Day six of the Milwaukee Film Festival was catch up day. My choice for today was the political documentary GASLIT about the liquified natural gas and petrochemical industries in Texas and Louisiana and their effects on the surrounding environment and people featuring Jane Fonda.
Jane Fonda is a divisive figure as a political activist. But, Jane Fonda knows that she’s a divisive figure as a political activist and smartly steps back and lets other people take the spotlight while she serves mainly as a host and connecting thread to let other people tell their stories. Jane Fonda serves more as a cheerleader for others to tell their stories than as someone stridently preaching at the viewer. That doesn’t necessarily make the film “fair and balanced”, clearly Greenpeace was involved in making this movie and there’s never a question on the film’s position, but it does mean that there are people to empathize with who never asked for nor deserve the illness and damage that came their way.
GASLIT is a feature film debut from director Katie Camosy and she keeps the scale human and relatable. And perhaps the big mistake of climate change activists speaking in terms and concepts that were unrelatable to the average person. You don’t need to know about the big concepts when you can see plastic pellets polluting a creek, emissions of something unnatural, and hear the stories of communities broken up, a fishing occupation damaged, and rampant cancer spread in a community. People may no fully understand climate change, but they understand pollution. It also doesn’t hurt that the film is well shot and is able to zoom out for larger views of the scale of the industries.
Full disclosure, I’m an environmental engineer in my day job. I’m trained to be skeptical of grand pronouncements without data and context. GASLIT is absolutely guilty of making some grand pronouncements without showing the data. Some of that would be simple additions too. The film makes a big deal of black smoke from flares. I know that black smoke is a signal of incomplete combustion and raw emissions are occurring and white smoke is better. I’m not sure that the average person knows what that means, and I’d argue that they undersell their case as a result. But other times, the film is quite eloquent and makes its case. We see billion dollar petrochemical plants, but no trickle down to the surrounding communities which all look poor and impoverished. Maybe that’s selective editing, but it certainly rings true.
I think we’re seeing a variation on this with data centers which are causing an uproar in Wisconsin. Nobody really believes the industries promises of jobs and prosperity. There are too many cases where industry has been shown to lie. The difference may be simply that before it was poor communities of color that were disrupted and now it is middle class white communities that are being disrupted, or maybe something more, but regardless people are no longer taking industry claims, no matter the industry, at face value. And trying to get government officials, the supposed people’s representatives to abide by NDAs and do business in closed sessions is no way to earn trust. Data centers and the petrochemical industry are two different things, but the broken promises of the latter affect the former.
But, I’m drifting from the film itself towards larger thoughts. The film mostly eschews that temptation in favor of the personal stories and experiences. When I was in middle school I was taught that there’s no such place as “away” where you can just make things disappear to. GASLIT makes a case where “away” ultimately is. And it isn’t as far from the source as hoped. At one point, Jane Fonda, with her trademark intensity, makes a grand pronouncement while driving next to a sprawling petrochemical complex spewing who knows what into the air. I’m probably paraphrasing “This isn’t progress. This is death.” Hyperbole aside, there’s much that rings true in that statement.
So, GASLIT makes an indictment of the damage being done by the petrochemical industry at a human scale. A damage being done to the very Americans its supposed to benefit. But, does it offer any solutions or call for action? Not directly. It mostly asks that people get mad and start holding the industry accountable. Which is fine, but isn’t a concrete step to take. GASLIT is very much an act of advocacy, but it leaves the next steps up in the air. That’s not necessarily a problem for the film, but maybe it makes it an incomplete thesis. Unless the goal is just to make people mad as hell and not take it anymore.
The 2026 Milwaukee Film Festival runs from April 16, 2026 until May 30, 2026. GASLIT plays once more at the film festival on April 26, 2026 at the Downer Theatre at 12:45 pm. Tickets to GASLIT and other upcoming films can be purchased at MKEFILM.ORG.
