In 2000, the world was given its first taste of the twenty-first century “lawyer movie.” Unlike the classic ones of the twentieth century (e.g. Judgement at Nuremberg, Witness for the Prosecution), the underdog is not going up against Nazis or other more specifically faced murderers (here’s looking at Jeff Bridges in Jagged Edge). Instead it is the blankness, the Twilight Zone-esque abyss blackness of “The Corporation.” Erin Brockovich established this with its heroine’s fight for a small town in Southern California after unearthing documents that PG&E was aware of contaminating the residents’ water with hexavalent chromium. Julia Roberts’ brother from another mother, George Clooney, experienced something similar though more sinister in 2007’s Michael Clayton, in which he is a stalked-by-hitmen lawyer, increasingly more dangerous to the firm’s valued corporate juggernaut of a client, U-North (fictional, unlike PG&E and DuPont). Michael’s colleague and friend is the one who discovers the extent to which U-North has been manufacturing a carcinogenic product, leading him to something of a moral quandary meltdown.
It’s the same type of quandary that befalls Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) in Dark Waters. Like Brockovich, Bilott is the real lawyer who worked tirelessly on what seemed to be a hopeless case for nearly twenty years. Unlike her, however, he is a corporate lawyer in the same vein as Clayton (though slightly less skeevy by sheer virtue of not operating out of New York City). With co-screenwriters Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan basing the script primarily off Nathaniel Rich’s 2016 New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” director Todd Haynes’ usual style is lost in the shuffle of the story itself. So, too, is Anne Hathaway’s character, Sarah Bilott, save for when she’s given a brief monologue about not being treated like a little wife to Robert’s employer, Tom (Tim Robbins), and that he needs to stop making her husband feel as though he’s some kind of failure when all he’s done is help those in need. Desperate need, in fact, of his specific brand of legal expertise. For Robert has spent years defending corporations and their interests, unraveling all the nuanced loopholes these “people” are capable of finagling.
And yes, corporations were long ago legally recognized as having the same rights as a human being. Though none of them seemed to have gotten the memo about the golden rule regarding how fellow human beings would like to be treated. Something the Fourteenth Amendment opened up for corporations to be protected as, unfortunately established by the 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. It was during the court recording of the legal proceedings that Chief Justice Morrison Waite stated, “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” It was with those words that the entire landscape of corporate power was augmented. And, just as it is in the instance of the narrative of Dark Waters, the ominous forces at play with regard to how it all went wrong started well before 1998, when we’re first introduced to Bilott.
In fact, the opening scene is set in the mid-70s, with a group of teenagers “horsing around” (as Bojack Horseman would want you to say) in the water located right on the DuPont facility’s contaminated grounds. An “enforcer” comes by to scare them off, likely not caring that they’ll probably grow scales now, only that they don’t “stick their nose” where they oughtn’t. For DuPont prides itself on a Pleasantville aesthetic, overtaking the entire town of Parkersburg, West Virginia with its toxic Kool-Aid as the town’s largest employer. After all, employing “test dummies” helps DuPont just as much as it helps the denizens’ bank accounts. This much is uncovered by Bilott, who traces the development of PFOA to the Manhattan Project, when companies decided that in addition to using it as protective coating for weapons, hey, why not use it in everyday American products? Most illustriously in cookware, thanks to Teflon. The “miracle” product used to market the essence of the American dream in the twentieth century: the non-stick pan. A.k.a. every housewife’s best friend (and, like her husband, secretly her worst nightmare). Just packing her kids full of contaminants as overt symbolism of how tainted everything about the U.S.’ false claims of being a Promised Land is.
That the EPA was only established in 1970, with very few precedents in place regarding regulations, made it easier for corporations to interpret what “self-regulation” meant. Yet even DuPont flagrantly admits in all of their secret testings that their version of PFOA, C8, is not very obviously correct for human consumption or use. Humans, to them, being referred to as “receptors,” as Robert points out this callous classification to the CEO while grilling him with questions for the taped deposition set off by Parkersburg farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp). The very man Bilott tells his wife “has a twelfth grade education” and already knew that his government and the corporations of America would not protect them from harm. That only they could protect themselves. As one of the key examples of a “receptor,” Bucky Bailey (who appears as himself in a touching moment, defects and all), should have been. But was instead a victim of being a child born to a woman working the Teflon line at DuPont.
Yet it takes Bilott decades of working tirelessly on this case to understand something that Wilbur knew all along. The corporation always triumphs. Even amid small blips of victory that nearly drain a “receptor” of his entire will to persist, it is no match for these titans of “industry.” If killing people legally is to be called an industry. What’s more, since its merger into an even larger juggernaut with Dow Chemical, the revenue for the company in 2018 totaled eighty-six billion dollars, placing it as number thirty-five on 2019’s Fortune 500 list. As its propensity toward monopoly intensifies, its legacy will mean more than just being the cause of why ninety-nine percent of all life on Earth has PFOA in its bloodstream.
So yes, while Haynes can try to make the story as upbeat as possible by concluding the film with Johnny Cash’s version of “I Won’t Back Down,” it’s likely that Bilott’s (tainted) blood, sweat and tears will eventually erode with the same chemical precision as anything DuPont touches. And surely after the third act in the movie of Erin Brockovich’s and Michael Clayton’s (even if fictional) lives, the same holds true for them as well. Momentary Davids able to stave off a Goliath before a new one crops up in his place.
