Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.
I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything. A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.
In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.
I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.
-Brandon Ledet
