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. senators.
We could have made a movie about the national parties clashing over control of Congress, but made a conscious decision to go local (for the most part) and stick there. I think it was a bit of a risk, but we’ll see how it pays off.
I worked for a long time in theatrical distribution before making this film and I never envied any of the filmmakers I met that anxious week prior to the theatrical open. How will the reviews be? Will anyone buy tickets? Will they like it? You just never know and, at a certain point, there’s just not much you can do about it.
In advance of our opening, I’ve been (literally) crisscrossing the country screening the film for hundreds of people in grand movie palaces and a few handful in makeshift theaters in cafes. At each stop audiences seem to understand why we decided to lace the film with multiple “Bad Histories” as opposed to telling one unified story. During a phone interview the other day, the writer I was speaking with told me that "Gerrymandering" eminded him of the Greil Marcus quote about the “old weird America.”
This was very exciting as Marcus’ idea was definitely in air along with Pynchon during production and shows that, at least for some, the really weird stuff that makes our very odd nation hum pokes through the surface of a film about district lines. So far, so good. Now, we wait.