The movie "Dark Waters" is based on the 2016 New York Times Magazine article "The Lawyer Who Became Dupont's Worst Nightmare." This is a true story. Rob Billot, a lawyer, found out that a titan chemical company, DuPont, has exposed all humans to Teflon, a hazardous chemical, for decades while knowing the hazard of the cancer-causing, artificial acid PFOA (Teflon). Their products ranged from makeup to pots to cleaning powder, and Teflon has been unregulated all the time. This chemical triggers various diseases in human beings. Rob took 14 years to discover and confirm the horrifying effects caused by Teflon and spent the next many years gaining the compensation that the affected citizens deserve. This film is directed by Todd Haynes, adapted by screenwriters Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan, starring Mark Ruffalo as Rob. The movie has won Best Feature Film at the Environmental Media Association Awards. In the following, the essay will focus on the problems of capitalism for getting away with its misconduct easily and unveil the complicity of the issues from different perspectives while suggesting possible solutions.
Some scenes in the movie haunted me for so long. From the very beginning, Rob Billot, who has always been a defendant of corporations, finally drives to see the farm of an indignant farmer. Billot exclaims, "His farm is a graveyard." The cinematographer makes the whole scene of the farm drained of colors. The numerous dunes on the farm are buried with hundreds of cows, and the green is nowhere to be seen. The few live animals are all ill with tumors, aggressive and dangerous. The cynical farmer yells about how much love and effort he put into the farm. As the viewer, it bathed me in pure terror, "If those were the effects of Teflon on cattle, imagine what it will do to a human body?" The horrifying effects of pollution turn a lively farm into a graveyard, and I, in disbelief, understood the indignation of the farmer.
DuPont's decades of evil acts shown in the movie are closely related to the meager history of attempting to mitigate pollution. After World War II, the US had the only industrial plant left standing, and industry rapidly expanded – especially into the new fields of organic chemistry, with the manufacture of plastics, synthetic fibers, and pesticides. The increasing intensity of this industrial activity in the US in the 1950s, in the almost complete absence of any consciousness of environmental sophistication, led to massive poisonings of birds and wildlife from the use of pesticides, and massive accumulations of chemicals eventually recognized as toxic in waterways and landfills all over the country.
From WWII to the most recent decade, pollution is not being well-monitored. The farmer is cynically angry because others (the people, the lawyers, and all who are responsible for the environment) are not angry or not even concerned. When the farmer accuses Billott of still being one of them, those who never genuinely care about the environment, Billot feels sorry and guilty and decides to switch sides, from the defendant of big firms to the one suing companies in court. Billot flips, employing his knowledge for DuPont to fight against them. "American business should not run on blood. That is not how you build faith in the system. If the companies have crossed the line, we'll push them back." Billot used his efforts to prove how he would "push them back." On the way to seek truth, he acts like a crazy person: he stays in a storehouse full of piled files for days, labeling documents one by one; he gets back home in the middle of the night, pulling his Teflon pots out of his kitchen; he confronts a DuPont executive at a gala in front of dozens of people.
So far, it seems that the movie has always centered on Billot: he fights against the world and overcomes all the difficulties to save everyone. At first, I have the impression that the movie is overly emphasized individualistic heroism—a typical American value. Nevertheless, as I dive deeper, I come to realize that lawyer Billot is not a typical hero image. I could relate ordinary figures to him. He's sullen and awkward in his movements – when he is under an enormous amount of pressure, his hands start to shake violently. The movie doesn't present Bilott as the hero, but as a man who's been awakened to the world of moral decency, only to be rewarded with powerlessness and ineffectual anger. He worries about failing to afford to send his kids to catholic schools; he almost escaped from the room with the fear of being avenged personally after showing Dupont the pieces of evidence; he was labeled "a hick" when he is partly driven by loyalty to his small-town roots. He is not a typical hero. He has a mundane life, and he is a modest person. Moreover, he is not a hero because we want to be him; he is a hero because we don't. He put his whole career, his lawyer team, and his family, which are decent now, at huge risk for the things he felt obligated to do for his family's health and the environment of society.
Billot is such a fighter full of grit. The latter part of the movie, going chronologically, further proves how brave and determined Billot has been. After Billot collects samples from citizens to testify the negative effects of Teflon, year past year, he does not receive the study result. After each year goes by, Billot loses more things financially, emotionally, and physically. It takes seven years of hopeless waiting for the study result to come out, which revealed the definitive causation between various diseases and Teflon. I was expecting this conclusion to be a happy ending to the movie, as the scientific result is supposed to be a piece of evidence strong enough to mark the end of DuPont's evil acts,
However, despite the result, with the power and money, DuPont is still able to act as it is. The movie skillfully portrays how a monolith of American capitalism can plow through human lives with near impunity—they want to show the world it's no use fighting.
"Look, everybody, even he can't crack the maze, and he's helped build it.' The system is rigged! They want us to think it'll protect us, but that's a lie. We have to protect ourselves. We do. Nobody else. Not The Companies, not The Scientists, not the government. It is us. A farmer with a twelfth-grade education told me that. On day one, he knew, and I thought he was crazy. Isn't that crazy?"
Billot yells out these words in the rain. In the face of powerful corporations, the hopelessness, bearing so long in Billot and the people, reaches its peak. The desperation overflows the screen. Each word punches the audience in the heart.
The hopelessness comes from the fact that Teflon has not been recognized as a hazardous chemical for decades because DuPont claims it is not hazardous. The corporation creates a whole regulating system by itself, thus everything it does goes unregulated. The forces of the public and individuals could not contend with these corporations, as they do not have access, money, or time (as many are dying due to the hazards in their blood). Billot, being in such a resourceful position, dedicates wholeheartedly for years to fight. However, he still fails to crack the system.
This system could stand upright all the time because America, since its birth, has been pro-corporate and elitist. The book "We the Corporations" reveals how American businesses won equal rights and transformed the Constitution to serve the ends of capital. American corporations have steadily gained "the same rights as individuals under the Constitution." Like minorities and women, corporations have had a civil rights movement of their own, and now possess nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. From 1868 to 1912, the Supreme Court decided only 28 cases involving the rights of African-Americans under the amendment compared with 312 cases involving the rights of corporations. The corporations' civil rights have a deep historical root, from the English corporate colonies to the Bank Wars, from trust-busters and New Dealers to Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, and Hobby Lobby, Daniel Webster's famous defense of Dartmouth College in 1819, and Justice Lewis Powell's pro-business memo to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971. In other words, business is blended with politics at the very beginning of American history. The nation's most powerful corporations gained our most fundamental rights and turned the Constitution into a bulwark against the regulation of big business. The Constitution could not protect human rights effectively as it, to some degree, considers corporations as human beings. A central tension in US political and legal history pits the rise of organized business interests and their wealthy owners and managers against the interests of individual citizens, including employees, consumers, and voters. Undoubtedly, people, who stood athwart the corporate juggernaut are the long-term losers and would be trampled by well-funded and powerful business elites. Thus, this is the main reason why DuPont in "Dark Waters" is unregulated and dares to continue doing so even when Billot shows the concrete evidence that Teflon is a hazard threatening people's lives.
Although America's politics is entangled with capitalism throughout history, the capitalist system is not confined to the states. Everywhere the structure of the modern cooperation is that the managers are instructed by the board of directors to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for the company; the board of directors are instructed by the shareholders who elected them to make sure the managers do just that and nothing more; and the shareholders usually are the fund managers for large pension funds, who have been instructed by those who invest only in companies that promise the highest possible ROI. As a business major student, I am consciously aware of the possibility for me to be a builder of the system. It seems to me that this is an unbroken string of fiduciary responsibilities. Even people who are "builders" are trapped in this system. Therefore, asking companies to accept less than the highest possible ROI for the sake of preserving the environment is to ask for the impossible. Even if, in the ideal scenario, companies mind their environmental effects under the designated regulation voluntarily, the "free rider" problem is very likely to happen. It means that there would be parties that feel "if everyone adheres to the agreement except me, we all benefit from the restored resource, and I can "voluntarily" except myself from the rule because the effects of my actions would be insignificant."
The profitability and the impossibility of prioritizing the environment are not excuses for us not to care about the environment. If each company blazes full speed ahead in total disregard of the environment, the result will likely be the end of the industry, and the company. (Newton, 2008) This is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Because the ecosystem is the life support system on which we depend, we have no other source of wealth or access to life. Natural capital, its value, and its fragility are of great significance, as the precondition for everything.
Since nature is important to preserve, we cannot decide the steps taken by the plants. It goes back to the "only" forum to solve the problem— the law. The law collective-decision power settles dubious issues in advance on the strength of the best available knowledge and the democratic process. However, as in Dark Waters, Billot tries so hard to sue the companies, but the law is too slow. The profits are immediate, and the repercussions are extensive. Every single one of the actions is very costly in the legal process.
Even law could not be the solution, so how to solve the distressing problem—break the system and stop the pollution? We could not rely on the public or a person because it is too costly in every aspect to any individual; We could not rely on companies because they have the profitability to deal with; we could not rely on the regulations because they could be ineffective in enforcement; We could not rely on laws even, because they are too slow to be implemented. Each "solution" comes with its limitations.
This essay does not try to offer a single solution to fit all, as it is impossible. It reveals the complexity of the social issue discussed in Dark Waters. The plot could be summarized as simple: Inflamed by that injustice and the complicity of local authorities, the lawyer risks his career as he embarks on a decades-long legal siege of one of America's most powerful corporations. This social issue is related to the history of pollution mitigation and America's political constitutions. Many parties have taken different roles here. This is a social issue about the tensions between different parties' stances and goals. Hopefully, All parties, be it the company, the people, the lawyer, and government, could reach their balance. The legislation, though takes so much effort and time to be passed and carried out, is still the most concrete solution. As Billot, the hero in real life, continues fighting against "Dark Water, he said in the interview:
"If we can't get where we need to go to protect people through our regulatory channels, through our legislative process, then unfortunately what we have left is our legal process," says Bilott. "If that's what it takes to get people the information they need and to protect people, we're willing to do it."
Bibliography
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Lisa H. Newton. (2008).Business Ethics and the Natural Environment
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ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA (2019). Dark Waters Tells the True Story of the Lawyer Who Took DuPont to Court and Won. But Rob Bilott’s Fight Is Far From Over. Time.
https://time.com/5737451/dark-waters-true-story-rob-bilott/
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