In 2023, I learned a term from a book about Minnesota’s Iron Range: “petro-masculinity,” the idea that certain men’s identities and senses of self-worth are tied up in the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. To such men, the very notion of conservation is inherently emasculating.
Sounds silly on the face of it, but the more you think about why so many men balk at the idea of decarbonizing, the more it makes sense that they’re fundamentally not thinking with their heads: it’s a form of thinking with their dicks.
Train Dreams is a haunting meditation on the consequences of this kind of thinking, not only for the planet but for the individual. Early 20th century logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is surrounded by men who are crushed by falling trees, who are exploited by their employers and who have a homicidally racist working environment. Most (William H. Macy makes a piquant supporting turn as an exception) choose to ignore the toxicity, and from the lasting damage they’re doing to the land.
Grainier is no hero, simply a man of good conscience who observes and who thinks. When his own joys are swept away, he goes on living — still observing, still thinking, but ultimately lost to history. I grew up reading tall tales of iconic lumberjack Paul Bunyan, but no one told the stories of the people who saw the toll that kind of resource extraction was taking on the country’s future.
That’s now starting to change, but even so, Train Dreams is astonishing in the subversiveness of its take on the frontier narrative. It’s far from the first white-guy-sees-the-light movie about American history, but unlike, say, Dances with Wolves, it doesn’t feel any need to aggrandize its lead. The film simply allows us to watch Grainier watching, and through his eyes to glimpse the horrors of pre-war capitalism.
Director Clint Bentley, who with Greg Kwedar adapted Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, also observes the beauty of Idaho in the railroad era. The land holds promise for Grainier and his young family (including Felicity Jones doing a drawl that will melt your heart), but that promise is irrevocably tied to the kind of money Granier can only make on logging jobs.
Train Dreams is romantic, but not regarding trains. (Planes fare better.) By the end of the film, we see railway lines not as we now understand them — pathways to grand adventure — but as they actually were in their time. That is, interstate highways. Sometimes they’re pretty, sure, but they’re also signs of America’s destructive domination of the landscape.
Edgerton is being hailed for his performance, and justly so: he creates neither a wide-eyed innocent nor a damaged cynic, but the kind of admirable, optimistic hard worker who can never quite manage to escape the system that keeps him on a debilitating treadmill.
Grainier understands, at least, a profound truth that escapes many of his peers: work won’t love you back.
Images courtesy BBP Train Dreams. LLC.
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