Documentary filmmaker Rachel Lears’ To the End chronicles the compelling struggles of four young Black and brown women as they fight against all odds to move the moribund Democratic Party to the left, in particular on the life and death issue of the climate emergency. In their impassioned crusade to save the Earth from an impending fossil fuel apocalypse, the documentary’s featured politician and activists deploy a variety of strategies, working inside and outside of the system.
As the planet heats up, so do their tactics, which range from grilling oil executives at Congressional hearings to commentary on global warming in the media to mass demonstrations to direct action targeting those standing in the way.
The quartet of climate gladiators To the End focuses on are: U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prime proponent of the Green New Deal (GND) and Democratic Socialists of America member; Executive Director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement Varshini Prakash; Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas; and the Roosevelt Institute’s Director of Climate Policy Rhianna Gunn-Wright, who has served as policy director of the New Consensus think tank. All are in their thirties, except for the twenty-seven-year-old Rojas.
To the End also includes scenes with other left-leaning politicians, notably Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist; Massachusetts’s Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat who is AOC’s pro-GND counterpart in the Senate; and U.S. Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush who, like AOC, are DSA members.
Co-writer and director Lears’ latest is a sequel to her 2019 Knock Down the House, which also featured four young lefty women (including AOC and Bush) who ran for Congress. To the End opens with a 1930 quote from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new world cannot quite be born. In the meantime, all kinds of dreadful things are happening.”
Viewers immediately see one of these “dreadful things”: A town—perhaps Paradise, California—destroyed by a wildfire unleashed by global warming and footage of flames almost engulfing a car. A montage of eco-catastrophes later in the film further drive home the point of how existential the climate crisis is.
Speaking about “disruption,” Prakash highlights the Sunrise Movement’s militant approach to confronting the rapidly unfolding environmental disaster and those who cause and enable it through inaction and timidity. Composed of young people staring at the daunting prospect of having to spend most of their lives living in a world ravaged by out-of-control climate change, these energetic activists display a “get out of the way” type of youthful impatience and idealism as they push for the GND—and their survival.
According to AOC’s Congressional website, “The Green New Deal is a jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy within ten years.” The film includes another montage sequence of archival material that illustrates FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression. To the End’s activists are motivated by a sense of urgency that Earth’s fate hangs in the balance, with only about a decade left to change course and reverse despoilment of the planet—before it’s too late to do so.
Declaring “We believe we have to scare the shit out of the elites,” Prakash and the Sunrise campaigners put their proverbial money where their mouths are and are seen marching in the halls of Congress on November 13, 2018, then occupying the office of Nancy Pelosi, the then-incoming Speaker of the House who was riding an electoral wave wherein Democrats had just won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives in the midterms. “We want Pelosi and Democratic leadership to back a program like the Green New Deal [GND],” demands Prakash.
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Later in the film, Sunrise Movement activists confront an out-of-touch Senator Dianne Feinstein in her San Francisco Senate office on February 22, 2019. Pressed to support the GND, Feinstein responds that there’s not enough money to pay for it. The youngsters reply that Washington’s massive military funding could be used, instead, to support the GND, and that not supporting it will cost far more in the long run. (In a statement reacting to the meetings, the eighty-six-year-old Democrat incorrectly identified the group as the “Sunshine” Movement.)
In more dramatic footage, Sunrise Movement protesters boldly place themselves in harm’s way by blocking Senator Joe Manchin’s Maserati from leaving a Washington, D.C., parking garage on November 4, 2021. The West Virginia Democrat—a main Senate stumbling block in passing President Biden’s “Build Back Better” package, which includes major environmental measures—is accused of profiting from his coal industry holdings. Tellingly, Manchin,who is also called the largest recipient in Congress of coal, gas and oil campaign contributions,does not deny the allegation.
When Varshini Prakash and her Sunrise comrades crashed Representative Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office in November 2018, they were joined by the just-elected Ocasio-Cortez, who is seen in To the End addressing the upstarts’ sit-in. By doing so, AOC seems to be throwing down the gauntlet, serving the establishment notice that to pursue her GND vision and other causes, the newly-minted Congressmember is willing to take on the Democratic Party’s old guard.
In terms of civil disobedience, 600 young protesters close entrances to the White House, and others go on hunger strikes. Meanwhile, AOC carries on the fight inside, telling an Exxon CEO during congressional hearings: “We have to live in the future you’re putting on fire.” In the legislative horse-trading over Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill and agenda, AOC rails against “lobbyists” who are “ruthless and want to decouple bills that risk giving away a chance to fight climate change.”
Justice Democrats, a federal political action committee that relies on grass roots contributions and supports Democratic candidates who pledge not to accept corporate PAC donations, backed and helped elect AOC when she was a long shot candidate in 2018. The organization’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, proclaims: “We’re in the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.”
In addition to the campaign trail, Rojas takes Justice Democrats’ case to mainstream media, becoming a political commentator. On CNN, Democratic hack Hillary Rosen (who subsequently criticized Democrats for obsessing over “democracy” instead of bread and butter issues during the midterm elections), belittles Rojas’s perspective. Afterwards, Rojas fumes, “I was called ‘silly’ on the air.” In fly-on-the-wall camerawork, she is shown rehearsing talking points in front of a mirror and insecurely fretting over whether she is qualified to be a pundit as she hasn’t graduated from college.
Climate policy writer Rhianna Gunn-Wright warns, “fossil fuel capitalizes on racial divisions . . . [including through] redlining. There are people you can poison without consequence . . . . They’re some sly motherfuckers.” Onscreen Gunn-Wright repeatedly says “fuck,” as do some of the documentary’s other protagonists, apparently to remind viewers they are watching cool young “rebels.”
After Biden’s infrastructure bill is passed, Senator Manchin makes a deal with the Democrats, a compromise is reached and in August 2022 the Inflation Reduction Act also passes. Gunn-Wright states that the bill “has deep investments” to combat climate change. Prakash says, “I thought it was dead in the water. But the zombie bill is alive again. Everything good in the bill is because the movement fought for it. Everything bad is because of fossil fuel,” and its influence over the compromised legislation.
“This bill is a major win.” AOC insists. “Our job is where do we steer the ship?” she adds. To the End’s argument is that the organizing and efforts of left-leaning lawmakers and activists clearly had a big impact and steered the ship of state portside.
Lears adeptly packs a lot into her ninety-three-minute film, which is all the more relevant as generational change comes to the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership team, with younger lawmakers taking the helm. When watching To the End I couldn’t help but remember Bob Dylan’s admonishments in “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”:
“Come Senators, Congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall…”
To the End is being theatrically released starting Dec. 9. For more info see: https://www.totheendfilm.com/.