sherman’s march

Nuclear Missed Connections

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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

Sherman’s March (1985)

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If there’s any one Ross McElwee documentary that’s essential viewing for all cinephiles, it’s his 1985 breakout Sherman’s March, which is returning to streaming platforms in a spiffy new 4k restoration early September. Its re-release is timed to coincide with the streaming premiere of McElwee’s latest doc, titled Remake, which revisits scenes from Sherman’s March four decades later, reflecting on how it established and defined his directorial career. Except, not exactly. McElwee’s approach to documentary filmmaking is a gentle bait-and-switch game, with logline premises that promise an easily marketable, digestible picture that then gets slowly eroded & replaced with what’s actually on his mind — something more personal than sellable. Sherman’s March is the foremost example of this bait-and-switch technique, pitched as a dry educational film on the history of “Sherman’s March to the Sea”, a famous Civil War military campaign that financially devastated the American South. That Ken Burnsian academia only lasts for a few wry minutes before McElwee reveals his true mission, though, as indicated in the film’s verbose subtitle “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation”. After securing funding to revisit famous sites from General Sherman’s warpath in what’s meant to be a much more traditional doc, McElwee quickly makes the project all about himself and his romantic struggles in a time of global political doom. He still makes a point to stop by some key historical sites from Sherman’s March to the Sea, but only when they’re conveniently close to his social calls or when they’re convenient for giving his film a vague sense of narrative structure. Likewise, his latest work is not exactly a “remake” of Sherman’s March in particular, as its title suggests, so much as it is a broad overview of McElwee’s filmography to date, using the act of reviewing old footage as an access point to grieve the loss of his son, who had appeared in many of McElwee’s films over the decades since Sherman’s March. What Remake makes clear about McElwee’s career is that he is first & foremost a diarist, one whose body of work only becomes more meaningful as you spend more time with him and his loved ones, as captured on film. His first and his most recent pictures are only bookends on a much larger library of communal self-portraits.

Considered in isolation, Sherman’s March is an Odyssean epic for people with “Wait, was she flirting with me or not?” social anxiety. McElwee spends the film’s sprawling three-hour runtime hopping from one situationship to another, filming his awkward flirtations and semi-romantic entanglements with a casual parade of Southern women his parents would love to see him settle down with. The movie’s framing within the historical echoes of a Civil War military campaign, the ongoing threat of nuclear holocaust, and a cheekily imagined romantic rivalry with Hollywood sex symbol Burt Reynolds is all just novel set dressing for the real business at hand: observing Southern womanhood in the 1980s. McElwee’s softspoken narration is a constant aural presence in the film, but he rarely appears onscreen himself. Most of the runtime is populated by the women he’s lazily pursuing, allowing the audience just enough time to fall in love with each of them before some universal obstacle gets in the way of a genuine romantic connection. The camera itself is one of those obstacles, since it would’ve been much less common for everyday social interactions to be documented in the 1980s than it would be now, in the smartphone era. McElwee had to sell Sherman’s March as a historical revisit to key Civil War sites at the time, since this kind of diaristic record of personal canon events and romantic self-lore was on the more experimental end of pre-camcorder 1980s filmmaking, long before the influencer vlog was invented as a medium. On revisit, its 16mm filmstock greatly helps the picture feel more artistically substantial than it would as a modern digital object. Firstly, the depth of color in the new 4k scan of that celluloid is gorgeous, emphasizing both the geographic beauty of the South and the film’s value as a document of a recently bygone era. Not for nothing, the limitations of 16mm film reels also helps maintain a steady rhythm so that no individual moment lingers past its welcome. The overall runtime may be nearly three hours in length, but the shortened film reels keep the pace moving along at such a brisk clip that the audience hardly has time to notice. It’s like tubing down a lazy river with a gaggle of chatty strangers, each just as alluring as they are peculiar and each sending mixed signals about their romantic intentions.

Remake‘s title suggests that it might find McElwee physically retracing his steps at old Sherman’s March shooting locations by catching up with the surviving subjects of that film whom he’s still friendly with. However, that’s only a small part of an infinitely more absurd attempt to remake his name-making doc. The larger project of remaking Sherman’s March was in the hands of mainstream comedy filmmaker Steve Carr, most famous for directing Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Once Carr approached McElwee with the outlandish idea of adapting Sherman’s March into a narrative comedy feature for the wider moviegoing public, McElwee instinctively started documenting the process via digi camcorder, tracking the Quixotic project as it mutated from theatrically-released comedy to prestige TV streaming series to goofball network sitcom to nothing at all. Like the initial pitch of Sherman’s March, that Hollywood project-development campaign only serves as a convenient entryway for allowing McElwee to continue documenting his familial life through cinema; the framing, however amusing, is incidental. The real project here is in revisiting footage McElwee recorded of his son, who died tragically young of a drug overdose after years of struggling with addiction. The prospect of developing Sherman’s March into a mainstream crowdpleaser was an obvious fool’s mission from the start, but McElwee used it as a chance to get his son acclimated to the mechanics of professional filmmaking after he showed interest in it as a potential career. They spend a significant amount of time together during the development process collaborating as documentarians of each other’s professional lives, unsure of what the near future holds. As news about the Sherman’s March adaptation fizzles out and fades away, so does the professional ambitions of McElwee’s son, who appears to be more interested in the hedonism of an artist’s lifestyle than in the tedious act of making art. The tragedy of his death takes Remake into much darker, more painful territory than where Sherman’s March goes, despite the relative lightness & frivolity of its framing. It also opens McElwee up to a larger exploration of how his documentary career has both preserved and distorted his familial life. McElwee’s time in Hollywood humorously draws a distinction between documentaries and “real movies,” but things get much more serious when he then has to ponder the distinctions between documentaries and “real life”.

If there’s any major deviation in McElwee’s filmmaking methodology between Sherman’s March and its in-name-only remake, it’s that he started his career documenting life as it happened in real time but now views cinema as a record of the past. Remake finds the filmmaker reviewing footage from several major titles in his personal catalog, often in a pained attempt to spend more time with his son, whom he’s preserved a record of through decades of happenstantial film diaries. It’s just as personal and self-justifiable as any of McElwee’s other projects, but it also makes the case that his work is more effective in total than it is in individual titles. As indicated by its significance in Remake as the movie that defines McElwee’s professional career, Sherman’s March is likely the one title that could be wholly understood and appreciated as a standalone movie outside his larger body of work. Watching it alongside Remake only makes it a richer text, though, recontextualizing it as the first diary entry among many, all gently narrated by McElwee and all populated with recurring characters he deeply, truly loves: his takes-no-guff sister Dede, his boisterous poetry teacher Charleen, his son Adrian, and everyone else who’s politely suffered him pointing a camera in their direction for decades on end.

-Brandon Ledet