Goodbye Gauley Mountain: Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Meets Art and Sex

There is yet another documentary about mountaintop removal. Premiering yesterday in Charleston, West Virginia, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, is an effort from filmmakers Elizabeth Stephens and her life partner Annie Sprinkle.

            Both Stephens and Sprinkle are artists and academics. Stephens teaches at UC Santa Cruz, and Sprinkle has a Ph.D. in human sexuality. Their film is being touted as an “ecosexual love story.” In the trailer, among images of the catastrophic destruction of mountaintop removal coal mining are scenes with naked people in them. I guess the naked people scenes are the “ecosexual” angle of the movie.

Trailer Goodbye Gauley Mtn: An Ecosexual Love Story from Elizabeth Stephens on Vimeo.

And I guess that if this couple were going to make a movie about mountaintop mining, sex would work its way in there. Stephens is a performance artist. Her work has concentrated on the themes of “queerness,” feminism, and environmentalism and her current passion is what she calls “SexEcology,” which is thinking of the Earth as a lover. For Sprinkle Goodbye Gauley Mountain is only her latest in a long line of movies. She started making pornographic movies back to the mid seventies. She has appeared in close to 200 films, most of which have been pornographic.

            I’ve seen two other documentaries about mountaintop mining. On Coal River is about a small number of individuals who live in the Coal River area and whose lives have been disrupted by the mountaintop mines. The film focuses on their concern for the safety of the schoolchildren whose schoolhouse lies downstream from a coal slurry impoundment. The Last Mountain pretty much contains the same individuals. Robert Kennedy Jr. makes an appearance, and, despite all the havoc caused by these oversized coal mines, the film manages to end on an upbeat note. I believe that, until Stephens and Sprinkle’s movie, these are the only two documentaries about mountaintop mining.

            Maybe the “ecosexual” theme of the movie might get folks to go to the theatre and see Goodbye Gauley Mountain. Theatres were not packed for the earlier films. For the showing of On Coal River here in San Diego, a showing that was sponsored by Whole Foods, the entire audience consisted of three attendees: my wife, our friend Deborah, and me. San Diego is the sixth largest city in the country, and only three people saw On Coal River here, and my wife and our friend probably wouldn’t have seen it had I not dragged them to the theater.

            And even if more people see Goodbye Gauley Mountain, will it make a difference? I’m beginning to think that no matter what we see in a documentary, no matter how dramatic or persuasive the movie is, no matter how well the filmmaker entertains us, it won’t make any difference.

            Fifty years ago the seed of modern environmentalism was planted with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Similarly, Betty Friedan inspired the modern Women’s Movement of the sixties and seventies with her book The Feminine Mystique. Though it can be argued that books don’t create the stir that they once did in the day of Carson and Friedan, there has never been a documentary with the influence of Silent Spring or The Feminine Mystique. Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame aired on television around the same time as when Carson and Friedan wrote their books, and the show shocked those who watched it. Harvest of Shame is quite famous, and people still talk about it, but more than fifty years later not much has changed for the migrant workers who harvest our food. Detroit still went down the tubes even after Michael Moore’s Roger and Me spotlighted the way General Motors and the other big American automobile companies were shutting down factories. And his indictment of the George W. Bush administration, Fahrenheit 911, failed to keep Bush from getting reelected.

            Will I go see Goodbye Gauley Mountain? I don’t know if I need to see more scenes of large earth moving equipment leveling mountains. I don’t know if there is much more that I can learn from another film on super sized strip mining. Greg Archer, writing in the Huffington Post says that the movie is “one of the most creative romps to shed light on King Coal.” Maybe all the folks I that I was expecting to see in the theatres when I went to see On Coal River will come out to see Stephens and Sprinkle and their new film. Maybe they'll be informed and entertained by this ecosexual love story, and maybe the mountains will still crumble for King Coal.