Syriana

Because Stephan Gaghan’s recently released film Syriana is a high profile thriller involving the politics of oil, many peak oil activists have seen it as an opportunity to raise awareness about the coming energy crisis. Gaghan has in fact promoted the film as a “discussion about world dependency on oil,” and the film’s website has a link to an affiliate site called “Oil Change”, billed as “a campaign to reduce our dependence on oil.” Unfortunately, the film, while in many ways well-done, may actually serve to obscure rather than expose the real energy issues the U.S. and the world face.

In his previous film, Traffic, Gaghan organized multiple storylines around a single theme: illegal drug trafficking. In Syriana, the structure is the same, but the drug trafficked is oil. The movie focuses on several loosely connected characters: an energy analyst (Matt Damon) who, through a tragic twist of fate, gets an contract to advise the heir apparent of an unnamed Persian Gulf state; a CIA agent (George Clooney) who is betrayed after trying to arrange the assassination of that same oil prince; a corporate attorney (Bennett Holiday) who is given the morally dubious task of making a shady oil company merger possible; and an unemployed Pakistani oil worker (Mahar Munir) who is led to become a terrorist.

The actors all give excellent performances, and Gaghan has an eye for shooting scenes in surprising yet effective ways. But for all the dramatic weight of the individual scenes, the movie fails entirely to bring home the most important truths about oil—that it is a finite, irreplaceable resource, without which modern society as we know it would not exist. At only one point in the film does a character (Matt Damon) allude to the fact that “it [oil] is running out” and this only in the context of a speech explaining why Western governments want to prevent the development of true democracies in the Middle-East.

Meanwhile, the rest of the film subtly reinforces the opposite idea: that the machinations of government and industry are the cause, and not the result, of the fact that oil is a finite resource. This is not to deny the harsh reality of governments and businesses struggling for resources. But to be the truly courageous film it aspires to be, Syriana would have to go beyond supply-side examinations of oil production and look at the nature and structure of demand—from the vast exurbs, where Americans in SUVs commute 30 miles each way to work and take an additional half-dozen car-trips a day, to the energy intensive modern industrial farm, to the globalization of economies—in short, all of the things that make the geopolitical machinations necessary, and which will either change dramatically or disappear at the waning of the oil age.

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