“Burying King Coal”
Casey A. Williams (Rice University)
There is a moment towards the middle of King Coal when a high school football team streams out of a locker room, each player rubbing a chunk of gleaming black coal on his way to the field. The coal, cut from a mine that used to be a mountaintop, is in some sense “intrinsic,” director and narrator Elaine McMillion Sheldon tells us; it simply is. But for these boys, who stand for unnamed thousands in the coal-producing states of central Appalachia—Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia—coal is also saturated with meaning, with history and myth, a talisman and cursed object.
Broadly speaking, King Coal asks viewers to dwell with the many, sometimes contradictory meanings of coal in central Appalachia. There are thus many ways to read the film: a eulogy for a dying industry; a love letter to a region; an apologia for coal, in the double sense of expressing “pride and remorse;” a dream of a different future. Though it is a documentary, watching King Coal feels like inhabiting a lyric poem or a folk tale. Narrated in the first person by Sheldon, a coal miner’s daughter, King Coal lacks a conventional plot, instead weaving together slices of life, archival footage, and dream sequences, loosely focalized through an unnamed red-haired girl and her friend. The girl, another coal miner’s daughter, is Sheldon’s proxy and heir to the accumulated history of coal country. When we watch her do her homework (“Is coal important to your family?”), we witness that history imprint itself on a new generation. Such quotidian rituals are one way the “ghost of King Coal” does his haunting. At the same time, the girl represents the possibility of change. She touches moss growing in a mine shaft and emerges in a forest clearing, resplendent and bathed in light. She and her friend dance like birds before train cars laden with coal, the lightness of their movements countering the coal’s weight.
For now, they do all this “under the King.” Sheldon invites us to see King Coal as a literal sovereign—an industry that can “make live and let die,” but which is now itself dying. The fuel that powered the industrial revolution, coal remains responsible for most of the energy sector’s planet-heating emissions. But US coal production has plummeted over the last twenty years (although AI’s thirst for computing power has revived several moribund coal plants)—a decline that has been especially painful for Appalachia. Dozens of mining companies have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, defaulting on pension and healthcare obligations to miners. No one expects the private equity firms that have purchased these bankrupt mines to stump up the billions required to remediate environments damaged by extraction. There has so far been no “just transition” for the 27,000 people still mining coal.
Yet rather than narrate coal’s decline, Sheldon offers a sensuous, dialectical picture of places that have been both defined and defiled by the global hunger for fossil fuels. Layering coal’s boom-and-bust cycle over deeper historical rhythms, Sheldon composes tender portraits of people who take immense pride in the traditions developed in relation to mining, even if they no longer “believe in the King’s powers.” She also presents people creating new traditions, who nonetheless feel that coal deserves a decent burial. The film stages such a burial, opening and closing with a funeral for King Coal—a symbolic reinterring of this ambivalent force from the depths.
The rites of death are only the most dramatic of the many rituals that appear in the film, which are ultimately its main subject matter. Crowds gaze at a lump of coal descending on a crane arm during the New Year’s Eve “Coal Drop.” Fistfuls of soot are thrown at participants in a road race. A shirtless man shovels coal from one concrete box to another. Prospective “coal queens,” swaddled in sparkling dresses, deliver earnest speeches about coal.
In the hands of a filmmaker not so committed to the dignity of her subjects, such rituals could easily appear fetishistic or provincial. Sheldon instead presents ritual as an empathetic answer to the riddle of why so many people still seem so attached to coal—as fewer and fewer people work in the mines, as the ecological costs of extraction mount. And yet it would be wrong to read these rituals as pro-coal. In one scene, a besooted former miner leads a school group in a chorus of “Sixteen Tons”: “Load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” The man, ghost-like, reminds us that class antagonism has long suffused the poetry of coal country, which has never struggled to appreciate that people can take pride in their work while abhorring the conditions in which they do it.
King Coal is in conversation with this poetry (one thinks of Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter”) and inherits some of its class consciousness. “The coal leaves but the people stay,” Sheldon narrates, recalling Rob Nixon’s idea of “the stationary displaced.” Sheldon honors the union tradition as well, but this is not Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976). When we meet United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts (unnamed in the film), he and perhaps twenty UMWA members are retracing the steps of workers who participated in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, when thousands of armed miners fought for union recognition. This is a ghostly procession, visually parallel to the funeral march that opens and closes the film, figuring the union as a relic rather than an active force. In the film’s final third, Sheldon presents “dreams” of life after coal: people (mostly children) gardening, planting trees, foraging, dancing, running, fishing coal from rivers and using it to paint pictures. These are powerful metaphors of change—of making the new from the old—but Sheldon, having relegated unionism to the past, leaves us with little sense of how, exactly, such change might happen.
Interestingly, for all its emphasis on place, King Coal more or less elides differences across states. Aerial shots of mist-shrouded valleys figure the region we call central Appalachia as a coherent entity from time immemorial, defined first by geography (mountains), then geology (coal), and next by the characters’ dreams. The characters too are strangely composite: we learn none of their names, nor where most of them are from. The girls at the heart of the film are singular (when they describe what they want to be when they grow up, the specificity of their aspirations creates a moment of bathetic relief in a mostly solemn film), as well as abstract. When Sheldon’s proxy lights a bonfire with a coal torch, her red hair merging with the flames, she is not a girl but a symbol of rebirth.
The film’s rich symbolism allows Sheldon to affirm the spiritual depth of her subjects, affording them a measure of dignity often denied the rural poor. It is refreshing to encounter a depiction of Appalachia that refuses the moralistic obsession with poverty and drug addiction one finds in, say, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But there is a fine line between dignifying one’s subjects and romanticizing them. Funerals, festivals, commemorative marches—these are visual shorthands for social cohesion, ways to make the vague concept “community” feel weighty, solid, real. The film’s emphasis on ritual thus makes it easy to conclude that the communities of central Appalachia are somehow more deeply rooted in place, more tightly knitted by custom and lore than the fragmented, alienated, disenchanted non-communities that make up so much of the US. There is of course rich culture in the region, but it is also riven with antagonisms and exclusions, struggling with the same modern ailments many of our communities experience (Sheldon has documented the region’s chronic illness and opioid epidemics in previous films). Given that such ailments are also ghosts of King Coal, perhaps predictable consequences of extractivism, we might ask: Is our picture of King Coal’s haunting really complete without some sense of the profound social crises left in its wake?
With the coal gone, “they’ve come to mine the memories, the moments, mine the magic,” laments yet another coal miner’s daughter at the end of the film. Her complaint invites us to ask who, ultimately, King Coal is for. Is it for Sheldon’s subjects—the people who, attending King Coal’s funeral, appear on screen as the spectacle’s final audience? Or is the film itself an extracted resource? A trove of memories and moments mined from coal country and shipped away—destined for audiences whose own places have perhaps been hollowed out or desacralized by forces unleashed by King Coal, who now hunger for authenticity, for magic?
“Magical Realism Meets Fossil Realities”
Siobhan Angus (Carleton University)
In Upton Sinclair’s 1917 novel King Coal, the upper-class Hal Warner wants to see the realities of coal mining. Disguised in the attire of a working man and using a false identity, Warner goes underground at the Pine Creek Coal Company. He is swiftly disillusioned of any romantic notions about labor and, horrified by the extreme oppression suffered by the workers at the hands of the company, decides to become a union organizer. Sinclair, a socialist, immerses readers in the complex world of the mine to remind them that labor is the foundation of our society and to expose the brutal exploitation of workers that underpins it.
If class struggle is the animating axis of Sinclair’s take on coal, Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s documentary King Coal (2023) offers a more ambiguous and often dreamy exploration of the cultural dimensions of coal mining. Energy regimes are personified and mythologized. We learn that coal is ancient life, decomposed plant life turned into coal by 300 million years of heat and pressure. Coal is ancient but vital—energy. In a sense, Sheldon reifies the nineteenth-century framing of coal as a supernatural force that replaces the energy generated by labor with energy derived from fossil fuels. The mystification of energy runs throughout the film, obscuring the social relations that underpin extraction and the centrality of class struggle.
In Sheldon’s King Coal, Sinclair’s hard-edged realism gives way to a magical-realist approach. The narrator places us in the kingdom of King Coal. Our guide is a young girl, standing in for the director, often accompanied by a friend. Their presence is mostly confined to staged scenes, which challenge the documentary format’s promise of an unfiltered glimpse into reality. These moments with the young girls weave an element of magical realism into the narrative, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Community voices occasionally intrude, but the dominant tone of the film is detached, yet visually captivating. This dreamy feel is reflected in the narration. Sinclair’s King Coal is the company, representing industrial capitalism; in Sheldon’s version, the king is the rock itself—coal is personified as an omnipotent ruler. We learn that this king owns everything in the region, including the lives of its inhabitants. However, this ruler is no longer as powerful as he once was; with only 12,000 miners left in West Virginia, it is time for his reign to end.
Accordingly, the film is structured around a funeral for King Coal as the narrator asks, “Who are we without a king?” The funeral is perhaps the strongest part of the film, a reminder that ritual and mourning are crucial for both moving forward and remembering. This summer, I attended the funeral of the Conesville coal-fired power plant in Coshocton, Ohio through Calling Hours, a play by Anne Cornell, Tom Dugdale, and Jeffrey Jacquet, in which oral history interviews with local residents were transformed into eulogies, which were then performed by community members themselves. The staged funeral brought home the reality that energy transitions are necessary but will bring significant pain to communities that are built around coal. We must grapple with this loss if we are to achieve a just transition.
Sheldon’s film wrestles with how to make sense of the culture that has developed around coal as the world moves on. Today, Appalachia is often cast as a relic of a bygone era. King Coal reinforces this sense of pastness. It promises an insider’s perspective to outsiders, with stunning landscapes juxtaposed with idiosyncratic local traditions. Culturally, Sheldon seems to suggest that Appalachia is trapped in the past, that Appalachia won’t let go of King Coal. It was unclear to me what Sheldon intends viewers to make of rituals like marathoners being doused in coal dust or a Times Square New Year’s Drop starring a lump of coal. Or the young women with curled hair and sparkly dresses competing in the Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Queen Pageant (the subject of a 2005 documentary by David Hunt and Jody Eldred), dedicating their first dance to all the coal miners who lost their lives in the mines. Sheldon’s framing seems to suggest a deep psychological investment in coal, one that holds the region back. Watching the film, I found myself wondering: are these coal-centric vignettes truly so different from broader cultural phenomena, or are they simply a more working-class expression of energy dependency? As Dipesh Chakrabarty warned, “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use” and decarbonizing requires major cultural shifts that, as a society, we seem unwilling to make. For instance, growing awareness of climate crisis has not resulted in investments in low-carbon transportation. Instead, vehicles have grown larger and more gas-guzzling, celebrated as status symbols in advertisements and songs—such as the prominence of F-150s in country music. Energy companies sponsor museums and exhibitions, cementing their cultural influence. Appalachia often becomes an easy scapegoat, criticized for not moving on, but isn’t our society as a whole, in its own way, worshiping energy?
The looming context of energy transition prompts the question: what are the stories that we need to imagine in order to enact energy transition? The film uneasily suggests miners are holding onto a way of life that is already gone, slowing transition. Yet the responsibility for slow to no progress on decarbonization rests with coal, oil, and gas companies, and the power structures that depend upon them. Surprisingly, corporations and politicians figure nowhere in this narrative.
In Sheldon’s narrative, coal itself—“The King”—mines the tops of mountains. The company owners are depicted as “the king’s men,” humans subservient to coal, as if it wasn’t coal that was disturbed, burned, commodified. This portrayal suggests a sense of inevitability—human actions are not the driving force; rather, it is the inherent energy within the fossil fuel that dictates events. With all of coal’s vital energy, how could it be otherwise? It is not until 68 minutes into the film, during a eulogy at a funeral, that we receive an acknowledgment that coal is elemental, not moral. I found this troubling. Drawing on Zoe Todd’s work on bitumen, we might argue that coal is neither the king nor the problem. Coal is ancient life that is transformed and weaponized into a pollutant. It is the colonial-capitalist systems that extract, burn, and commodify coal, along with the corporations that obfuscate and deceive to keep us trapped in a cycle of carbon dependency. The issue lies not in the material itself, but in the system—one that is historically contingent and socially constructed.
The film is most effective when it grounds us in reality: scenes of workers underground, the children walking through coal tunnels, and a United Mine Workers of America representative leading a commemorative march for the Battle of Blair Mountain. As the UMWA representative reminds us, if you enjoy time off, health and safety standards, vacations, healthcare, pensions, and benefits, it all began with coal miners. These are histories we need to know as we chart the path for a just transition. In King Coal, coal is both a ghost haunting the region and a tangible, material force shaping lives and economies. This duality speaks to the broader implications of society’s dependence on fossil fuels, and the complex, lasting impact this has on communities and their futures.
DOCALOGUE 