“To Use a Mountain creates space for a much-needed conversation about the series of Faustian bargains science has made in the name of technological progress.”

Casey Carter takes a very traditional journalistic approach to documentary filmmaking by using historical footage mixed with interviews to tell the story of six rural American communities selected to house the country’s nuclear waste as part of Ronald Reagan’s Nuclear Waste Policy Act signed in 1982. Despite this conventional treatment, To Use a Mountain manages to tackle a pressing question that often feels under-discussed: how do we deal with events that refuse to be seen as spectacles, and that might even be perceived as invisible?  

As previously mentioned, six different areas in America were chosen to become burial grounds for over 70,000 tons of nuclear waste that will take thousands of years to decompose. And To Use a Mountain is, on the surface, a documentary about how the local population attempted to resist over the years, to no avail. Symbolically enough, in one of the many town halls meant to justify the government’s logistical and geographical studies that led to the selection of these sites, another piece of nuclear history is constantly evoked: Chernobyl’s. And watching the late eighties footage, we – decades later – are reminded of what happened in Fukushima as well. Carter’s point, however, is that there is a difference between addressing a tragedy – something many filmmakers before him have done – and confronting the ever-developing catastrophe that follows such events.  

Perhaps that’s why cinema tends to focus on specific events rather than ongoing catastrophes: because there is a spectacle, a ruin, a corpse waiting to be captured by the camera. In To Use a Mountain there is no corpse, for the body is being slowly eaten away while the person is still alive. That is, while the reactor explosion in Ukraine was eventually contained and Fukushima was deemed safe for tourism, the effects on the local population may take so much time to fully manifest that they might be seen as a random tragedy of life rather than the direct consequence of human actions. From stillborn babies to deformed children and specific cancer spikes, radiation remains invisible.  

Here’s the brilliance of Carter’s project: he is not concerned with the bombs (and bombings, for that matter) that led to the creation of nuclear waste. To Use a Mountain is not a film about that. Rather, Carter seems to be interested in the passage of time, something brilliantly conveyed through the editing, which maintains a crescendo of urgency, as if the subjects were walking toward an apocalyptic event. Which in many ways, they are. The heavy use of text on screen (something that reminded me of Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla; appropriately so, since the Japanese monster is a way to address nuclear trauma) is also commendable. In To Use a Mountain, as people talk about their fears and ask for justice, the legal texts cover the screen, leaving their concerned voices without a face, lost in a bureaucratic hell. 

So, we listen to farmers talk about how the waste might contaminate their crops and how it could take generations of plants to negate the nuclear impact. Women speak about their stillborn babies and the impossibility of getting pregnant. People recount how their relatives got sick; the stories go on and on. “The glory was in making bombs, then electricity, but never in taking care of the waste. It’s a father’s mess that’s a son’s job to clean up,” says one of the interviewees. In other words, much like the biblical idea of a father’s sins passing on to his son, the consequences of nuclear expansion will weigh on those who had little to do with such decisions. 

At its core, To Use a Mountain creates space for a much-needed conversation about the series of Faustian bargains science has made in the name of technological progress. Like radiation, another urgent topic of our reality – climate change – may be mistakenly perceived as something that is yet to come, at an undetermined moment, but something that is still in the future. For we tend to focus on the spectacle of tragedies – looking for specific floods and bodies scattered across streets when the water recedes – but by then, it is already too late. Like the radiation in Casey Carter’s To Use a Mountain, this, too, is something that will just keep going, and passing through and over us.