It’s not every Fred Wiseman film that pushes for a close-up on a dog’s anus, but that’s one of the more flattering images he plucks from God’s Green Earth Monrovia, Indiana, the small-town subject of his 41st documentary. Mileage will vary on its integrity, but if Wiseman doesn’t intend a barrel-end metaphor for Trump-era America, then the timing of his latest regional portrait is wildly fortuitous – why else make a film about a 97.3% white, 75.9% red, 1,441 populace on the first dawn of this administration? There’s a stagnant air to Monrovia that rolls in with tide change, and from scenes of council debates over “changing demographics” to a bumper sticker declaring that ‘84,999,987 Firearm Owners Killed No One Yesterday’, it’s clear that the majority of Monrovians weren’t out on November 8 stemming the tide.
Wiseman's camera is often labeled ‘unobtrusive’, but that hardly equates to an impartial style, and it’s through the organisation of material that his films unpack their agendas (and indeed, since the hirsute scientists picking their noses through a lab conference in Primate [1974], his films have carried clear agendas). After shooting for several months, he collates his footage and selects scenes for narrative emphasis, subtly building arguments through juxtaposition, relation, and irony. And so it goes in Indiana, as the director announces his thesis during a humdrum bible study, allowing the plain-clothes pastor his admission that “we brought the tribulations on ourselves.”
Like the pastor, and the high school coach who lectures on Monrovia's former “dominance” in all-star basketball, most citizens of the town speak in past or future tenses, suspended in workaday limbo between a promised holy heaven and the how-things-used-to-be-ness of things. Usually famed for his engrossing scenes of board meetings, here Wiseman dedicates long passages to a fretful debate about whether a new housing development will bring rough elements into the community (meaning, of course, ‘diverse’ elements). Elsewhere, in a scene that would make his beloved Marx's proud, he films the under-budgeted honouring of a 50-year Freemason who looks utterly exhausted by the incompetent faffing around him (“may the joy of this moment abide with you always”). The joke is on Monrovia’s abiding localism at a time of national bifurcation: this is a town of circular pegs in circular holes.
It would be easy to watch these quotidian goings-on – a harvester auction, gun shopping, the school orchestra squawking The Simpsons theme – and assume that Wiseman simply couldn’t gather enough material. But while everyone in Monrovia is investing skyward, his camera is subtly, methodically taking stock downstairs, revealing the desperation of a community still clinging to pure-heart patriotism and hokey traditions, fending off a deep anxiety toward change that is, of course, the source of all great comedy. Behind it all, Wiseman's frustration is palpable, and the final scene – the funeral of a local woman named Shirley Frick, attended by a flowery sermon about finally “going home” – resonates as a blunt reminder that regardless of belief or values, we all go out the same way.
I don’t know how citizens of Monrovia have reacted to the film, but I’d expect an exchange like this one from The Last Picture Show (1971):
Wiseman's camera is often labeled ‘unobtrusive’, but that hardly equates to an impartial style, and it’s through the organisation of material that his films unpack their agendas (and indeed, since the hirsute scientists picking their noses through a lab conference in Primate [1974], his films have carried clear agendas). After shooting for several months, he collates his footage and selects scenes for narrative emphasis, subtly building arguments through juxtaposition, relation, and irony. And so it goes in Indiana, as the director announces his thesis during a humdrum bible study, allowing the plain-clothes pastor his admission that “we brought the tribulations on ourselves.”
Like the pastor, and the high school coach who lectures on Monrovia's former “dominance” in all-star basketball, most citizens of the town speak in past or future tenses, suspended in workaday limbo between a promised holy heaven and the how-things-used-to-be-ness of things. Usually famed for his engrossing scenes of board meetings, here Wiseman dedicates long passages to a fretful debate about whether a new housing development will bring rough elements into the community (meaning, of course, ‘diverse’ elements). Elsewhere, in a scene that would make his beloved Marx's proud, he films the under-budgeted honouring of a 50-year Freemason who looks utterly exhausted by the incompetent faffing around him (“may the joy of this moment abide with you always”). The joke is on Monrovia’s abiding localism at a time of national bifurcation: this is a town of circular pegs in circular holes.
It would be easy to watch these quotidian goings-on – a harvester auction, gun shopping, the school orchestra squawking The Simpsons theme – and assume that Wiseman simply couldn’t gather enough material. But while everyone in Monrovia is investing skyward, his camera is subtly, methodically taking stock downstairs, revealing the desperation of a community still clinging to pure-heart patriotism and hokey traditions, fending off a deep anxiety toward change that is, of course, the source of all great comedy. Behind it all, Wiseman's frustration is palpable, and the final scene – the funeral of a local woman named Shirley Frick, attended by a flowery sermon about finally “going home” – resonates as a blunt reminder that regardless of belief or values, we all go out the same way.
I don’t know how citizens of Monrovia have reacted to the film, but I’d expect an exchange like this one from The Last Picture Show (1971):
“Could’ve been worse.”
“Yeah. You could say that about nearly everything, I guess.”
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