#BPCares: Sinking Oil, Spreadable Détournement

Abstract

In a 2014 episode of HBO’s VICE, Shane Smith interviews Louisianans still suffering the effects of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Smith expresses shock upon learning that negative environmental impacts, ranging from respiratory and skin issues to deformed, oily seafood, are still emerging four years after the spill was supposedly cleaned up. While Smith anticipates viewers’ own disbelief that the spill’s effects seem to be intensifying long after the media has stopped paying attention, his interviewees are far more equanimous. For example, Plaquemines Parish’s Coastal Zone Director, P.J. Hahn, explains that once BP and the Coast Guard sunk the oil, it was “out of sight, out of mind. There’s no story if you don’t see the oil” (“Crude Awakening”). This refrain of invisibility is echoed throughout the episode by victims who understand all too well the direct link between visibility and media viability, between invisibility and limited liability. Smith and, through him, the viewers struggle to comprehend how a spill that was publicly proclaimed to be cleaned up and resolved when its oily seepage was no longer visible could be causing problems an entire four years later.