Wisconsin Death Trip

Several years ago, I rummaged up an oversized book called Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties, by Michael Lesy. The cover photo is of an armored car surrounded by men in suits and hats, who appear to be standing still for the camera, and two policemen flanking a Santa Claus whose hat droops as much as his eyes and shoulders. He is hemmed in not only by the officers but also by five enormous sacks of mail. It is a bizarre and melancholy picture but poisitively fades away when one reads next to the author's name that he is the "author of Wisconsin Death Trip"!

Wow, said I, Wisconsin death trip! Bad ass!!

Desafortunadamente, the book--which is really just a collection of photographs Lesy found whilst himself rummaging around in the Midwest--costs too much for me to actually buy a copy. And, my library was fresh out. But que suerte! Netflix has a DVD by the same name and carrying the following description:

"In the late 1890s, the small town of Black River Falls, Wis., suffered its fair share of pestilence in the form of a diphtheria epidemic coupled with a lingering economic depression. But the worst was yet to come: Soon, the residents of the rural town began to collectively go insane. Via re-creations, old photographs and vintage newspaper clippings, James Marsh's documentary (narrated by Ian Holm) shows just how bizarre this true story really is."

To which I can say, after having seen the "film": bullshit! This movie, to start with, isn't about Black River Falls, WI, because within mere minutes of the narrator--a very suspect "Ian Holm"--making that claim, he begins to relate anecdotes about Kenosha, which last I checked, is over 200 miles away! This is not an isolated case of anecdote-slippage, either.

The larger problem with this movie, though, is that it isn't a movie. It's a slide show interspersed with silent actors miming the narrator's reading of newspaper clippings. None of the vignettes or photographs are connected to one another or to what we would call "real life" or "historical context," or what filmmakers might call "the plot."

The fiasco begins with the juxtaposition of an editor's celebratory scribblings regarding Black River Falls' history and development into the most perfect place on earth, and the historical facts of mine closures, diptheria's decimation of the youngest residents, and violent outbursts by transients, immigrants, and desperate residents. There is no attempt to sync these events in time, however, so the viewer must fabricate his own timeline (did the prosperity come first, and then the pestilence? Who knows...).

And then, just like that, the film skips blithely off to every corner of the Dairy Land, never pausing to pull away and set the scene or locate new subjects in time and space.

This is a short review. Then again, it was a short "film," short on everything: time, ideas, execution. If the same experience can be had reading the book (and I suspect it can!), then what the fuck right does this DVD have to exist?