Watching the first episode of Toxic Town, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was War of the Worlds. In Netflix’s new miniseries, the industrial town of Corby resembles a modern-day Pompeii, blanketed by a thick red dust that turns the whole place crimson. Although this dust isn’t volcanic ash or a Martian terraforming agent, it’s just as frightening – a perpetual toxic airborne event that poisons the people of Corby and genetically alters their unborn children.
Toxic Town is inspired by true events. Around the 1980s, women in Corby began giving birth to babies with deformities, particularly and peculiarly, malformed hands and feet. Struggling alone at first, these women found one another and discovered that they were part of a birth cluster. Banding together, the Corby mums, led by the delightfully salt-of-the-earth Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker), fight their local council for dumping poisonous waste from steel plants without caring about the residents’ safety or health.
The miniseries is a strong example of ecofeminism. A branch of feminism, ecofeminism explores how, historically, the natural world and women are exploited by patriarchal forces that see both as resources to plunder. Women are disproportionally affected by climate change and disasters that are caused largely by male-driven hyper-capitalism and expansion. Another major tenet of ecofeminism is a respect for all life, and acknowledging humanity’s dependence on, and duty to, Mother Nature.
Now, many people often take umbrage with ecofeminism as overcritically focused on bashing men or excessively fixating on women’s exploitation. But Toxic Town shows how men are not only the root cause of the pollution crisis in Corby, but also its fiercest defenders. Many characters of all classes speak lovingly of the tough-as-nails steelworkers of past generations. The town’s gritty, alpha male industrial spirit is spoken of as mythic and heroic qualities to admire and aspire to.
Even with the steel factories closed, a new form of hyper-masculinity has emerged, one wedded to hyper-capitalism. The local town council, led by Roy Thomas (Brendan Coyle), is determined that the future of Corby depends on aggressive expansion and growth, even if this literally destroys the actual future of Corby – its children. Each episode paints the town council as a boys-only club, gathering, deciding, and manoeuvring power plays in exclusively male spaces like the council pub and bathrooms.
Such power is useful for silencing dissent, and the town council wields it to crush the Corby mothers’ lawsuits. They’re helped by other institutions of power like the medical, scientific, and legal communities. Nobody takes the mothers seriously, minimising and even gaslighting their concerns about their children’s health. It’s a sad commentary that the systemic silencing these women face is neither unexpected nor unsurprising. “Women’s intuition” has little value in the eyes of these experts.
What’s more hurtful and harmful is the silence the women face at home. Their husbands either do little, withdraw support, or even outright leave, as if embarrassed by their wives for speaking up and making demands for their children. Just as ecofeminism sees women as bearing the brunt of the weight of family responsibility, the fight for justice falls entirely on the Corby mothers.
One particularly interesting theme the series explores is children’s medical autonomy. Do children have the right to reject operations that might improve their future? For much of his life, Susan’s son Connor has undergone surgeries to graft “fingers” on his stunted hand. Naturally, Susan wants the best for her child and forces Connor to have the surgeries, disregarding his pleas to stop because the psychological toll and physical pain are too much for him.
Susan believes she’s securing Connor’s future because the working-class jobs in Corby need two good hands. But despite her deep love, is she actually projecting an ableist perspective onto her child? Connor himself doesn’t see his hand as a liability but as a source of humour. He jokes with a bully that he’d rather be called “Captain Hook” and takes the bigger boy down single-handedly.
The inevitable comparisons to Erin Brockovich are understandable and unfortunate. I say unfortunate because both Toxic Town and Erin Brockovich, made decades apart, are still beating the same drum as they continue to show how devastating environmental public health crises continue to be. The rights to clean air, food, and water are so fundamental that they’re taken for granted and ignored by those in power. Ecofeminism argues that ecological disasters disproportionally burden women, but the Corby mums also prove that ordinary people can do amazing things together. Sometimes, they just need a helping hand.
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