The first Frederick Wiseman film I saw, and the one that remains my favorite so far (Wiseman made a lot of films, and I have yet to see more than a fraction of them), was his seventh: Juvenile Court, first shown in 1973. Like many of Wiseman’s works, it’s about an institution, the people whom that institution is made of and whom it makes. In the case of his first documentary, Titicut Follies (1967), the institution was Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, on the banks of the Titicut River in Massachusetts; High School (1968) was filmed at Northeast High School in Philadelphia; Basic Training (1971) at Fort Knox in Kentucky. In this case, the institution is a court in Memphis, Tennessee—the only juvenile court in Shelby County and presided over by a single judge who processes around 18,000 cases per year.
Wiseman, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, is known for the total lack of narration or explanation in his films: for letting the scenes “speak for themselves.” This has led some to associate him with the cinema verité (or “direct cinema”) genre, but Wiseman apparently found the label pretentious. He understood very clearly that there was no such thing as reporting reality or “truth” in a passive or unmediated way (he disliked the term “documentary,” too, partly because he found it “a bit neutral”). The process of shooting and editing a film was, as Wiseman put it in 2003, “highly manipulative.” That was neither a confession nor a boast. It was not a description of a particular way of making films (manipulatively as opposed to non-manipulatively), but a comment about what making films (or anything else, for that matter) inescapably means. Even films without staged scenes or leading questions have to select what they show to the viewer. As Wiseman observed: “What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it … all of those things … represent subjective choices that you have to make.” For Wiseman (who would often shoot more than one hundred hours of footage, then spend up to a year cutting it down to one or two), this process of selection was not incidental to filmmaking but the main business. Just as the political theorist Steven Lukes named “agenda control” as an important “face” of power (in addition to the more visible kind: getting your way in deliberations over particular agenda items), so Wiseman saw that filmmakers exercise power not just through what they directly say (or what they tell participants to say), but by deciding what makes the cut: what is on the “agenda,” and how the items are ordered, arranged and juxtaposed. In Wiseman’s films, where the filmmakers are neither seen nor heard, it is this face that comes to the fore.
This is not to say that the films contain hidden messages which require only to be decoded. With Wiseman, there is no particular “message” that the viewer is expected to absorb or to “take from” what they see. There are, at most, parameters or suggestions—and they point in the opposite direction from determinacy or dogmatism. The effect of the long, continuously evolving scenes his films increasingly featured was, as one commentator remarked, to move the viewer not toward resolution or clarity but toward complexity. This should not be mistaken for evasiveness or timidity: his films (many of which are hard-hitting, and several of which were controversial enough to land him in court) are a good illustration of the point that complexity and open-endedness need not come at the expense of critical force. It is part of the fecundity and power of Wiseman’s films that they give birth to reactions in the viewer that are not foreseeable or determinable in advance, that have lives of their own.
As ever with Wiseman’s films, Juvenile Court is complex: the point is not that the staff are bad and the children are good, or vice versa (Wiseman’s own judgment, given in an interview with Studs Terkel, was that the court staff were “people doing their best,” but faced with “problems that are essentially insoluble, given the current state of knowledge and commitment to solving them in our society”). As ever, too, there are many possible reactions to the scenes the film puts before the viewer. Mine are not necessarily Wiseman’s (and in some cases, I know that they are not), but they are nonetheless his co-creations, products of his particular choices.
●
Strange as it might sound, what strikes me most of all when watching Juvenile Court is the way it is possible actually to see the intelligence on certain faces. I’m not talking about anything as crude as IQ. Incidentally, as former judge Lois Forer relates in her grim 1971 memoir of the U.S. juvenile justice system, No One Will Lissen, the IQs of child defendants were routinely measured and reported in adjudications of their cases, and typically found wanting (Forer reports the case of a young boy who raises his hand to contest the verdict on his intelligence, which it was presumed he would not understand: “I ain’t retarded, judge”). It’s something else. You can see it in the micro-movements of facial expressions: the brief, darting movements of the eyes; the fleeting but clearly perceptible signs of the effort of suppression of impulses (anger, contempt, boredom); the naked, wide-awake terror; the stoic resignation mingled with defiance.
I’m talking here about the children (and sometimes their parents), rather than the judge or court staff. The two sets of faces are quite different. Those on one side of the divide have a pinched, alert intensity about them, the psychic and emotional equivalent of taut muscles. Those on the other side, the court’s various employees and consultants, look different. They have a slack, somewhat doughy quality. I don’t mean that the staff are fatter, or even that they are better nourished (although the latter, at least, is almost certain to be the case). It’s something about the way the two groups inhabit their faces, the different ways their faces are animated. The judge and his subordinates are clearly thinking, but it is a different kind of thinking, less pressured and less urgent, from that which happens on the other side. The judge deliberates: you can see him weighing up the considerations as they appear to him (and he generally seems confident that the way they appear to him—often at second- or thirdhand—is how they are). He deliberates, and comes to a decision. Deliberation is not the kind of thinking in which the accused and their parents have the luxury of indulging. They are the objects of the deliberation, of the decision, not its subjects. Their thinking is largely silent while the judge’s is spoken aloud. Their thinking is confined to reacting (and to the stifling of reactions). All of this is there to be seen on the faces. The result is to give to the experience of watching the film an uncanny quality, as if you have taken some drug that has enhanced your vision so that you are seeing things that others (the “experts” in the courtroom, specifically) apparently do not or cannot see.
This suggests an additional sense in which what you see in Wiseman’s film is a product of power. If necessity is the mother of invention, then unaccountable power is the mother of gross stupidity. You can see this in the billionaire or monarch who is so continually flattered they can believe that their every half-baked idea is brilliant and groundbreaking. But there are petty versions of the same phenomenon to be found in virtually every school, in many a home, as well as in the juvenile courts: the court staff exist as if in a bubble, insulated from the lives over whom their deliberative power is exercised (it’s significant that Wiseman’s film is shot almost exclusively within the walls of the juvenile court, with only the opening and closing scenes showing the building from the outside). While very few people can hope to be billionaires or monarchs, it is within the reach of many ordinary adults to wield near unlimited power over children, whether as parents, teachers or officials in the “welfare” or “justice” systems.
One result of this, of course, is abuse—common both then and now, and seen in several of the cases brought before Judge Turner. In almost all (the one exception is where the alleged perpetrator is also a juvenile—the teenaged babysitter Tommy, who is accused of abusing a child in his care), the court staff are dismissive and display attitudes that are jarring to contemporary sensibilities: a little boy, covered head to toe in bandages after an uncle poured boiling oil over him, is asked, “Now what did you do, son, to make him pour this on you?”; discussing a case of a three-year-old badly beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, Judge Turner concludes that the man just “got carried away” and is unlikely to pose a threat to the child (one of his staff chimes in: “There are times when a child going through what psychiatrists call the anal stage can be extremely vexatious. I’ve got two that are just finished that myself. There’ve been times when I’ve, uh, wanted to put a few bruises”); a teenage girl, Anita, alleges that her stepfather has molested her, but is brushed off when the stepfather denies it and the mother suggests that the girl’s story might be influenced by the knowledge that her biological father had been charged with incest against her older sister (“Do you think that coulda made you jumpy, and jump to conclusions?” the social worker asks). Wiseman himself, in conversation with Studs Terkel, affirms Terkel’s observation that Anita has a “Lolita touch,” remarking that she is “a sexy little girl” (“Yeah, she’s wise,” Terkel replies, “And the guy seemed so lost—that’s just the feeling, you know”).
But another, more insidious effect of the steep asymmetries of power that exist between children and adults—and all the more so between the children and the adult attendants of the juvenile court—is the particular species of stupidity it breeds on the adult side. One of the more excruciating things about watching Juvenile Court is having to listen to adult professionals saying various stupid things to the children (and sometimes to their parents). This is the flip side of the visible intelligence of the children: you are observing them suffering fools (as well as just suffering). The effect Wiseman manages to create, whether intentionally or not, is that of a quasi-telepathic connection with the children as they are “bored and twaddled at … [by] bores and twaddlers” (as George Bernard Shaw once summed up the experience of childhood), an effect achieved perhaps in part through producing in the viewer the same feeling of being trapped, of being a captive audience, as must characterize the experience of the children in the film. You have to sit there, listening to platitude after platitude, to one non sequitur or semi-willful misunderstanding after another, for as long as it takes.
Wiseman might attribute the high volume of “bromides” (as he refers to them in his conversation with Terkel) issuing from the adults in charge to their impotence in the face of forces far larger than themselves. “Little lady, you say to yourself, that you’re going to be somebody … Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. And you hold your head up high and you say, you’re going to be somebody!” These words of one social worker to a young girl in her charge may be about the best that you can do in such circumstances. They might even be helpful to hear—if they come at the right moment, from the right person, or in the context of real human warmth (the same social worker, even as she enjoins the girl against being a “whore,” exhibits a rapport with her that is genuinely touching). But the inanity of much of the speech of the court’s staff might also be seen as a function of that curious mix of anxiety and impunity that characterizes adulthood and officialdom alike. Observe the behavior of those canonical grown-ups, the professionals in the film, and there are moments where it’s as if there is a flash of light and the essential childishness of their behavior appears as though illuminated. Two court employees pore over a self-portrait by eleven-year-old Diane, who is accused of “prostitution”: the man explains to the woman that it is significant in some way that her picture’s “proportions are good,” and he sounds so assured of himself that you can forget how essentially silly and evidence-free his statements are; but through Wiseman’s lens, you suddenly find yourself looking over the shoulders of two grown adults who are talking nonsense (“twaddling,” as Shaw would say) about a child’s drawing.
“Well, I don’t know, it kind of just tears you apart little by little, y’know,” a teenage girl, Lisa, confides in a chaplain employed by the court:
It’s just kind of a lonely world sometimes, and you look for someone to talk to but, a lot of times, like a psychiatrist will tell you he can’t tell you a solution to your problem, just get your mind straight, and uh, maybe a Sunday School teacher will tell you “Well I can’t give you a solution because you’re a minor” … I just don’t understand sometimes how people can’t talk to you—and the people who can talk to you, you don’t really know how much experience they’ve had, whether they’re really giving you the right advice or not.
To which the chaplain replies: “These things are part of a problem of living, Lisa.” There are several points in the film where an exchange like this happens, or rather is shut down in this way. The adults associated with the court are very concerned to let the children know that their problems, whatever they may be, are part of the universal stuff of life—that they are not special, in other words, and should not make a fuss. This is significant, I think, not only for what it says about the attitude of adults to children but for what it reveals about the attitudes and fears of the adults themselves (there is a strong sense that there are things they not only do not wish to speak to children about, but that they are striving more generally to avoid thinking about or acknowledging).
The chaplain’s response is anyway beside the point. Grief is part of life, something that most people experience at some point. But it is scarcely imaginable that a therapist would tell a bereaved client: “These things are a problem of living.” That would be obviously rude, callous, unhelpful. (It is interesting how an aberrant harshness often coexists with a rhetorical or official commitment to a special care and gentleness in dealings with children.) It would also cut off a conversation in which a person might otherwise be able to say something more about the nature of their experience, in which a person might come to know another—or to be known by another—somewhat better (Wiseman and Terkel both see this: “She’s trying to tell him something”). You see the moment when the possibility of such a connection is severed, in the way Lisa’s face drops. There is, we may imagine, much more to say. For a start, even if some things are problems of living, could we not still talk about living? But it also strikes me that Lisa is probably not merely describing the general difficulty of the unavailability of certainty in human life. I take it that she is saying something more particularly about the predicament of childhood, something which the chaplain’s response illustrates and confirms: that the way you are cut off from reliable information, or even honest opinion, leaves you both practically in the dark and also profoundly alone. Nobody will talk to you—or if they do, they do not really talk to you (let alone listen), but serve you up a load of ready-made clichés: Hold your head up high … Sticks and stones may break your bones … These are problems of living.
●
I’ve found that my friends are often reluctant to watch Wiseman with me, on the grounds that it’s “too depressing.” In a way, you might think, this is not really the kind of thing people can be wrong about: if you find something depressing, you find it depressing. And it’s true that Wiseman’s films are not exactly cheerful: their subject material ranges from the poignant to the downright harrowing. But in another way I suppose I do think my friends’ reaction is the wrong one. The point is not so much that it’s cowardly to turn away from difficult truths, that we have a duty not to close our eyes to unpleasantness. You might agree with that, up to a point, but still prefer not to be beaten over the head with the unpleasantness for two hours. But it would be a mistake, I think, to see watching Wiseman as merely a worthy but grim duty, a means of informing oneself that the world is an awful place. Wiseman’s films anyway tell you nothing that you couldn’t find out in other ways (Juvenile Court, for example, tells you no more—much less, in fact—about the juvenile justice system than you could glean from reading Lois Forer). Their point is not really to tell us things about the world so much as to change our ways of seeing it: throwing sudden light; showing up what is beneath the surface as if in an x-ray; making the familiar strange, stupid, often hideous.
I think that is why I find Wiseman’s films paradoxically enlivening. What they exemplify, and sometimes are able to impart to the viewer (even if only for a moment), is that quality of careful, curious and even loving attentiveness which is so often absent or shut down both in the institutions Wiseman portrays and in the wider world beyond. As the writer Edgar Friedenberg observed in 1971, of the institution scrutinized in Wiseman’s film Basic Training: “A central function of Basic Training is to alienate young men from access to their own feelings and values, and to destroy their capacity for spontaneous perception and response.” This basic capacity, it seems to me, is about as central to life as anything is—and is itself kept alive only through a constant struggle against that countervailing tendency by which things are deadened by familiarity, by which care and curiosity give way to apathy, and by which seeing becomes blindness. By making us see the world—however awful—with a heightened and psychedelic vividness, Wiseman’s films are like a shot of adrenaline to the heart: an intervention on the side of life.
The first Frederick Wiseman film I saw, and the one that remains my favorite so far (Wiseman made a lot of films, and I have yet to see more than a fraction of them), was his seventh: Juvenile Court, first shown in 1973. Like many of Wiseman’s works, it’s about an institution, the people whom that institution is made of and whom it makes. In the case of his first documentary, Titicut Follies (1967), the institution was Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, on the banks of the Titicut River in Massachusetts; High School (1968) was filmed at Northeast High School in Philadelphia; Basic Training (1971) at Fort Knox in Kentucky. In this case, the institution is a court in Memphis, Tennessee—the only juvenile court in Shelby County and presided over by a single judge who processes around 18,000 cases per year.
Wiseman, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, is known for the total lack of narration or explanation in his films: for letting the scenes “speak for themselves.” This has led some to associate him with the cinema verité (or “direct cinema”) genre, but Wiseman apparently found the label pretentious. He understood very clearly that there was no such thing as reporting reality or “truth” in a passive or unmediated way (he disliked the term “documentary,” too, partly because he found it “a bit neutral”). The process of shooting and editing a film was, as Wiseman put it in 2003, “highly manipulative.” That was neither a confession nor a boast. It was not a description of a particular way of making films (manipulatively as opposed to non-manipulatively), but a comment about what making films (or anything else, for that matter) inescapably means. Even films without staged scenes or leading questions have to select what they show to the viewer. As Wiseman observed: “What you choose to shoot, the way you shoot it, the way you edit it and the way you structure it … all of those things … represent subjective choices that you have to make.” For Wiseman (who would often shoot more than one hundred hours of footage, then spend up to a year cutting it down to one or two), this process of selection was not incidental to filmmaking but the main business. Just as the political theorist Steven Lukes named “agenda control” as an important “face” of power (in addition to the more visible kind: getting your way in deliberations over particular agenda items), so Wiseman saw that filmmakers exercise power not just through what they directly say (or what they tell participants to say), but by deciding what makes the cut: what is on the “agenda,” and how the items are ordered, arranged and juxtaposed. In Wiseman’s films, where the filmmakers are neither seen nor heard, it is this face that comes to the fore.
This is not to say that the films contain hidden messages which require only to be decoded. With Wiseman, there is no particular “message” that the viewer is expected to absorb or to “take from” what they see. There are, at most, parameters or suggestions—and they point in the opposite direction from determinacy or dogmatism. The effect of the long, continuously evolving scenes his films increasingly featured was, as one commentator remarked, to move the viewer not toward resolution or clarity but toward complexity. This should not be mistaken for evasiveness or timidity: his films (many of which are hard-hitting, and several of which were controversial enough to land him in court) are a good illustration of the point that complexity and open-endedness need not come at the expense of critical force. It is part of the fecundity and power of Wiseman’s films that they give birth to reactions in the viewer that are not foreseeable or determinable in advance, that have lives of their own.
As ever with Wiseman’s films, Juvenile Court is complex: the point is not that the staff are bad and the children are good, or vice versa (Wiseman’s own judgment, given in an interview with Studs Terkel, was that the court staff were “people doing their best,” but faced with “problems that are essentially insoluble, given the current state of knowledge and commitment to solving them in our society”). As ever, too, there are many possible reactions to the scenes the film puts before the viewer. Mine are not necessarily Wiseman’s (and in some cases, I know that they are not), but they are nonetheless his co-creations, products of his particular choices.
●
Strange as it might sound, what strikes me most of all when watching Juvenile Court is the way it is possible actually to see the intelligence on certain faces. I’m not talking about anything as crude as IQ. Incidentally, as former judge Lois Forer relates in her grim 1971 memoir of the U.S. juvenile justice system, No One Will Lissen, the IQs of child defendants were routinely measured and reported in adjudications of their cases, and typically found wanting (Forer reports the case of a young boy who raises his hand to contest the verdict on his intelligence, which it was presumed he would not understand: “I ain’t retarded, judge”). It’s something else. You can see it in the micro-movements of facial expressions: the brief, darting movements of the eyes; the fleeting but clearly perceptible signs of the effort of suppression of impulses (anger, contempt, boredom); the naked, wide-awake terror; the stoic resignation mingled with defiance.
I’m talking here about the children (and sometimes their parents), rather than the judge or court staff. The two sets of faces are quite different. Those on one side of the divide have a pinched, alert intensity about them, the psychic and emotional equivalent of taut muscles. Those on the other side, the court’s various employees and consultants, look different. They have a slack, somewhat doughy quality. I don’t mean that the staff are fatter, or even that they are better nourished (although the latter, at least, is almost certain to be the case). It’s something about the way the two groups inhabit their faces, the different ways their faces are animated. The judge and his subordinates are clearly thinking, but it is a different kind of thinking, less pressured and less urgent, from that which happens on the other side. The judge deliberates: you can see him weighing up the considerations as they appear to him (and he generally seems confident that the way they appear to him—often at second- or thirdhand—is how they are). He deliberates, and comes to a decision. Deliberation is not the kind of thinking in which the accused and their parents have the luxury of indulging. They are the objects of the deliberation, of the decision, not its subjects. Their thinking is largely silent while the judge’s is spoken aloud. Their thinking is confined to reacting (and to the stifling of reactions). All of this is there to be seen on the faces. The result is to give to the experience of watching the film an uncanny quality, as if you have taken some drug that has enhanced your vision so that you are seeing things that others (the “experts” in the courtroom, specifically) apparently do not or cannot see.
This suggests an additional sense in which what you see in Wiseman’s film is a product of power. If necessity is the mother of invention, then unaccountable power is the mother of gross stupidity. You can see this in the billionaire or monarch who is so continually flattered they can believe that their every half-baked idea is brilliant and groundbreaking. But there are petty versions of the same phenomenon to be found in virtually every school, in many a home, as well as in the juvenile courts: the court staff exist as if in a bubble, insulated from the lives over whom their deliberative power is exercised (it’s significant that Wiseman’s film is shot almost exclusively within the walls of the juvenile court, with only the opening and closing scenes showing the building from the outside). While very few people can hope to be billionaires or monarchs, it is within the reach of many ordinary adults to wield near unlimited power over children, whether as parents, teachers or officials in the “welfare” or “justice” systems.
One result of this, of course, is abuse—common both then and now, and seen in several of the cases brought before Judge Turner. In almost all (the one exception is where the alleged perpetrator is also a juvenile—the teenaged babysitter Tommy, who is accused of abusing a child in his care), the court staff are dismissive and display attitudes that are jarring to contemporary sensibilities: a little boy, covered head to toe in bandages after an uncle poured boiling oil over him, is asked, “Now what did you do, son, to make him pour this on you?”; discussing a case of a three-year-old badly beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, Judge Turner concludes that the man just “got carried away” and is unlikely to pose a threat to the child (one of his staff chimes in: “There are times when a child going through what psychiatrists call the anal stage can be extremely vexatious. I’ve got two that are just finished that myself. There’ve been times when I’ve, uh, wanted to put a few bruises”); a teenage girl, Anita, alleges that her stepfather has molested her, but is brushed off when the stepfather denies it and the mother suggests that the girl’s story might be influenced by the knowledge that her biological father had been charged with incest against her older sister (“Do you think that coulda made you jumpy, and jump to conclusions?” the social worker asks). Wiseman himself, in conversation with Studs Terkel, affirms Terkel’s observation that Anita has a “Lolita touch,” remarking that she is “a sexy little girl” (“Yeah, she’s wise,” Terkel replies, “And the guy seemed so lost—that’s just the feeling, you know”).
But another, more insidious effect of the steep asymmetries of power that exist between children and adults—and all the more so between the children and the adult attendants of the juvenile court—is the particular species of stupidity it breeds on the adult side. One of the more excruciating things about watching Juvenile Court is having to listen to adult professionals saying various stupid things to the children (and sometimes to their parents). This is the flip side of the visible intelligence of the children: you are observing them suffering fools (as well as just suffering). The effect Wiseman manages to create, whether intentionally or not, is that of a quasi-telepathic connection with the children as they are “bored and twaddled at … [by] bores and twaddlers” (as George Bernard Shaw once summed up the experience of childhood), an effect achieved perhaps in part through producing in the viewer the same feeling of being trapped, of being a captive audience, as must characterize the experience of the children in the film. You have to sit there, listening to platitude after platitude, to one non sequitur or semi-willful misunderstanding after another, for as long as it takes.
Wiseman might attribute the high volume of “bromides” (as he refers to them in his conversation with Terkel) issuing from the adults in charge to their impotence in the face of forces far larger than themselves. “Little lady, you say to yourself, that you’re going to be somebody … Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. And you hold your head up high and you say, you’re going to be somebody!” These words of one social worker to a young girl in her charge may be about the best that you can do in such circumstances. They might even be helpful to hear—if they come at the right moment, from the right person, or in the context of real human warmth (the same social worker, even as she enjoins the girl against being a “whore,” exhibits a rapport with her that is genuinely touching). But the inanity of much of the speech of the court’s staff might also be seen as a function of that curious mix of anxiety and impunity that characterizes adulthood and officialdom alike. Observe the behavior of those canonical grown-ups, the professionals in the film, and there are moments where it’s as if there is a flash of light and the essential childishness of their behavior appears as though illuminated. Two court employees pore over a self-portrait by eleven-year-old Diane, who is accused of “prostitution”: the man explains to the woman that it is significant in some way that her picture’s “proportions are good,” and he sounds so assured of himself that you can forget how essentially silly and evidence-free his statements are; but through Wiseman’s lens, you suddenly find yourself looking over the shoulders of two grown adults who are talking nonsense (“twaddling,” as Shaw would say) about a child’s drawing.
“Well, I don’t know, it kind of just tears you apart little by little, y’know,” a teenage girl, Lisa, confides in a chaplain employed by the court:
To which the chaplain replies: “These things are part of a problem of living, Lisa.” There are several points in the film where an exchange like this happens, or rather is shut down in this way. The adults associated with the court are very concerned to let the children know that their problems, whatever they may be, are part of the universal stuff of life—that they are not special, in other words, and should not make a fuss. This is significant, I think, not only for what it says about the attitude of adults to children but for what it reveals about the attitudes and fears of the adults themselves (there is a strong sense that there are things they not only do not wish to speak to children about, but that they are striving more generally to avoid thinking about or acknowledging).
The chaplain’s response is anyway beside the point. Grief is part of life, something that most people experience at some point. But it is scarcely imaginable that a therapist would tell a bereaved client: “These things are a problem of living.” That would be obviously rude, callous, unhelpful. (It is interesting how an aberrant harshness often coexists with a rhetorical or official commitment to a special care and gentleness in dealings with children.) It would also cut off a conversation in which a person might otherwise be able to say something more about the nature of their experience, in which a person might come to know another—or to be known by another—somewhat better (Wiseman and Terkel both see this: “She’s trying to tell him something”). You see the moment when the possibility of such a connection is severed, in the way Lisa’s face drops. There is, we may imagine, much more to say. For a start, even if some things are problems of living, could we not still talk about living? But it also strikes me that Lisa is probably not merely describing the general difficulty of the unavailability of certainty in human life. I take it that she is saying something more particularly about the predicament of childhood, something which the chaplain’s response illustrates and confirms: that the way you are cut off from reliable information, or even honest opinion, leaves you both practically in the dark and also profoundly alone. Nobody will talk to you—or if they do, they do not really talk to you (let alone listen), but serve you up a load of ready-made clichés: Hold your head up high … Sticks and stones may break your bones … These are problems of living.
●
I’ve found that my friends are often reluctant to watch Wiseman with me, on the grounds that it’s “too depressing.” In a way, you might think, this is not really the kind of thing people can be wrong about: if you find something depressing, you find it depressing. And it’s true that Wiseman’s films are not exactly cheerful: their subject material ranges from the poignant to the downright harrowing. But in another way I suppose I do think my friends’ reaction is the wrong one. The point is not so much that it’s cowardly to turn away from difficult truths, that we have a duty not to close our eyes to unpleasantness. You might agree with that, up to a point, but still prefer not to be beaten over the head with the unpleasantness for two hours. But it would be a mistake, I think, to see watching Wiseman as merely a worthy but grim duty, a means of informing oneself that the world is an awful place. Wiseman’s films anyway tell you nothing that you couldn’t find out in other ways (Juvenile Court, for example, tells you no more—much less, in fact—about the juvenile justice system than you could glean from reading Lois Forer). Their point is not really to tell us things about the world so much as to change our ways of seeing it: throwing sudden light; showing up what is beneath the surface as if in an x-ray; making the familiar strange, stupid, often hideous.
I think that is why I find Wiseman’s films paradoxically enlivening. What they exemplify, and sometimes are able to impart to the viewer (even if only for a moment), is that quality of careful, curious and even loving attentiveness which is so often absent or shut down both in the institutions Wiseman portrays and in the wider world beyond. As the writer Edgar Friedenberg observed in 1971, of the institution scrutinized in Wiseman’s film Basic Training: “A central function of Basic Training is to alienate young men from access to their own feelings and values, and to destroy their capacity for spontaneous perception and response.” This basic capacity, it seems to me, is about as central to life as anything is—and is itself kept alive only through a constant struggle against that countervailing tendency by which things are deadened by familiarity, by which care and curiosity give way to apathy, and by which seeing becomes blindness. By making us see the world—however awful—with a heightened and psychedelic vividness, Wiseman’s films are like a shot of adrenaline to the heart: an intervention on the side of life.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.