July 18, 2024
In the 1740s, a German explorer named John Peter Salling made a discovery that would change the history of North America. Poking around a river in a valley near the Blue Ridge Mountains, he found evidence of the presence of coal. The river was soon renamed the Coal River, and the surrounding region, stretching from southern Pennsylvania through West Virginia and Kentucky, would forever be known as "coal country." Over the next 250 years, the coal industry would define nearly every aspect of life in these states.
The personal side of this vast history is powerfully conveyed through a patient, thoughtful, and at times elegiac new documentary from Oscar-nominated director Elaine McMillion Sheldon, who grew up in West Virginia and still lives in Appalachia. So, she knows the industry, landscapes, rivers, valleys, towns, and people. Rather than a single-issue documentary, the film is a complete cultural history of coal that ponders the many varied ways that this single, ancient, powerful resource has affected a region. At a time when our nation is deeply divided on the future of coal, planners working at the intersection of environmental and energy policy would be wise to ponder this history.
The film paints the rise and fall of the coal industry with broad strokes. In the 1930s, over 140,000 people were directly employed in mining in West Virginia. The industry fueled the regional economy and the expansion of manufacturing, transportation, and urbanization across the country and around the world. Today, fewer than 12,000 of these jobs remain, but the region remains steadfastly loyal to its roots. Told partly through the perspective of two young girls growing up in the shadow of "King Coal," the film leaves the viewer to ponder not just the past but also the future of this industry, lifestyle, and culture.
After taking this in, the story zooms in on a single community. A small group has assembled outside a quaint church nestled in a high mountain valley just under the fog line, a somber assembly of mourners dressed in black walking in a slow processional: a funeral for Old King Coal. The group invites us to bear witness to what coal meant — good and bad — to these people.
Strangely, the film does not discuss the mounting toll of opioid deaths that has plagued the region as jobs and industry have declined. This seems like a significant oversight, especially given the director's previous Oscar-nominated documentary, Heroin(e), focusing on the devastating effects of the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, which has led the nation in overdose-related deaths every year since 2014. Similarly, the film never mentions the words "climate change," "carbon," or "fossil fuel" — or even passingly addresses the world-altering effects of burning all this coal over the past 250 years.
As the film rolls on, these omissions feel like a heavy pair of shoes waiting to drop. But importantly, Sheldon says more through this silence than any environmentalist sermon or public health appeal could: these unaddressed disasters and unspoken deaths hover like ghosts over the funeral, mute witnesses to the lives lost and worlds ruined by coal.
Still, one last question lingers like a foggy mountain mist hovering over a hidden holler: after King Coal, who will reign next?
King Coal is screening at festivals and independent theaters across the country and is streaming via your local PBS station as part of the 37th season of the acclaimed POV documentary series.
If you liked King Coal, you may also enjoy ...
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Barbara Kopple's groundbreaking documentary immerses viewers in the struggles of coal miners in southeastern Kentucky as they fight for their lives and their rights. Over the course of the 13-month Brookside Strike, 180 workers and their families held out against money, power, and the political influence of Duke Energy. The strikers eventually won the right to be represented by the union of their choice, but this victory did not come without cost: it added one more violent chapter to the history of a county known as "Bloody Harlan" since the 1930s, where blood and conflict mix with coal and ash. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and is still considered a milestone in the use of documentary film as a tool to advocate for social justice.
Harlan County, USA is available on Max (subscription).
The Last Mountain (2011)
Set in the same West Virginia valley as King Coal, this documentary directed by Bill Haney delivers a more hard-hitting environmental exposé of the coal industry. Beyond the problems of poor working conditions, air and water pollution, and climate change, the film takes aim at the unprecedented scale of late-stage mining operations. Rather than quaint, old mines with miles of cramped underground tunnels, shafts, pumps, and rickety tracks, the modern mining operation destroys the landscape wholesale, through a process known as "mountaintop removal." Drawing on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2005 book, Crimes Against Nature, the film advocates for clean, renewable wind-farm energy to preserve and restore these magnificent mountains, rather than grinding them down in an insatiable hunger for more and more fossil fuel.
The Last Mountain is available on Tubi (free).
Coal Miner's Daughter (1980)
Michael Apted's biopic stars a pitch-perfect Sissy Spacek as country singer Loretta Lynn (born Loretta Webb, one of eight children of a poor coal miner in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky). Despite her rise to fame, she never forgot the importance of her humble roots in coal country, which imbued her music with a pathos that can't be faked. The song of her life story — "Coal Miner's Daughter" — topped the Billboard country charts in 1970 and remains an unofficial anthem for generations of miners and their kin.
Coal Miner's Daughter is available to rent on Amazon Prime ($3.79), Apple TV ($3.99), and YouTube ($3.99).
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