INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT THE BENCH. The scene is the Monrovia Lions Club in Monrovia, Indiana, where a meeting is being held. A concerned woman, flanked by a man in shirtsleeves who is somewhat paying attention, would like to raise the matter of the bench. First of all, it needs to exist. The club’s 100th anniversary looms, and she is proposing to allocate funding to build a commemorative bench in town. Perhaps near the library, where another bench is currently slated to be built, thereby providing a pleasing logistical and visual symmetry. There’s a certain amount of back-and-forth as the case is made for construction, and oddly, momentarily unmade. Then the apparent leader of the meeting, another woman who will later be spotted browsing a gun shop, moves the motion forward: the club sets aside $500 for the project. Something has been done about the bench.

This is not an uncommon scene—either in budget meetings across America, or in the manifold films by Frederick Wiseman that survey the care and upkeep of our country and its citizenry. Yet as I watched this particular exchange—which takes place in Wiseman’s 44th film, , premiering in Venice and screening in the main slate of the New York Film Festival—divergent notions took hold in my mind regarding its significance. On the one. Weren’t there bigger fish to fry? What was all this really for? Is this meeting the picture of civilization and local self-government, or in all the fussing is there a hint of desperation?