White Man's Burden
Elizabeth Thompson
Tells the Tale of a
Reformed White Supremacist in Blink
- Interview by K.M.
Soehnlein. Reprinted with permission from Release Print: The Magazine
of the Film Arts Foundation (www.filmarts.org),
July/August 2000 issue.
In 1996 Elizabeth
Thompson read an article in San Francisco Focus magazine about Greg Withrow,
a high profile white supremacist-the hand-picked protegÈ of White Aryan
Resistance leader Tom Metzger-who had turned his back on the movement
and renounced its ideology. The story of Withrow's conversion was dramatic:
he had fallen in love with a woman whose parents had fled Nazi Germany,
and through their relationship he'd come to see the error of his ways.
Withrow's white supremacist comrades lashed out at him; in one widely
reported incident, he was beaten, knifed and nailed to a board by a gang
of skinheads-a "crucifixion" that made his transformation complete.
Thompson, a Bay Area
documentary producer whose credits include David Collier's For Better
or for Worse, recognized in Withrow's story the stuff of compelling filmmaking.
Though Withrow was living in hiding somewhere in Northern California,
Thompson tracked him down through the Anti-Defamation League, which had
raised money for Withrow to have his swastika tattoos surgically removed.
After several phone conversations marked by Withrow's suspicions about
her intentions, Thompson was invited for a visit-with explicit instructions
not to tell anyone where she was going.
This initial paranoia
would play itself out again and again over the four and half years it
took Thompson to make Blink, her one-hour documentary about Withrow's
life and the larger issues surrounding it. Filmmaker and subject alike
had to wade through a morass of what Thompson now refers to as "some pretty
serious trust issues." Withrow, ambivalent about exposing himself on camera,
dropped out of the film several times; Thompson, struggling with a growing
conviction that Withrow was lying to her about key points of his biography,
constantly had to regain his confidence, even as she was doubting his
story. The journey from their initial phone call to the film's national
television debut this month on P.O.V. was a long and bumpy road that Thompson
says has left her feeling "like I've given birth to Rosemary's Baby."
Though she may look
at her creation and, like Mia Farrow in the Polanski film, wonder what
in hell she has just delivered, Thompson need not worry. Blink is a mesmerizing
portrait of a tormented man attempting to rebuild an identity. It's also
an intellectually deft examination of how extreme racism is played out
in the American media.
In attempting to push
beyond the tidy before-and-after conversion story relayed in the press,
Thompson inexorably delved into Withrow's psyche-an unsettling place to
be. Greg Withrow is a man who at certain moments displays a finely tuned
emotional intelligence-as when he recalls his fearsome alcoholic father
threatening to throw a pot of boiling water on him if he didn't beat up
a black friend he'd brought home from school. "I was taught to fear long
before I was taught to hate," Withrow tells Thompson. This is the Withrow
whose Latina wife and Latino best friend testify to his revived spirit,
his triumph over a racist past. But there's also the Withrow who, recounting
his days in youth prison, recites: "What do you call a conservative? A
liberal who's been mugged. What do you call a racist? A conservative who's
been raped and beaten"-in such a resolute tone of voice that you are left
wondering just how successfully he has outrun his demons.
In order to bridge
the gap between the reformed Withrow and the haunted Withrow, Thompson
employs stylized, lyrical footage designed to interpret her subject's
inner landscape: high-contrast black and white images of Withrow's daily
martial arts regimen; color-saturated Super-8 footage of the park in San
Francisco's Chinatown where Withrow, as a homeless teenager, spent lonely
nights; re-staged scenes of a gang of skinheads romping through an urban
landscape. The filmmaker also turns occasionally to talking-head interviews
with writers like Jessie Daniels, author of White Lies-writers who wrap
Withrow's story, and the mainstream media's depiction of it, in an intellectual
bundle.
Blink is Thompson's
first solo directing effort. In addition to working as a producer, she
is an oft-employed documentary D.P., and has shot for a variety of projects
including Regret to Inform, Rachel's Daughters and Means of Grace. Her
documentary path began years ago, when she was asked by a co-worker at
her Silicon Valley job what she would do if she could choose any job she
wanted. "I blurted out, 'Oh, I think I'd be a documentary filmmaker,'"
Thompson remembers. "I didn't really know what I was talking about, but
I couldn't get it out of my head." A seed had been planted; she eventually
left her job, enrolled in Stanford's documentary film program and set
up her own production company.
Saving her highest
praise for the crew that made Blink possible-editor Elizabeth Finlayson,
cameramen Adam Beckman, Michael Anderson and Tom Harting, sound recordist
Kevin Brown and sound designers Spencer Critchley and Marco D'Ambrosio-Thompson
is notably more tentative in discussing her subject. One senses the personal
toll of being in such close contact with a prickly, even volatile character
like Withrow, and perhaps a certain caution in discussing him beyond the
balanced artistic portrait she worked so tirelessly to create.
Thompson talked to
Release Print in May, at a cafÈ near her home in Palo Alto, California.
RP: What was your
interest in this story?
I'm interested in
making sense of violence on a very personal level, and I'm also interested
in the question of transformation and what that means-and this seemed
like a very dramatic display of transformation. I was also interested
in the way racism plays out in the American imagination. How is it that
one goes from fear to paranoia to hate, to the point where violence against
an entire group of people makes logical sense to someone?
I assume you didn't
bring a camera and tape recorder to your first meeting with Greg Withrow.
Trust has really been
the most challenging, the most delicate aspect of this process. On the
one hand Greg has been exploited by the media; on the other hand he knows
how to exploit the media. He gets into this dance of wanting media attention,
but then feeling deeply victimized by how his story is sensationalized.
Even though he participates, he ends up feeling angry about it as well.
The media has told his story in very black and white terms, which never
feels fair to anybody. I wanted him to understand that the kind of documentaries
I make are different from these "bad guy turns good guy" stories on TV.
There's a scene where
he's in his car with his martial arts sensei, and you're in the back seat
shooting him, which struck me as more intimate even than being in his
house or on his property. You're in his daily flow at this point.
That's an astute observation,
because actually before that shoot we'd had a falling out. Just to back
up: Every April of every year he dropped out of the film, and it would
take a couple of months of my writing letters and him returning them,
then going up there and spending time with him and his wife and talking
things through. In any case, to answer your question, I arrived two days
in advance just to get back on track. We went on a long walk to talk about
things. I think he felt that-it's a very classic documentary problem-he
felt that I was wanting him to perform for the camera, and I felt that
he was acting for the camera and it was inauthentic. We had to get together
to talk about that. But as a result, I did get some more intimate moments,
like in the back of the car. He tended to trust me when I took the time
to be very clear about what I intended.
I was intrigued by
the fact that early in the film you interviewed him standing up in his
house. It struck me as a very dynamic way to see him.
Part of the way he
expresses himself is through this physicality. The way he occupies space-you
see his rage. But it was also a question of trust. His experience had
been with the networks that go in there, sit him down in a chair, mic
him, set up the three-point lighting and hold him there for an hour or
two. I asked him which he would prefer. He preferred to be able to walk
away if he wanted to, or to sit on the ground if he wanted to. So I chose
to put a lavalier mic on him, not do the three point-lighting and just
do it hand-held. To give him more freedom.
You went to Northern
California over the course of four years. How many times did you visit?
When he initially
agreed to the project, I went up there right away. I thought, I'm going
to get some footage in the can, as much as I can, just in case, and I'll
use that to cut together a sample reel. I had ideas stylistically about
how I wanted to tell the film, but I wasn't sure it was going to work,
to combine this very evocative, more intuitive footage with this very
raw, hand-held interview. Then it was about a year and a half before I
went back, because I got sick with chicken pox and then mono, back to
back. I was going through a whole existential crisis because I was suddenly
unable to work or raise money for the film. Really, when I wrote the ITVS
proposal for funding, I was on my last leg. I thought, if I don't get
money, I'll just cut together a short piece and be done with it. But then
when I did get the money, there were four or five more shoots, something
like that.
At what point did
you realize you wanted to include the more poetic footage?
The poetic footage
is really to signal the audience that this is an interior film. This is
about the dance between the inside and the outside. Let me back up and
say something: I did not always trust what he was telling me. Halfway
through the film I started to have some serious doubts about the way the
more dramatic elements of his story were reported in the press. But the
one thing I did trust was that there was some emotional logic that was
authentic and real. There was some truth in that. I was trying to connect
with his own self-mythologizing, how he perceives the world, the narrative
he creates about his world. I wanted to evoke the feeling of being in
the [white power] movement, for example, with the footage of skinheads.
I didn't have any literal footage of him in the movement and I didn't
really want to go there. It was really about evoking the emotional truth
behind that kind of rage and alienation.
So did you round up
a bunch of skinheads to shoot those scenes?
They weren't skinheads.
One of them's a Buddhist monk, a couple of them are gay, I think there
might have been one Jewish guy. It was a really fun shoot, because it
was shot without sound, and they were really nice guys. When I was directing
it I was trying to get them angry at the world. They were shouting as
they were running around, but they were shouting things like, "I fucking
love you, brother!" and "You fucking Nazi, why can't you love the world?"
Getting back to the
issue of truth, the big question that emerges about Greg's story is whether
or not his "crucifixion" happened. You have an interview with a former
friend who says that if it happened, Greg did it to himself. Then you
show the Donohue footage, where Phil Donohue is pointing to the scar on
Greg's hand, and you can't see any scar there.
But the audience is
going, "Yeah, I see it, I see it!"
The crucifixion seems
like a topic you would have to raise very tactfully.
Yeah, because it's
a really big part of his story. I did ask him about it a couple of different
times and just did not trust his answer. I doubted the veracity of his
story, but on the other hand I didn't want to bog down the film in the
question of "Did he do it, or did he not do it?" And I also didn't want
to provide a venue for his lies. It became more interesting to me when
I started to suspect that he had staged it somehow, because it made me
wonder what was going on in this man's soul that he would rig this. How
does this fit into the larger narrative that he is living by? Why is it
that violence holds out this promise of transformation? How does this
fit into white supremacist thinking? It was an interesting way of looking
at how the media represents racism and racists. People are always looking
for the "full recovery" story. He bought into that.
In your interview
with Jessie Daniels, she suggests that someone like Greg Withrow, in his
redemption, lets everyone else off the hook.
Precisely. And it
relieves him of having to take real action aimed at addressing social
inequities. He was punished; he was crucified. And then he is returned
to a state of innocence, so he never has to take responsibility for what
he's done. When he left the movement and was held up as this role model
for anti-racism, and relieved of all the damage he'd done based on the
nature of the attack-because it was a crucifixion-he then rebuilt his
life based on this story. It replaced his identity.
So many of the milestones
in his life were through the media. He met his wife because she'd seen
him on TV. Earlier, he'd met Tom Metzger when he was invited to talk on
Metzger's TV show about a white student group he'd formed.
At a certain point
I realized that one of Greg's motivations in making this film was just
to have a beginning, middle and end to the story. But because it took
so long to make the film, it necessarily became messier and messier, and
I kept asking increasingly more subtle questions, and this became uncomfortable
for him. On the one hand I think he wants the truth told, because it's
hard for anybody to live by a story that's not accurate or true. On the
other hand he's fairly fragile, and it's hard for him to see himself in
an ambiguous way.
Has he seen the film?
Yes. Initially he
did not like it. We're not in contact now, so I've just heard from his
wife and the sensei. I think he's saying now that he does like it. Since
completing the film he has acknowledged staging the crucifixion.
He acknowledged it
to other people?
Just to me.
You're not in contact
because it was left badly between you?
We had an incident
over the phone where he was verbally abusive, and I said I didn't want
to carry on a relationship if that's the way he was going to be.
Making a film about
an individual is so different from making a film that examines many people,
or an institution. Everything depends on your relationship with that one
person.
It's a delicate relationship.
One has to remain respectful, no matter how one feels about the subject.
That was a challenge for me because there were times when I had doubts
about the way he represented himself. The only way he'd seen himself represented
in the media was in a very dramatic way. When he was in the movement he
was made out to be more evil, and therefore more powerful, than he actually
was. When he was "crucified" and absolved of all guilt, he was granted
a kind of innocence greater than he actually deserved. I think he wasn't
prepared for my telling a subtle film. It was a challenge-trying to walk
this middle line, trying to find the humanity in his story, without absolving
him, without condemning him. It was like making a poetic film about a
jackhammer.
He tells some very
gripping stories. There's the childhood story of his father forcing him
to beat up his black friend. After he finishes telling that story, he
says, "Then I went back into my father's house and was praised." It's
so eloquent. It's almost biblical.
As filmmakers we all
know of great stories, but often the person who went through it is flat
and uninteresting. But Greg's a good storyteller. There's also a downside
to that. He's full of shit sometimes. He embellishes his stories. Again,
it speaks to his self-mythologizing, this nostalgic myth-making that he
engages in, about his father, about his white ancestors, a time when white
men were unchallenged. If you're a white male you're born with a certain
set of expectations, certain entitlements, but because we consider ourselves
a classless society, there's this invisible but very real barrier based
on class that someone like Greg is never going to transcend. I think there's
an explosive frustration, and also a level of shame, that comes from that.
Can you explain the
film's title?
I was looking for,
initially, those moments when one wakes up and sees one's life in a direct
way, free of all the stories and narratives that we place in our lives.
I also wanted to call into question the idea that one changes in the blink
of an eye, permanently. I wanted to point to change as a dynamic process;
transformation is not a fait accompli, it's not a state that one reaches;
it's constantly evolving. It also has something to do with the capacity
to endure ambiguity about one's self in the world. There are those moments
when he did see life in a more complex way. He hasn't stayed there-I mean,
he's still struggling.
That brings me to
Sylvia, the woman he fell in love with, who turned him around, although
their relationship eventually didn't work out. She's very much a part
of his narrative, with her parents having gone through the Holocaust.
Well, her parents
did not go through the Holocaust. They were German intellectuals. They
were Gentiles; they were not Jewish. It's hard to make that clear in the
film. In fact, it makes it more interesting to me, because here he idealizes
German folk and the Nazi era, and then he meets this woman whose parents
were German folk and said "no," and objected to Nazi policies and left.
From the way he talks
about Sylvia, you realize that Greg is who he is, on some level, because
he simply has not been loved, has not had joy in his life. It's quite
powerful.
There are people who
have objected to the beauty shots in that section, but what I was trying
to get at was that even if you are a violent neo-Nazi, love still can
be transformative. Even if it's not permanent, you do have that moment
of feeling alive and feeling related to the world through another person.
I used that footage to evoke the feeling of falling in love. You see a
woman on a swing, her hair swooshing through the frame, and flowers and
this cloud spinning and trees spinning. I was trying to evoke the moment
when there wasn't this rigid separation between Greg and the rest of the
world.
What reactions have
you had when you've screened the film at festivals?
The response has been
positive, and it's heartening to hear some of the questions that come
up, because I can see that people are really paying attention and thinking
about it in an interesting way. But I don't know if that's because you
get a selective audience at festivals, people who like independent films
and are liberal-minded. So far it's been overwhelmingly positive.
So are you ready to
make another film?
Oh, God. It was so
emotionally and intellectually challenging. I feel quite depleted. It
was often like being in the middle of a wilderness of mirrors and trying
to find some truth in that.
Blink airs in the
Bay Area at 10 pm on July 18 on the PBS series P.O.V.
K.M. Soehnlein's novel,
The World of Normal Boys (www.normalboys.com),
will be published in September.
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