Studies in the Fantastic, in partnership with the Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University, is proud to present the first in a series of blog posts highlighting new and exciting research in horror studies. Sophie Dungan, the first of our featured authors, is runner-up for the Peter Hutchings Award for Outstanding Contribution to Horror Studies, which recognizes the best new work presented at the Horror Studies Now annual research conference. Her project, “The Anthropocene Unconscious of Jerry London’s Killdozer (1974),” brings a crucial environmental perspective to the monster flick.
In Jerry London’s cult-TV film Killdozer (1974), adapted from Theodore Sturgeon’s 1944 novella (revised in 1958) by the same name, an American construction crew is hired by Warburton’s Oil Resources Company—a possible play on Halliburton Company, a real-life oil company that is second-largest in the world—to “hack out a base camp for [a] drilling cruise” on an unnamed island two hundred miles off of the coast of Africa. This requires, as one crew member quips, the clearance of some “six square miles of lush tropical garden.” It also requires the demolition of the island’s sole preexisting structure, a Nissen hut left over from the island’s previous use as a World War II refueling station (a nod to the island’s original purpose in Sturgeon’s novella). During the course of this demolition work, the bulldozer comes into contact with a meteorite, seen in the opening sequence hurtling toward Earth. It is this meteorite, which emits a strange buzz and blue glow, that comes to animate the eponymous bulldozer.
As John Kenneth Muir notes, “The remainder of the film’s seemingly eternal running time (74 minutes) is devoted to a lackadaisically-paced and poorly-orchestrated man vs. machine war.” Mack (Robert Urich), the bulldozer operator, is the first to die of radiation burns. Next to die is Al Bertand (James A. Watson, Jr.), the film’s sole Black character, who takes the killdozer out, despite being told to “turn that thing off” and “get out of there.” His death is, as Muir claims, “an especially absurd scene.” Somehow unable to “outrun a slow-moving bulldozer,” Al “stop[s] in the vehicle’s path to hide in a hollow pipe” (Muir), which the killdozer promptly runs over. The killdozer claims two final victims, Chub (Neville Brand) and Dutch (James Wainright), by running them off the road in separate incidents. The killdozer is defeated when the remaining crew members, which includes foreman Lloyd Kelly (Clint Walker), electrocute the dozer.
There is little in all this pulpy violence, or in the critical response to Killdozer, to suggest the Anthropocene, the name that denotes our current geological epoch in which humankind is a key driver of planetary change, “is even remotely on the [television] film’s mind” (Bould, “Anthropocene Unconscious” 258). And yet there are elements that suggest an Anthropocene unconscious is at work in the text.
Anthropocene unconscious is Mark Bould’s term. It names his belief that “the Anthropocene is the unconscious of ‘the art and literature of our time’” (Anthropocene Unconscious 17). “Fredric Jameson argues that to draw out the textual unconscious, critics must rewrite the ‘text in terms of a particular master code,’” Bould explains (Anthropocene Unconscious 18). If the queer master code is “to stop assuming that everyone in the movie is straight, and instead to watch queerly,” the environmental master code is to “stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us” and to think “all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene” (Anthropocene Unconscious 18).
We can begin to register the television film’s Anthropocene unconscious in the eponymous killdozer. Not only does it run on fuel, but bulldozers are necessary for all sorts of anthropogenic interventions, including the clearing of land. America’s postwar construction boom is a good example: “Throughout the 1950s, the nation’s cities and suburbs took a million more acres every year – a territory larger than Rhode Island” (Rome 120). By the mid-1970s, “almost a million acres of marshes, swamps, bogs, and coastal estuaries were destroyed by urban development” (Rome 121). As of result of such interventions, and as early as the mid-1960s, bulldozers, “once a symbol of progress, [had] become a symbol of destruction” (Ammon 292).
Of greater interest to me here is how an Anthropocene unconscious lurks in the television film’s periphery in the reason it offers for the crew’s presence on the island: oil extraction. Notably, this reason is never explicitly stated; we only have a vague reference to the incoming drilling cruise. Oil extraction is, however, expressed via the Warburton logo, which adorns construction hats worn by crew, the vehicles they drive, and the construction equipment they operate.
The logo, first seen stamped on the side of an excavator, features a section of the globe overlaid with the letter W. The peak of the W is formed by an oil derrick (a towering structure used in the extraction of oil and gas resources from underground reservoirs) which is, as Matthew T. Huber notes, “perhaps the emblematic image of the landscape of U.S petroleum production” (45). A closer look at the globe reveals, diagonally left to right, the easternmost part of Siberia, North America, and northern South America—all key oil-producing areas America then relied on for its oil. Tellingly, the peak of the W points to Alaska, which is home to the largest crude oil field, Prudhoe Bay, in North America. Although the oil field was discovered in 1968, crude oil would not be extracted until 1977 with the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TRAPS) which enabled “Prudhoe Bay crude oil [to] be transported to market economically and in bulk” (Zelnick 62).
Despite the allusions to the extraction of oil in Russia and the Americas, the television film, as noted above, is set in Africa. Conversely, Sturgeon’s novella is set in Mexico. This changed setting means the television film cannot help but evoke the human and environmental legacies of plantation slavery. While there is a logic of imperialist incursion at work in the novella (going to Mexico, appropriating land for an American refuelling station), the shift to Africa opens up a longer history of slavery, the Middle Passage and “the global agricultural transformation of plantation slavery” (Goddu 270) that provided the “ugly blueprint” (McKittrick 10) of our present ecological crisis. It is “from this larger view”—the racist, imperialist, capitalist origins of ecological crisis—“that the Anthropocene unconscious of [the television film] comes into view” (Bould, “Anthropocene Unconscious” 270).
It is perhaps unsurprising that the television film looks to Africa for cheap oil at the moment America was seeking to open up new resource banks in the peripheries due to the 1973 oil crisis. But it is important to situate this moment in the longer history of a region that, as Jennifer Wenzel writes, “has seen successive waves of energy commodities being extracted and taken elsewhere—slaves, palm oil, petroleum” (9), and to which the meteorite is shown in the opening credits hurtling ever closer toward. (This history of resource extraction is, of course, not limited to energy commodities; it continues in the extraction and trade of ivory, rubber, diamonds, copper and so on.) The plantation’s legacy is further recalled in the method of oil’s extraction and transportation via a ship that echoes the mode of the Middle Passage and in the unmarked graves of the killdozer’s victims. The graves, located in the despoiled land located at the runway’s end, cannot help but evoke the “trail of African graves and barren landscapes [left] in [slavery’s] wake” (Moore 619).
Although the television film suggests that resource being extracted is oil and not enslaved Africans, the extractivist practice of drilling for oil recalls the extraction of enslaved people. This is grounded in plantation slavery’s treatment of the black body as inorganic material from which energy is extracted. This is what Kathryn Yusoff terms the “geo-logic” of slavery, in which “[b]odies become gold, emptied of the sign of the human, reinvested with the signification of units of energy and properties of extraction” (48). “This racialized equation of energy” includes, on the one hand, chattel slavery’s objectification of enslaved labor as an energy source that could be extracted from. It also includes the enslaved “being energy for others, of putting sugar in the bowl, and in the muscles of white labor” (Yusoff 47).
In Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013), Huber reminds us that “[o]nly through the refining process does crude oil become transformed into a variety of ‘petroleum products’ that serve various uses in industrial and everyday economic life” (124). Considering Warburton Oil Resources Co. is an American oil company and America has “the largest refining capacity” of any country “in the world” (Huber 69), it can be assumed the crude oil due to be extracted in the television film will be, eventually, transported to America for refining into petroleum products. While the television film shows no interest in the latter stages of the fossil fuel cycle (processing, transport, and combustion), they are, nevertheless, part of the larger view of its Anthropocene unconscious. This is because of the unequal sitting of America’s petrochemical industry in disproportionally Black and Brown communities—a phenomenon Timothy Q. Donaghy et al. refer to as “fossil fuel racism” (1). Two important reports conducted in the 1980s—the United Church of Christ (UCC 1987) report on “Toxics and Waste in the United States” and the Cerrell Associates Consultants (CAC 1984) report prepared for the city of Los Angeles on siting polluting facilities—“verified that race was a factor in siting unwanted facilities” (Allen 244). The spatial location of America’s petrochemical industry thus reveals how “the plantation uncovers a logic that emerges in the present and folds over to repeat itself anew throughout black lives” (McKittrick 4).
To quote Bould, “whatever the intended point of [Killdozer] might be, it is clearly not” to express the racist, imperialist, capitalist origins of ecological crisis and their permutations in the present (“Anthropocene Unconscious” 262). Despite this, as I have demonstrated, the television film, like other (televisual or cinematic) films about objects animated by nonhuman sources that come alive and harm human life, is a story about the Anthropocene.
Works Cited
Allen, Barbara L. “The Making of Cancer Alley: A Historical View of Louisiana’s Cancer Corridor.” Southern United States: An Environmental History, edited by Donald E. Davis et al., ABC-CLIO, pp. 235–46.
Ammon, Francesca Russello. Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. Yale UP, 2016. De Gruyter Brill, doi: 10.12987/9780300220544.
Bould, Mark. “The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Anxiety in Suburban Sf.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 16, no. 3, 2023, pp. 251–75. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/909248.
–––. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. Verso, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Donaghy, Timothy Q., et al. “Fossil Fuel Racism in the United States: How Phasing Out Coal, Oil, and Gas Can Protect Communities.” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 100, June 2023. ScienceDirect, doi: 10.1016/j.erss.2023.103104.
Goddu, Teresa. “The (Neo-)Slave Narrative and the Plantationocene.” African American Review, vol. 55, no, 4, Winter 2022, pp. 269–85. Project MUSE, doi: 10.1353/afa.2022.0040.
Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. U of Minnesota P, 2013.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 3, Nov. 2013, pp. 1–15. Duke UP, doi: 10.1215/07990537-2378892.
Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 594–630. Taylor & Francis Online, doi: 10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036.
Muir, John Kenneth. Review of Killdozer, directed by Jerry London. John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV, 11 Nov. 2016, reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2016/11/cult-tv-movie-review-killdozer-1974.html.
Rome, Adam. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. Cambridge UP, 2001. Cambridge Core, doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511816703.
Wenzel, Jennifer. Introduction. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman et al., Fordham UP, 2017, pp. 1–16. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. U of Minnesota P, 2018. EBSCOhost.
Zelnick, Robert. “The Oil Rush of ’70.” New York Times Magazine, 1 Mar. 1970, pp. 27+, www.nytimes.com/1970/03/01/archives/the-oil-rush-of-70-the-oil-rush-of-70.html.
Sophie Dungan (MA Thesis Only, The University of Melbourne) is a PhD student in English at the University of Warwick. She is funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Her PhD offers the first ecocritical analysis of objects that imperil the lives of humans and (some) animals in American horror fiction and film of the 1970s and 1980s. She is the author of Reading the Vegetarian Vampire (Palgrave 2022).