Documentary Films .net

By Bryan Newbury
November 18, 2009

Recently, The New York Times ran a piece speculating upon what our thankfully nearly late decade should be dubbed. Among other ghastly appellations were The Era of Misplaced Anxiety and The Decade of Overshoot, to say nothing of the North going South and The Decade of Disruptions. Watching The Garden while looking back at the aughts, one is tempted to leap to hyperboles of wickedness so pernicious that he might be accused of striking at least a passing resemblance to the Yahwist.

The past decade has been nothing if not a paean to fiendishness. Attempts to define it and label it fall short not for lack of nuance; rather, these years burden the sensibilities with iniquities every bit as vile as they are complete that they bewilder the observer beyond reason. If one is inclined to bemoan the violations of American empire against its subjects and enemies, he is bound to recognize the equally dreadful thoughts and actions of the victims. As Wall Street speculated away the wealth of many nations, it did so with the consent of its victims, who were hoping for a share in the Sachs spoils. This decade has been an age without victims… all have come well short of the glory, or so says the reporting.

The Garden goes further than any documentary of the decade in defining an age where everything good has suffered from the rot of unthinking avarice. The story is simple enough and much to familiar in narrative arc. To be as succinct as possible, there once was a community garden in South Central Los Angeles tended by its (largely Latino) residents with nearly transcendental results. The plot was purchased by the city from a developer, whose irredeemably black soul shall be dealt with presently, following the riots of 1992. As time went on, the land was observed to have a great value in graft by an unscrupulous city councilwoman and erstwhile community activist. The land was sold back to the contemptible fellow in an extralegal process with the help of the corrupt councilwoman and the clout of the nefarious activist in order to line their pockets.

It would be a pedestrian tale were it not for the fact that the South Central Farmers had done something that is all too rare in our age: they made something beautiful and good.

To recount the abhorrent acts of venality and violence that occur would do a disservice to a film that should be seen by all. It is difficult to watch at times and equally difficult to describe without resorting to sloganeering reminiscent of the Paris commune. What transpires is a depiction of solid, honest people – even when they are at their worst, even as they battle amongst themselves – being thrown to the rapacious hydra that has become fully evolved in our America: the three devouring heads of corporatism, cronyism and complacency.

The corporatism is easy enough to understand. Ralph Horowitz is a grasping bastard bereft of a soul that sells high and buys low (truth be told, sells same buys same, but with the passing of time the depiction fits, as does the rhyme) and eventually refuses to sell higher still because of his contempt for humanity. In short, a businessman.

Juanita Tate and Jan Perry were likely human at one time. Perry became involved in institutional politics, which inevitably corrupts. If there is doubt on that, research what your Congresspeople have received in contributions from insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists within the last few years. Tate saw her golden ticket and punched it after years of activism. The examples of Tate and Perry set against that of Horowitz clearly illustrate a growing cognitive dissonance in popular thought. Business is irreparably amoral and government is irrevocably unethical. Meanwhile, business and government present themselves as adversaries. Business creates wealth which government taxes and government manages to regulate while business prevaricates. This becomes pure theatre when both aspire to similar aims. So, is it complacency when the victims of business protest the government charged with protecting them and their counterparts wail about those same agents advancing their cause?

In many ways, yes. Even as we inveigh against self-important celebrities sticking their noses in issues of public policy, we ignore every plight that doesn’t draw a camera. (The Garden is replete with celebrity appearances, from Danny Glover and Darryl Hannah to Joan Baez and Willie Nelson.) It is only natural to be consumed with outrage as the film draws to a close, but how often are we speechless witnesses to crimes such as these? What use is any of it if, to borrow from Phil Ochs, it wouldn’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends?

It is nearly impossible to encapsulate the topics orbiting around the basic story told by The Garden. To give an honest and in depth accounting of the racial issues would require more space than is available here. When the spectre of antisemitsm is raised in regard to Mr. Horowitz to a bemused group of Mexican Americans who are in jeopardy of losing something great they’ve created, when we see African Americans on both sides of the fight, when we see those African Americans endeavoring to steer the issue into a brown on black battle (one area among many that Dan Stormer distinguishes himself as both ethical and intelligent) and when we see the LAPD exercise their trademark brutality on the South Central Farmers it defies definition. It seems to simply be, which might be the ultimate indictment on us, our decade, our species.

The Garden is a morality tale equally simple and multi-faceted where evil prevails. It reminds this reviewer of a Woody Guthrie statement that new and better curse words are required to describe certain people. It is a ballad depicting the conflict between verdancy and decency with the bankrupt ideology of mammon, the clash of humanity and saurian predation. Hopefully, it is the coda to a decade marred with needless acquisitiveness and an instructive document informing us of how we’ve gone wrong. In any event, it is as useful an interpretation of where we are and how we got there as the medium is likely to give us.

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The Garden
Written & Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
2008, Color, 80 minutes

By Bryan Newbury
October 5th, 2009

Thank a merciful Christ I live in Lawrence.

This affirmation begins the day for many residents of Lawrence, Kan., which, as the bumper stickers say, represents 27 miles of reality surrounded by Kansas. Not that Lawrencians head en masse to their numerous coffee shops reciting the phrase with their various other Bikram-related mantras; however, they will often be heard to say something like this after watching the state news or a film such as Laura Cohen & Joe Winston’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? Judging from What’s the Matter, Kansas can be a pretty scary place. A scary place with a long and obscured history festooned with the better angels of progressivism, but a scary place nonetheless.

The film takes its lead from Thomas Frank’s book of the same title, and can be forgiven for lacking the depth of the written word. Unfortunately, the portrayal the viewer is provided can tend toward myopia to the point of farce. Where Frank provides a thoughtful analysis of what could be called the Kansas Problem… namely, the issue of white working class voters casting ballots against their own economic interests… Cohen and Winston appear content to show us a vision of an evangelical backwater obsessed with the holy fetus.

Frank isn’t blameless as a writer, and it is important to stress that the Chicagoans who made What’s the Matter take a considerable lead from the Prairie Village, Kan. product. (For the benefit of readers who aren’t from Kansas, Prairie Village is to the state of Kansas as Plano is to Houston’s Fifth Ward circa 1983.) Being an actual Kansan – that is, a product of a depressed rural area who went to school in a depressed urban area – it is the reviewer’s duty to suggest that both Frank and the filmmakers could’ve spent a little more time with people like M.T. Ligget.

Ligget, from Mullinville, provides a picture of the kind of Kansan most of us grew up with and around. The cantankerous septuagenarian delivers the most enjoyable lines in the film (“Gay marriage… who gives a shit?”) as well as a more accurate depiction of the attitudes of rural Kansans. If someone were inclined to plumb the depths of the flyover psyche, people like Ligget are the place to start, not the Barden family. The Bardens are the caricature that seems to comfort urban sophisticates the nation over. In one scene, we see the mother, called “mommy” even by her adolescent children, driving her brood to the bleeding Creation Museum in Kentucky. Brittany, the eldest daughter, eventually attends Patrick Henry College in Virginia, America’s leading educational outlet for folks uncomfortable with the whole “established science” thing. Throughout What’s the Matter, we’re inundated with people likely to TiVo The Colbert Report without thinking for a second that the program is satire, to say nothing of the terrorist splinter groups in and around Operation Rescue. One can just imagine Angelinos and Chicagoans moaning “Is this what is going on in Red America?” Well, is it?

The short answer, to borrow from Sarah Palin, is kinda’. It can’t be argued that these people aren’t out there in considerable number. They are. They’re in Wichita, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, even San Francisco. Do they represent a larger segment of Kansas’ population than that of Oregon or Massachusetts? Of course. To say that the megachurch-attending rube tips the electoral scales of our sylvan landscapes, however, does a disservice both to rural Americans and to our understanding of how our political realities are forged. After all, the year in which What’s The Matter was filmed saw the trouncing of the ultra-right’s favored candidates at the polls even in Kansas. Much is made of the candidacy of Phill Kline, still his loss in the AG’s race seems an inconvenient footnote, along with that of Jim Ryun and Kris Kobach.

Getting back to Ligget. The Frank formula, at the risk of oversimplification, is “God, guns and gays,” which is to say that social issues dominate the electoral map. Let it be submitted that one can safely omit God and gays from this calculation. One wonders what the producers made of Ligget’s take on Iraqi insurgents. The fellow, straight out of central casting, clad in overalls and baseball cap – the unofficial uniform of the rural Kansan – suggests that we reverse the rolls and imagine another country invading our own and dictating to us what our political system and cultural mores are to be. If you take up arms against that invading force, would you be an “insurgent”? “I know I would,” the man says without hesitation. Kansans, like most other small staters, are fiercely independent and mistrustful of anything resembling authoritarian or even official. Understanding this is paramount to getting past the bewilderment caused by analyzing the perceived cognitive dissonance of the rural voter. Credit where it’s due, the segments with Donn Teske go a long way in this direction. To an inattentive viewer, Teske’s stances seem like welcome bulwarks against a  Christofascist uprising, when indeed he is representative of exactly the mindset that makes Kansas fundamentally conservative. He is a populist, true, but he introduces himself as a “populist without a party.” What does that mean? Could it be that the Kansan outlook recognizes that neither party represents the interests of the lower classes? In one instructive scene, Teske tours The Garden of Eden, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor’s eccentric artistic and philosophical statement in stone. The mass sculpture, located in Lucas, has a centerpiece depicting the worker on a cross, being crucified, or bled, by lawyer, doctor, preacher and banker. Teske opines that there’s a lot of truth to it. This doesn’t mean that he is running to the local Democratic Party call center. Quite the contrary. Teske’d likely see it how many Kansans do: if the banker and preacher represent a Republican point of view, what do we say of the lawyer and doctor? There’s the rub. Like Teske, Ligget proclaims a great hatred for George W. Bush. This doesn’t necessarily serve as an endorsement for Bush’s official opposition. It only conveys a cynicism that we can find one half hour before Stephen Colbert’s speaking satiric truth to crazy.

In the end, Kansas isn’t the creationist lunatic asylum the film might suggest any more than the radical utopian outpost of Frank’s history books and graveyards. It is much more akin to the film’s Garden City scenes: awash in the Christian ethos that brought us both free clinics and clinic bombings, beleaguered by economic inequality, profoundly untrusting of bureaucracy yet collectively susceptible to simple solutions to complex problems, the latter being possible largely because no major political entity represents (or is allowed to represent) reasonable solutions to the problems life in the American outback is rife with. Could it be that we’ve spent a few too many years wondering what’s the matter with Kansas? Imagine Ralph Nader getting his five per cent or Ross Perot expanding his Reform Party beyond a genital measuring contest with his fellow Texans. Possibly Ronn Teske would be a populist with a party then. It leads one to wonder what the matter might be with California, New York, or any of the 2000 election’s other “safe” states.

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What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Produced by Laura Cohen and Joe Winston

Color, 90 Minutes, 2009