THIS COLUMN ORIGINALLY RAN ON COMICS BULLETIN
Sometimes the most universal truths can
be found in the smallest slices of life. That’s what makes
independent documentaries so powerful, engaging, and entertaining.
Not only do they show you little worlds to which you’ve never had
access, but they oftentimes also tell the larger story of what it
means to be human. Armed with this intellectual conceit, a bag of
Funyuns, and a couple of Miller beers, Daniel Elkin curls up in front
of the TV and delves deep into the bowels of Netflix Streaming
Documentaries to find out a little bit more about all of us.
Today he and his friend Jason Sacks
found 2011's The Pruitt-Igoe Myth by director Chad Freidrichs.
Elkin: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
is a thoughtful, albeit dogmatically one-sided, documentary about
public housing, urban development, the role of government in social
engineering, racism, suburbanization, politics, hopes, dreams, and
failure.
The film focuses on the Pruitt-Igoe
public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, a complex of
thirty-three eleven story buildings that were built in 1954 to great
fanfare and promise, which were then subsequently taken down twenty
years later, vandalized, crumbling, and crime-ridden. The film-makers
state that the downfall of Pruitt-Igoe has been mythologized over the
years to become the public face of the perceived failures of public
housing polices, the perceived failure of the welfare state, the
perceived failure of modern architectural design, and the perceived
failure of African-Americans in the 1970's. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
seeks to debunk what it sees as the misconceptions of the causes of
Pruitt-Igoe's demise and draws attention to what it sees as the real
causes of its failure.
The film's agenda gets in the way of
what I look for in good documentaries. I prefer my documentaries to
“document,” not lecture -- to reveal, not point at. While I
appreciate the work that Freidrichs has done by putting together The
Pruitt-Igoe Myth, its exhortative nature raised my hackles.
This is not to say that I disagreed
with most of the various theses posited by this film. I agree that
there are systematic failures that have been built into governmental
housing policies since the 1949 Housing Act was signed, and that
these are a result of both greed and a fundamental underlying racism.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does a fine job of delineating these
failures and drawing the connections to create a larger picture.
But its one-sidedness and omission of
counterpoint undermines the film's documentary nature, to its
detriment.
What were your thoughts, Sacks?
Sacks: It’s interesting how we
often get different things out of movies, Elkin. You saw this movie
as polemic and exhortative, while I really enjoyed how it presented a
completely different take on social issues that are often seen
through a one-sided or dogmatic prism of elitist propaganda. So even
propaganda on a completely different track was welcome for me rather
than frustrating.
I actually found myself a bit
fascinated by the clear and distinct differences between the
perception of the general public about public housing, and the actual
truth of life in the projects. It’s true that the projects were
terrifying, crime-ridden, poorly maintained hellholes for many of
their years, but they also represent two other important items: they
were peoples’ homes, and, maybe most fascinating to me, the
Pruitt-Igoe Projects represent the great gap that society can have
between good intentions and inept follow-up.
Pruitt-Igoe was built with plenty of
positive values – families would be moved out of the slums, the
city of St. Louis would be able to handle its expected massive
population growth, and businessmen would have the ability to develop
valuable land that would be useful for businesses. It was the epitome
of a win-win for everyone. And in fact the apartments opened with
great fanfare. One woman talks about moving into the “poor person’s
penthouse”, an apartment on the tenth floor of one of the many
buildings of Pruitt-Igoe.
But that excitement soon turned to
despair as the apartments were basically forgotten and fell victim to
exactly the same sort of despair that the urban planners professed to
be interested in fighting.
I was intrigued and horrified by how
the city of St. Louis essentially forgot about these developments and
the people who lived in them. They left the complex to complete
neglect, refusing to spend money to fix things like broken sewers and
windows.
But the story isn’t quite as simple
as that recitation of facts makes it sound. At the same time that it
neglected its poorest citizens, St. Louis also suffered a precipitous
drop in population – the largest drop of any city in the United
States during the period covered in this film. The citizens of that
town moved away from the inner city and towards the suburbs, or
completely out of the state, meaning that St. Louis’s declining tax
base and lack of jobs were strong contributing factors to the decline
of the Projects.
Simply put: while there was plenty of
blame to be assigned for the hellish conditions in the Project,
there’s no one person responsible. It’s the worst of all evils:
something that can’t be blamed on anybody.
So I liked the moral complexity and
ambiguity of this movie a lot. Elkin, what did you make of the
complex picture of society that this movie paints?
Elkin: One thing the filmakers
say about their film is especially interesting to me and basically
sums up why I thought The Pruitt-Igoe Myth deserved our
attention this week. They write: “History is a contested space.
It becomes used politically and culturally. Arguments become
flattened, rather than expanded; available evidence discarded, rather
than sought … This is why Pruitt-Igoe matters... So much of our
collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are
tied up in those thirty-three high-rise buildings, informed by the
demolition image.” These two thoughts, history being a
“contested space” and the power of images to convey attitudes
about particular subjects are important things for us, as thinking
individuals, to ponder.
The idea of history being a contested
space is clearly evident in this film. The fate of the Pruitt-Igoe
housing project has clearly been framed as a clear example of the
failure of this sort of government intervention and social
engineering. The film-makers want us to realize that this is not
necessarily true, and they outline a rather detailed argument to show
the viewer alternative interpretations to the historical narrative.
Wasn't it Churchill who said, “History is written by the victors”?
I think that in the case of Pruitt-Igoe this is what has happened.,
and, by the film-makers showing this to us, we, as an audience, can
perhaps look at our other preconceived notions of cause and effect
with a more critical eye.
The power of images to create
attitudes, both political and emotional, is another kettle of fish. I
was thinking about launching into an examination of semiotics here,
but this is probably not the place for such a thing. Rather, let me
put this idea more into the context more relevant to this discussion.
For around the last ten years of
Pruitt-Igoe's existence, the images coming out of it were
specifically designed to further a narrative. That story was: these
places are dangerous, the residents are animals, and socialized
people (read: White Middle Class) should be afraid and should feel
justified in abandoning the city to move to their suburban ranch
house manicured lawn dreams. The pictures broadcast by the media of
what was going on at Pruitt-Igoe were shown to assuage any guilt
people may have felt for leaving St. Louis, as well as reconfirm a
previously established racial stereotypes. This furthered not only
the inherent racism that existed in our country, but also allowed
those in power to then cite more evidence that government doesn't
work in these situations and then foster their politics of personal
responsibility and the power of the private market.
But it's a manipulation of cause and
effect – through this lens, the narrative is distorted. The power
of imagery is often abused in this manner, and it takes a critical
sensibility to realize it. While “news” and “history” is rife
with this sort of underhanded political skullduggery, I wonder how
pop culture is affected by this sort of thing?
Sacks: Which is part of why it’s
so entertaining to watch a good documentary – or at least a
documentary that takes a contrary position to the standard viewpoints
that we get of the world. I love to watch an argument go against the
standard collective wisdom, show that there really are different
sides to the stories that our media show us, learn that the world is
always more complex than we are told that it is.
A great documentary has the power to
change your mind, to persuade you that something you previously felt
was true actually isn’t. In that way, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
isn’t a great documentary. It didn’t change my view of the issues
it discussed as much as it colored those issues in deeper shades of
gray. This movie added more ambiguity to my life, more complexity,
more of a move away from the distorted narrative that I had
previously taken for granted.
The movie makes the case quite
persuasively that society has blamed the victims for the utter
desolation of the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments, but that also feels a bit
simplistic to me. The case is made strongly that a lack of attention
led to the downfall, but there is a bit of truth to the myths that we
both reference above: if the people living in Pruitt-Igoe hadn’t
taken part in the destruction of these apartments – if they hadn’t
engaged in crime and peed in the elevators and thrown trash on the
floors and broken out the windows, then the apartments would have
lasted much longer than they did.
While society avoided its
responsibility, so too did some of the residents of the apartments,
who were unable to prevent the terrible vandalism to happen to the
place in which they lived. So I don’t see the manipulation of cause
and effect that you condemn above to be much more than the media’s
endless zeal to tell a good story, not some sort of manipulative
skullduggery.
I’m not blaming the victims. I’m
just saying that there are some truths on both sides of this story,
some truths that make this documentary so fascinating. It goes
against the grain and tells untold stories. While The Pruitt-Igoe
Myth is not a great documentary to me, it is an important
counterpoint to our urban myths and sheds an important other
dimension on topics that I had once thought were more or less
settled.
Elkin: I guess you can say that
we both agree that The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, like so many of the
documentaries we have looked at together, Sacks, is maybe not the
most successful film produced, but at least it raises some
interesting issues for us to think about, while at the same time
tells a little part of the story of what it means to live in a
society. How we treat those who live among us guarantees how we end
up living ourselves.
Trailer for the Film:
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