵⁸

This affective geopolitics of toxicity presumes, first, that knowledge of a chemical threat logically results in its exclusion, and, second, that unconscious processes, to the extent that they subtend this logical exclusion, can be made legible through a sociology of racism. To track regional and class difference in Dark Waters is certainly to apprehend the construction of morbidity as an attribute of the unprivileged. We may think of Sarah’s correction that Wilbur, rather than a “we” that includes her, is being poisoned; or of Phil’s slight on Robert for not disavowing his West Virginian heritage. But what are we to make of the absence of a PFOA panic in Haynes’s film? What are we to make, once again, of the fact that the marital and familial antagonism is exacerbated not when one party poisons the other but when Sarah is told about the poisoning perpetrated by corporations? The recurrence of these questions signals an enforcement of domestic sovereignty and social order that does not coincide with the material and discursive evacuation of impurity as modeled by Chen, or by Mary Douglas in her influential anthropology of dust.⁵⁹

Robert’s unintended challenge to the upper-middle-class couple and family units resides not just in his failure to sustain and increase his income but, more fundamentally, in his violation of a silent covenant or “open secret”⁶⁰: that to embody good-life fantasies under late industrialism is to enjoy one’s commodities as well as one’s waste.⁶¹ In the psychoanalytic terms laid out by Todd McGowan, the exclusion of death qua PFOA isn’t as life-giving and -sustaining as the ability to obtain satisfaction and gratification from its inclusion.⁶² “Political struggles,” as McGowan begins Enjoyment Right & Left, “take place to determine what form of enjoyment will predominate.”⁶³ The experience of enjoyment, or of the Lacanian jouissance on which McGowan is riffing, lies beyond the pleasure principle; it is “excessive,” “damaging,” and “ruinous.” The path to enjoyment is therefore the unconscious: “When we are caught up in it, we cannot consciously trace the reasons for why we are enjoying. We enjoy when we unconsciously disturb our usual routines, throw ourselves off course, or cause too much trouble for ourselves. Such acts don’t make sense according to conscious calculation.”⁶⁴ Whereas McGowan sees enjoyment as an exception to “everyday life” that in turn makes it “bearable,” in Dark Waters it is the reproduction of an everyday life of chemical relations that fits the definition of the enjoyable (“what is not useful, what is not good for our health or well-being, what involves some sacrifice of what is good for us”).⁶⁵

Lacan argues that the “inanimate”—“a point on the horizon, an ideal point, a point that’s off the map,” which constitutes the destination of the Freudian death drive—“is revealed perfectly by the fact of jouissance.”⁶⁶ The “transgression” or “aggression” that is jouissance “overruns” the pleasure principle, “which is nothing other than the principle of least tension, of the minimum tension that needs to be maintained for life to subsist.”⁶⁷ The enjoyment of intoxication in Haynes’s film indicates a force of self-destruction proper to the couple and the family. The film doesn’t narrate the protection of life against death; it awkwardly shoves into a narrative structure the distinctly nonnarrative (repetitive, not evolutive) comixing of life and death.

In the melodrama, according to Sirk, who is here referring to his use of objects, “there is no such thing as a dead thing and a live thing.”⁶⁸ The camera’s horizontal pans across the contaminated landscape of bourgeois domesticity in Dark Waters suggest that valence and inertia are happier bedfellows than can be admitted under the geontological governance of a distinction between Life and Nonlife.⁶⁹ Before us isn’t so much life or death as what M Murphy sums up, in terms friendly to the melodrama, as “alterlife”: “Forms of alterlife are systematically and brutally harmed and even exterminated in chemical relations; at the same time, alterlife includes being in the mess of consumption, subsistence, and side effect.”⁷⁰

There are, according to McGowan, two possible responses to the traumatic encounter with “impossibility,” the “point of contradiction within the social order.”⁷¹ The conservative response, exemplified by the defensive reactions to Robert’s toxic discourse, “rejects the impossible contradiction and attempts to assert social belonging by contrasting those who belong with the enemy who doesn’t.”⁷² This is a response that, in Lee Edelman’s words, hangs onto the Symbolic (futurity, reproduction, the Child) and its “putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real.”⁷³ The radical response would for its part consist in the enjoyment of “nonbelonging.”⁷⁴ No one occupies this position in Dark Waters. Robert qualifies as an enemy of the people for exposing belonging as disavowal, but he, too, clutches the Symbolic. The same goes for Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen’s play; the patriarch floats the idea of “sail[ing] away to the New World,” and at the same time insists that he cannot be driven out of the country because he is “the strongest man in the town.” In Enlightened, Amy, when confronted by Abaddon high executives, favors the idiom of reparation over that of shattering (she “tried to take a little power back” because she was “tired of watching the world fall apart”), but she does come close to expressing something like the enjoyment of a life without guarantees: “The only thing I feel right now is satisfaction.” The radical response to impossibility has no character to attach to in Dark Waters, but it isn’t absent from the film; Haynes, as this essay’s final section shows, displaces it onto form.

The encounter with the traffic between Life and Nonlife smoothed out in the exercise of geontopower is structured by two melodramatic forms in Dark Waters: one is the impossible situation, the other the false happy ending.⁷⁵ The impossible situation—a term I inherit from Goldberg, who inherits it from Sirk—designates an impasse out of which there is no way without loss. To inhabit it, as does Robert, caught as he is between two signifiers of futurity (health and wealth), is to take on “the impossible task of overcoming differences that remain insuperable.”⁷⁶

In one sequence relevant to the impossible situation, set in 2004, Robert is conducting a deposition in DuPont’s offices. Once the examination is over, his face, shown in close-up, starts to twitch, and his hands, also in close-up, to shake. His tremor worsens as he steps into the parking garage. A tracking shot follows him as he walks at a steady pace, holding his right arm with his left hand. Cut to another tracking shot, this one following Robert from behind a perforated concrete wall. The shift in camera position insinuates that he is being watched. He very well may be: we twice catch a glimpse of a menacing figure—or are there two figures?—standing in the distance. Sound and image together alert us to a diffuse threat. Much like John Williams’s score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), frequently described as a loose adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Marcel Zavros’s sinister, jittery score for Dark Waters prompts us constantly to under- or overestimate the distance between character and danger. Blue and amber filters, for their part, make the corporate architecture appear strangely aquatic; the danger could be anywhere because, as we know, “it’s in the water.” Robert at last reaches his car, enters it, and locks the doors. He mechanically prepares to insert the key into the ignition before stopping himself (fig. 5). A low-angle profile enables us to read growing anguish on his face (fig. 6). He very slowly returns the key to the switch, then rotates it—a movement broken apart by successive shots and counter-shots. The engine turns on, undramatically.

The sequence obviously references the 1970s paranoid thriller, especially director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis’s “paranoia trilogy”—Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976)—which Haynes and Lachman cite as inspiration.⁷⁷ The scene in the parking garage is also one of many inscribing Dark Waters in a melodramatic tradition. Robert’s paranoid suspicion that starting the car will detonate a bomb renders immediate the dilemma he regularly imagines himself to be facing: either he gives up, wounding his attachment to ideals of purity, viability, and fairness, or he goes on and risks exhaustion or death. But, the film insists, a legal victory would not achieve detoxification; forever chemicals are forever. Nor would a legal victory restore justice beyond narrow parameters of financial compensation for past and future damages; Wilbur has long been dead by the time the first payment is issued.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Audit Policy mandates corporations to maintain internal compliance structures that align their behavior with legal and social expectations by voluntarily discovering, disclosing, correcting, and preventing the recurrence of environmental violations.⁷⁸ From the vantage of most characters in Dark Waters, DuPont’s compliance, not a regulatory apparatus that presumes corporations good-faith actors (rational and reasonable), is on trial. Bilott may have been labeled “DuPont’s worst nightmare” by the New York Times, but neither he nor the character he inspired has removed the conditions authorizing such a corporation to profit from pollution. On the contrary, Robert’s revelations and actions authenticate a system that, by keeping lawsuits rare and fines manageable, incentivizes noncompliance. Through the immunitary logic of liberal adaptation to dissent, the identification and prosecution of a so-called rogue agent can be claimed as a win for self-regulation—proof that the system works.⁷⁹ That it does is at least the claim made by Tom, who once bewilders his colleagues by delivering a passionate monologue in support of Robert:

Within the legal parameters endorsed by Robert and Tom, we can hope only for the corporate orchestration of mass murder and environmental decline to register as a mishap amid processes that we’re told are, like the “gentlemen” who defend them, deserving of our faith. Robert, then, is a paranoid subject, but not a paranoid reader. He palpates the structure that is jurisprudence without ever recognizing it as a structure. Dark Waters enables this recognition—a properly structural palpation—especially in unmistakably melodramatic scenes where the film’s artificiality, or its status as a technical and formal apparatus, is most salient.

In the parking garage scene, a chasm between Robert’s account of political stakes and the film’s own is enforced by the frame—a cut, as it were, between the realities included and those excluded. The frame specifically severs the hand holding the key from Robert. Like the disembodied tear that for Eugenie Brinkema operates as “a structure rather than an emotional expression,” the hand and the key aren’t strict extensions of Robert’s psyche.⁸⁰ They are, if not irreferential, differently referential. Mary Ann Doane says of objects in close-up that they are “larger than life” as well as morbid or parasitic, for they “cover[] the screen, using up, exhausting all space.”⁸¹ The neither-live-nor-dead hand and key exhaust fantasy and figure enjoyment. The hand that doesn’t belong indeed holds the key to nonbelonging. It does so by dwelling longer than is comfortable on the pause that precedes a decision, thereby giving away that liberal schemes of world-altering revelation and action run on deferral. Amy, in the pilot of Enlightened, condenses these schemes with the following aphorism: “If we can change, anything is possible. If we can change, the whole world can change for the better.” This model of transformation necessitates the causal conditionals, insofar as once we’ve changed, we must deal with the fact that the world still has not. What we do is inadequate to the world, which is to say that the world is inadequate to what we wish. The slow movement of the hand and the key evict liberal fantasy from deferral. What remain are the shattering tactile pleasures of belonging to neither life nor death, before both outcomes are revealed as business as usual.

The “false happy ending” formulation comes from Haynes himself, who arrives at it in a conversation with his frequent collaborator, Julianne Moore:

The false happy ending manifests as excess or lack, whether emotional remainder or financial deficit. It is an ending that bears the mark of incompleteness: that of all efforts to overcome the impossible situation and to withstand its crushing pressures.

Other biographical dramas of contamination hint at false happy endings, generally in “where are they now” epilogues relayed by title cards, but they refrain from melodramatizing the falseness of that happiness, or the happiness in falseness. Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000) reframes its David and Goliath plot as a “rags to riches” tale by disclosing the $2 million bonus that Erin (Julia Roberts) received for her leadership in the Pacific Gas & Electric Company case. Mike Nichols’s Silkwood (1983) more tragically concludes with the death of Karen (Meryl Streep), a chemical technician and union organizer, in a car crash depicted as provoked rather than accidental. Yet Silkwood also dispenses an optimistic epilogue: the whistleblower’s legacy lives on with the closing of the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant. In both cases, narrative and the law are called upon to contain both the violence of late industrialism and the harmful substances (hexavalent chromium in Erin Brockovich, plutonium in Silkwood) that travel between environments and bodies.

Lingering, in Dark Waters, formalizes the impossibility of toxicity’s full containment. As I’ve brought up, the camera lingers on the froth above the water during the cold open, and on the commodities and debris in the Bilotts’ kitchen. We may add to this list a series of aerial shots, appearing very late in the film, of DuPont’s monstrous site, which is said to be thirty-five times the size of the Pentagon. Haynes lingers on moments of joy or pride with the same paranoid skepticism. In the final scene, Robert takes one plaintiff’s case to court. After Robert identifies himself, the judge remarks, “Oh! Still here, huh?” “Still here,” Robert replies. The rest is history, or epilogue:

“Still here,” and “still fighting.” Dark Waters has conditioned us to receive the word “still” as an indicator of not just perseverance but paralysis. Stillness implies an impasse, be it a new one or an old one, newly displaced.

Haynes observes that neither the results of the medical study nor the ensuing legal processes and decisions make for a climactic or cathartic conclusion: “I love the successes that Rob achieves in this movie, they mean something to me.…But the news that he gets at the end of the movie, which we’ve been waiting for and watching [him] suffer in that wait, is the saddest good news. There’s a sense of, holy shit, this is our world, but then what do you do about it?”⁸³ The toxic melodrama lets this question linger to the point of reversal: What can’t we do about it? The formal amplification of contradictions within “toxic late liberalism,” as Povinelli labels the management of industrial pollution through the liberal politesses of self-reflection and self-correction, in turn removes the premise that “this is our world.”⁸⁴ None of us, whether we enjoy it or not, truly belongs to the chemical forever.