Then something emerged that she didn’t expect. People on both sides — the students (now in their thirties) and the Guardsmen (also in their thirties) mentioned a supposed agent provocateur. She remembered the article on her bulletin board and its description of this figure. There was one sentence about a student radical “some people suggested” worked for the FBI. They quoted a person who thought this man fired a shot at the National Guard, the one that made them turn, kneel, and shoot at the students. She discovered that there was a growing conspiracy at the center of some of the stories of that day. A saboteur, a boogeyman. Who was this provocateur, this fellow accused of causing all this violence? Maybe he was the responsible one. Not the students, clearly. But maybe it isn’t entirely the fault of the Guardsmen either.
“I saw him there, he had a gun. Right after the shooting, he said he had to shoot, had no choice,” said a Kent professor who had come out on the quad after the shots were fired. “He was arrested after, and I heard they released him. That he was working for the FBI.”
“What did he do?”
“He fired the shot that provoked the National Guard,” he said.
“You saw him?”
“No. But other people did.”
“You think the FBI infiltrated the Kent student protests?”
“Of course they had undercover people in there. The agents are always the ones urging everyone to violence and mayhem. They wanted to discredit the student activists.”
“But all they did was make the students into victims.”
The professor shrugged and smiled. “I didn’t say it was smart or effective. It was the FBI.”
But some of the members of the Guard also believed it.
“If you listen to the tape, the audiotape, you can hear a lone shot before we kneel and shoot.” It was true. There was no video, but an audiotape existed, made by a student doing a project in which he kept a tape recorder on his dorm room windowsill. It was very staticky — the audio version of grainy — full of pops and cracks. Meadow included it in the film, played it while showing a black screen. She put titles on the black screen to point to sounds. Somebody is talking and words appear in large typed letters as you hear them: You and after they come and taken and tell them and then when you hear the supposed shot, (gunshot), a pause of blank screen, (running), then a word that sounds faintly like ready. Then (garbled), seconds go by on blank screen, then (shots, screams).
It is true that the isolation of sounds on a blank screen can deceive, that anything isolated in a sense-depriving way can feel odd or wrong no matter the content. And suggesting what a sound is makes you hear that sound. Meadow knew that. She also knew that once the provocateur was mentioned, she would bring him up to each person she interviewed. She would sometimes put her question about him in the film. Other times she would discuss it with the person before the filming—you know what, several people have said this. And the person would get around to mentioning it when she filmed the person talking. But she already had fake film mixed with real film. Her film was a stylized, constructed thing, a version of reality. Not a pure, untainted object. You cut, you put this next to that, you edit this out, you ask, you enact, you show an image. It was a fictiony thing: a fictional thing comprised of pieces of real life. A hybrid, a combine. Only one line of events actually happened, but it was obscured by memory and time and wishful confabulations. She wanted to convey that.
Slowly the film bent toward a conspiracy, with one person after another circling back to the saboteur, essentially blaming him as ultimately responsible. The Guard turned for a reason, and maybe this was it. The belief was that most of the violence on the student left was instigated by fellows like him. And truly, there was a guy lurking around Kent State who appeared to be protected by the FBI. He was always at meetings, always taking photographs. He was off in obvious ways. People felt that he was some kind of narc. And the Guardsmen were sure someone fired at them — they wouldn’t be ordered to shoot actual bullets because of a few rocks. Although the rocks hurt — a number of Guardsmen claimed to have sustained injuries from rocks. And from chunks of cement and gas canisters. (“A rock could kill a person, you know. We were the same age as the students, but we didn’t go to college. We were enlisted or drafted, lucky to be stateside in the Guard. Lucky!”)
Eventually Meadow understood where the film should go. She had been filming for a year already. It took another year to locate and talk to him. He was easy enough to convince to speak once she found him in a Boston suburb. He had always lived with a hum of doubt under him. “I will talk to you.” He was pained — no one got more contempt in this world than the turncoat. Misguided true believers? Fine. But the deceiver, the liar, the betrayer? Everyone was united in their hate for Marvin Joseph.
Marvin lived in a small brick split-level house on a suburban street lined with old oak trees. She would film Marvin, and Marvin alone, in his living room, where his ordinariness was palpable. People would expect a fully satisfying narrative, a bad guy. But she would give them the unknowable, the meaningless. The mistake.
“Is this okay?” he said. He was wearing a dress shirt under a wide-lapelled blazer. He was chubby and wore outdated aviator frames that made him look, with his tight shirt, a bit like a porn producer. This was not right. Meadow found him a looser shirt, a more conservative blazer. She didn’t suggest he shave his sideburns, but she asked him to take off his glasses. So the lights won’t reflect so much, she told him. She expected him to be squirmy and deny everything, not convincing, but his apparent powerlessness would mark him as a scapegoat for the regrets and wishes of the others. No matter what he said. But instead he gave a speech, something entirely born for the camera. And in minutes he had rewritten his life.
“Here is why I wanted to talk to you,” he said. He leaned in, looked directly into the camera.