A few years into the research for my new movie "Gerrymandering," which opens this weekend, I came across a quote from Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon":
“Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."
I wasn’t terribly surprised to find it. That book, as with so much of his writing, is focused on boundaries and delineations, both geographic and psychological.
Before finding the quote, I’d thought I was making an up-to-the-minute movie about the decennial war, between the two parties, that is redistricting. After I read it, the movie went in a very different direction.
We posted that quote on the wall of the edit room and it ended up onscreen as a graphic. (Immediately before we premiered at Tribeca I emailed Pynchon’s wife/literary agent letting them know we used the quote and she replied and asked for a DVD; I’m pretty sure I’ll go to my grave without knowing what he thought of it, but there’s something kind of appropriate in that.)
The quote became something of a guiding principle -- "Gerrymandering" opens with a made-up song set to a familiar tune, features a cast of, at times, weirdly named characters (both hallmarks of Pynchon) and, most importantly, continually detours into the odds and ends of history (also very Pynchon-esque). While making the film, I became obsessed with the “bad history” that redistricting often produces.
The term “gerrymandering” is derived from the name of one of our Founding Fathers, Elbridge Gerry. He had the unfortunate luck of being blamed by a political cartoonist for a partisan redistricting plan in which one particularly shady district looked like a salamander. Gerry didn’t draw the lines himself, but he did sign the plan into law; hence the gerrymander was born.
Elbridge was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, fought hard for our Bill of Rights and was even James Madison’s vice president, yet all we remember him for today (if at all) is a term for the manipulation of political district lines. And we don’t even say it right (it should be pronounced “gary-mandering” not “jerry-mandering”) -- Elbridge can’t catch a break.
We do want to change the way the U.S. handles redistricting, make no mistake about that; our current process is a relic from a much earlier age that disenfranchises voters across the country. But we tried to convince viewers of this necessity in a somewhat oblique fashion.
"Gerrymandering" has a central narrative that focuses on a redistricting reform effort in California (a similar approach to many contemporary documentaries), but, in many ways, the meat of the film is everything that happens around this story. I feel proud to be involved with a movie in which an armadillo race in a small central Florida town can rub elbows with the most famous movie star-turned-governor ever; where a man who won a City Council election by accident in a small Iowa town expresses similar concerns about democracy as former U.S.
