Runoff
A tale of two documentaries.
What coal country has produced in exajoules of energy, the rest of the United States seems to be repaying in exajoules of political attention. How we imagine Appalachia has become a fulcrum of our electoral politics, from Green New Dealers’ ground zero for a just transition to J.D. Vance’s fables of small communities broken by an unfair system. Since Trump’s first election, political commentators have started paying much more attention to Appalachians, whose grievances he apparently successfully platformed, as the key to his electoral college victory. Where has this decade of anxiety about deindustrialization and coal communities gotten us?
I recently watched two documentaries that engage with these grievances to starkly different ends. The first, Devil Put the Coal in the Ground (2021), follows the demise of West Virginia’s coal industry, told mostly through the perspective of communities struggling through economic depression. It’s a brutal just transition narrative about the total devastation of West Virginia’s coal towns through strike-breaking and the replacement of labor-intensive shaft mining with the explosive removal of whole mountaintops. Once-thriving communities thus withered into hollow neighborhoods, strewn with cancerous coal slurry, hazardous mountaintop dust, and deadly opioids.
What baffles me is how the documentary—neither its producers nor its subjects—makes no policy demands whatsoever. It doesn’t mention Trump’s first term, or discuss the Bernie-wave agitation around universal healthcare, or even engage with the political fistfighting around the Build Back Better agenda. It doesn’t even call for a return to union labor! (If my memory serves me right, it also doesn’t name-check Obama, Trump, or Biden.)
By omitting these references, it entirely sidesteps the political world that’s shaping its story, appealing instead to an apolitical fantasy where we can all agree that this state of affairs sucks, regardless of what team we’re on. The documentary sticks to platforming the struggles of the people, specifically women, hurt by Appalachian deindustrialization and ends up being a slurry of Bad Things That Are Really Bad. The first 30 minutes of Devil really hone its nostalgia for a better time, before the destruction of the unions and the mountaintops. Its only defined enemies are big corporations and their political allies. The second half of the documentary features a bunch of shots of former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin at Dupont Chemicals facilities, and, while the narrators and the subjects never mention him by name, the film paints him as guilty by association with the companies that have ruined West Virginians’ lives.
The second documentary, The Nuclear Frontier (2025), takes this Appalachian nostalgia in a much more dangerous direction. Made by The Nuclear Company, this documentary is designed to socialize and promote the renewed development of nuclear energy across the United States. Frontier seeks to realize the potential of nuclear power for our energy grid and for emissions reductions, surmount the barriers to developing and financing new nuclear technologies, and support American energy abundance and the data centers springing up across the country.
What does nuclear development have to do with coal country? A good chunk of this documentary features a few subjects, including the CEO of The Nuclear Company, who discuss how they grew up in coal communities, where the economic opportunities dried up with the death of the coal industry and the widespread leaching of coal slurry into the water led to birth defects and deteriorating health across the region.
It’s implied that nuclear energy is a solution to the jobs and health crises in Appalachia. But, in every single case where Appalachia comes up, the subjects who mention the region then pivot inexplicably to arguing that nuclear energy helps the United States compete against China to win the AI race. There is no rationale given as to why the former entails the latter; the implication that nuclear energy supports economic development is subsumed, in a blink, into the right’s hawkish project of weaponizing a speculative technology against a foreign adversary.1
I attended Frontier’s premiere at the Kennedy Center in DC, in an auditorium full of tech entrepreneurs and national conservatives, who see in the Trump administration this promise of American industrial revival. (I was there for work: I write about nuclear finance sometimes.) And Frontier reflects some of the nauseating priorities and preoccupations of this political coalition. It’s chock-full of AI-generated videos and graphics, and it single-mindedly dismisses renewable energy resources. The message is clear: Nuclear energy not only rebuilds our broken white communities, but helps us beat our dangerous foreign enemies. I wish I had more to say, but that’s really all the documentary amounts to: identity politics for conservatives, marshaled around the nostalgia for American hegemony—for the catharsis of winning a cold war as an undisputed superpower, this time with data centers.
For all of their differences, in the rearview mirror of Trump’s second election, these two documentaries subscribe to the same worldview: the tragedy of white people under threat. Devil treats Appalachia as a blank white canvas for political unity,2 and Frontier prepares Appalachia as a testing site for unrelated ambitions of global dominance against China. The plight of small-town American whites and the project of American hegemony have perhaps always been at the core of our political nostalgia.
Liberal artists and writers who treat coal country as a place where people agree about problems rather than a place where people disagree about solutions leave their work entirely open to cooptation by the right. Devil describes and so painstakingly catalogs the demise of West Virginian coal communities.3 But it places sentimentality over generative critique when it stops short of having its subjects voice their political beliefs, even their potentially Republican ones.4 In accommodating the right by building as big a tent as possible around Appalachia’s problems, Devil ends up feeling passive with respect to the real challenges it raises.
In the end, Devil’s refusal to digest the connection between subjects’ nostalgia and real political movements―declining, as it were, to make actual policy demands or identify the proper enemies of coal country―leaves room for Frontier’s toxic appeal to postwar nostalgia, weaponized by fission-fixated fascists for their own belligerent ends.
The little we do explicitly get of Devil’s politics looks backward, failing to see the real threat just ahead. Manchin, for all his climate villainy, did end up delivering a massive just transition program for Appalachia that promised clean manufacturing jobs, spending on environmental remediation, and support for miners with black lung. Trump, meanwhile, has gutted all of that and is violently forcing coal back into the economy.
Neither Trump’s return nor Frontier are Devil’s fault, of course, but Devil refuses to betray its subjects by admitting that, however imperfectly, one party is better than the other.5 In the breach, the producers of Devil leave a vacuum for the right’s political vision, inviting the entrepreneurs of Frontier to step in and process that relationship themselves in their own Trump-friendly interest and to all our detriment. The Nuclear Frontier is the political runoff of the Devil Put the Coal in the Ground’s aesthetic imagination, with all the attendant health effects. This absence of any policy demand or political vision becomes less of some noble deference to the desires of people in Appalachia and more like an unintentional appeasement of partisans with far worse visions. Demonstrating how everything has gone wrong makes for a good documentary, but it’s sorely inadequate politics.
It’s like a bad college admissions essay: replete with non sequitur jumps from personal struggles to tenuously related personal aspirations.
The documentary does not feature a single person of color. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, given Appalachia’s demographics, but, insofar as this is a white story, it has its politics.
If you couldn’t tell, I appreciated watching Devil much more.
Devil’s creators could have asked their subjects about their political visions. After all, isn’t so much of the progressive agitation around “just transitions” focused on having communities suggest their own solutions to problems, even at the risk of discord? On the other hand, it’s not the job of everyday Appalachians to solve problems that they didn’t create. Isn’t this what our political leaders are supposed to do for us?
There’s a possibility, of course, that Devil’s creators are not liberal. If they happen to be conservative, or even partly so, they’ve done a good job of creating a tent big enough for them to stand comfortably under.