“I didn’t fire a shot at the Guards,” he said. “But I did work for the FBI.” He had never publicly copped to being an informant before. Meadow felt a tingle on the surface of her skin. She looked at him and didn’t say a word. Let him. As he spoke, his face grew animated and his features became more defined. “I was a photographer. I was not a radical, not a student. I liked to photograph them at protests. They looked interesting; they were so passionate. Occasionally scary. Often beautiful — they were all young and beautiful.” He paused, as if he were remembering.
“I was known as someone who took pictures, and the FBI asked me for some of my photos. It is true. I complied; I don’t deny it. I was scared of the FBI, everyone was. I let them have my photographs. I took money for the photos, it is true.” Marvin looked down for a moment. He took a deep breath. “I already had the rap of being an informant. I was older, I was awkward. I didn’t know how to dress like the cool kids. My hair is curly and doesn’t look good long, really. So I was already an outsider. And I tried to impress a girl once by saying the FBI bought my photos.” He laughed bitterly. “I was a little naive about it. Not political at all, which condemned me in any case. I did not win the love of this girl, and from then on I was marked as an agent provocateur. I didn’t even know what that was.” He shook his head. And then came the astonishing part. Big cinematic tears started to flow. Not the sobby, messy kind, but elegant tracks of teardrops on cheeks: a clearly visible indication of emotion.
“I was on the quad that day, more or less shunned as always. Everyone knew there would be a confrontation, and I was a stringer for some papers. That is how I made a living. I would photograph the protests. And that is all I planned to do.” He stopped and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “I did have a gun, it is true. But that is because I’d had death threats. I had already been beaten up once. I didn’t even think it was loaded. I just kept it in case I got jumped, so I could scare people off.”
Marvin paused, and then in a breaking but emphatic voice, he spoke. “I never fired a shot that day. I swear that I did not.” He stopped. “For years now people have been hounding me. I used to get calls in the middle of the night from people telling me that I killed four kids. The police arrested me that day because some of the students attacked me and I pulled out the gun to scare them. But the police report shows that no bullets were fired from my gun. I know people think the report was all fixed by the FBI. What answer can I have to endless paranoia? There is no answer.” He shrugged, and looked down.
“Look, I admit I was an awkward, stupid jerk. That I should have disappeared after everyone made it clear they didn’t want me around. I don’t blame them! I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but the FBI ruined people’s lives. I am sorry I gave them photos. And I am truly sorry for what happened that day, which I witnessed and will never forget. Our kids murdered by our other kids. For no good reason.”
Marvin’s speech, true or not, was the most vital moment in the film. Meadow framed it, set it up, gave Marvin the last word. Because his was the best.
* * *
In the first cut of her film, the professor looked like something out of The Crucible and Marvin looked like a victim. Meadow edited it again to make it more complex — she placed a convincing and weeping and nearly contrite Guardsman at the very end, after Marvin. Meadow thought that it was okay, this interaction with real lives. Look, look. It’s okay. She was raising questions, and if they made people uncomfortable, all the better.
She filmed one more scene. Her cameraman filmed Meadow editing with her photogenic assistant, Kyle. The camera showed Meadow and Kyle watching a playback: the professor clip followed by the Marvin bit.
Meadow says, “Marvin’s so convincing but it isn’t just about Marvin. Can you call up the Guardsman who admits guilt?” Kyle nods. “Let’s slip him in at the end. Make him the last word to complicate Marvin’s story a little.”
“What about one of the survivor students?” Kyle says.
“Naw. We all know how we feel about them.”
“What?”
“Bad. We feel bad about the students. They feel bad. It is too easy. The Guardsman? Marvin? We feel bad in a more interesting way. Let’s end with them.”
Then the film shows a repetition of the crying Guardsman, and then the film ends. Meadow knew this was a fake ending, but it was a fake ending that admitted its fakeness instead of hiding it. Then she thought it too jarring to have herself only at the end. She and Kyle went back and inserted film and audio of her throughout. Her questions. The back of her head as she worked to animate still photos. Her filming new footage on the quad. She showed some of the strings, but not all of them, of course — it was still a highly constructed thing. An essay more than a neutral rendering. It had a point of view. A film is an idea about the world. Meadow thought of it like that, but she also knew that people can know something and visual images will override anything they know. Cinema truth is deceptive that way. It can tell you something but show you something very different. And you can bet you will walk away believing in what you saw. She thought she should make this problem an explicit part of her film. The way to manage a problem is not to solve it, which is impossible, but make the problem the material of the film.
After a few weeks, she had Kyle go back and cut out all the scenes of her. The fake footage watching her watch her own movie was too similar to her strategy on the Deke film. All that self-reflexivity seemed narcissistic to her and, well, too obvious. After all, the title said “A Film by Meadow Mori” right on it. Of course it was cut a certain way, constructed by her. Of course it had fraught objectivity; it was constructed of first-person points of view.
Kent State: Recovered took four years to research, shoot, edit, and promote. When it finally was shown, she waited for people to say it was manipulative and false. Objections. But that’s not what happened. Maybe it had something to do with the timing: the film was first shown in September, right after President Bush launched the initial stages of Desert Storm. War was on everyone’s mind, and Kent State: Recovered struck a nerve with some critics. It won several prizes, and in the winter, after everyone watched the clinical footage of the Desert Storm air strikes, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Carrie was the first one to call.
“I can’t believe it!” Carrie screamed into the phone. Meadow laughed. “I mean, I can believe it because you’re a total genius, but I mean I can’t believe that the world finally caught on. Oh, Jesus, you know what I mean.” Carrie screamed again. “Tell me everything,” she said.
“Some interviews and write-ups. Runs scheduled in LA, New York, and San Francisco.”
“That’s great!” she said.
“Yeah,” Meadow said. “How’s your movie going?” Carrie’s student short, Girl School, won enough prizes that Carrie was able to find backing from a small independent production company to make a feature-length film based on it. She had asked Meadow to work on Girl School, but Meadow said she was too busy. The truth was that Meadow thought it was a little silly, and the way Carrie planned to film and edit it was too conventional and boring to her.
“Great,” Carrie said. “We start shooting in three weeks.”
Meadow took Kyle to the awards as her date, and they had fun because they were pretty certain they would lose (although Meadow had a breathless moment when the nominees were being read). In the last few weeks, some people in the Academy and in various established critical circles objected to the fictional footage and animations used in the film. It wasn’t a “true” documentary. It didn’t matter; she was now making films that people would watch. No longer just a kid fooling around. Not everything changed for Meadow, not the way she thought it might. The problems of making films were still there; it didn’t make her any better. But now she had this thing, this credential, and it helped her get money, get access, get trust.