Filmic representations following Kerr-McGee’s success draw on a drive to minimize the conflict between the fishing and oil industries and valorize oil drilling and the opportunities it brings. Both Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948) and Anthony Mann’s Thunder Bay (1953), for example, commend the oil industry for bringing wealth to an otherwise impoverished region, with differing levels of interdependence between local residents and oil company outsiders on display.
Whereas Louisiana Story makes the case that an oil company can build its rig, drill for oil, build a pipeline and disappear, leaving the bayou untouched and the Cajuns around the well a little richer, Thunder Bay asserts that oil drillers and shrimpers can work together. In fact, in Thunder Bay, oil drilling provides more than jobs and money, according to the film. It provides access to “the golden shrimp” fishermen have been seeking for generations, stimulating a more productive shrimp season.
As a testament to a continuation of this vision of interdependence, Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on this same mythology, asserting that the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
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