Inscribing Interiority and Ideology: Representing the Visually Elusive in the American Petroleum Institute’s Cold War Films

Films sponsored by the American oil industry during the Cold War often pit communism and capitalism against each other, arguing for the latter’s ideological superiority. Since abstract ideologies are difficult to represent visually, the battle takes concrete form via depictions of layers of underground rock in films like The Last Ten Feet (1949) and Destination Earth (1956), which demonstrate how the American oil industry’s engineering ingenuity locates and extracts the precious crude oil reserves found therein. In this essay, I argue that by harnessing moving images’ power to visualize the optically elusive, films sponsored by the oil industry show it to have technological access to customarily inaccessible underground space, thus making the industry seem a more potent foil for the Red menace.Image Credit: Screenshot from Destination Earth (1956).