Time Travel to the 80s American Empire
Did you ever want to time travel back to America in the 1980s?
Director McElwee is a pioneer in the field of incel live-streaming, showing a raw feed of his mishaps with women bookended with voiceover about the hopelessness of politics.
Did you ever want to hear the voices and see the real faces of another world lost to time? When you go back with director Ross McElwee in his documentary Sherman’s March (a proto-YouTube vlog from the 80s) you might be shocked to find a foreign country. People look and sound differently, and the pace of life is alien. The movies all had happy endings, there’s no iPhones, and everyone smoked.
You’ve seen The 80s in dozens of movies like Back to the Future, Coming to America, and Scarface, but that’s a Hollywood simulacrum of the 80s. This is the real deal; an unfiltered, candid, unscripted time travelogue into the heyday of the American Empire.
Though time travel is only one of the joys of McElwee’s project. When the doc begins and McElwee sets off to follow General Sherman’s march of destruction through the South, you think you’re in for some good old-fashioned Ken Burns fun, something that would play on the History Channel when you were a kid. But there’s a turn. A couple minutes in you realize this isn’t going to be a standard history doc with slow pans and pushes on black & white archival stills of uniformed soldiers. McElwee tells us — over an intimate narration which might’ve been recorded with his head on a pillow — that his girlfriend has just dumped him, and his journey South is now one motivated by love as much as historiography.
So he heads South in a broken down jalopy, reconnecting with women from his past and meeting new ones, and at each stop along the way he weaves William Tecumseh Sherman’s story with his own. He visits a battleground before another breakup. He gets lectured on what a woman wants to hear while walking through the ruins of a fort in which the Union General lived. McElwee sets off to show you the history of another time, but he actually shows you the anthropology of his time.
One by one you meet the beautiful, tragic, flawed but terribly alive women that float in and out of McElwee’s orbit. Like Sherman, McElwee leaves destruction in his wake as he travels South, the destruction of lost romances, subtle rejections, mixed signals, and fleeting affections. He’s not the ideal Casanova to be sure; McElwee is rejected more times than he does the rejecting. But this makes for a more interesting story. If he was only a successful playboy breaking hearts across the South, there wouldn’t be much of a documentary, it would just be a good summer for McElwee. No, this way, with McElwee as hopeless (sometimes pitiful) romantic, there’s more to chew on as McElwee is left to confront his own limitations and talk through them with us, usually from the confines of his dark bedroom.
But it’s not as dreary as it sounds. In between these moments of self-reflection, McElwee sets out on new adventures through the green and explosive South, sometimes with gun-toting doomsday prepper patriots who blow up dynamite while they give conservative soliloquies in the wilderness, and sometimes with red-faced young women in preppy clothes who show McElwee their eccentric dances at country clubs. McElwee is nothing if not resilient; his projects denies him the wallowing of heartbreak. He’s always on the move. It becomes clear why the documentary’s official subheading is “A Meditation upon the Possibilities of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.”
McElwee’s vlog through the South shows you the intimate details of a person’s life that you shouldn’t be able to see, memories of a special place and a special someone that most people keep for just themselves. Sometimes you wish to avert your eyes, to give privacy back to the subjects. Sometimes, especially in a moment of rejection, you want to reach through the screen and shake some sense into McElwee. How could such a brilliant director be such a blundering lover? He’s meek when he should be firm and self-effacing when he should be passionate, yet he always manages to get the shot, and you can’t help but like the guy as he pours his self-pitying heart out to you in the darkness of his motel bedroom. Director McElwee is a pioneer in the field of incel live-streaming, showing a raw feed of his mishaps with women bookended with voiceover about the hopelessness of politics.
And if time travel and love diaries aren’t your speed, there’s still plenty of history in Sherman’s March. He gives a portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman as an insecure, conflicted man. To the Southerners, he’s Genghis Khan, burning and pillaging his way across their land. And yet historical accounts show him to have a sensitivity and fondness for the South. He loved the land and its people. To Northerners, Sherman is half a turncoat who showed too much sympathy for the backwards Southerners and who only redeemed his failed military career with this destructive march to the sea. McElwee’s companions suggest war is not as glorious as it is in the movies. It’s a tragedy for everyone involved. Many of these soldiers died before they had their first sweetheart, a Southern woman tells us. They didn’t have the opportunity for self-actualizing love that McElwee had, yet McElwee must notice this distinction because he’s not greedy with his love lessons. He shares all his soul-searching with us; we get to benefit and learn from his mishaps and frailties. Maybe we see shades of ourselves in him, memories of our own summer romances.
Despite its unfortunate origins in war crimes and romantic rejections, there’s something for everyone in Sherman’s March. But for me, the opportunity of a time capsule was gold. Like found footage, Sherman’s March shows one unemployed man’s daily adventure in the 1980s South in every beautiful and disorganized detail. It gave me nostalgia for a time I never saw.
Disagree with my take? Let me know at mvs2132@columbia.edu
Originally published on Substack.
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