Tulsa and the Limits of Environmentalist Critique under Mid-century Petrocapitalism

• In Event: Energy Cinema, part 1: Filming Energy Landscapes

Abstract

Tulsa (1949) is best remembered for its depiction of spectacular oilfield fires. The film opens with a scene of towering conflagration as a gusher fire disrupts the bucolic life of rancher Cherokee Lansing, thrusting her into the seedy world of oil prospecting. After Lansing’s slow devolution into a greedy, amoral petrocapitalist, Cherokee ranch hand Jim Redbird destroys her oilfields with a conveniently placed fire, seemingly purifying the land and its people.

At first glance, Tulsa is ahead of its time: daring to highlight oil’s environmental consequences and culture of corruption in an era of massive industry expansion. Oilfield spectacle -- especially fire -- became a tool for native opposition to white control and was used to illustrate just how dramatically the industry changed the land. However, the film’s capacity for symbolic critique is limited at best. An early postwar western, Tulsa waxes nostalgically for an imagined, old-west Oklahoma ruled by white cattle ranchers and populated by subservient Indians. By juxtaposing the cattle industry as the positive alternative to oil, the film fails to acknowledge the similarities between the two systems – both industrialized rural spaces, both were predicated on the opening of the Oklahoma territory to white settlement.

Acknowledgement of such thematic limitations becomes particularly interesting in the context of mid-twentieth century American culture and politics. By 1949, critiques of industry greed were par for the course in Hollywood cinema. However, Tulsa also highlights postwar anxieties about energy consumption, the connections between oil and global finance, and US international ambitions.

Author

• Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, University of Wyoming