Timothy Stueve
The documentary The American Question follows Guy Seemann, a political analyst, as he interviews a variety of Americans throughout the course of the last eight years. The titular question is presented from the film’s beginning—has America become culturally divided to the point it will fracture? Or will American culture renew a grand narrative to unify itself? The film explores this question with political experts and historians, contrasting their answers with those of everyday Americans living in swing voter districts. We cut from the average Joe sharing his political perspective as informed by his surroundings to experts sitting in offices and studies giving us an intellectualized context for America’s current political situations.
The elephant in the room is Trumpism. The real question for much of the film is the following: Why is it that so many Americans support? By creating a dichotomy between the experts and the voters, the film ironically recreates the exact sort of dichotomy that fuels the Trumpian ideology: the opinions of the average citizen are devalued, while the elites get to tell them what is “correct”. For some reason, the fancy infographic animations in these sorts of documentaries only seem to appear when someone with a PhD is speaking.
But that’s not to say this film was made with bad intentions— on the contrary, I believe this film’s heart was in the right place and I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. What the film never engages in is a mocking or superior tone, which has become, at this point, a popular mode of non-fiction filmmaking. In fact, this year’s highest grossing non-fiction film, Am I Racist? makes for a compelling point of contrast: a film that presumes its viewership’s perspective and mocks its subjects.
The American Question contains numerous, genuinely compelling interviews and subjects. In on way, the film buries the lede: its most compelling attribute is the fact that all of the interviews with average citizens are recreated several years later. Although the documentary does not make its own timeline terribly clear, the repeated interviews can be clearly demarcated by being either pre- or post-pandemic. We hear the concerns of interview subjects, such as a white highschooler in Hazelton, Pennsylvania who explains why his family threw their support behind Trump in 2016’s election, and then some years later we see him interviewed again as a college student who seems to retain some fundamentally conservative political ideals but has now interacted with all sorts of different perspectives which he can appreciate as well.
This journey towards open-mindedness is repeated in many, but not all, of the interviewees. This will likely be the most appealing aspect of the film to many, as the recovery from the pandemic gives the more recent interviews an optimistic tone. There are also some very compelling experts advocating for ways that radicalization and stratification can be combated. While the film’s central answer of “community” can be frustratingly ambiguous, the film offers some surprisingly concrete and compelling examples of this solution. I was particularly compelled by a discussion of the “erosion of the four pillars of American civil society”, à la Robert Putnam, those four being: religious congregations, political parties, unions, and newspapers. Each of these pillars was a way for individuals to participate in civic engagement, and without widespread participation in these pillars today, how will civic engagement occur? Pair this with the way the film documents the opening up of a local art center in Hazelton and you have the film at its best: linking research with concrete examples. In fact, the film’s greatest strength is not getting caught up in rhetoric around politics (the “culture war”) and honing in on people’s day-to-day realities. Its focus on the relationship between the erosion of labor unions and the rise of Trumpism is the strongest case the film makes.
These topics are introduced via Guy Seemann, who is not only the film’s producer, narrator, and the one conducting the film’s interviews—we also spend much of the runtime looking at his face, instead of the subjects of the film. Now, I am not opposed to self-insertion in documentaries in general. Some of the best non-fiction filmmakers do it: Werner Herzog, Theo Anthony, Adam Curtis and so on. But it is at its best when the documentarian becomes involved as a sort of necessary intrusion: the film’s narrator is thrust into its world out of necessity. A fine example can be found in Grizzly Man, where Herzog acknowledges that he will not play footage of the film’s subject, Timothy Treadwell, dying. He insists that the footage be destroyed instead.
The involvement of Seemann in The American Question is not out of necessity. The film even begins with him recounting some of his life story, saying that he is moving back to America from Israel in search of the root of division in American politics. This is somewhat unfortunate, as it sets up Seemann’s life as the frame narrative, as if the documentary itself is merely part of his journey rather than framing itself as taking the voice of the American populace. The film stages the everyman-style interviews as shot-reverse shot—constantly cutting back to Seemann’s reactions to what the subjects are saying, to the point that it feels as if we are seeing more of him than we are of the subjects. This is a formal issue, but it is one that threatens the impression that the film isn’t really about America or politics or empathy—it’s about him.
I don’t believe this was the film’s or director James Kicklighter’s intention, but the result interferes with the engagement between the viewer and the substance of the film. It is especially jarring when we receive images of Seemann moodily walking around desolate landscapes while we are hearing the film’s interviews. Ultimately, it does not stop the film from getting its point across, but when its point is made, it is constrained by our impressions of Seemann. It is simply a matter of getting out of one’s own way. Much of what The American Question is attempting to achieve is being achieved in a more direct manner by independent journalists such as Andrew Callahan who show their reactions during literal man-on-the-street interviews, but restrain from making the film about themselves. There is an age-old documentary technique which has still not failed us, which The American Question could have benefitted from: simply film the interviews without showing the interviewer. As it is, the film seems torn between being an extended Sunday Morning report or a Social Dilemma-style documentary.
All of that said, the film’s substance is especially pertinent following 2024’s election cycle which has Democrats scrambling, asking: what went wrong? What don’t we understand about the American voter? The American Question, though it is flawed, posits some concrete answers to those questions.
