Enemies of the People

“It’s in the water!”The elemental exclamation identifies the aquatic and its associated processes (dissolution, saturation, flow) as the hitherto-undisclosed source of a clear and present danger. “It’s in the water,” like the properly idiomatic and humorous “there must be something in the water,” fills a gap in knowledge, supplying an explanation where there was none for a generalized condition. The two assertions are paranoid, if differently so. “There must be something in the water” parodies paranoia, heightening causal and factual logics beyond plausibility. The idiom adopts figuration and mystification to account without really doing so for a common trait or behavior within a group or an area. The joke is that nothing really is in the water. The perceived anomaly is tied to cultural and economic factors. Or there is in fact no anomaly but the illusion of one, produced by a limited sample or an error in measurement. “It’s in the water,” by contrast, insists on paranoia’s status as epistemology, and even empiricism.1 The speech act reveals the literal presence in and transmission by an aquatic medium of a chemical threat to human, animal, and plant life. It righteously warns of an “invasive malevolence”: a toxicant that lies beneath the surface and accounts, at least partially, for the prevalence of a pathology among a population.2 Moreover, the speech act systematizes the chemical’s accumulation and circulation, or holds that under “late industrialism” these operations occur “by [corporate] design.”3 By rendering the spread of information secondary to the spread of paranoia, “it’s in the water” imposes itself as an exemplar of “toxic discourse,” Lawrence Buell’s term for the rhetorical life of “the fear of environmental poisoning.”4The present essay concerns itself with the aftermath of the assertion that “it,” a life-threatening chemical, “is in the water” within a dramatic and narrative mode that I call “toxic melodrama.”5 This mode tracks the propagation of toxic discourse—a chemical and discursive potency that Vincanne Adams also mythologizes as “the swirl”6—by characters who, in registering and reporting the absence of a “protective environmental blanket,” experience and in turn set out, with mixed results, to provoke a “rude awakening.”7 The toxic melodrama adopts the melodrama’s affective, aesthetic, and social conventions (heightened emotion; archetypal characters; the stunted transgression of class, gender, and racial norms) to problematize the containment of industrial pollution as impossible under “geontopower,” the “set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape…the distinction between Life and Nonlife.”8 The law represents one mechanism for adjudicating geontopower in settler and extractive colonial states. Elizabeth A. Povinelli has touched on animist constructions of legal personhood;9 I consider, for my part, how information and action regarding “substances that are biologically noxious or poisonous” become “legally metabolized.”10By declaring impossible the containment of industrial pollution, I seek, more than to make a probabilistic assessment, to participate in the conceptualization of impossibility.11 As Max Liboiron explains, a “permission-to-pollute system” like Canada’s or the United States’ sets acceptable thresholds based on “assimilative capacity,” the amount of waste that, say, a body of water can receive before exhibiting deleterious ecological consequences.12 Pollution legislation thereby legitimizes, rather than curtailing or reversing, the conversion of land into resource. This system’s animating contradictions are intensified by aesthetic mediation, as necessarily doomed attempts are made to restrict toxicity to such close-ended forms as the investigation, the discovery, the trial, the resolution, and the restitution. Toxicants hold a privileged relation to an “aesthetics of impossibility,” for they leak out of the dramatic and narrative arts’ spatial and temporal limits.13 This is especially true of “forever chemicals” (the nickname given to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS), which are defined by a virtual eternity they owe to their resistance to breakdown in bodies and environments. Endocrine-disrupting PFAS put pressure on sexual existence, ensconcing impossibility in biographical and historical subjectivity. The toxic melodrama, then, configures the management of chemical potency, or the management of desires pertaining to chemical potency, into what Jonathan Goldberg calls a “lived impossibility” and a “real impossibility.”14My title nods to Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, an antecedent to the toxic melodrama, and one of the texts I discuss briefly. In it, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer tasked with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his town depends, discovers “decomposing organic matter” (“infusoria”) “in the water.”15 Stockmann attributes “typhoid cases, and cases of gastric fever,” to the “filth” draining from the tanneries nearby, the worst of which is owned and operated by Morten Kiil, his wife’s adoptive father. While it is set close to a century prior to the emergence of the late industrial landscapes in which I locate the toxic melodrama, An Enemy of the People constitutes a blueprint for a dynamic all too common in today’s company towns, or undiversified local economies. The figures who dare tell “home truths” about the misalignment of two notions of life or health—first, economic livelihood; second, biological autopoiesis—are made to personify a tear in the social fabric.More obviously indicative of the toxic melodrama, and more prominently featured in this essay, is Todd Haynes’s 2019 film Dark Waters, which opens with an ominous bathing scene that takes place at the onset of late industrialism. In Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1975, three inebriated youths drive to a quiet wooded area in the middle of the night and, disregarding a yellow “PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING” sign, jump over a barbed-wired fence. Two of them strip nude and dive into a lake. An underwater shot confirms their exposure—intoxication of a different kind, we already surmise. The third, still dry on the shore, is telling his friends about a small dead rodent he just found when a boat labeled “W Virginia Containment Services” glides in their direction, and two employees order them through a megaphone to vacate the premises. We lose sight of the comedy of misbehavior as the camera lingers on a frothy substance that the employees are spraying on the lake’s surface. Far away, a colossal industrial plant is to an of the chemical and to an shot of the the spraying and the as an area as we can account of in the of the the of Dark in two in through by made at a a from a who has two that the from a operated by the chemical company is his and and among the who in and from in environmental law but used to or through by chemical even he to the at his he be a to the of an or a chemical PFAS used in the of he that the can the and a in who a he “It’s in their that with a of than that of the such medical as and and and on his to medical and legal that turn out than they are of what to the toxic melodrama as a my out a I to a set of that into through the of the toxic and the and I constructions of life the This is by an misalignment between and to make and, so to waste to the we to We in the of something of a one that has to with the of the and forms even under such as a leak which these forms from and as as when environmental or the figures of sexual and this of late I how the and their but industrial make a that to the elemental exclamation with which I this essay by a to like on but has the from what a that to participate in is to and legal of and maintain their as in the of their they still the that the the to the As a of and Dark what it to be in and of a that and As a it more the processes by which and the environmental that it in An Enemy of the People and the toxic it something in the than its through toxic discourse, for such among that of economic the play to Stockmann, who to be perceived as a to “the than the he has Stockmann about the he a that the he “the of the and “the of is in fact the of the at that is that the public be his to the public and to that the life of town is on and is when he a the The the of the is Dr. a in the as the which the be and his In one the of the baths for two to and all this at this as the are to be are in the with to for bathing they to the of to they and where we We to the which has so Stockmann with and to the that he is the town of its but the to the the an of the as the of a town is to to a the economic by the of an about By the is from as a the an dare he like doing it, but dare account of his and in the baths with the for his and is in of a of Dr. nothing to his in or in the to between and even to the like of Stockmann his for an and one, that to the that “the on its and the of the of what as into a biological at the of the the play the and the of a of the he of the Dr. Stockmann it his the to and the The in what is of an their medical officer when he that, by the of conversion into by the body the of acceptable forms of by Ibsen’s the or the of or into a of a between is Dr. in Dark an in one a to one by a in the is given in an of Ibsen’s play and its that “the of and to than the of a While is more than Stockmann in a of and that when we knowledge, in the of to be by a of and through and to a regarding a on the that to to if of their local are something the of An Enemy of the People and Dark differently to the that within and are to and and to Stockmann for more and than his the based on to and a for and at and at two by that he to his the that he to a the and that emergence as a of from its in the to its as and into the through from the employees to the that found by the in that it to the of before and it that the of the chemical on and and all the into the and the into and this in his one and already like that the they put into the and into the for was that their these that the the with the for the on the camera was it in bodies are of it all of still this by through the of in a The of that amount to an of about the that and warns be this like a he for action but no his and three for and In must be and An or the of and as but by and its that the and of It to an of knowledge, to is the of on the social from In order to and to what we we on and economic that, to are from an that out the of or social of the the of and the of in of the of the of for as to of in the of through a the to of the of to which without that we to what we and that we to in a in which of are so of the they in the of to in and industrial As we even to of or with the of liberalism as a of for as as for the of the which was by and and of which a In the a for the term the of and the of a breakdown from and to as a of an a in a but this to a in the the of that The employees to as a their the of their the as a of its and as a to a the of by with the of a into the defined by as that from within with the to them and to provoke a a for who of from the is by the that their or differently about it, if they of environmental and to be as an While the is in an turn of and they the them of about their their their and as an of the through the and of Dark Waters, out as an accumulation of by the and he used to as an calls for a of chemical operations of an at a Moreover, the of his he from the of the of the in his direction, The that his is and In West Virginia, for to public 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toxicity at within the and Dark imposes itself as a for a to and I so as to that Dark constitutes Haynes’s with the melodrama, for it an of sexual the of a who between properly and the of into the to about the of the from the of and of his as The in the is on the and that when he for two that, he figures out, It the in and a of to and as if to The distinction between the and its that his has the by the the camera the of the that has the where has the and is through and a of before for to that one has the he but something their a of the a by if he to be in the of that a to his or a for his attempts by to of if still he shot of the by a prior of medium as at the to and the of the on to which I in the between the the the and a in the to their The that the is he about or We to the is for the in the The and and as common of can no the of this if doing so the of The as I it, a which the of by toxic and but a an account of the that and mixed as to be at of the and management of This is the by 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and and The that holds the to It so by than is on the that a thereby that of and action on in the of these with the we can is we can the can for the This of the causal as we must with the fact that the still has we is to the which is to that the is to what we The of the and the from are the of to life before are as as from who at it in a with his these a amount of to the of social and the on who be by and to was a that that it be as or or It is an that the of that of all to the impossible and to its biographical of at in are they by title but they from the of that or the in its and as a to by the that for in the more with the of a chemical and in a as rather than also an the on with the of the In cases, narrative and the law are to the of late and the in in that between and in Dark Waters, the impossibility of As the camera lingers on the the water the and on the and in the We to this a of late in the of which is to be the of the lingers on of or with the In the takes one to identifies the The is or the of these cases, a of In the The third, all cases for is to be in the of on the of as a of there are the to and to over “forever all more than through his is still and Dark has to receive the as an of just but an be it a one or an one, that the of the medical the legal processes and make for a or the that in this they something to the that he at the of the which for and in that is the a this is but what about The toxic melodrama this to the of we about The of contradictions within “toxic late as Povinelli the management of industrial pollution through the of and in turn the that is of we it or to the chemical

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