by Dana Spiotta
Then something emerged that she didn’t expect. People on both sides—the students (now in their thirties) and the Guardsmen (also in their thirties) mentioned a supposed agent provocateur. She remembered the article on her bulletin board and its description of this figure. There was one sentence about a student radical “some people suggested” worked for the FBI. They quoted a person who thought this man fired a shot at the National Guard, the one that made them turn, kneel, and shoot at the students. She discovered that there was a growing conspiracy at the center of some of the stories of that day. A saboteur, a boogeyman. Who was this provocateur, this fellow accused of causing all this violence? Maybe he was the responsible one. Not the students, clearly. But maybe it isn’t entirely the fault of the Guardsmen either.
“I saw him there, he had a gun. Right after the shooting, he said he had to shoot, had no choice,” said a Kent professor who had come out on the quad after the shots were fired. “He was arrested after, and I heard they released him. That he was working for the FBI.”
“What did he do?”
“He fired the shot that provoked the National Guard,” he said.
“You saw him?”
“No. But other people did.”
“You think the FBI infiltrated the Kent student protests?”
“Of course they had undercover people in there. The agents are always the ones urging everyone to violence and mayhem. They wanted to discredit the student activists.”
“But all they did was make the students into victims.”
The professor shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t say it was smart or effective. It was the FBI.”
But some of the members of the Guard also believed it.
“If you listen to the tape, the audiotape, you can hear a lone shot before we kneel and shoot.” It was true. There was no video, but an audiotape existed, made by a student doing a project in which he kept a tape recorder on his dorm room windowsill. It was very staticky—the audio version of grainy—full of pops and cracks. Meadow included it in the film, played it while showing a black screen. She put titles on the black screen to point to sounds. Somebody is talking and words appear in large typed letters as you hear them: You and after they come and taken and tell them and then when you hear the supposed shot, (gunshot), a pause of blank screen, (running), then a word that sounds faintly like ready. Then (garbled), seconds go by on blank screen, then (shots, screams).
It is true that the isolation of sounds on a blank screen can deceive, that anything isolated in a sense-depriving way can feel odd or wrong no matter the content. And suggesting what a sound is makes you hear that sound. Meadow knew that. She also knew that once the provocateur was mentioned, she would bring him up to each person she interviewed. She would sometimes put her question about him in the film. Other times she would discuss it with the person before the filming—you know what, several people have said this. And the person would get around to mentioning it when she filmed the person talking. But she already had fake film mixed with real film. Her film was a stylized, constructed thing, a version of reality. Not a pure, untainted object. You cut, you put this next to that, you edit this out, you ask, you enact, you show an image. It was a fictiony thing: a fictional thing comprised of pieces of real life. A hybrid, a combine. Only one line of events actually happened, but it was obscured by memory and time and wishful confabulations. She wanted to convey that.
Slowly the film bent toward a conspiracy, with one person after another circling back to the saboteur, essentially blaming him as ultimately responsible. The Guard turned for a reason, and maybe this was it. The belief was that most of the violence on the student left was instigated by fellows like him. And truly, there was a guy lurking around Kent State who appeared to be protected by the FBI. He was always at meetings, always taking photographs. He was off in obvious ways. People felt that he was some kind of narc. And the Guardsmen were sure someone fired at them—they wouldn’t be ordered to shoot actual bullets because of a few rocks. Although the rocks hurt—a number of Guardsmen claimed to have sustained injuries from rocks. And from chunks of cement and gas canisters. (“A rock could kill a person, you know. We were the same age as the students, but we didn’t go to college. We were enlisted or drafted, lucky to be stateside in the Guard. Lucky!”)
Eventually Meadow understood where the film should go. She had been filming for a year already. It took another year to locate and talk to him. He was easy enough to convince to speak once she found him in a Boston suburb. He had always lived with a hum of doubt under him. “I will talk to you.” He was pained—no one got more contempt in this world than the turncoat. Misguided true believers? Fine. But the deceiver, the liar, the betrayer? Everyone was united in their hate for Marvin Joseph.
Marvin lived in a small brick split-level house on a suburban street lined with old oak trees. She would film Marvin, and Marvin alone, in his living room, where his ordinariness was palpable. People would expect a fully satisfying narrative, a bad guy. But she would give them the unknowable, the meaningless. The mistake.
“Is this okay?” he said. He was wearing a dress shirt under a wide-lapelled blazer. He was chubby and wore outdated aviator frames that made him look, with his tight shirt, a bit like a porn producer. This was not right. Meadow found him a looser shirt, a more conservative blazer. She didn’t suggest he shave his sideburns, but she asked him to take off his glasses. So the lights won’t reflect so much, she told him. She expected him to be squirmy and deny everything, not convincing, but his apparent powerlessness would mark him as a scapegoat for the regrets and wishes of the others. No matter what he said. But instead he gave a speech, something entirely born for the camera. And in minutes he had rewritten his life.
“Here is why I wanted to talk to you,” he said. He leaned in, looked directly into the camera.
“I didn’t fire a shot at the Guards,” he said. “But I did work for the FBI.” He had never publicly copped to being an informant before. Meadow felt a tingle on the surface of her skin. She looked at him and didn’t say a word. Let him. As he spoke, his face grew animated and his features became more defined. “I was a photographer. I was not a radical, not a student. I liked to photograph them at protests. They looked interesting; they were so passionate. Occasionally scary. Often beautiful—they were all young and beautiful.” He paused, as if he were remembering.
“I was known as someone who took pictures, and the FBI asked me for some of my photos. It is true. I complied; I don’t deny it. I was scared of the FBI, everyone was. I let them have my photographs. I took money for the photos, it is true.” Marvin looked down for a moment. He took a deep breath. “I already had the rap of being an informant. I was older, I was awkward. I didn’t know how to dress like the cool kids. My hair is curly and doesn’t look good long, really. So I was already an outsider. And I tried to impress a girl once by saying the FBI bought my photos.” He laughed bitterly. “I was a little naive about it. Not political at all, which condemned me in any case. I did not win the love of this girl, and from then on I was marked as an agent provocateur. I didn’t even know what that was.” He shook his head. And then came the astonishing part. Big cinematic tears started to flow. Not the sobby, messy kind, but elegant tracks of teardrops on cheeks: a clearly visible indication of emotion.
“I was on the quad that day, more or less shunned as always. Everyone knew there would be a confrontation, and I was a stringer for some papers. That is how I made a living. I would photograph the protests. And that is all I planned to do.” He stopped and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “I did have a gun, it is true. But that is because I’d had death threats. I had already been beaten up once. I didn’t even think it was loaded. I just kept it in case I got jumped, so I could scare people off.”
Marvin paused, and then in a breaking but emphatic voice, he spoke. “I never fired a shot that day. I swear that I did not.” He stopped. “For years now people ha
ve been hounding me. I used to get calls in the middle of the night from people telling me that I killed four kids. The police arrested me that day because some of the students attacked me and I pulled out the gun to scare them. But the police report shows that no bullets were fired from my gun. I know people think the report was all fixed by the FBI. What answer can I have to endless paranoia? There is no answer.” He shrugged, and looked down.
“Look, I admit I was an awkward, stupid jerk. That I should have disappeared after everyone made it clear they didn’t want me around. I don’t blame them! I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but the FBI ruined people’s lives. I am sorry I gave them photos. And I am truly sorry for what happened that day, which I witnessed and will never forget. Our kids murdered by our other kids. For no good reason.”
Marvin’s speech, true or not, was the most vital moment in the film. Meadow framed it, set it up, gave Marvin the last word. Because his was the best.
* * *
In the first cut of her film, the professor looked like something out of The Crucible and Marvin looked like a victim. Meadow edited it again to make it more complex—she placed a convincing and weeping and nearly contrite Guardsman at the very end, after Marvin. Meadow thought that it was okay, this interaction with real lives. Look, look. It’s okay. She was raising questions, and if they made people uncomfortable, all the better.
She filmed one more scene. Her cameraman filmed Meadow editing with her photogenic assistant, Kyle. The camera showed Meadow and Kyle watching a playback: the professor clip followed by the Marvin bit.
Meadow says, “Marvin’s so convincing but it isn’t just about Marvin. Can you call up the Guardsman who admits guilt?” Kyle nods. “Let’s slip him in at the end. Make him the last word to complicate Marvin’s story a little.”
“What about one of the survivor students?” Kyle says.
“Naw. We all know how we feel about them.”
“What?”
“Bad. We feel bad about the students. They feel bad. It is too easy. The Guardsman? Marvin? We feel bad in a more interesting way. Let’s end with them.”
Then the film shows a repetition of the crying Guardsman, and then the film ends. Meadow knew this was a fake ending, but it was a fake ending that admitted its fakeness instead of hiding it. Then she thought it too jarring to have herself only at the end. She and Kyle went back and inserted film and audio of her throughout. Her questions. The back of her head as she worked to animate still photos. Her filming new footage on the quad. She showed some of the strings, but not all of them, of course—it was still a highly constructed thing. An essay more than a neutral rendering. It had a point of view. A film is an idea about the world. Meadow thought of it like that, but she also knew that people can know something and visual images will override anything they know. Cinema truth is deceptive that way. It can tell you something but show you something very different. And you can bet you will walk away believing in what you saw. She thought she should make this problem an explicit part of her film. The way to manage a problem is not to solve it, which is impossible, but make the problem the material of the film.
After a few weeks, she had Kyle go back and cut out all the scenes of her. The fake footage watching her watch her own movie was too similar to her strategy on the Deke film. All that self-reflexivity seemed narcissistic to her and, well, too obvious. After all, the title said “A Film by Meadow Mori” right on it. Of course it was cut a certain way, constructed by her. Of course it had fraught objectivity; it was constructed of first-person points of view.
Kent State: Recovered took four years to research, shoot, edit, and promote. When it finally was shown, she waited for people to say it was manipulative and false. Objections. But that’s not what happened. Maybe it had something to do with the timing: the film was first shown in September, right after President Bush launched the initial stages of Desert Storm. War was on everyone’s mind, and Kent State: Recovered struck a nerve with some critics. It won several prizes, and in the winter, after everyone watched the clinical footage of the Desert Storm air strikes, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Carrie was the first one to call.
“I can’t believe it!” Carrie screamed into the phone. Meadow laughed. “I mean, I can believe it because you’re a total genius, but I mean I can’t believe that the world finally caught on. Oh, Jesus, you know what I mean.” Carrie screamed again. “Tell me everything,” she said.
“Some interviews and write-ups. Runs scheduled in LA, New York, and San Francisco.”
“That’s great!” she said.
“Yeah,” Meadow said. “How’s your movie going?” Carrie’s student short, Girl School, won enough prizes that Carrie was able to find backing from a small independent production company to make a feature-length film based on it. She had asked Meadow to work on Girl School, but Meadow said she was too busy. The truth was that Meadow thought it was a little silly, and the way Carrie planned to film and edit it was too conventional and boring to her.
“Great,” Carrie said. “We start shooting in three weeks.”
Meadow took Kyle to the awards as her date, and they had fun because they were pretty certain they would lose (although Meadow had a breathless moment when the nominees were being read). In the last few weeks, some people in the Academy and in various established critical circles objected to the fictional footage and animations used in the film. It wasn’t a “true” documentary. It didn’t matter; she was now making films that people would watch. No longer just a kid fooling around. Not everything changed for Meadow, not the way she thought it might. The problems of making films were still there; it didn’t make her any better. But now she had this thing, this credential, and it helped her get money, get access, get trust.
Aborted Desoto Film Project
While working on Kent, she remembered an underground filmmaker she had first heard about in high school, Bobby Desoto. He made some amazing short films in 1970 and 1971, but he was mostly famous for vanishing after a protest bombing he was involved with in 1972. Meadow attempted to locate him. She spent some time in California, where he grew up, and then later in the Northwest. But she couldn’t get anyone to talk to her. Not his family and not his friends. It was a dead end, and she gave up on it. However it wasn’t a total waste of time: she ended up using clips from his films in Kent State: Recovered.
Play Truman (1993)
Meadow made Play Truman quickly. It was a short speculative film essay about the dropping of the second atomic bomb. Historical footage of Truman and Nagasaki were intercut with an actor in a room, which was Meadow herself in a suit as Truman. She read from Truman’s journal. As Meadow went into Truman’s biography, she showed archival film clips of regular people in their homes, rare films made in the early part of the century with very early hobby cameras, which she hoped conveyed a sense of the American middle-class security that Truman came from. She intercut these with home films of 1940s ordinary Japanese people—not exactly home films, but they appeared that way: a woman in a garden, children playing. She used intertitles and tinted some of the images to make them individual but also of a piece. As she showed these images, she read from Truman’s journal to show how he made the case to himself that the continued fire-bombing of cities was worse than dropping an atom bomb. She let her Truman make his case, but the dropping of the second bomb gave the lie to most of the reasons. Still she caught, somehow, the way this unimaginable and world-changing power fell into Truman’s hands, a man who didn’t even know the bomb existed before his predecessor died. She felt his raw humanness melt away as he decided who would live and who would die. It made her shudder, pretending to be Truman. The film was her hybrid projection, a leap from her earlier reenactments to something else. And no one knew what to make of it. It was fantasia more than documentary, and it hardly got shown, won no prizes. It was clearly not what people wanted from her after her Kent Stat
e film, which made her feel pleased in a complicated way.
