Sherman's March

Posted to www.marxmail.org on June 19, 2004

Ross McElwee's 1986 "Sherman's March" is now available in DVD. The alternative but unwieldy title is "A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation" conveys the film-makers deeper motivation in making this quirky but brilliant documentary. Starting out as a project on General William Tecumseh Sherman's bloody march through his native South, the film rapidly turns into a meditation on the difficulty of finding love under the shadow of the bomb.

The film is structured around a series of encounters between the diffident, tall, bearded and bespectacled film-maker and Southern belles who friends and family hook him up with on blind dates. He also looks up old flames. This becomes his own march through the South with a lot less bloodshed but a lot more angst.

When he arrives in Charlotte, North Carolina--his home town--he runs into an aspiring actress who pins her hopes on landing a part in a Bert Reynolds' movie. She is a complete airhead who divides her time between roller-skating and doing squat exercises designed to reduce cellulite. In one of the funniest scenes in the film, she recounts the scenario of a movie she would write, direct and produce and star in after she becomes famous. Her character would be a returned astronaut who after achieving wealth and power would set up laboratories on a Pacific island where lots of "intellectuals" would be subsidized to discover cures for cancer and solve the world's problems. It would all be "very tropical" with lots of big animals and plants, as she puts it.

With this scene McElwee establishes the millenarian framework for the rest of the film, which is consumed with hopes and fears for the future in an age of nuclear uncertainty.

He next meets an Atlanta interior decorator whom he escorts to Church after a few days of hanging out. After the service, we see the Parson patiently explaining to him how the spirit will survive the flesh in the Second Coming, which could very well coincide with all-out nuclear war. McElwee has a true gift for drawing such people out and allowing them to be hoisted on their own petard. Unlike Michael Moore, who never hides his own strong opinions, McElwee is content to function more like a good psychotherapist who interjects with something like "Hmmm, that's interesting", while the patient pours out his obsessions.

A couple of days later she introduces him to a group of survivalist men in the back woods. They have built houses, stored food and stockpiled weapons that will help them survive nuclear war. These tobacco-chewing rednecks tell McElwee that the "government" is the source of all their troubles. In a perfect example of the kind of "found humor" that is pervasive in this film, one of them likens their survivalist project to "Little House on the Prairie".

Continuing along the path blazed by Sherman, McElwee next arrives in Charlestown where his former high school teacher sets him up with a music teacher from a local girl's school. More than any other woman in the film, this one is clearly not his type. She is a Mormon who expects that her husband will "bring the Priesthood" into their marriage. She too is a survivalist and gives McElwee a tour of their sub-basement, which is replete with canned goods, water and other necessities for surviving nuclear war. Like the Parson in the previous scene, she too makes an amalgam between a nuclear war that seemed to be looming during the Reagan presidency and theology.

Fears about nuclear war and frustrations in meeting the right woman haunt McElwee. As he lies in a third-rate motel room at 3am in the morning, he recalls being in Hawaii as a teenager with his parents. While there, they go to the beach late one night to view the sky after the largest hydrogen bomb in history is detonated at an atoll 800 miles away. He describes Honolulu becoming as bright as day a moment or two after the bomb goes off. And then the sky turns a lime green. This vision has haunted him his entire life.

Although Ross McElwee is not a prolific film-maker, everything he makes combines stunning existential insights with sharp political commentary. His most recent film made in 2003 and titled "Bright Leaves" is a Michael Moore type assault on the tobacco industry that was widely acclaimed but I haven't seen. The only other McElwee film I have seen is the 1993 made-for-TV documentary titled "Time Indefinite", which is a meditation on raising a family, growing old and mortality. It is very much in the vein of Spalding Gray's performances.

If "Sherman's March" is not available in your local video store, you can order it from http://www.firstrunfeatures.com. I give it my highest recommendation.