黑水

首先要感谢这部电影的制作团队，感谢你们把真相告诉了世界。

其次要感谢律师罗伯，感谢你为揭露真相付出的努力，没有你也就没有这部电影。

为什么要感谢这部电影，因为这部电影所讲述的东西离我们都很近，因为他告诉我们一些事情的真相。

电影根据律师罗伯的真实故事改编，讲述了浩克饰演的律师罗伯和杜邦公司打官司的过程。

不得不说这个过程很漫长，漫长到跨度十几年。

但庆新的是这个漫长的等待是值得的，最后等到了杜邦公司的为他犯下的错买单。

罗伯在和杜邦斗争的过程不仅漫长，还很艰难。

你要知道以一己之力去对抗一个世界500的企业，没有坚韧的毅力和正义的心，很容易被击垮。

不说别的，就说罗伯梳理的杜邦公司所提供的一堆的资料，都够让人放弃的。

还不说杜邦公司可以凭借其财力和势力去对你做出各种骚扰，比如去到证人家搜证据，比如利用自己的影响力勾结行业专家，比如申请禁令不让你去作证等等。

这些都不算，杜邦还能在证据确凿后翻脸不认。

电影虽然是讲的罗伯和杜邦的事，但对我启发最大的还是电影关于对PFOA的曝光，这东西太恐怖了。

首先这东西能致病，而且还是像癌症那种高死亡率的病。

其次这东西覆盖范围太广泛了，几乎存在于地球上每个生物的血液中，包括99%的人类。

而且这个东西是不容易分解的，可以在人体内留存40几年，等到积累到一定的量就会致病。

虽然这东西现在被全球大部分国家所禁止，但在禁止前我们已经使用了几十年。

这些年人类患各种病的人越来阅读哦，是否跟这个有关呢？

电影中的3500多人因为这个患病是不幸的，但他们又是幸运的，幸运的是还有罗伯这样的律师去帮他们，还能得到杜邦的赔偿。

那现实中还有很多可能因为这些而致病的人，又能去告谁，找谁去赔偿，甚至连找谁去帮忙都不知道。

就算是因为PFOA致病的，也不知道是因为这个，只是怪自己命不好。

从来没有想过不是自己命不好，而是有人为了利益，不顾普罗大众的健康——《黑水》首发于微信公众号“看世界电影”，欢迎朋友们关注

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesBy Nathaniel Rich Jan. 6, 2016Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburg’s lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. The farmer was angry and spoke in a heavy Appalachian accent. Bilott struggled to make sense of everything he was saying. He might have hung up had Tennant not blurted out the name of Bilott’s grandmother, Alma Holland White.White had lived in Vienna, a northern suburb of Parkersburg, and as a child, Bilott often visited her in the summers. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants’ neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. He was 7 years old. The visit to the Grahams’ farm was one of his happiest childhood memories.When the Grahams heard in 1998 that Wilbur Tennant was looking for legal help, they remembered Bilott, White’s grandson, who had grown up to become an environmental lawyer. They did not understand, however, that Bilott was not the right kind of environmental lawyer. He did not represent plaintiffs or private citizens. Like the other 200 lawyers at Taft, a firm founded in 1885 and tied historically to the family of President William Howard Taft, Bilott worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients. His specialty was defending chemical companies. Several times, Bilott had even worked on cases with DuPont lawyers. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. ‘‘It just felt like the right thing to do,’’ he says today. ‘‘I felt a connection to those folks.’’The connection was not obvious at their first meeting. About a week after his phone call, Tennant drove from Parkersburg with his wife to Taft’s headquarters in downtown Cincinnati. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firm’s glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Taft’s founders. Tennant — burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap — did not resemble a typical Taft client. ‘‘He didn’t show up at our offices looking like a bank vice president,’’ says Thomas Terp, a partner who was Bilott’s supervisor. ‘‘Let’s put it that way.’’Terp joined Bilott for the meeting. Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them as children. They had seven cows then. Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money.DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named after the creek that ran through it. The same creek flowed down to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows. Not long after the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged. They had always been like pets to the Tennants. At the sight of a Tennant they would amble over, nuzzle and let themselves be milked. No longer. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged.Wilbur fed a videotape into the VCR. The footage, shot on a camcorder, was grainy and intercut with static. Images jumped and repeated. The sound accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror movie. In the opening shot the camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding forest, the white ash trees shedding their leaves and the rippling, shallow water, before pausing on what appears to be a snowbank at an elbow in the creek. The camera zooms in, revealing a mound of soapy froth.‘‘I’ve taken two dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,’’ Tennant says in voice-over. ‘‘The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’’The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ‘‘This is what they expect a man’s cows to drink on his own property,’’ Wilbur says. ‘‘It’s about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans.’’At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. Patches of its hair are missing, and its back is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Another blast of static is followed by a close-up of a dead black calf lying in the snow, its eye a brilliant, chemical blue. ‘‘One hundred fifty-three of these animals I’ve lost on this farm,’’ Wilbur says later in the video. ‘‘Every veterinarian that I’ve called in Parkersburg, they will not return my phone calls or they don’t want to get involved. Since they don’t want to get involved, I’ll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I’m going to start at this head.’’The video cuts to a calf’s bisected head. Close-ups follow of the calf’s blackened teeth (‘‘They say that’s due to high concentrations of fluoride in the water that they drink’’), its liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ‘‘I don’t even like the looks of them,’’ he says. ‘‘It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before.’’Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows’ eyes. ‘‘This cow’s done a lot of suffering,’’ he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.‘‘This is bad,’’ Bilott said to himself. ‘‘There’s something really bad going on here.’’Bilott decided right away to take the Tennant case. It was, he says again, ‘‘the right thing to do.’’ Bilott might have had the practiced look of a corporate lawyer — soft-spoken, milk-complected, conservatively attired — but the job had not come naturally to him. He did not have a typical Taft résumé. He had not attended college or law school in the Ivy League. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Germany. Bilott attended eight schools before graduating from Fairborn High, near Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As a junior, he received a recruitment letter from a tiny liberal-arts school in Sarasota called the New College of Florida, which graded pass/fail and allowed students to design their own curriculums. Many of his friends there were idealistic, progressive — ideological misfits in Reagan’s America. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. ‘‘I learned to question everything you read,’’ he said. ‘‘Don’t take anything at face value. Don’t care what other people say. I liked that philosophy.’’ Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis about the rise and fall of Dayton. He hoped to become a city manager.But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. ‘‘It seemed like it would have real-world impact,’’ he said. ‘‘It was something you could do to make a difference.’’ When, after graduation, Taft made him an offer, his mentors and friends from New College were aghast. They didn’t understand how he could join a corporate firm. Bilott didn’t see it that way. He hadn’t really thought about the ethics of it, to be honest. ‘‘My family said that a big firm was where you’d get the most opportunities,’’ he said. ‘‘I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. I just tried to get the best job I could. I don’t think I had any clue of what that involved.’’At Taft, he asked to join Thomas Terp’s environmental team. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known as Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. Superfund was a lucrative development for firms like Taft, creating an entire subfield within environmental law, one that required a deep understanding of the new regulations in order to guide negotiations among municipal agencies and numerous private parties. Terp’s team at Taft was a leader in the field.As an associate, Bilott was asked to determine which companies contributed which toxins and hazardous wastes in what quantities to which sites. He took depositions from plant employees, perused public records and organized huge amounts of historical data. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. ‘‘I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you defend these claims,’’ he said. He became the consummate insider.Bilott was proud of the work he did. The main part of his job, as he understood it, was to help clients comply with the new regulations. Many of his clients, including Thiokol and Bee Chemical, disposed of hazardous waste long before the practice became so tightly regulated. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. A colleague on Taft’s environmental team, observing that he had little time for a social life, introduced him to a childhood friend named Sarah Barlage. She was a lawyer, too, at another downtown Cincinnati firm, where she defended corporations against worker’s-compensation claims. Bilott joined the two friends for lunch. Sarah doesn’t remember him speaking. ‘‘My first impression was that he was not like other guys,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m pretty chatty. He’s much quieter. We complemented each other.’’

The road to one of the Tennant farms. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesThey married in 1996. The first of their three sons was born two years later. He felt secure enough at Taft for Barlage to quit her job and raise their children full-time. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as ‘‘a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough.’’ He was a model Taft lawyer. Then Wilbur Tennant came along.The Tennant case put Taft in a highly unusual position. The law firm was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. The prospect of taking on DuPont ‘‘did cause us pause,’’ Terp concedes. ‘‘But it was not a terribly difficult decision for us. I’m a firm believer that our work on the plaintiff’s side makes us better defense lawyers.’’Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a West Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. For many years, Winter was a partner at Spilman, Thomas & Battle — one of the firms that represented DuPont in West Virginia — though he had left Spilman to start a practice specializing in personal-injury cases. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft.‘‘His taking on the Tennant case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’’Bilott, for his part, is reluctant to discuss his motivations for taking the case. The closest he came to elaborating was after being asked whether, having set out ‘‘to make a difference’’ in the world, he had any misgivings about the path his career had taken.‘‘There was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants,’’ he said after a pause. ‘‘It was a great opportunity to use my background for people who really needed it.’’Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’ In other words, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault.This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to suffer the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburg’s main employer. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. ‘‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’’ they said, when confronted. Four different times, the Tennants changed churches.Wilbur called the office nearly every day, but Bilott had little to tell him. He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients — pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill — but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. ‘‘We were getting frustrated,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I couldn’t blame the Tennants for getting angry.’’FURTHER READINGFor more about DuPont's FPOA pollution, see ‘‘The Teflon Toxin’’ by Sharon Lerner (The Intercept, Aug. 17, 2015) and ‘‘Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg, West Virginia’’ by Mariah Blake (The Huffington Post, Aug. 27, 2015).With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: ‘‘PFOA.’’ In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Taft’s in-house library. The chemistry expert that he had retained for the case did, however, vaguely recall an article in a trade journal about a similar-sounding compound: PFOS, a soaplike agent used by the technology conglomerate 3M in the fabrication of Scotchgard.Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. But there was nothing. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. In the fall of 2000, Bilott requested a court order to force them. Against DuPont’s protests, the order was granted. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Taft’s headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted by DuPont scientists. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. Bilott spent the next few months on the floor of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. He stopped answering his office phone. When people called his secretary, she explained that he was in the office but had not been able to reach the phone in time, because he was trapped on all sides by boxes.‘‘I started seeing a story,’’ Bilott said. ‘‘I may have been the first one to actually go through them all. It became apparent what was going on: They had known for a long time that this stuff was bad.’’Bilott is given to understatement. (‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated,’’ his colleague Edison Hill says, ‘‘is an understatement.’’) The story that Bilott began to see, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ‘‘I was shocked,’’ he said. That was another understatement. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. The company appeared not to realize what it had handed over. ‘‘It was one of those things where you can’t believe you’re reading what you’re reading,’’ he said. ‘‘That it’s actually been put in writing. It was the kind of stuff you always heard about happening but you never thought you’d see written down.’’The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people in all.Bilott learned from the documents that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. A year later, they replicated these results in studies with dogs. PFOA’s peculiar chemical structure made it uncannily resistant to degradation. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. They did not tell the E.P.A. at the time. In 1981, 3M — which continued to serve as the supplier of PFOA to DuPont and other corporations — found that ingestion of the substance caused birth defects in rats. After 3M shared this information, DuPont tested the children of pregnant employees in their Teflon division. Of seven births, two had eye defects. DuPont did not make this information public.In 1984, DuPont became aware that dust vented from factory chimneys settled well beyond the property line and, more disturbing, that PFOA was present in the local water supply. DuPont declined to disclose this finding. In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. Despite internal debate, it declined to make the information public.(In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. during those decades. When asked for evidence, it forwarded two letters written to West Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links between PFOA exposure and human health problems.)By the ’90s, Bilott discovered, DuPont understood that PFOA caused cancerous testicular, pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA damage from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. DuPont at last hastened to develop an alternative to PFOA. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that ‘‘for the first time, we have a viable candidate’’ that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time. Discussions were held at DuPont’s corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. DuPont decided against it. The risk was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important part of DuPont’s business, worth $1 billion in annual profit.‘His taking on the Tennant case, given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.’But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a low-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly.By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. DuPont’s scientists understood that the landfill drained into the Tennants’ remaining property, and they tested the water in Dry Run Creek. It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later — the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. Bilott had what he needed.In August 2000, Bilott called DuPont’s lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. It was a brief conversation.The Tennants settled. The firm would receive its contingency fee. The whole business might have ended right there. But Bilott was not satisfied.‘‘I was irritated,’’ he says.DuPont was nothing like the corporations he had represented at Taft in the Superfund cases. ‘‘This was a completely different scenario. DuPont had for decades been actively trying to conceal their actions. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway. These were bad facts.’’ He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking water had done to cattle. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? What did the insides of their heads look like? Were their internal organs green?Bilott spent the following months drafting a public brief against DuPont. It was 972 pages long, including 136 attached exhibits. His colleagues call it ‘‘Rob’s Famous Letter.’’ ‘‘We have confirmed that the chemicals and pollutants released into the environment by DuPont at its Dry Run Landfill and other nearby DuPont-owned facilities may pose an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment,’’ Bilott wrote. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft.DuPont reacted quickly, requesting a gag order to block Bilott from providing the information he had discovered in the Tennant case to the government. A federal court denied it. Bilott sent his entire case file to the E.P.A.‘‘DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them,’’ says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who later joined Bilott’s legal team. ‘‘For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. is an extraordinary remedy. You could realize how bad that looks. They must have known that there was a small chance of winning. But they were so afraid that they were willing to roll the dice.’’With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. Though nominally representing the Tennants — their settlement had yet to be concluded — Bilott spoke for the public, claiming extensive fraud and wrongdoing. He had become a threat not merely to DuPont but also to, in the words of one internal memo, ‘‘the entire fluoropolymers industry’’ — an industry responsible for the high-performance plastics used in many modern devices, including kitchen products, computer cables, implantable medical devices and bearings and seals used in cars and airplanes. PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight.

Jim Tennant and his wife, Della, sold DuPont a 66-acre tract of land that became part of the Dry Run Landfill.‘‘Rob’s letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater,’’ says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiff’s lawyer in West Virginia who works with Bilott. ‘‘Before that letter, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated.’’ Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.It was especially damning to see these allegations against DuPont under the letterhead of one of the nation’s most prestigious corporate defense firms. ‘‘You can imagine what some of the other companies that Taft was representing — a Dow Chemical — might have thought of a Taft lawyer taking on DuPont,’’ Larry Winter says. ‘‘There was a threat that the firm would suffer financially.’’ When I asked Thomas Terp about Taft’s reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, not quite convincingly, that he didn’t recall one. ‘‘Our partners,’’ he said, ‘‘are proud of the work that he has done.’’Bilott, however, worried that corporations doing business with Taft might see things differently. ‘‘I’m not stupid, and the people around me aren’t stupid,’’ he said. ‘‘You can’t ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think. I perceived that there were some ‘What the hell are you doing?’ responses.’’The letter led, four years later, in 2005, to DuPont’s reaching a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A., which had accused the company of concealing its knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and presence in the environment in violation of the Toxic Substances Control Act. (DuPont was not required to admit liability.) At the time, it was the largest civil administrative penalty the E.P.A. had obtained in its history, a statement that sounds more impressive than it is. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year.Bilott never represented a corporate client again.The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. In all ways but one, Bilott himself was in the ideal position to file such a suit. He understood PFOA’s history as well as anyone inside DuPont did. He had the technical and regulatory expertise, as he had proved in the Tennant case. The only part that didn’t make sense was his firm: No Taft lawyer, to anyone’s recollection, had ever filed a class-action lawsuit.It was one thing to pursue a sentimental case on behalf of a few West Virginia cattle farmers and even write a public letter to the E.P.A. But an industry-threatening class-action suit against one of the world’s largest chemical corporations was different. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Taft’s bottom line. This point was made to Terp by Bernard Reilly, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, according to accounts from Bilott’s plaintiff’s-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to demand that Bilott back off the case. (Terp confirms that Reilly called him but will not disclose the content of the call; Bilott and Reilly decline to speak about it, citing continuing litigation.) Given what Bilott had documented in his Famous Letter, Taft stood by its partner.A lead plaintiff soon presented himself. Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ‘‘low concentrations,’’ but that it was not a health risk. Kiger had underlined statements that he found particularly baffling, like: ‘‘DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health.’’ The term ‘‘support confidence’’ seemed bizarre, as did ‘‘protective of human health,’’ not to mention the claim that DuPont’s own data supported its confidence in its own guidelines.Still, Kiger might have forgotten about it had his wife, Darlene, not already spent much of her adulthood thinking about PFOA. Darlene’s first husband had been a chemist in DuPont’s PFOA lab. (Darlene asked that he not be named so that he wouldn’t be involved in the local politics around the case.) ‘‘When you worked at DuPont in this town,’’ Darlene says today, ‘‘you could have everything you wanted.’’ DuPont paid for his education, it secured him a mortgage and it paid him a generous salary. DuPont even gave him a free supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used as soap in the family’s dishwasher and to clean the car. Sometimes her husband came home from work sick — fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting — after working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. Darlene says the men at the plant called it ‘‘Teflon flu.’’In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. Darlene would remember this six years later when, at 36, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy and again eight years later, when she had a second surgery. When the strange letter from the water district arrived, Darlene says, ‘‘I kept thinking back to his clothing, to my hysterectomy. I asked myself, what does DuPont have to do with our drinking water?’’

Joe called the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources (‘‘They treated me like I had the plague’’), the Parkersburg office of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (‘‘nothing to worry about’’), the water division (‘‘I got shut down’’), the local health department (‘‘just plain rude’’), even DuPont (‘‘I was fed the biggest line of [expletive] anybody could have been fed’’), before a scientist in the regional E.P.A. office finally took his call.‘‘Good God, Joe,’’ the scientist said. ‘‘What the hell is that stuff doing in your water?’’ He sent Kiger information about the Tennant lawsuit. On the court papers Kiger kept seeing the same name: Robert Bilott, of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, in Cincinnati.Bilott had anticipated suing on behalf of the one or two water districts closest to Washington Works. But tests revealed that six districts, as well as dozens of private wells, were tainted with levels of PFOA higher than DuPont’s own internal safety standard. In Little Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.But Bilott faced a vexing legal problem. PFOA was not a regulated substance. It appeared on no federal or state list of contaminants. How could Bilott claim that 70,000 people had been poisoned if the government didn’t recognize PFOA as a toxin — if PFOA, legally speaking, was no different than water itself? In 2001, it could not even be proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking water caused health problems. There was scant information available about its impact on large populations. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown?The best metric Bilott had to judge a safe exposure level was DuPont’s own internal limit of one part per billion. But when DuPont learned that Bilott was preparing a new lawsuit, it announced that it would re-evaluate that figure. As in the Tennant case, DuPont formed a team composed of its own scientists and scientists from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. It announced a new threshold: 150 parts per billion.Bilott found the figure ‘‘mind-blowing.’’ The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Within two years, three lawyers regularly used by DuPont were hired by the state D.E.P. in leadership positions. One of them was placed in charge of the entire agency. ‘‘The way that transpired was just amazing to me,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘I suppose it wasn’t so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the system there. But it was to me.’’ The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had become the government regulators responsible for enforcing that limit.Bilott devised a new legal strategy. A year earlier, West Virginia had become one of the first states to recognize what is called, in tort law, a medical-monitoring claim. A plaintiff needs to prove only that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. If the plaintiff wins, the defendant is required to fund regular medical tests. In these cases, should a plaintiff later become ill, he or she can sue retroactively for damages. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action suit in August 2001 in state court, even though four of the six affected water districts lay across the Ohio border.Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilott’s research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public — anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. The E.P.A. was particularly alarmed to learn that PFOA had been detected in American blood banks, something 3M and DuPont had known as early as 1976. By 2003 the average concentration of PFOA in the blood of an adult American was four to five parts per billion. In 2000, 3M ceased production of PFOA. DuPont, rather than use an alternative compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, N.C., to manufacture the substance for its own use.Bilott’s strategy appeared to have worked. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. It agreed to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts if they wanted them and pay a cash award of $70 million. It would fund a scientific study to determine whether there was a ‘‘probable link’’ — a term that delicately avoided any declaration of causation — between PFOA and any diseases. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont.

The chemical site near Parkersburg, W.Va., source of the waste at the center of the DuPont class-action lawsuit.A reasonable expectation, at this point, was that the lawyers would move on. ‘‘In any other class action you’ve ever read about,’’ Deitzler says, ‘‘you get your 10 bucks in the mail, the lawyers get paid and the lawsuit goes away. That’s what we were supposed to do.’’ For three years, Bilott had worked for nothing, costing his firm a fortune. But now Taft received a windfall: Bilott and his team of West Virginian plaintiff lawyers received $21.7 million in fees from the settlement. ‘‘I think they were thinking, This guy did O.K.,’’ Deitzler says. ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a raise.’’Not only had Taft recouped its losses, but DuPont was providing clean water to the communities named in the suit. Bilott had every reason to walk away.He didn’t.‘‘There was a gap in the data,’’ Bilott says. The company’s internal health studies, as damning as they were, were limited to factory employees. DuPont could argue — and had argued — that even if PFOA caused medical problems, it was only because factory workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong.Bilott represented 70,000 people who had been drinking PFOA-laced drinking water for decades. What if the settlement money could be used to test them? ‘‘Class members were concerned about three things,’’ Winter says. ‘‘One: Do I have C8 in my blood? Two: If I do, is it harmful? Three: If it’s harmful, what are the effects?’’ Bilott and his colleagues realized they could answer all three questions, if only they could test their clients. Now, they realized, there was a way to do so. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 check.The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire population’s personal data and infinite resources available to study them. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested.It was assured that the panel would return convincing results. But Bilott could not predict what those results would be. If no correlation was found between PFOA and illness, Bilott’s clients would be barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. Because of the sheer quantity of data provided by the community health study and the unlimited budget — it ultimately cost DuPont $33 million — the panel took longer than expected to perform its analysis. Two years passed without any findings. Bilott waited. A third year passed. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Still the panel was quiet. Bilott waited.It was not a peaceful wait. The pressure on Bilott at Taft had built since he initiated the class-action suit in 2001. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the firm’s money and was unable to attract new clients, he found himself in an awkward position.‘‘This case,’’ Winter says, ‘‘regardless of how hugely successful it ends up, will never in the Taft firm’s mind replace what they’ve lost in the way of legal business over the years.’’The longer it took for the science panel to conduct its research, the more expensive the case became. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled frequently to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories about PFOA. ‘‘We were incurring a lot of expenses,’’ Bilott says. ‘‘If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, we’d have to eat it all.’’

Land where Tennant cattle once grazed. Credit: Bryan Schutmaat for The New York TimesClients called Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. When would they get relief? Among those who called was Jim Tennant. Wilbur, who had cancer, had died of a heart attack. Two years later, Wilbur’s wife died of cancer. Bilott was tormented by ‘‘the thought that we still hadn’t been able to hold this company responsible for what they did in time for those people to see it.’’Taft did not waver in its support of the case, but the strain began to show. ‘‘It was stressful,’’ Sarah Barlage, Bilott’s wife, says. ‘‘He was exasperated that it was lasting a long time. But his heels were so dug in. He’s extremely stubborn. Every day that went by with no movement gave him more drive to see it through. But in the back of our minds, we knew that there are cases that go on forever.’’His colleagues on the case detected a change in Bilott. ‘‘I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him,’’ Winter says. ‘‘Rob had a young family, kids growing up, and he was under pressure from his firm. Rob is a private person. He didn’t complain. But he showed signs of being under enormous stress.’’In 2010, Bilott began suffering strange attacks: His vision would blur, he couldn’t put on his socks, his arms felt numb. His doctors didn’t know what was happening. The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. They struck suddenly, without warning, and their effects lasted days. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. ‘‘Nothing different than normal,’’ Bilott told them. ‘‘Nothing it hadn’t been for years.’’The doctors ultimately hit upon an effective medication. The episodes ceased and their symptoms, apart from an occasional tic, are under control, but he still doesn’t have a diagnosis.‘‘It was stressful,’’ Bilott says, ‘‘not to know what the heck was going on.’’In December 2011, after seven years, the scientists began to release their findings: there was a ‘‘probable link’’ between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.‘‘There was relief,’’ Bilott says, understated nearly to the point of self-effacement. ‘‘We were able to deliver what we had promised to these folks seven years earlier. Especially since, for all those years, DuPont had been saying that we were lying, trying to scare and mislead people. Now we had a scientific answer.’’As of October, 3,535 plaintiffs have filed personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont. The first member of this group to go to trial was a kidney-cancer survivor named Carla Bartlett. In October, Bartlett was awarded $1.6 million. DuPont plans to appeal. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartlett’s case: Hers is one of five ‘‘bellwether’’ cases that will be tried over the course of this year. After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. Or DuPont can fight each suit individually, a tactic that tobacco companies have used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. At the rate of four trials a year, DuPont would continue to fight PFOA cases until the year 2890.DuPont’s continuing refusal to accept responsibility is maddening to Bilott. ‘‘To think that you’ve negotiated in good faith a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a point where certain things were to be resolved but then remain contested,’’ he says. ‘‘I think about the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or have died while waiting. It’s infuriating.’’In total, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Some had been doing so for decades.As part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased production and use of PFOA in 2013. The five other companies in the world that produce PFOA are also phasing out production. DuPont, which is currently negotiating a merger with Dow Chemical, last year severed its chemical businesses: They have been spun off into a new corporation called Chemours. The new company has replaced PFOA with similar fluorine-based compounds designed to biodegrade more quickly — the alternative considered and then discarded by DuPont more than 20 years ago. Like PFOA, these new substances have not come under any regulation from the E.P.A. When asked about the safety of the new chemicals, Chemours replied in a statement: ‘‘A significant body of data demonstrates that these alternative chemistries can be used safely.’’Last May, 200 scientists from a variety of disciplines signed the Madrid Statement, which expresses concern about the production of all fluorochemicals, or PFASs, including those that have replaced PFOA. PFOA and its replacements are suspected to belong to a large class of artificial compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals; these compounds, which include chemicals used in the production of pesticides, plastics and gasoline, interfere with human reproduction and metabolism and cause cancer, thyroid problems and nervous-system disorders. In the last five years, however, a new wave of endocrinology research has found that even extremely low doses of such chemicals can create significant health problems. Among the Madrid scientists’ recommendations: ‘‘Enact legislation to require only essential uses of PFASs’’ and ‘‘Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick.’’When asked about the Madrid Statement, Dan Turner, DuPont’s head of global media relations, wrote in an email: ‘‘DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to introduce its alternatives. Extensive data has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and have improved health safety profiles. We are confident that these alternative chemistries can be used safely — they are well characterized, and the data has been used to register them with environmental agencies around the world.’’Every year Rob Bilott writes a letter to the E.P.A. and the West Virginia D.E.P., urging the regulation of PFOA in drinking water. In 2009, the E.P.A. set a ‘‘provisional’’ limit of 0.4 parts per billion for short-term exposure, but has never finalized that figure. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. In response to Bilott’s most recent letter, the E.P.A. claimed that it would announce a ‘‘lifetime health advisory level for PFOA’’ by ‘‘early 2016.’’This advisory level, if indeed announced, might be a source of comfort to future generations. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. It is in your parents’ blood, your children’s blood, your lover’s blood. How did it get there? Through the air, through your diet, through your use of nonstick cookware, through your umbilical cord. Or you might have drunk tainted water. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del.; Colorado Springs; and Nassau County on Long Island are among those whose water has a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in Rob Bilott’s class-action suit. The drinking water in Parkersburg itself, whose water district was not included in the original class-action suit and has failed to compel DuPont to pay for a filtration system, is currently tainted with high levels of PFOA. Most residents appear not to know this.Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. PFOA is in the blood or vital organs of Atlantic salmon, swordfish, striped mullet, gray seals, common cormorants, Alaskan polar bears, brown pelicans, sea turtles, sea eagles, Midwestern bald eagles, California sea lions and Laysan albatrosses on Sand Island, a wildlife refuge on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, about halfway between North America and Asia.‘‘We see a situation,’’ Joe Kiger says, ‘‘that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now it’s everywhere, it’s global. We’ve taken the cap off something here. But it’s just not DuPont. Good God. There are 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there right now. We have no idea what we’re taking.’’Bilott doesn’t regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. But he is still angry. ‘‘The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long,’’ Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, ‘‘that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects — we told the agencies about this in 2001, and they’ve essentially done nothing. That’s 14 years of this stuff continuing to be used, continuing to be in the drinking water all over the country. DuPont just quietly switches over to the next substance. And in the meantime, they fight everyone who has been injured by it.’’Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. The plaintiff, John M. Wolf of Parkersburg, claims that PFOA in his drinking water caused him to develop ulcerative colitis. That trial begins in March. When it concludes, there will be 3,533 cases left to try.A correction was made on Jan. 24, 2016:An article on Jan 10. about legal action against DuPont for chemical pollution referred incorrectly to DuPont’s response in the 1970s when the company discovered high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of workers at Washington Works, a DuPont factory. DuPont withheld the information from the E.P.A., not from its workers. The article also misstated the year DuPont agreed to a $16.5 million settlement with the E.P.A. It was 2005, not 2006. In addition, the article misidentified the water district where a resident received a letter from the district noting that PFOA had been detected in the drinking water. It was Lubeck, W.Va. — not Little Hocking, Ohio. The article also misidentified the district where water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. It was Little Hocking, not Lubeck. And the article misidentified the city in Washington State that has fluorochemicals in its drink-ing water. It is Issaquah, not Seattle._________Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Odds Against Tomorrow.’’ He lives in New Orleans and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

当然了由于《黑水》这个电影的存在，让更多的人会去深入了解事件的真相，了解化学物质的危害，了解化工巨头的资本渗透，为我们自己，我们的后代拥有更加健康的身体，我们应该也必须揭露其黑暗，打压其嚣张气焰！

电影主要讲述了杜邦公司的特氟龙生产线的有害物质排放对环境和人类的危害，主人公坚持了十数年，最终打败了企图欺骗民众的资本巨头杜邦，为民众赢得巨额补偿款，但是值得深思的是在科技发展的今天，在被资本裹挟的今天，我们甚至于没有能够拥有哪怕一寸不被污染的生活环境，真的让人唏嘘！

揭露黑暗的勇者，让人钦佩！

01杜邦的跨时代创新带来了3000多个癌症患者！

电影《黑水》的原型故事要从1954年一项跨时代的发明——不粘锅说起。

而制造不粘锅需要叫做PFOA或C8的有毒物质。

杜邦集团在明知PFOA会导致胎儿畸形以及受体致癌的情况下，仍然继续生产不粘锅，并且把7100吨含有PFOA的淤泥丢进工厂旁边的露天深坑里，接着渗进了帕克斯堡和邻近三个城市共十万人的饮水系统。

1984年一个先天面部畸形的小男孩巴基降生，但这只是开始，当地7万多名住户中先后出现了3000多例癌症患者。

更为触目惊心的是，由于生物无法分解此种物种，致使现在地球上99%的人体内都有PFOA存在！

2004年9月，杜邦就集体诉讼提出和解，同意在受到影响的六个水区安装过滤装置，并支付7000万美元的赔偿。

但杜邦并不承认C8和疾病有关。

代表律师罗伯特比洛特提出了一个方案，只有接受体检才能拿到赔偿金。

之后70000名西弗吉尼亚居民接受了体检，每人领到了400美元的补偿金。

之后又经过漫长的7年等待，科学家终于证明PFOA与多种癌症之间的因果关系，2015年，美国环保署全面禁止生产C8。

其实该案件其实已经被拍成了纪录片——《魔鬼你知我知》。

需要说明的是杜邦之所以会交出所有资料包括证明PFOA有毒的材料，是因为根据美国法律在这种环保案件中被告必须无条件提供原告所需材料。

02青蓝色下绿巨人的无奈《黑水》就是根据上文提到的律师罗伯特（片中由绿巨人马克叔饰演）真实经历改编的。

影片在青蓝的色调下由一群年轻人在倾倒废水的河里游泳开场，然后很快场景转移到了1998年马克叔供职的律所，一个操着浓重口音的农场主来寻求帮助。

电影也从马克叔追查杜邦排放有害物质PFOA开始，讲述了这个前后历时17年的漫长而又曲折的真实故事，他提起的诉讼揭露了几十年来杜邦公司化学污染的历史。

影片给人印象最深刻的无疑是无力感，农场主面对世界500强公司的无助，马克叔在面对杜邦送来的打乱了顺序的上万页资料时的无奈，以及面对自己对家人疏于关心的挫败感。

这致使本片氛围极其压抑，马克叔略显佝偻的身体，仿佛被压垮一样。

当我们看到那些触目惊心的由污染导致的身体缺陷和残疾时，我们的无助转为了愤怒。

故事发生地西弗吉尼亚本是美国十三块发源地之一，但是因为污染已经有多个地方破败不堪，片中为这些镜头配了描绘当地美丽风光的经典名曲《Take Me Home, Country Roads》，可谓讽刺意味十足。

片中除了马克叔这个绝对主角的精彩演出，还有安妮海瑟薇扮演在他身边一直支持他的妻子，她退去了花瓶扮相，以一个真实的有时候甚至有点徐娘半老的姿态出现在我们面前。

同时影片对17年中真实的时间流逝十分关注，每次都要提醒观众，而且片中男主的孩子们也一天天的长大，无不提示我们扳倒杜邦之艰难！

03大卫击败巨人的套路为什么屡试不爽有人曾经说过古往今来只有一个故事模板，那就是小人物逆袭战胜巨人的故事，本片无疑又是一个例证。

一开始马克叔对这件事并不上心，眼里只有成为公司合伙人后的满足和对金钱的追求，但是他看过农民的处境后决定帮个小忙，没想到在过程中自己找到了愿意为之付出一生的使命。

仔细想想大火的国产电影《我不是药神》，徐峥好像也经历了这样的心路历程。

虽然大家面对的具体的“巨人”不太一样，但无论是《达拉斯买家俱乐部》中挣扎求生的艾滋病患者，还是《辩护人》中内心觉醒的律师，他们想改变的其实都是不合理的体制。

虽然监管必然会落后于创新，但是更好的更负责任的化学品监管总是需要的。

在一个雾霾时有发生的时代，对环保的要求应该会越来越高，看过本片马克叔不停奔走的17年应该体会到社会改变的不易，片中很多人没有等到结果就已经先一步离开了人世，庆幸的是总有一些像罗伯特比洛特这样的人敢于对“巨人”说不。

为什么大多数有钱人都会变得素质低下，为什么大多数有钱人都会漠视生命。

毕竟钱能买命，而钱能买到的东西本身就不值钱了。

有钱人随随便便就能只手遮天，这让好人做好事更难，更显得滑稽。

原本，拯救一个人还是拯救所有人，这对于一个心怀正义的律师来说是没有区别的，可惜人心的复杂，现实的黑暗，往往是从击破个人为起点，紧接着逐个击破。

人们感谢你，是因为你有价值，人们憎恨你，是因为你的价值不够。

幸运的是我家从来没有用过不粘锅，因为从我记事开始，不粘锅就成为了“毒”的代名词。

历史告诉我们使用任何便利的事物，总得考虑代价是什么。

人为因素导致的疾病，至今还在不断发生，可是死亡究竟教给人类什么？

是如何规避责任，还是如何写一份漂亮的检测报告，又或者告诉我们，怎样死才最好看？？？

尽管这个世界乌漆麻黑，无数人在黑暗之中跌倒受伤，但幸运的是依旧有人坚持摸爬滚打，依旧有人坚持战斗。

我们应该嘲笑的是那些玩弄生命的渣滓，而不是坚持正义的“普通人”。

西弗吉尼亚的人均收入在美国50个州中排名倒数第一。

多年前的一次旅行中，当地人的自嘲能力给我留下深刻印象。

一家乡村餐馆的老板问我，知道西弗吉尼亚最有名的笑话吗？

我摇头。

他说，“牙刷toothbrush是西弗吉尼亚发明的。

”我不明就里，没笑出来。

他接着说，“如果是其他地方人发明的，牙刷就不会叫toothbrush，应该叫teethbrush。

”这是我听到过的美国各州中的最佳自嘲。

西弗吉尼亚居民牙齿脱落的比例稍高，所以才拿单数和复数开玩笑，因为经济相对落后，也因为冰毒、阿片的泛滥。

不过，将西弗吉尼亚仅视作穷乡僻壤只能失之于简单粗暴。

民谣歌手约翰·丹佛著名的《乡间路带我回家》描述的正是西弗吉尼亚的美好，很多地方看着离天堂很近，就跟歌里唱的一样。

这首歌也出现在电影《黑水》(Dark Waters, 2019)的音轨上。

主角Rob Bilott在西弗吉尼亚乡村长大，成年后向西跨过俄亥俄河，到大城市辛辛那提做律师。

Rob与根的联系无法割断，乡亲们的不幸遭遇让他首先成为吹哨人，接着成为不懈抗争20多年的维权律师，以个人力量对抗美国社会的超级强权、化工巨头杜邦公司。

起因在于曾被誉为划时代化工产品的特氟隆，即不粘锅涂层的重要成分，其中的化学物质PFOA有可能造成溃疡、肿瘤、新生儿的眼睛错位。

杜邦公司经由化工造福人类的同时，他们仍然具有利益集团隐匿罪责的本性。

Rob完成使命过程中需要面对重重困难，而且他并不能够进入为民请命的圣徒心态。

杜邦公司是当地最重要的经济支柱，因为Rob，很多人或许将饭碗不保。

他回到乡间无法找到荣归故里的幻觉，反倒需要为人身安全担忧。

当然比起中国来，Rob在维权过程中还算幸运，因为国家机器并不全受利益集团支配。

杜邦等企业一直是律师楼的主要客户，明知道Rob的做法接近吃肉砸锅，良心驱使之下，老板仍然基本支持。

太太在几乎每一个场景中都唠唠叨叨，但刀子嘴、豆腐心，立场大致为夫唱妇随。

安妮·海瑟薇扮演妻子的角色，她保持着自己固有的特点。

好演员演谁像谁，而海瑟薇演谁都像海瑟薇。

原载「虹膜」几乎所有的政治惊悚片都在试图回答一个问题：我们看似美好正常的生活如果是个假象，那背后到底是什么力量在控制着这一切？

托德·海因斯执导的《黑水》便可被归类其中，影片在烂番茄得到了评论家和观众的双高分，豆瓣也有8.3分的好成绩，它所触及到的话题，在我们每个人的生活中可能都还继续存在，就像一颗颗定时炸弹，躺在你的平底锅涂层，又或者是地毯表面，甚至是饮用水里，悄无声息地扼杀着我们的生命。

《黑水》改编自律师罗伯特·比洛特和世界化学巨头公司杜邦长达数年的抗争。

这绝对是一场历史性战斗，不仅仅因为它牵涉的时间长达几十年，也因为它几乎危及了全世界的人类，更因为这场战斗几乎是一个人与世界上最大的资本主义公司巨头的战斗。

杜邦公司在化学领域的巨头程度，差不多就等于苹果之于全球手机厂商，麦当劳之于连锁快餐产业，全球有无数人都在为杜邦公司工作，而比洛特就是其中一员。

为杜邦公司做常规辩护的他在偶然的机会下接触到了杜邦公司的受害者。

由于杜邦长期在当地排放化学污物，农场主坦南特的牛牙齿腐烂，双眼充血，性情发狂，身体器官肿大，成群死去。

坦南特自己和妻子，也都患上了癌症，大家都知道是杜邦的问题，但没有一个人敢接这个案子。

因为杜邦的势力实在是太大了，它不仅决定着无数社区居民的工作、生计问题，更和当地环保部门有着盘根错节的关系，它之所以能逃过环保部门的督查，是因为其涉及到污染的化学物质，根本就没有相应标准被报备。

面对一个比监管者还懂得多的违法者，普通人什么也做不了。

问题出在一种叫「特氟龙」的化学物质上，它由3M公司研发，由于抗水性极强而被用作坦克的涂层，后来这项技术转到了杜邦手里，它们开始想法设法把这项技术从战场上扩大到平民百姓家中。

于是涂层不粘锅诞生了。

伴随着解放家庭主妇的宣言，这项技术走进了千家万户，也为杜邦带来了年逾十亿美元的收入。

早在几十年前，由于特氟龙生产线上的工作人员接二连三出问题，甚至罹患癌症，产下畸形儿，杜邦就已经做过长足的调查，证明了特氟龙对人体有直接危害，但巨大的商业利润让它把这一切掩盖了下来，继续推动着这台商业机器往前运行。

而《黑水》，就为我们展现了律师比洛特和杜邦公司长达数十年的抗争历程，在这之前，他自己家里甚至也在使用平底锅和有特氟龙成分的地毯。

这就回答了我们一开始说的那个问题，在一切出现，假象被打破之前，比洛特甚至自己就是杜邦共同体中的一员，踩着法律和道德的边界线为杜邦进行环境辩护。

一切看起来都很好，他还刚刚成为律所的合伙人，而直到那个陌生的农夫找上门来之后，他才发现，原来这一切都是被控制下的假象。

《黑水》基本以年份为节点线性构建起全片的时间脉络，在体现真实性的同时，也带来一种让人倍感无力的、事态毫无进展、阴谋始终在继续的延宕感。

从发现和拿到杜邦为害的证据，到说服律所的其他合伙人，再到真正和杜邦对簿公堂，每一个关口都走得极其艰难。

即便是已经打赢了官司，走到研究特氟龙与杜邦受害者疾病的直接关联上，都花了七年的时间。

而当科研报告出来后，杜邦又否认了之前的一切行为，比洛特甚至需要面临具体到每一个受害人与杜邦的单独案子。

这几乎是接受不到任何正反馈的持久抗战，影片在为我们展现了这种无休止的调查诉讼的同时，也为我们展现了比洛特的生活是如何被摧毁的。

因为十几年都一心扑在这个案件上，他缺席了孩子的成长，和妻子缺乏交流，也没有人敢找他参与其他案子，他在律所的薪水也被降到了原来的三分之一，人也因为巨大的精神压力而出现了暂时性休克状态，之前那种典型白人中产阶级精英的状态几乎荡然无存。

由此，《黑水》也得以完成了起两个层面上的功能。

一方面，它呈现为一部真实而详尽的时事改编电影，对于特氟龙事件的前因后果和利益相关方都有展现。

而这种展现被有机地植入到了比洛特和受害人、杜邦公司相关方、科学研究人员、律所同事、家人等的交流中，这些纷繁的素材被托德·海因斯自然地编织进了所有的「对话」中，亦成为了影片本身所想要挖掘的那种日常生活背后真相的佐证。

另一方面，作为真实事件和影片的绝对主角，《黑水》也同样为我们展现了比洛特的生活是如何被这一事件占据的。

托德·海因斯时常把他扔进具有强大压迫性的单人场景中，以影像传达那种无法言说的压力和恐惧。

当比洛特一个人坐在地上整理材料，被如山的档案包围时，他也是在被杜邦那种超越了时代和历史的强权包围。

一个非常有意思的场景是，在一次和杜邦高层的关键性对谈后，比洛特步行去地下车库准备驱车离开，那种巨大压力带来的焦虑又让他手发生了神经性抽搐，比洛特几乎是逃进了自己的车里。

在准备转动车钥匙点火时，他迟疑了很久，最终什么也没有发生。

但作为观众的我们已经明白了他的担忧。

对于他这样的体制撼动者而言，在各种不明原因的爆炸意外中丧生是常见的结局。

且不论比洛特本人是否遭遇过这样的危机，但托德·海因斯由此所建立出的惊悚感和悬疑性，不得不让人想到上世纪那些著名的政治惊悚电影诸如《凶线》《视差》。

而比洛特那种被摧毁的状态，贯穿了整部影片的无力感，以及那种站在失败者边缘的崩溃状态，显然也是诸如《唐人街》这样的黑色电影中绝望侦探的变体。

由此，《黑水》也在拥有了时事改编电影的那种现实性的同时，也成功地在其中融入了政治惊悚片所会带给我们的恐慌和荒谬感。

而它所触及的「政治」，已经远远超过了我们通常理解的那种国家层面上的政治，呈现为一种不同掌权者之间的相护和勾结。

就像比洛特的同事在反对他的行为时暗示的那样，起诉杜邦除了意味着律所要完全打破以前的制度，还无异于在摧毁一家标志性的美国公司的形象，这同样也是维护杜邦的当地政府在巨大的经济利益之外要考虑的事。

某种程度上，这是在摧毁「美国精神」。

从这个角度上来说，《黑水》显得尤为大胆，并在这样一个看起来完全不像托德·海因斯会拍的题材中，展现出了一种高度凝练的共性。

无论是同性题材的《卡罗尔》和《远离天堂》，还是讲述艾滋病群体的《安然无恙》，都是在讲述某种「局外人」和「边缘人」的故事。

为了一个陌生人的请求而拿出了自己十几年甚至更长人生的比洛特就是这样的「局外人」。

即便到故事的最后，我们也不能说比洛特胜利了，杜邦为此付出的代价还不及自己一年的利润，陈述与局外人相对的巨型体制的胜利，是《黑水》的毫不粉饰。

它犹如一封战书，向每个人宣读了战斗的理由。

我们战斗的意义，并不因这战斗的胜利与否而削减半分。

“立体的人物塑造“众所周知，美国是一个非常推崇个人主义，英雄主义的国家。

这一特点在《黑水》中体现地淋漓尽致。

主人公Rob义无反顾地帮助无辜大众，不顾自己的律所的地位，不顾家庭的经济压力，不顾家人的误解，不顾旁观者的白眼。

乍一看，他不过是脸谱化的正义使者，鸡汤文中的赞美对象。

但，真的仅仅是这样吗？

托德·海因斯告诉你，nonono，别把事情简单化。

首先，Rob是完全出于自己的正义感而帮助那些弱势民众吗？

影片通过安妮·海瑟薇之口告诉我们；Rob是一个没有童年的可怜孩子。

多次搬家，没有朋友，没有联系，他的童年记忆里承载的只有他的家人，他的友邻。

所以，他才不愿意辜负祖母的期望，不愿意辜负曾经邻居大叔的期望，作为一个有能力的环境律师，助他们一臂之力。

既是出于公德，也是出于私义。

其次，作为一个丈夫，Rob并不完美。

关于案情，他对妻子三缄其口；对于家庭，他并不上心。

很难想象，作为律师，本应是滔滔不绝，口若悬河的形象，而他在面对家人的时候却甚至很难说出一句完整的话。

再次，Rob还是一个虔诚的天主教徒。

人们通常认为天主教徒是保守死板的，在堕胎持枪等问题上愚昧不堪。

但一枚硬币是有两面的。

正是由于他们的虔诚，所以他们的道德感比一般人更强，由此也可以解释Rob的行为动机。

“正义的代价“本片最核心的戏剧冲突就在于主角Rob面临的种种压力，其中来自杜邦的压力和家庭的压力都属于显性压力，最引人深思的压力来自于大众的压力。

被Rob帮助的大众不停地催促他，责难他；与事件无关的群众只是把他当作摇钱树，甚至为杜邦辩护，认为杜邦是清白的。

在这种种压力之下，Rob终于顶不住了。

他的手总是止不住地颤抖，他开始出现幻觉，怀疑杜邦的人要来害他，甚至插入车钥匙，发动汽车都要耗上巨大的勇气。

但面对这些，他还是选择不告诉身边的亲友，所以我说，这是一个纠结的英雄，默默坚持自己认为对的事。

话说回来，尽管本片的结局是he，但我还是对“正义会迟到，但从不缺席”这句话持怀疑态度。

因为这其中存在巨大的变数，what if Rob没有等到胜利到来的那一天就挂了，what if杜邦没有把完整的资料交给Rob。

即使是片中那样的he，我们也很难说实现了完全的公平。

对一个产业巨头来说，这些补偿或许会大伤元气，但不至倒闭。

更何况时代会忘记，人们会忘记，倒下一个巨头，还有另一个巨头，因为资本但逻辑没有改变。

我们唯一能做的，就是祈祷“正义的使者”能够及时出现，国家的监管能够有效执行。

我想，这就是本片打动人的一个关键点所在，尽管我们对英雄主义有些抗拒，有些怀疑，但在内心深处，我们都渴望这样的“正义使者”来拯救我们充满谎言的世界。

《黑水》（2019）是一部令人无法忽视的电影。

如今全球99%的人口身体里都含有这种物质，可使胎儿畸形，还可能致使患癌风险。

它就是“特氟龙”，结构稳定不易损坏，将永久留在人类血液中，无法排除。

而罪恶始作俑者就是美国知名化工企业杜邦。

《黑水》根据真实事件改编，源自《纽约时报》上的一则深度报道，名为《一名成为杜邦最大噩梦的律师》。

知名律师就是律师罗伯特·比洛特，他与化工巨头杜邦公司的环境诉讼案长达8年之久，旷日持久的艰难诉讼揭露了杜邦五十多年的化学污染史。

影片开始农场主坦南特发现自己的几百头牛大批量死去，不仅出现各种病症，而且还会产生攻击性，经营农场大半辈子的坦南特认为其中必有蹊跷，一定是附近杜邦公司的化学废料填埋场污染了水源。

鉴于杜邦巨头企业的影响力，没有律师愿意接这样的案子，坦南特自行搜集证据寻求真相，无奈之下他找到了由“绿巨人”马克·鲁弗洛饰演的老乡罗伯特。

盘旋的直升机宣示着警告，坦南特彻夜不眠守护家园。

罗伯特本不愿意趟这趟浑水，毕竟他曾担任过杜邦的辩护律师，不想得罪对方，但碍于祖母的面子亲自去了农场，发现儿时美好的农场如今就是死寂的坟场。

看了死牛的解剖录像，他从一开始的将信将疑，到下定决心为农场主辩护起诉杜邦，个人的力量终究微不足道，杜邦并不care，直接放话“sue me!"。

在浩瀚的材料中，罗伯特一页页仔细查询线索，多次发现PFOA的字眼。

什么是PFOA?询问专家得知PFOA一种表面活性剂，用于制造生产特氟龙，这种化学物质具有高度稳定性，对人体有害。

原本用于军事领域坦克的外层防水涂料，后杜邦公司为谋取利益普及推广，应用于饮水、不粘锅、雨衣、护肤品等生活中。

杜邦公司明知道特氟龙对人体有害，依然没有停止生产，甚至在员工身上进行试验，致使女员工出现胎儿畸形，雇员萨拉出生的婴儿只有一只眼睛一只鼻孔。

事情败露后改换成男员工，造成身患睾丸癌等多种癌症。

看到很多人因此受到伤害，心存正义的律师觉得应该做点什么，杜邦公司也在威胁他，劝他不要毁掉自己的事业，画面中高个子的狡诈巨头大佬和矮小的憨厚律师，形成鲜明的高度压迫，暗示着诉讼之艰难。

但罗伯特一直坚守从未放弃，民众也开始觉醒，专家小组抽取上万份血样进行病变研究。

长达8年之久的诉讼也使他面临来自各方面的压力，被杜邦公司进行人身威胁，还遭遇众人的不理解，有些人依然为杜邦说话，认为帮他们提供了就业机会。

上级领导也在不断施压，家庭压力更是让他喘不过气来，日渐减少的薪水连孩子们的教育都负担不起，安妮·海瑟薇饰演的妻子满肚子委屈。

终于深感无力的罗伯特倒下了，妻子在医院走廊与上司的声嘶力竭让人动容，她说，丈夫冒着所有风险去帮助有所需要的陌生人，我跟你也许不懂那是什么，但那从来都不是失败。

第七年科学家打来了迟到的电话，通过上万份血样研究，特氟龙会导致多种疾病的发生，包括肾癌、睾丸癌、口腔癌、胆固醇增高等等，因为罗伯特的坚持数万名受害者获得了医疗监护。

律师彻底如释重负又异常难过，所有的一切都是谎言，没有人可以保护你，只有自己保护自己。

一直以来所信任的都是被操控的，还不如一个只有小学文化的农夫看的透，是多么滑稽可笑。

对于商业轨道越线的企业终究受到相应的惩罚，2015年，群体诉讼案件开庭，共有3535起案件起诉杜邦公司，共计6亿7千万美元的赔偿金。

法官看着罗伯特问，你还在？

“Still here。

”从1950年，整整半个多世纪，罗伯特一直在与杜邦抗争，虽然影片中规中矩，但这部电影更大的价值在于它的现实意义，它与你我并不是毫无关系，特氟龙已经扩散至全世界，人类健康依然存在隐患。

美国环保署在2006年发布的禁令中规定，到2015年美国将全面停止使用特氟龙材料。

影片塑造的罗伯特不是高大威猛、富有激情的“绿巨人”，相反在沉闷的氛围中时常感觉到他的无力绝望感，连屏幕前的观众都会感觉喘不过气来，就是这种艰难无言的对抗，更能强烈凸显罗伯特的可敬与伟大。

影片中也出现了真正受害者Bucky Bailey的身影，就是加油站那个问律师球赛的男子，虽然先天畸形依然乐观向上，看到这里怎能不痛心，人不能为了一时的利益而忘了自己为什么要拿这个利益。

这是一部传记片，涉及的时间跨度之大，远可追溯至上世纪40年代的美国“曼哈顿计划”（研究原子弹），近则涉及到今日今时，是的，这件事的影响依旧处于现在进行时。

《黑水》是一部什么样的电影？

戳戳在看完后震撼到以至于不可言喻，撇开任何的电影艺术，单纯的感受其记录之事便足以久久不能释怀。

先简单介绍一下这部电影以及其导演该影片由托德·海因斯所执导，上映于2019年年末，这个导演的作品中多数都是以真实事件和社会问题为主题 海洛因 同性恋 艾滋病… 通过他的影片令大家开始对这些东西真正的注意起来，影片中对毒品的讽刺，对同性恋群体受歧视现状的反应，艾对滋病患者被孤立的同情，这些所给社会带来的影响是不容忽视的，也是具有着非凡意义的。

我们先从PFOA(又名C-8)的诞生说起 PFOA诞生于美国曼哈顿计划期间，这是一种分子结构非常牢固，有着极强的热稳定性和化学稳定性的材料，被用作于坦克飞机等军用设备的防水涂料。

而在曼哈顿计划期间，同政府合作的杜邦公司有着共享计划期间所有技术的权力，战争结束后，很多战时发明的技术便可以通过商业化转为民用，而杜邦公司便同其他公司一样抓住了这个商机，用PFOA为原料研制出了如今大家耳熟能详的“特氟龙”，也就是平底锅上的不沾涂层。

然而新发明的问世总是少不了安全问题，“特氟龙”本身没有问题，很稳定也很安全，而制造“特氟龙”的原料PFOA确实对人体危害巨大的致癌物质，这一点杜邦公司早在上世纪50年代推出此产品之时就已知晓，可在高额利益和昂贵处理成本的驱使下，杜邦选择了对所有人隐瞒此事，并将无数的PFOA废料不经过处理的随意排放填埋。

由少到多 日积月累 这样的一种稳定的化学废料在土地中已经积埋了成千上百万吨，终于，在填埋场附近的倒霉农场主遭殃了，最开始是奶牛的性格变得狂躁，接连死亡，再然后是受水质污染影响身体机能开始逐渐下滑，直至患癌死去。

这些污染物所影响的远不止这个小小的农场，周围的乡镇，城市的饮用水源中都充满着高于安全标准数倍的PFOA含量，（可笑的是这个标准还是杜邦自拟的，当时官方并没有出台这类的安全标准）甚至，生活在地球上超过百分之九十九的人类体内都存有此物，它并不止具有稳定性，更是有着极强的致癌性… “是杜邦公司的疏忽吗？

” “并不是！

” 早在上世纪产品被研发和上市之时，杜邦公司就已做了各种实验，各种测试，其中不人道的部分也数不胜数，实验小白鼠的死去，PFOA生产线岗位上员工的相继患病，妇女们不育不孕，新生儿畸形率大幅上升，这些杜邦公司是知道的，并且早在几十年前就知道，可他们的做法只是撤下在有关PFOA的岗位上工作的那些妇女，替换成男性，对那些已经受害的员工给予关怀，却并没有告诉他们罪魁祸首就是和他们朝夕相处的PFOA。

更为令人发指的是，杜邦在被实验对象不知情的情况下每天给他们提供含有PFOA的香烟进行抽食，结果不出意外的几乎所有人都患上了重病，杜邦则假惺惺的给予关怀。

在高额利润，广阔市场这样的诱惑下，资本的干预渗透到了当时美国的每一处土地，提起杜邦，群众们都只会觉得他们是一家良心企业，给大家提供生活便利，暗藏在美好外表下的丑陋事实是什么呢?用资本干预政府，干预标准，遍及各地，甚至全世界。

就大陆而言，1988年在深圳注册成立“杜邦中国集团有限公司”，这好似就是将资本之手伸向了他国土地，把PFOA带去了东方直接排放。

你以为： “它只是遥远的历史？

” “只是停留在了上个世纪？

” 如果没有那个为正义挺身而出的律师，我们可能今天身体中PFOA的含量会是现在的很多倍，再过十几年患癌人数直线上升，各种莫名病痛也将干扰着我们的身体健康。

可就算是这样，PFOA的污染还是从上世纪50年代一直持续到如今，而它真正被重视则是在2012年检测小组长达七年的调查结果公布，你以为在2013年还是2014年就能出台相关条例制约PFOA生产和杜邦公司吗？

现实情况是直到2017年PFOA才被列为2B类致癌物质，政府才给出官方标准和制约条例，在此之前全由杜邦公司自拟标准。

17年意味着什么？

意味着17年以前PFOA的生产排放都未受到官方的控制，17年以后的很多年内历史残存的PFOA都难以得到有效处理。

戳戳是九零后，自然体内极大概率的存在着的PFOA，可00后，10后，甚至今年出生的20后的孩子们…可想而知。

谈谈影片中的艺术部分，这类真实事件改编的电影，真实事件与人为艺术加入，之间的纠葛是必然存在的，这直接影响到了影片质量和事件的真实还原度。

多了，事情就讲不清 少了，更像是一部伪纪录片 在农场主的109头奶牛坟墓出现在画面中，在那头红着眼怒气十足的奶牛被猎枪击毙后，影片的节奏有了第一次明显的转变，观众们也开始回想起开头那几个误入私人领地嬉水，同影片名称《黑水》相联系起来不由得颈后发凉。

一部电影的节奏很重要，它可以通过多元化的手法表现出来，画面明暗转变，背景音乐风格的转变，当然，这些都是不那么令人眼前一亮的小把戏，也是多数影片中常见的东西，更为重要的是在合适的时间切入合适的冲突，在对人物性格，作风等等进行一定刻画后能在观者心中建立起一个有骨肉的人设。

一个人给人的印象，取决于你和他一起经历的事情，从中在你的脑中构建起一个你对他的认知，在影视作品中，我们之所以会和镜头中的人物产生联系，会因为他在镜头中的好坏走向而产生心理变化，就是因为他做的事情得到了你的认可或者不认可，比如某人当街虐待了自己的宠物，这样一个人如果突然出车祸被撞，观者心中对他的同情自然是几乎没有的，甚至多数人还会有觉得他活该的“快感”。

影片中的律师为什么我们会觉得他是一个正义好人，觉得他会为PFOA事件坚持下去，并且发自内心的对他敬佩？

正是和影片中影响到他的事件有关，潜移默化的在加深观者和片中律师的心里联系，这样的联系建立不是那么容易的，特别是在这类真实事件改编的传记片中，导演并没有选择加上过多的人为的镜头手段，而是用客观的，冷静的，甚至可以说是克制镜头去讲述这个故事，全片看下来甚至有一丝的压抑，给人一种危机四伏却又无发逃离的扼制感。

没有剧烈的冲突和动作戏份，甚至在生气的对话戏上都是那么的克制，全片下来也只有律师的一次怒气发泄；没有丰富多样的运动镜头和那些炫技的难度剪辑，导演只是架好机位，采用多固定机位，慢摇，跟镜这类慢节奏的方式，也偏偏是这种方式，让观众少了被导演牵着鼻子走的感觉，在观影过程中建立属于自己关于影片故事的认知和立场，自己感受自己思考，最后在微妙的镜头语言引导下都汇总在一个大的框架中，产生共鸣，造成影响，也引起社会重视。

片中在等待检测小组出报告结果的七年中，律师由于将过多的精力投入到案件中导致了家庭内部矛盾的爆发，而长时间得不到完结的案件也让他被频繁降薪，直至原来的三分之一，在压力和焦虑以及经济危机的多重打击下，律师的间歇性脑供血不足症状显现了，晕倒在地，被迫住院。

这样一段令人倍感煎熬的七年，在电影中没有占用太多的片长时间，可却分秒灼心，悲惨而又无奈的带入感通过短短的数分钟在观者心中悄悄的放大着，也在报告结果出来的一刻同片中律师一般的得到释放，而杜邦公司的反悔不认账，拒绝支付赔偿的举动又再次让事情恶化，短短的几分钟内“大起大落”的上演让我们前期观影中在心中建立起的正义律师人设一下升至“高潮”，宛若被剧情走向和反转揪住了一般某名难受，这便是前面大篇幅的人物刻画的作用所在，让我们在感受真实事件的情况下内心构建的饱满人物形象变得生动，变得有血有肉，也正因此在律师的人物弧光的细节上显得顺畅无比，丝毫没有任何卡顿，违和感。

这部电影的揭露事件的价值远高于其本身作为电影的艺术价值，而本篇文章中只是粗略介绍了一番。

所以在此，戳戳希望有兴趣的小伙伴们在观影后能够去了解一下该事件的详细始末。

ps.喜欢电影的小伙伴们可以关注戳戳的vx公众号哦ID：胡戳电影

黑水 (2019)8.62019 / 美国 / 剧情 / 托德·海因斯 / 马克·鲁法洛 安妮·海瑟薇