Narrative would have you believe that action and consequence is individual. It is when zoomed in to a human scale, sure, but it’s impossible to predict the weather by looking at a wisp of cloud. At the beginning of Night Moves, Kelly Reichardt’s 2013 ecoterrorist thriller sharing its name with the 1975 Gene Hackman neo-noir, a group of environmentalists are gathered for a screening of a bleak climate documentary. At the end of the movie, they comment on how it isn’t inspiring, it just bombards the audience with despairing images. They ask the filmmaker what kind of plan she has to save the world. She responds saying that big plans are what got all of us into this mess, that it’s more complicated than grand gestures. She suggests smaller, collective actions.
When Reichardt’s film premiered 10 years ago, it was generally favored by critics (as her films often are) yet dismissed or outright disliked by audiences (which they often were, before Certain Women). It is one of two works often forgotten in her filmography, along with her deeply underappreciated debut River of Grass, made before her forced dozen-year hiatus after she failed to get a follow-up film off the ground. Night Moves is a stunning work, not just for its affirmation of Reichardt’s genre mastery being more than just a one-off with her Western Meek’s Cutoff, but its incredible, continued prescience.
Since the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, it seems that radical action against the environmental crisis has become more acceptably; the cult popularity of Paul Schrader’s Winter Light reworking First Reformed and Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline have demonstrated a niche in the film market that Night Moves was just a few years ahead of. Incredibly, however, Night Moves seems less like a jumping-off point for a new wave of ecoterrorist films than a final statement on the subject—something which pulls at the contradictions inherent in the protagonists’ logic.
The machinations of Night Moves get into gear as a young man and woman buy a boat from a middle-aged suburbanite. They pay in hundreds kept in a pencil case, tying the boat to an old truck—too old to be casually used by an everyday millennial couple. Their offness comes into sharp focus as Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) arrive at a camp deep in the Oregon woods. It’s the residence of Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), an ex-marine who will be their explosives expert. Now that the trio have a boat, all they need is 500 lbs of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to blow the dam.
Night Moves is often called a “slow-burn” thriller, but that description implies much more warmth than its cold characters possess. It’s an icy film, full of that terrifying quiet found in outer space. It is a nerve-racking movie for its distinct lack of noise. Everything about it on paper seems loud: Terrorism, bombs, impending collapse, rushing water. But even the image that opens the film, water spurting out of a spillway, is hushed—a kind of impotent kinetic energy. It’s a phallic image, a pipe sticking out of a reservoir letting out a small load. Eisenberg looks down on this release with that muted discomfort that plays so well across his face. Almost the entirety of his screentime is made up of listless looks, turning into something scarily seething behind his eyes.
Just as, on paper, the movie implies a certain scintillation that Reichardt denies at every step, on paper, the main characters are environmentalists seeking to stop the destruction of the world. Yet their grand attack is barely the halfway point of the film. What they’re left with is not the river mightily rushing back into the valley, but how little things have changed as the water has settled, bar a couple personal catastrophes.
In a certain sense, the world in Night Moves has already ended. The gears are already in motion, the world is getting hotter, sea levels are rising, weather is getting more extreme—all a person can seemingly do is to break the machine that feeds destruction. Night Moves presents a group of idealists, ones who can’t even seem to verbalize what their ideals are when pressed, and their mission to destroy a symbol of environmental oppression only thought about as dubious by the most radical or most niche. They’re not attacking oil wells, coal refineries or even the often mis-maligned nuclear power plants. No, they’re going after a dam; something who’s toppling could lead to a kinetic flood triggering revolutionary inspiration. It also sounds a lot like something that every young person who’s spent a lot of time on trails, in national parks, or otherwise outdoorsy places out West read when they were younger.
No matter what the actual quality of the book is, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a classic in crunchy circles. Abbey’s writing is indicative of the politically confused post-war generation, where the divide between anarchism and libertarianism (their definition of which was ripped from its left-wing roots by fascists to rebrand their now-unbrandable politics) had more to do with whether one was more socially liberal or conservative. While Abbey was firmly on the side of the former, his leftist writing feels like it has little substantial deviation from his more right-wing counterpart Ken Kesey, whose acid-fueled Merry Pranksterism served well to channel the impetus of the hippie generation away from meaningful action and towards pure nuisance.
Abbey, for his part, was more committed to genuinely upending the system. Yet underneath Abbey’s effuse environmentalism is a welling misanthropy—a bubbling hatred of encroachment. Take his “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and National Parks,” in which he argues that the development of these federalized recreation areas into car-friendly byways undermines their purpose of preservation. It is a famous argument against accessibility, whereby the opening up of the environment physically destroys it. It is logically sound, and an interesting study into the dilemma at the heart of the National Park Service’s mission: How can it be for everyone but also be untouched? How can something be about maintaining if it is also damaging that very thing?
One conclusion he draws is that there is simply too much population growth, and it is inevitable that unless it’s controlled this will destroy the parks outright. That’s logical, certainly, but it doesn’t make it moral, and is the exact kind of thinking that leads to accelerationism—the radical right-wing thinking that industrial society must be immediately destroyed, and is also primed for destruction. It’s most associated today with anarcho-primitivist ecoterrorist Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”) as well as fascist, neo-Nazi or other ultra right-wing militias. Theoretically, one could have a leftist, progressive read of Abbey and The Monkey Wrench Gang, yet his writing is imbued with the same logic that Nazis use to argue for a race war. It is, at best, troubling.
Regardless of what was or wasn’t the point of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey’s estate certainly saw a similarity between it and Night Moves, filing suit against Reichardt’s production before it even began principal photography (the case was resolved less than six months later). One could pick apart Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond’s script for parallels to the book, but the film is far more interesting for every way in which its presentation and tone is opposite the novel. Where the book is lively, the film is cold; where one is youthful and necessarily optimistic towards action, the other is tired, disillusioned; where Abbey has a loving, even propagandistic support for his heroes, Reichardt presents her protagonists’ actions as desperate, and the consequences as being deeply sad, terrifying and outright pathetic.
The day after the dam is destroyed, Josh is back on the organic farm he resides at, overhearing everyone talk about the big national news story of the day. A younger farmhand, Dylan (Logan Miller), argues that it’s a good gesture, while the owner, Sean (Kai Lennox), talks about how blowing up one dam won’t do anything. There’s still a dozen more on that river alone.
Josh finds himself not in an inspired, awoken world, like all the people that became followers and copycats of the Monkey Wrenchers, but one of broken discord. Life goes on with one fewer dam and a missing hiker in its wake. They haven’t saved the world, just killed someone and caused themselves immense psychological harm. When Sean starts to suspect that Josh had a hand in the dam attack, he politely kicks him off the farm, emphasizing to Josh how long it took him and his partner Anne (Katherine Waterston) to build this community.
In a symbolic sense, Sean and Anne are the small, difficult strides that people can take to build a better world, where Josh is the big, bold, foolish statement that got them “into this mess” to begin with, like the filmmaker in the opening scenes talked about. Of the co-conspirators, Dena is the most affected, having a physical reaction to the guilt by breaking out in anxious rashes. Josh, feeling heat on the horizon, ambushes her at work, vaguely threatening her if she’s to tell anyone or go to the police. Whatever humane justification he may have reasoned for his terrorist plot has given way to self-preservation—pure survival instinct rather than dedication to a cause.
More thematic resonance can be drawn from one of Reichardt’s greatest cinematic influences, Robert Bresson. While the thriller aspects of Night Moves clearly borrow language from A Man Escaped, its storytelling is more in line with the bleakness of Bresson’s last two films: The Devil Probably, about disaffected, post-‘68 existential young radicals, and L’Argent, a partial adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon.
The apathy, the icy, systemic push towards dehumanization, and the lackadaisical cinematography and editing in Night Moves makes it feel like Reichardt has transported the French master to the 2010s. Moreover, Reichardt seems to be doing a dissection similar to Bresson’s The Forged Coupon, this time of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She cuts the story short to leave it in psychological disarray—all dominoes falling over with no redemptive conclusion.
Since Abbey’s time, the face of ecoterrorism has moved away from the likes of the left-wing Weather Underground to neo-primitivist successors to Kaczynski and white nationalist accelerationists much more interested in The Turner Diaries than The Monkey Wrench Gang. Standing Rock, in retrospect, is beginning to feel less like the start of a new age of on-the-ground environmental struggle from the left, but its last gasp, as environmental issues have largely been relegated in the public sphere to the slow-moving, indifferent liberal bureaucracy. The sword of individual action has been taken up by neo-Nazis attacking power substations not to save the world, but to end it. Night Moves, like all Reichardt’s films that came before it, is set in a world of slow collapse (or “emergency,” as Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour put it in their book on Reichardt). The protagonists choose action rather than withering, trying to reclaim the world for themselves. What they find instead is just more destruction—only minor for the system they hate, and massive for the people around them.
Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.