The Six O’clock News

            When Roth McElwee decides to explore his deep fears associated with raising his first child in a media-saturated world of hostility, he takes his audience with him in a truly free-flowing, free-thinking and multi-layered odyssey.  The film is like a journal, with McElwee himself explaining every step of the way why he decides to visit this town, find this person, or walk into this building. The nature of his documentation highly contrasts with that of the mainstream news he criticizes; whether in material, form or philosophy.  He learns from people, makes modest observations, and – much like we do in real life – associates random elements of experience into coherent ideas, engaging stories and deep insights.  The Six O’clock News is thus a meditative journey that is uniquely effective, especially because it leaves room for the audience’s own meditations, rather than hyperactively encouraging their fears.
            One of the ways McElwee directly criticizes the rhetoric of the media is by finding what fields of interest they have in common, positioning himself amongst them, and recording the situations that arise from this encounter.  He describes himself plunging “directly into the territory held by the six o’clock news.”  The film begins with a comparison between the filmmaker’s habit of taking home videos of everything that happens to his family, and the videos he sees of other families on television, on the six o’clock news.  While his family is used to the presence of cameras, the people on television have their lives invaded by filmmakers:  strangers somehow interested in their tragedy.  “Due to a twist of fate, the six o’clock news suddenly becomes their home movie,” he says, “a movie they never wanted made.”  Throughout the film, his revealing interactions with these film crews present the backstage world of professional reporters, who appear impatient, artificial and often thoughtless.  Thus he is able to effect criticism by giving us his own, very different backstage access:  a voice-over of reason, authenticity, familiarity and especially humor. “Where did [the reporters] come from?  It’s as if they were beamed down by satellite transmission.”  He intimately shares with us how the cameraman’s microphone malfunctions and interrupts an interview.  Reporters demand second and third takes of events that are supposed to happen spontaneously.  In contrast, McElwee’s method is slower, subdued and perceptive, a way of filming where he does not demand quick sound bytes, where his interactions are conversations instead of interviews, and his subjects are treated as people with complexities.
            The application of this method, exemplified by the film itself, brings about an alternative news reporting that is more akin to the human psychology.  At the heart of the film, the filmmaker asks the question we all think about when watching the six o’clock news:  “how could this have happened?”  His reporting begins.  Right away McElwee disbands the idea that “these tragedies could only happen to other people, not to any of my family, or anyone I know.”  Discovering that the town where his friend Charlene lives has just been struck by a hurricane, he decides to go there to look for her.  He then captures what is rarely seen in reports about hurricanes:  the victim’s first moment of arriving at their home, discovering that it has not been destroyed, and walking through the inside of the house to gather what remains of their belongings, and to clean out their fridge.  This is an example of moments that the real six o’clock news, with their eagerness for gathering concise clips, could not have captured.  Under candlelight, Charlene philosophizes:  “There’s so much that’s lucky, or unlucky, or circumstantial in life. It makes me afraid…  If I had felt as little control back then as I do now, I don’t think I would have chosen to be a parent.”
            The filmmaker explores this idea from so many angles, intertwining storylines of unlikely subjects such as Barry the TV obsessive, film producers from Hollywood and an earthquake survivor, Salvador.  These are not isolated subjects, but characters summoned almost providentially to tell their part of the story and help McElwee discover something new.  He even brings irony to the situation when he visits a firefighter who bluntly exposes obvious symbolic relationships between forest fires and challenges in life.  Different mediums layer over each other; for instance, Salvador’s conversations with McElwee, the news report about his accident, and the Rescue 911 television episode recreating the event.  In this manner, stories within the film acquire different versions, showing the multiplicity of experience, opinion and ways to document lives.
            One of the most powerful moments, and a prime example of the power of McElwee’s method in The Six O’clock News is his conversation with the Korean business-owner whose wife was murdered, when he finally decides to talk about the event off-camera.  We hear their conversation but see only a dark image out the window of the car, as they drive, and the conversation then takes the deepest and most existential of directions:  “[It is] hard to believe in God... Out of control [of] this world. He cannot control the world.”  This is ultimately how the filmmaker does not pursue material or evidence, only his own thoughts and emotions, leading him to rare intimacies of the human mind, never seen in the “real” Six O’clock News.

 

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