Tobaccuh Country

When I was watching Bright Leaves I kept the blog post prompt in mind: “discuss elements of his [McElwee's] style that you might like to adopt or shed for your own purposes.”

‘What?’ I kept thinking, ‘That’s impossible.’ This guy has an incredibly rich family history, and I’m just some boring guy from New Jersey. How could I possibly hope to find a topic that is that engaging?’ However, as the end credits rolled, I realized that maybe George McElwee was just another ordinary man. The filmmaker put his ancestor up on a pedestal, made us believe that he was the righteous paragon of virtue, the Gary Cooper, while James B. Duke was the sniveling empire-stealing tycoon (as if there weren’t enough reasons to hate Duke University already). My favorite scene, however, came at the end: it turns out that maybe Duke didn’t steal anything but rather was more willing to embrace machine cigarettes than McElwee was. For me, there was an inkling of this coming, especially when people like the film theorist and  Patricia Neal kept wondering why McElwee was so obsessed with a long forgotten Hollywood melodrama.

What makes that scene so great is that it cements that McElwee’s family really might not have been out of the ordinary, and it gives me faith that there are fabula in my life that can be expanded in such a way and turned into a compelling subject. McElwee’s insistence on his great-grandfather’s importance, his tireless pursuit of a legend that it turns out does not exist, is an element that takes this film far. I think through the tapestry of my family history and wonder if I could find such an expansion. My grandfather’s ship getting struck by a kamikaze in WWII? My grandmother coming to America at age 2 to escape the pogroms? These seem like events that millions of  Americans could write about, but if I could find a way to expand them, as McElwee does with his ancestors, they could turn into compelling subjects.

But the duality of George McElwee by itself does not make this film, because Ross McElwee also delves into the various addictions of North Carolina: The addiction to cigarettes, obviously, but also the addiction to growing tobacco, a profitable crop that nonetheless kills millions every year. Any filmmaker could look at this subject,  but McElwee’s personalization of it made me care more. His family history allowed him to be completely even handed with the subject and allowed me as the viewer to feel for his dilemma and really get something out of this film. That, then, is something I could consider doing: Find an ordinary story and ordinary case study, embellish both of them, and turn the result into a working essay film. Sure sounds easier than uncovering the scoop of the century.