When I first heard about a local screening of Nina Davenport's documentary Parallel Lines, a smart-assed post title formed in my mind: "88 Lines about 44 Women." Which it wasn't, precisely, although like the Nails, Davenport assembles a litany of the [extra]ordinary people she meets on her cross-country road trip to New York City in late fall 2001. Her first work on video, Davenport's film is beautifully shot. Its scrolling sere landscapes [captured by various car-mounted cameras] are reminiscent of the stark cinematography in Herzog's Stroszek.
Some background: Davenport's apartment on 14th Street in Manhattan has a south-facing view, but on September 11, 2001, the director of Hello Photo and Always a Bridesmaid was a continent away, on a freelance assignment in San Diego. When the job ended, she faced the prospect of returning to the city with dread and decided to take the long way home: six weeks spent wending across the continent on "small" roads, asking the people she met about their thoughts on the terrorist attacks. Her only objective was to spend New Year's Eve with her city, in Times Square. Knit together by Davenport's ruminative voice-over, the resulting vignettes are milemarkers as she traces the parallel lines on the highway to the ones that are missing in New York.
Disallusioned with and alienated by the swell of monolithic patriotism that overtook the country immediately after the attacks, Davenport gravitates to veterans and loners and other sorrowful inhabitants of a nation still anything but united. Invariably, people's answers to her question, "Tell me about 9/11," take the form of autobiography. Her Navajo guide to Monument Valley remembers having his mouth washed out with soap for speaking Navajo at reservation schools. A guard at the Arch in St. Louis confides how he'd been moved to reconnect with a lost love from high school. An earnest sci-fi nerd in Frederickstown, MO, explains his personal connection to the attacks as a member of the Kiss Army: the terrorists hit Gene's hometown. Two men in Waco, TX, shrug and point out that the country was built on exploitation of others. At the museum at Los Alamos, an elderly couple who had worked on the Manhattan Project draw parallels, umprompted, between the mushroom cloud and the towers' collapse. On Christmas Eve, a Birmingham, AL, department-store Santa speaks of his Mrs. Claus, who died from pulmonary fibrosis before she could get a lung transplant.
Come to think of it, there may be 44 moustaches in the film. There were enough anyway that I began to wonder what Davenport's dad looked like. In addition to Santa, the Cajun ex-Marine [a frightening concept] who took her through the Louisiana bayou on a motorboat had one. So did the rabbit-hunting can scavenger in Deering, MO, who shyly explains to the filmmaker that "Living in the city, you can't see what's coming." The Ohio gun nut, who accessorizes his moustache with camo gear, upsets every knee-jerk assumption by revealing a startling depth of forgiveness for his father and compassion for the women and children of Afghanistan.
Rooster, an eyepatch-wearing cowboy in Bandera, TX, has a beaut of a 'stache. He lets his Marlboro Man veneer slip after a couple morning tallboys to reveal he is dying of cancer. Another broken vet, he lives with his mother, who, it is implied, took the justifiable homicide rap after he shot his abusive father when he was a boy. I'm still thinking about Rooster.
Davenport doesn't flinch when father and son segregationists in Chickasaw explain why Selma is no place for a little girl like her, especially after dark, or run away once the Finsteresque senior citizen making outsider-art topiary in his yard threatens to call the police, or stumble as she follows Steve into the woods outside Santa Fe while he lucidly explains how post-traumatic stress disorder after Vietnam destroyed his relationships and prompted him to remove himself from the grid, from polite society. There is anguish in his voice. The director's guileless trust in her intuition leads her to approach and sometimes follow these men, rehearsing in miniature the nation's heartbreaking, innocent, dangerous belief in the essential goodness of others.
If the men Davenport meets seem alone and unmoored, the women are tightly tethered to their fates and families. A Costa Rican bride weeps with homesickness and worry for her baby's future. A mother stuck in Los Vegas has had her children taken away and can't afford to visit her grandparents in New York. Teenaged Rebecca, encountered in a laundromat in West Virginia, confides that she is expecting her boyfriend's child. He's 61; she loves him because he doesn't beat her. A Tulsa waitress no longer thinks of the future now that her husband has abandoned her and their children. And the visitors' guide at the Murrah Building memorial in Oklahoma City, the only planned stop on Davenport's itinerary, explains how an appointment kept her from her desk that morning. The woman speaks achingly about her struggles with survivor guilt with a hard-won eloquence.
The filmmaker's survivor guilt comes through in her voice-overs and seems to intensify as she visits the site of the crashes in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. There is also a brief brush with homeland security in Washington, where her car-mounted cameras [and the gas-mask her mom sent her] attract suspicion. Her arrival in New York comes as a relief, provoking the same cycle of anxiety and exhalation that any establishing shot of the New York skyline now inspires. [When was this filmed? Will they be there?] The giddyness of the New Year's Eve revelers in midtown gives way to the somber faces of Ground Zero visitors on New Year's Day. Davenport keeps her camera on the people, unable to bring herself to document the ruins. A still photographer next to her slowly breaks down as he explains that he, too, photographs people to try and understand, because indirectly is the only way he can look at this tragedy.
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A lesser tragedy is our short attention span. Davenport, who was present at the screening the cinetrix attended, has been able to sell her film everywhere--Europe, Latin America, the UK--but the United States. Even though she purposefully avoided "9/11" or similar language in the title, somehow television outlets here seem to think the moment for a film like hers has passed.
If only.
