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Fossil-Fuel Futurity: Oil in Giant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

DANIEL WORDEN
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Abstract

Giant is a sprawling narrative, centered around the Benedict family, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jett Rink, a nouveau riche oilman. Originally serialized in Ladies' Home Journal in 1952, subsequently published as a novel, then adapted into George Stevens's 1956 film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is a text that dramatizes the domestication and naturalization of the oil industry in the postwar United States while endorsing a multiracial vision of Texas. This essay explores how Giant ultimately arrives at nationalistic pluralism after representing the radical changes brought about by the modern oil industry in the US, particularly the erosion of traditional class divisions as Jett Rink's oil wealth exceeds the Benedict's ranching wealth. The subsumption of oil into liberal pluralism marks what this essay names “fossil-fuel futurity,” an ideological configuration in which normative life is produced through the commodities and modes of transportation made available by fossil-fuel culture. The essay then puts Giant into a broader context of narratives about oil in the postwar US, especially the television series Dallas (1978–91) and the film There Will Be Blood (2007). In all three texts, oil culture becomes postwar US culture, saturating aesthetic, affective, and family relations. The challenge for us, then, is to imagine a mode of futurity that does not replicate the ideological valences of “fossil-fuel futurity.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 441 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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39 The cliffhanger episode that concludes with J. R. being shot is “A House Divided,” Dallas: The Complete Third Season (1979–1980), Warner Brothers DVD, 2005.

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42 The rise in the divorce rate is often attributed to the unilateral and no-fault divorce laws passed in all but two states in the US between 1970 and 1983. For readings of the divorce rate and the debates about the cause of its rise in the late twentieth century see Leora Freidberg, “Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates? Evidence from Panel Data,” American Economic Review, 88, 3 (June 1998), 608–27; and Wolfers, Justin, “Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results,” American Economic Review, 96, 5 (Dec. 2006), 1802–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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