In The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, author and critic John Clute connects the birth of Western horror to 1750, stating that it was "born at a point when it [had] begun to be possible to glimpse the planet itself as a drama: a very dangerous time in the history of the West, because it [was] at this point that (to put it very crudely) Enlightened Europeans were beginning to know it all, were beginning to think that glimpsing the world was tantamount to owning it" ("Horror"). For Clute, "Horror is (in part) a subversive response to the falseness of that Enlightenment ambition to totalize knowledge and the world into an imperial harmony" ("Horror"). From its conception, then, horror acted "in contradiction of the imperialisms of the West"; it was "Enlightenment's dark, mocking Twin" (Clute, "Horror"). However, horror has not remained focused on Enlightenment-era ideas but has instead grown alongside society as it approached and entered modernity.

"[O]ver the past 250 years," Clute argues, "there has evolved an understory or grammar that governs the literal telling of stories of Horror" – a "Grammar of Horror" that "exposes the lie that we own the world to which we are bound" ("Horror"). "The Darkening Garden," then, is Clute's consolidation of horror as a specific genre, one that relies on story/narrative moves  rather than on simply how the narrative affects viewers/readers. This "Grammar of Horror" is expressed through a four-stage story structure – Sighting, Thickening, Revel, Aftermath – and it "attempts to articulate a profound and specific fastening of Story to world" (Clute, "Horror"). This focus on the "fastening" of story to world allows for a broad approach to what might constitute horror within Clute's lexicon; indeed, the "Grammar of Horror" allows for the consideration of horror narratives that may seem to fall outside of the obvious definition. Clute himself uses Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life as one of his examples in the revel stage, as but one example.    

Clute's "Grammar of Horror" provides an ideal structure with which to examine director Peter Berg's Deepwater Horizon (2016), co-written by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Matthew Sand. Starring "Hard-Working American Hero" Mark Wahlberg as Mike Williams, Berg’s film examines what happened on board the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig on the day and night leading up to its ultimate destruction. Approaching a critical analysis of the film through Clute's "Grammar of Horror" creates space for the movie to be examined not simply as a disaster film committed to paying homage to the loss of life on board the rig, but rather as a narrative that is engaging, intentionally or not, with issues and anxieties specific to petroculture-reliant, contemporary Western society. As such, in this paper, I will trace the narrative of Deepwater Horizon through the point of view of the protagonist Mike Williams as well as through the four stages of Clute's "Grammar of Horror." In doing so, I will focus on specific elements of horror – the concepts of monsters and haunted houses – as well as specific cultural touchstones and anxieties – ideas of petroculture and the Anthropocene era we are currently experiencing. What is being said, explicitly or implicitly, about oil and the way we interact with it? From this starting point, I intend to produce a critical exploration of the film that begins to consider how the use of horror conventions can shape viewer experiences as both a piece of fiction and a representation of real-world anxieties related to the Anthropocene era and humanity's responsibility for, and place in, the world.¹

Sighting

The first stage of Clute's "Grammar of Horror" is Sighting, which is "a glimpse of terror to come" ("Sighting"). Sighting provides the protagonist with "the first sign that [they] are going to be unmapped...from the normal world" (Clute, "Sighting"). However, the act of Sighting is not just "an initial experience of horror" (Clute, "Sighting"). It can encourage feelings of horror in the protagonist and/or viewers, and does in many cases, but the main goal of Sighting is to presage the coming doom: "[i]t is the first 'sentence' in an argument whose outcome will be an unpeeling of the true world" (Clute, "Sighting"). In one of the first scenes of Deepwater Horizon, the protagonist's daughter, Sydney (Stella Allen), performs an experiment with a can of Coke, some honey, and a straw. She is practicing a demonstration for her class about her father's job as an engineer on the Deepwater Horizon, and her goal is to show how an oil rig works. The Coke can is first shaken by her mother, Felicia (Kate Hudson), and then Sydney violently stabs the straw into the closed lid and quickly pours honey down the straw to prevent the shaken pop from rushing up. As she does this, Sydney explains that the oil, represented by the soda in her experiment, is a "monster," and that one of her father's jobs is to keep the "monsters from coming up," by filling the pipe with mud, or drilling fluid. Sydney finishes her demonstration by declaring that once her father's crew are done "tam[ing] the dinosaurs," they "sail away to the next" oil rig. Presentation finished, Sydney is met with applause and praise from Mike and Felicia. 

Moments later, however, Sydney's experiment fails. The honey is overpowered by the fizzy drink, which comes gushing up the straw, hits the ceiling, and coats the Williams' kitchen in the sticky, brown mixture – foreshadowing the events to come. Though Felicia and Sydney jump back and ask Mike to stop what is happening, he just laughs, declaring: "There's only so much stuff in the can." The suggestion is that there is nothing to be done but wait for the can of pop to empty itself and then clean up the mess. For a single can, Mike deems the risk to his home and family miniscule enough to simply wait it out. Watching, the viewer might question what Mike's response would be if that brown, sticky substance was oil instead of a soft drink. Zooming in on the can with an ominous soundtrack, Berg makes explicitly clear what is to come.

The next scene, however, suggests that – even if it is subliminal – Mike has also been made aware of the Sighting when, as he fills his truck with gas, he asks Felicia if she knows where their passwords and insurance information are kept. When she questions why he is bringing that up, Mike responds that he "got a little spooked on the go-home chopper last hitch." If the Sighting works as "the beginning of the end of things" – and as "a flash of the future" –  then Mike's feelings of unease resurfacing after experiencing the failure of Sydney's experiment as well as recalling the helicopter ride solidly fit into Clute's suggestion that the Sighting begins to show the protagonist that what is to come will be "worse than what [was] just sighted" ("Sighting"). The horror story has officially begun.

While Clute suggests that the Sighting only applies to a story's protagonist/s, I argue that Deepwater Horizon also provides its audience with a first Sighting, one that they witness without any of the on-screen protagonists or secondary protagonists being present. This Sighting begins in the opening scene of the movie, as the camera slowly pans down the shaft of the oil drill to check its status. The shot seems to end anticlimactically: a man, through voiceover, states that the wellhead looks to only have "[m]inor corrosion. Not much more than [he'd] expect on a wellhead this age" and is told to return the (in-story) camera to the surface. But as that camera rises out of view, the film camera lingers deep within the water, moving closer to the floor of the ocean, until, as the music reaches a foreboding crescendo, a single gas bubble breaks free from the ocean floor and slowly drifts toward the surface. These Sightings foreshadow the same event – the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill – and they each make "the heart...thump in the breast" (Clute, "Sighting"). However, the results of these moments of Sighting are slightly different. The failed experiment caused Mike to revisit feelings of dread, which are amplified when the helicopter he is riding in is hit by a bird, causing him to close his eyes and claim that he "ain't saying nothin.'" At this point, Mike does not know that something bad will happen, but the Sighting he experienced has left him feeling uneasy. On the other hand, the audience knows what is coming. For viewers then, at its most basic level, the Sighting becomes a moment of anticipation that inspires the question of how it is going to happen. 

The two Sightings do something else for the audience, too. The single gas bubble floating eerily to the surface of the ocean firmly plants in the viewers' minds that this is a movie about an oil disaster. When Sydney's experiment goes awry a couple of minutes later, the audience is more likely to see the spewing liquid as oil, creating a second Sighting for them that corresponds to the protagonist's experience. Thus, the film shifts from the Sighting stage to the beginning of the Thickening stage during Mike's commute to work. The audience, prepared thanks to their initial moments of Sighting, is able to see oil in a way that it is often unnoticed. In "Conjectures on World Energy Literature: Or, What Is Petroculture?," Imre Szeman states that "oil has a tendency to vanish into the background, invisible to narrative and so, too, to critique" (283). However, as Deepwater Horizon transitions from the moment of Sighting to Thickening, shown through the imagery of Mike commuting to work, Berg refuses to allow oil to become invisible. The audience watches Mike fill up his truck with gas – fifty cents per gallon off – and listens as Felicia states that people "buy gas to go to work, to buy gas to go back to work, to buy more gas to get to work." Shortly after, the audience watches the helicopter that will take the crew to the Deepwater Horizon be filled with jet fuel in a parallel but less relatable image. Alongside these images, as Mike and Felicia pull into the Bristow Heliport, Mike navigates their truck through a veritable sea of other vehicles – mostly other new-seeming trucks – which is then juxtaposed with an image of dozens of heliport take-off and landing sites, all that have helicopters either currently out, taking crews to offshore rigs, or present and waiting to do so. Oil, Szeman states, "has shaped our communities in ways that have produced an abiding loyalty to the substance" (13). And yet, it remains "a resource whose consumption is almost entirely disassociated from its extraction" (Szeman, "Conjectures" 283). By utilizing the transition scenes from Sighting to Thickening as a way to juxtapose and overlap images of Big Oil and more everyday petro-consumption – through the use of images related to gas, vehicles, and even the highway infrastructure that Mike and Felicia drive down – Berg highlights the argument Stephanie LeMenager makes, that petroculture is "normative, everyday culture for many people in the wealthier parts of the world" (LeMenager, "What"). Petroculture is not just pipelines, or offshore oil rigs, it is everywhere, and by forcing the audience to witness and consider these juxtaposed images of everyday petro-consumption with images of Big Oil within the Sighting stage of the film, Deepwater Horizon ensures that, as the disaster unfolds, the audience will not be able to divest their own experiences with and reliance on petroculture from the destruction being wreaked onboard the rig.

Thickening    

According to Clute, the second stage of a horror movie is Thickening, which  begins as the "flash of Sighting begins to come true" ("Thickening"). In Deepwater Horizon, the moment when Sighting officially gives way to Thickening can be seen when the bird strikes the front window of the helicopter. In this moment, Mike is not simply being given a warning of what is to come; instead, he is actively being moved into the next stage of the narrative. The Thickening stage presents itself much differently than Sighting in a horror narrative. While Sighting is one – or, as I have argued, two – explicit moments, Thickening is a process that "will normally be felt as a cumulative movement towards a further stage" (Clute, "Thickening"). At its most simple, Thickening can be described as the build-up of "plot-complicating" moments, something that is seen in almost all fiction (Clute, "Thickening"): it is the middle of the story, where a series of events occur that increase tension and lead the characters to the climax of the narrative – the Thickening, then, literally "[t]hickens our passage" through the narrative (Clute, "Thickening").

However, the Thickening does not simply place vague and generic complications in the way of the protagonist to hinder their movement through the plot. Rather, it makes use of "the accumulated mass of precedent and conversation contained in everything already written and read" before it to "point to some truth which the moment of Revel [the next stage] may reveal" (Clute, "Thickening"). The Thickening stage, then, uses specific and recognizable complicating moments that connect the current narrative to other work that has come before it and connects the viewer to the protagonist and story through a "similar shared past: one that haunts and encumbers" (Clute, "Thickening"). This connection comes with the "sense that the stories of the past 250 years are somehow testamentary" to the current story being viewed (Clute, "Thickening"). This connection and bequeathment allows for horror creators to utilize recurring themes, tropes, and character arcs in their work that suggest – or aid the suggestion of – specific messages and meanings within their narratives and connect them to explicit moments or events of the audience's world. Peter Berg draws upon specific Gothic-inspired horror tropes – monsters and haunted houses – within Deepwater Horizon. These tropes are utilized within the Thickening stage to connect Deepwater Horizon to films that have come before it, but also to generate questions around the use of oil within the narrative that will ultimately inspire a deeper consideration regarding oil in the audience's own world.

Monsters and Haunted Houses

Rick Altman, in "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," suggests that "horror films borrow from a nineteenth-century literary tradition," that is, the Gothic with its "dependence on the presence of a monster" (38). Robin Wood, in "The American Nightmare," agrees, and offers "a simple and obvious basic formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the Monster" (31). Normality, in this formula, is usually defined in narrow terms: "the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions...that support and defend them" (Wood 31). However, the Monster is much more mutable and is transformed "from period to period as society's basic fears" also shift and change (Wood 31). As Kyle Bishop states, "the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II ushered in nuclear paranoia narratives like the films Godzilla (1954) and Them! (1954), and fear of the encroaching Communist threat inspired alien invasion stories like Jack Finney's novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) and the movie Invaders from Mars (1953)" (17). Post-9/11, Bishop argues, brought the Renaissance of the Zombie film, which highlighted both society's increasing fear of "the inescapable realities of unnatural death (via infection, infestation, or violence)" and the increasingly "grim view of a modern apocalypse in which society’s infrastructure breaks down" (17, 18). This shifting of what was seen as monstrous works to support Wood's formula, since, as Wood states, it "covers the entire range of horror films, being applicable whether the Monster is a vampire, a giant gorilla...[or] an amorphous gooey mass...and this makes it possible to connect the most seemingly heterogenous movies" and even movies that would not traditionally be defined as horror (Wood 31).

Throughout Deepwater Horizon, Berg sets up oil – specifically the oil and gas building up beneath the Deepwater Horizon drill/well – as the monster, and, in doing so, places what might have been a straight-forward disaster film explicitly within the horror realm. This application of the normality versus the monster formula can first be seen in both Sighting moments of the film. The first Sighting, of the gas bubble floating to the surface in the opening scene of the film, employs the soundtrack in a way that "gives the audiences cues on how to read [the scene]" (Knöppler 39). The music builds into "menacing crescendos" that suggest the oil/gas is a threat to the safety of those on board the rig,  which, of course, audiences would already have known (Knöppler 39). From the first glimpse of what lies beneath the Deepwater Horizon, then, viewers of the film are given specific cues to read oil as monstrous, as the villain of the narrative. However, Christian Knöppler also suggests that it is not just witnessing the monster that establishes it, but that monstrosity is also "established in dialogue and exposition about the monster in question" (39). The second moment of Sighting – the experiment gone wrong – heavily utilizes dialogue, by having Sydney explicitly frame oil as a monster when she describes what it is for her father: "That oil," Sydney explicates "is a monster. Like the mean old dinosaurs all that oil used to be. So, for three hundred million years, these old dinosaurs have been getting squeezed tighter, and tighter...They're trapped. Ornery." Sydney goes on to explain that the drilling mud that Mike and the crew use is "so thick and heavy" that it "stops the monsters from coming up." Mike encourages  the language his daughter uses to describe oil throughout this scene, which highlights that this depiction/reception of oil is normal and natural in their world. It is seen, as Sydney suggests, as a monster for Mike and his crew to tame.

Once firmly within the Thickening stage of the film, Berg draws on another specific technique of traditional horror films to situate oil as the monster of the narrative: the "Killer Point of View" (aka Killer POV), which "locate[s] its threats offscreen, in the unseen spaces surrounding us, just beyond what [is] visible" (Hart). The Killer POV "places a threat within a scene without visualizing it" – it is, therefore, "not limited to a body, human or otherwise" (Hart). The clearest moment that Deepwater Horizon utilizes this technique happens just after Mike has done a walk-through of the rig. He tosses a coin into the water, and as it falls and sinks into the ocean the point of view switches. Suddenly, the camera lens is gazing up at the Deepwater Horizon from the depths of the ocean. There is also a shift in the music as it becomes, once again, more ominous. It feels as if something is watching the crew. This image makes a connection to another famous Killer POV, also in a film that "came from outside the slasher tradition": Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) (Hart). In Jaws, "a camera moves underwater, angling upwards towards an unsuspecting young woman swimming alone. When the camera reaches its target, the shot cuts above the water to show the swimmer being painfully tugged from below" (Hart). This moment heightens the threat of the monster – the shark – for the audience, shifting it from being an invisible potential threat underneath the water to a legitimate danger, complicating the plot and filling the audience with the tension of waiting for what is undoubtedly to come, which  provides the threat with agency, even before it is visualized on screen. Similarly, in Deepwater Horizon the Killer POV shot gives a sense of agency to the oil – it cannot yet be seen, but it is still asserting its presence to the audience. When paired with the language used to depict the oil in earlier scenes, this shot firmly establishes oil as a legitimate monster – a threat – that actively seeks to harm the crew of the Deepwater Horizon.

Berg also plays with another integral element of horror, which also borrowed its roots – at least its Western roots – from the nineteenth-century Gothic: the haunted house. These narratives are usually set in an "antiquated space" like "a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey…or some new recreation of an older venue, such as an office with old filing cabinets, an overworked spaceship…Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past…that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story" (Hogle 2). The ocean is also a popular setting for haunted house narratives, since human's "inability to conquer and colonise the sea [is] an endless source of cultural fear and fascination" (Parker and Poland 4). The "elemental unpredictability" of the ocean "becomes a perfect catalyst for ghost narratives" (Armitt, qtd. in Parker and Poland 4). These hauntings "can take many forms, but they frequently assume the features of ghosts, specters, or monsters…that rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view" (Hogle 2).

The elements of a haunted house narrative are established immediately upon Mike's arrival onboard the Deepwater Horizon, which is full of broken-down machinery and parts that are constantly being repaired with "Band-Aids and bubble gum." In addition, modes of communication are limited, as phone lines and computers are either down or acting strangely. Sometimes, Mike may video chat with his wife, but even that connection is shaky. The lack of communication options adds an element of alienation to the narrative while the broken-down rig situates the Deepwater Horizon as an ideal haunted house. Mike stresses the antiquated nature of the rig when he states, "Every time I peel off a Band-Aid on this rig, I find three or four more." It is, essentially, the "overworked spaceship," minus the element of space (Hogle 2).  

Adding to the isolated, haunted setting in the middle of the ocean, Berg often inserts brief scenes of the Deepwater Horizon, sometimes including the Bankston, the ship working with the Deepwater Horizon to unload its drilling mud. This establishing shot emphasizes the scale of the Deepwater Horizon – it is enormous – while also heightening the sense of alienation and isolation that is common in haunting narratives. This isolation explicitly connects the Deepwater Horizon to another iconic horror film – and one that also utilizes the haunted house narrative despite not being in a traditional setting – Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), which "follows seven people on their way back to Earth after a picking up over 20 million tons of mineral ore" (Barkan). Not only is leaving the haunted house not a "feasible option" for the crews of each film, but both films also feature unconventional settings for their haunted locations and utilize the element of home in a way that many haunted house films do not (Barkan). In each film, the house setting is one that is familiar to the crew. They "feel comfortable in it, they are intimately aware of how it works and how to navigate it. This isn't a situation where people are thrust into a new environment where they have no idea what is around each corner" (Barkan). Horror films rely heavily on connections to their predecessors, and by connecting Deepwater Horizon to other haunted house narratives – particularly Alien – through the use of setting and isolation, Berg is able to amplify the tension and fear during the Thickening stage of the narrative as audiences connect Deepwater Horizon to films they have already seen.  

Horror narratives, particularly when they employ elements of the nineteenth-century Gothic, rely on "the traversal of boundaries: between good and evil, between black and white, between living and dead, and between the human and nonhuman" (Parker and Poland 2; emphasis in original). Jerrold E. Hogle argues that this traversal allows for multiple meanings to be read from Gothic/horror texts: 

We are always poised on the fulcrum of this choice when we read or consider Gothic fictions: do we let them mainly protect and justify us as we are (which most of them can, if we seek that through them) or do we let them arouse us to reconsider and critique the conventional norms of western middle-class culture, which can confront disguised challenges to them in the Gothic (if we let it) more vividly than anywhere else? (Hogle 19)  

By drawing on these specific Gothic horror elements within the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon, Berg is able to engage in this traversal of meanings. When read as a straightforward horror narrative, the Thickening stage represents a group of humans who are being haunted and hunted by an unknown presence. This reading places oil as the monster and humans as the heroes of the narrative. However, by explicitly positioning oil as the monster, Berg situates the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon into a horror subgenre – the revenge of nature – that sees “the revenge of an anthropomorphized nature that responds to human despoilment of the environment in dramatic and deadly ways” (Weinstock 359). Thus, the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon can also be read similarly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); that is, it can force the audience to consider the question of who the monster of the narrative truly is. When audiences consider this question – who is the monster? – the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon becomes explicitly connected to discussions of the Anthropocene era. Though its name is contested, the concept of the Anthropocene recognizes and explores the ways in which “human designs have thoroughly colonized the planet” (Vermeulen 10). In Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror, and the Anthropocene, Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson, and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen suggest the following:

Human beings have shaped the Earth in their own image and through this shaping activity human beings have wrought forth nonhuman forces from the ecological depths of Earth. These forces are becoming ever more present and pressing and they manifest as, for instance, ecological destabilization in the wake of accelerating loss of bio-diversity, rising water levels of the oceans in the wake of the de-icing of polar ice caps and growing emissions of greenhouse gases in the wake of the Arctic Tundra's melting permafrost. In a time where human beings as a species set the agenda for what is going to happen with life on Earth, nonhuman forces break in and disturb our self-centred, speciesistic and imperialistically invasive behaviour. They demand of us that we respond to their address, and it is only getting harder and harder to ignore the ethically beckoning gaze of Earth. (Lysgaard et al. 106-107)  

Humanity, then, is "deeply 'enmeshed' in and 'haunted' by non-human aspects of Earth's planetary reality at the historical moment at which human beings' technological power over the biosphere is at its peak" (Lysgaard et al. 106). When examined through the lens of literature and film, artists can explore what the planet might do in response to being continually and excessively colonized and commodified – how will it fight back? In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, the collected authors explore the connections between the Anthropocene, in all its myriad of designations, monsters, and ghosts. They suggest that "monsters and ghosts help us notice landscapes of entanglement, bodies with other bodies, time with other times. They aid us in our call for a particular approach to noticing" (Swanson et al. M7). Berg takes steps towards this noticing within the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon by asking us to question: who is, truly, the monster?

Revel

From the idea of noticing, however, comes the realization that while "[s]ome kinds of stories help us notice; others get in our way. Modern heroes – the guardians of progress across disciplines – are part of the problem" (Swanson et al. M8). Traditionally heterosexual, cisgender, and male, these heroes are the lens through which our stories are predominantly told, the eyes we see through. While this paradigm is shifting, slowly, to be more equitable – at least in regard to gender and sexuality – it is still a common problem in mainstream literature and film, including Deepwater Horizon. Nature – oil – is made monstrous in the Thickening stage in a way that demands consideration for humanity's role in colonizing and destroying the Earth – both in the Deepwater Horizon explosion and more generally. However, as the film moves through the Revel stage of Clute's "Grammar of Horror," humanity recenters itself, and nature – oil – is, despite being physically present everywhere on the rig, stripped of its agency and rendered essentially invisible.  

The initial moment of the Revel stage in a horror film "describes a formal event bound in time and place, an event in which the field of the world is reversed: good becomes evil; parody becomes jurisprudence; the jester is king; Hyde lives; autumn is the growing season" (Clute, "Revel"). In Deepwater Horizon, the narrative gives way to Revel from Thickening when the crew begins to pump the stabilizing mud out of the drilling shaft, one of their last steps before the well is ready to pump oil. They turn the machines off briefly when the pressure keeps rising, and Caleb Holloway (Dylan O'Brien) – a member of the drilling crew – excuses himself to go to the washroom. As he is leaving, he crouches down by a pipe in the drilling room and slowly reaches out a shaking hand. Caleb brushes his finger against the pipe, discovering that there is oil leaking through, and, moments later, the pipe violently explodes with mud and oil, sending the crew in the room flying. Shortly after this event, they contain the mud – contain the monster – and have a short feeling of victory, which is followed by the eerie sound of clanging as if a ghost were rattling chains in the attic. The camera focuses on the faces of the crew as they look around them – haunted – before mud begins leaking through the crack in the pipes. This time, there is no stopping it. Throughout the Thickening stage, the monster – oil – has haunted the rig and its crew from the shadows, and it is within this final moment of Thickening that it asserts its agency visibly and enacts its revenge. Roles are reversed, and it is the monster that is in control. However, this moment also mirrors itself, acting as the reversal of the world: the entrance to the Revel stage of the narrative. This mirroring, of the final stage of Thickening and the initial moment of Revel, is handled by superimposing the two moments on top of each other. In other words, rather than oil-as-the-monster having a sustained moment of active, on-screen agency, the film instead gives only a glimpse of it before shifting into focusing itself as a hero-led disaster film.

The Revel stage "marks the moment when a horror tale ceases to describe the welling up of the repressed and the subversive within the restraining walls of 'civilization,' and begins to tell it as it is" (Clute, "Revel"). So, what does it mean that the Revel stage of Deepwater Horizon sees what has been framed as the monster become physically visible but lose its agency? How can viewers justify that – as the Deepwater Horizon begins to be overwhelmed by mud, gas, and oil – the narrative and cinematography shift their gaze away from that same mud, gas, and oil and begin to frame the event as a wholly humancentric experience? If the Thickening stage of Deepwater Horizon asked the audience to explore what the planet/nature might eventually do in response to millennia of commodification and colonization, the Revel stage shifts away from that question and instead suggests that the audience should simply witness, in awe and terror, as brave American heroes attempt to survive a man-made catastrophe.

Petro-Heroes and 9/11 

In their article "Indigenous-Washing and the Petro-Hero in Genre Fictions of the North American Oil Boom," Crosby and Willow argue that Western society has "valorized an epic narrative shaped around the individual, environment-conquering exploits" of a specific type of heroic male figure (80). They name this specific hero the "petro-hero," and describe him as a "latter-day cowboy" whose "roots extend deep into accounts of extractive heroes such as Gilgamesh and Beowulf and settler-colonial conquerors such as Hernan Cortes and John Smith" (Crosby and Willow 80). The petro-hero is, as Crosby and Willow argue, the twenty-first century representation of the cowboy, who "[transforms] untamed wastelands into productive pumps for fossil-fueled energy" (Parson and Ray 257). The petro-hero is – in almost all representations – a white, cisgender, heterosexual male who is "posited as the central [character]" of narratives in TV shows, films, and books, "highlighting the problematic alignment of popular entertainment and an extractivist ideology" (Amatya and Dawson 14). Crosby and Willow argue that though some films, such as P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, are critical of the petro-hero, "genre fictions with wide mass appeal were and remain decidedly more starry-eyed, and thus, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, as the US exploded into a global superpower, the petro-hero went with it, serving as an important embodiment of this swaggering national dominance" (80-81). Some of the most explicitly revered examples of petro-heroes in contemporary cinema, Crosby and Willow argue, include "James Dean's Jett Rink in Giant (1956), Bruce Willis's Harry Stamper in Armageddon (1998)" and, most importantly for the purposes of this research, "Mark Wahlberg's Mike Williams and Kurt Russell's James 'Mr. Jimmy' Harrell in Deepwater Horizon (2016)" (Crosby and Willow 81).²  

The concept of the petro-hero is inherently connected to the concept of American nationalism and has thus become essentially synonymous with the "great American hero" (Crosby and Willow 81).³ Alongside this, the "great American hero" has always been popular in Western cinema, and within action/disaster movies specifically. However, similarly to how Bishop describes the shifting meaning of zombies in horror fiction – that is, that their symbolism is tied to specific cultural fears and anxieties that are present at the time they are being created – the "great American hero," or petro-hero, has also shifted along these same lines. Likewise, then, in the same way that 9/11 marked a shift in the meaning of zombie films, it also marked a turning point in disaster films and the way that the petro-hero is represented on screen. In Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11, Glen Donnar argues, "American national identity, notions of manhood, and expressions of hegemonic masculinity are often linked, especially in periods of perceived crisis. Each was widely considered to have been damaged by the attacks on, and consequent collapse of, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York" (1). 

The attacks of 9/11, then, "destabilized national masculine identity and threatened prevailing American narratives of national invulnerability" (Donnar 6). Essentially, America was left, according to some, vulnerable and violated. Donnar argues that this "exposed national vulnerability demanded an emphatic response and mandated national retributive masculinity," which extended to representations within film and television (Donnar 6). Hollywood, Donnar argues, typically "recuperate[s] threatened hegemonic masculinities through an arc of crisis, recuperation, and resolution. Such protagonist arcs are evident both in individual films and across particular genres, and particularly so in the conspicuous melodrama of 'male action' genres, most often action films, war movies, and westerns" (6).  

The Deepwater Horizon explosion/spill happened almost a decade after the events of 9/11, with the film being made half a decade after that – putting nearly twenty years between the two events. However, American popular culture – particularly in the abovementioned genres – is, for the most part, still focusing on narratives that fall into the category of "retributive remasculinization." As such, when it came time to depict the actual disaster on screen – within the Revel stage of the narrative – the filmmakers chose to focus the film firmly on the petro-hero – represented by the blue-collar crew of the Deepwater Horizon and spearheaded by Mark Wahlberg's portrayal of eternally capable Mike Williams rather than continuing to explore concepts of nature's revenge. Berg was able to stress the heroism – the petro-heroic nature – of these men by contrasting them with John Malkovich's character, Vidrine, who spent the entire Thickening stage of the narrative pushing the crew to complete the project, despite feedback from them that it was not ready. Now, as the ship is exploding, there are brief scenes of Vidrine wandering around the ship, covered in mud. He is clueless, and useless, and requires the crew – that he refused to listen to when it would have helped – to save him. In the Revel stage of the film, Vidrine is firmly shown as the villain. This characterization serves two purposes in the narrative. First, it heightens the image of the rest of the crew as petro-heroes: masculine, American, everymen. Second, by returning the concept of hero and villain to a solely humancentric point of view, the film removes any consideration of culpability from that everyman crew – a culpability that they would have to face if the film were still asking the audience to explore ideas of the colonization and commodification of nature and humanity's responsibility for it.

Aftermath and Conclusion  

At its most basic, the Aftermath of Clute's "Grammar of Horror" is the place where there "lies an awareness that the story is done" ("Aftermath"). However, it is not simply the wrapping up of a narrative. Instead, the Aftermath suggests that the story is finished because "there is nothing to be done, that there is no cure to hand, no more story to tell, no deus ex machina" (Clute, "Aftermath"). Deepwater Horizon ends – as most horror films with survivors do – because the surviving heroes are rescued and returned home to reintegrate into their normal lives. However, there is no end in sight for the actual site of the Deepwater Horizon spill, which "defies endings, persisting in space and time through its effects on ecosystems and bodies" (LeMenager 324).⁴ 

At the start of this research, I sought to explore what is being said, explicitly or implicitly, about oil and the way we interact with it, in Deepwater Horizon, when we frame it as the monster of a horror movie. Instead, the film showed me that humanity has not reached a place where we can hold two truths at the same time: we can either ask "who is the monster?" or we can tell a story about the devastating and unnecessary loss of life of men on board an exploding oil rig. Deepwater Horizon makes an honest attempt to consider both, but to do so it has to split itself into two separate stories – the horror and the disaster – and at the end there are still (some) humans that are privileged in the narrative. In "Staying with the Trouble," Donna Haraway suggests that "[i]t matters what thoughts think thoughts…It matters what stories tell stories" (38-39). This observation connects to Crosby and Willow's assertion that petro-hero narratives will always seek to make invisible Indigenous voices – they must, or it quickly becomes clear that they are not heroic. However, if even a film like Deepwater Horizon – a movie built to highlight the heroism of man – can take steps to attempt to consider "who is the monster?" there is surely room to tell both stories, to hold both in our hands at the same time, if we are just able to lay waste to the hierarchy that is needed to maintain our petrocultural, petro-heroic, colonizing and commodifying society and, as Haraway states, "stay with the trouble" (Haraway 34).

Notes

1. I am not contributing to the discussion about the term Anthropocene and how it may, or may not, effectively represent the current geological era. Rather, I am interested in how ideas about the Anthropocene might be represented within an oil-driven narrative. As such, though the term is used throughout, it is specifically to put a name to the cultural anxiety that the idea of the Anthropocene produces. 

2. The second side of Crosby and Willow's argument analyzes the way that Indigenous people are made invisible in petro-hero narratives. It is imperative to note that this invisibility extends to Deepwater Horizon. Numerous Louisiana communities, particularly Indigenous ones, are facing or have already seen the extinction of their way of life, including being permanently displaced from their homes due to the oil spill. In a contained story about the actual explosion, it can be easily explained why the film deals with the rig alone. However, we decide which stories we tell, and by choosing (as Hollywood normally does) the white-centric – the petro-hero – narrative, Deepwater Horizon unintentionally supports Crosby and Willow's argument that "[t]he necessary counterpart to the petro-hero is the 'Vanishing Indian'" (Crosby and Willow 81). 

3.  It is, however, important to note that the reliance on and reverence of petroculture, and petro-heroes, is not a "USA only" phenomenon, but rather a Western society one – Canada, especially, is culpable in this regard as well – see, as Crosby and Willow point out, Corner Gas (2004-09) (92).

4. Among other issues still present in the area of the site, researchers are now discovering that "the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has become a popular mating ground for deep-sea crabs and shrimp. Decomposing oil from the 2010 spill could be mimicking a sex hormone, and that's what's attracting these crustaceans to get frisky in this part of the Gulf, according to an August study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Spending time at the oil rig is also making these animals sick, especially as seen in the crabs. Their shells are turning black, parasites have latched on and some have lost limbs or developed mutations, according to the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, which led the study" (Zdanowicz). 

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