Missile
This week we are showing Frederick Wiseman’s Missile (1988) on Wednesday, March 4th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
The world lost preeminent documentarian Frederick Wiseman just two weeks ago, after 96 years of tireless curiosity and dedicated attention towards the world’s functioning. Wiseman was arguably the best filmmaker in the history of the medium at exploring institutions and systems, both in how they work and maintain themselves, and the strange psychic runoff that accretes in the corridors and shadows of those systems. Put more simply, he saw both the system and the strange, hilarious, disturbing humans that exist within those systems, prop them up, are consumed by them, and made more strange, more hilarious, more disturbing through their encounters with those systems.
In some of his works, those systems take the form of whole municipalities, such as Aspen (recently shown by our buds in Spectrum Between) or Belfast, Maine (another favorite of mine) or they may take the form of individual businesses (such as his final film, Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros, or the aptly titled The Store). The core of his work, though, comes through examining the various conceptual apparati of our neoliberalized state, capturing the eroding state of High Schools or Welfare offices, Hospitals and City Halls, and of course, the tendrils of America’s imperialist military.
To be honest, I had put Missile on the From Below calendar before Wiseman had even passed—I had wanted to show a Wiseman for a while, and Missile dovetails with another perpetual interest of mine: nuclear age anxieties, fears of the bomb, and the psychic fallout that has continued to ripple across the global consciousness (there’s a few more screenings in March that will be touching on this!) Missile is Wiseman’s depiction of the 14 week training of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) systems operators at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara. In Wiseman’s non-interventionalist approach, the film basically asks how people become the type of people ready to sit alone at the bottom of missile silos across the desolate landscapes of America, ready to press the button to launch nuclear bombs and bring about all-but-assured armageddon. In doing so, it crystallizes a core quandary of the whole Wiseman oeuvre—making it a great starting point for those who are just starting to familiarize yourself with his filmography, too—a sort of chicken and egg quandary, of whether this training program attracts the type of person that would be okay launching the bombs, or if in its functioning, this training program—this institution—creates that type of person out of the rawer material of humanity. This is not a knot that can be untangled, but in filming the process, Wiseman finds those trademark alarming eccentricities and bleak moments of humor here too, made all the more bleak in the nearly 40 years since its creation, with the proliferation of drone warfare turning more and more of the military into alienated, dehumanized button-pushing. On the morning after US and Israel launch attacks on Iran, bombing a girl’s school and killing more than 50 students—disgusting beyond comprehension, and only given a more concrete reality with images of the school-aged children from last week’s screening of Amir Naderi’s The Runner fresh in my head—it feels all the more gravely pertinent to trace that strand back to the point captured in this film.
May we outlive the bombs rotting in their silos,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark