Cooked played at the Tales from Planet Earth festival last week and I managed to snag a seat. Director Judith Helfand was on-hand to talk about her work and hosted a discussion afterwards
Helfand was introduced to us as an activist and she said before the screening that one of her intentions with Cooked was to inspire viewers to take action. The movie began as an adaptation of Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a book about the July 1995 heat wave in Chicago which claimed over 700 lives. But as the project moved forward, she expanded her purview to include a look at the concept of the natural disaster itself instead of just the one that happened in Chicago. Having placed herself in the activist documentary tradition, I wondered whether she would take the Michael Moore route and have herself as the main protagonist going around and causing trouble or whether she'd do something more subtle a la Barbara Kopple. The movie we saw was a rough cut but it was pretty polished.
It begins in 2011 with the New York subways closing down in preparation for Hurricane Irene making landfall. Helfand is talking to a ticket agent who explains that the last subway train will be departing soon. The scene then shifts to Worcester, MA where she is visiting her brother who is also preparing for the storm's landfall. He shows us around his garage where flashlights are charging, a gas generator is ready to take over in the event the electric grid fails, and a plan to round up their mother via boat is also in place. The scene then cuts to Chicago and the heat wave of 1995. One of Mayor Daley's press conferences provides a key insight into what happened that summer when he implores city residents to check in on their neighbors. This is juxtaposed against an interview with an older black woman who reluctantly tells the camera that the deaths from the heat wave and many of the problems of her south side community stem from a lack of compassion.
Helfand focuses on the Englewood neighborhood on the city's south side, which was also featured in The Interrupters. (It is obviously in bad shape when multiple documentarians are exposing it's troubles.) Most of the heat deaths in 1995 occurred in the south and west sides in neighborhoods which were predominantly black and stricken with poverty. The movie shows how Englewood used to be a safe, bustling area where residents would often sleep outside or in a park when summer nights were intolerably hot. Today, though, Englewood is populated by mostly by the poor. It's population has dwindled over the years and many buildings stand vacant while many other lots are just empty fields of grass. Multiple people describe the neighborhood as a "food desert" citing the lack of grocery stores.
In addition to the residents of Englewood, the movie features Klinenberg as well as Dr. Steven Whitman who was the city's epidemiologist in 1995. Klinenberg says something which Helfand jumps on: that we cannot talk about abandoned seniors and their deaths unless there's a disaster.
In a nutshell, his social autopsy revealed that most of the victims of the heat wave were black senior citizens in poor neighborhoods with a high crime rates. They couldn't afford air conditioners and were afraid to open their windows or leave their apartments out of fear. The sense of community in these communities had broken down and few of these isolated people had anyone check on them. In other words, poverty was to blame.
Helfand goes to a disaster preparedness conference and discovers that there's a lot of money to be made by selling generators, rations, etc. to people in preparation for a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. The movie also goes behind the scenes of a disaster exercise in which authorities practice giving relief and coordinating rescue efforts after an earthquake emanating from the New Madrid fault line. Helfand proposes to change the definition of "disaster" to include extreme poverty and ponders what would happen if money were poured into poor neighborhoods so that they'd have better schools, job training, and access to healthier food.
The movie ends on a food note. We witness an old CTA bus converted into a mobile produce market to serve Englewood residents and current mayor Rahm Emmanuel at the grand opening of a grocery store in the neighborhood. He, perhaps like Helfand, is cautiously optimistic. He lauds the presence of the store but warns that he cannot force parents to shop there. It was, I think, a wonderfully ambivalent way to bring the movie to a close.
I've read Heat Wave and thought Helfand did a good job of explaining what happened in July 1995 and summarizing the results of Klinenberg's social autopsy. But I walked out of the theatre feeling like she'd missed the boat in terms of alleviating poverty. She shows us a still photograph of Englewood in 1955 with a street full of people, trolleys, and neon signs. What happened? Chicago is a Rust Belt city and my best guess is that Englewood suffered when factories, slaughterhouses, and steel mills left. A graphic featuring statistics about the neighborhood said that the unemployment rate was 25% or thereabouts. While she says that money should be used for job training as part of a disaster relief effort, I felt that this was a much more important tactic than the paucity of screen time it got suggested. But how do you emphasize this in a visual medium? How do you rally viewers to that cause? Not easy. Instead the movie emphasizes the lack of good, healthy food in the neighborhood.
When Helfand said that we should treat poverty as a disaster and spend money to alleviate it in the same way we spend money to prepare for earthquakes and whatnot, I said to myself that we'd tried this already. Remember Johnson's Great Society? While certain aspects of it were arguably a success, Chicago only recently finished demolishing emblems of some of its failures – housing projects. So, while I'm not totally unsympathetic to Helfand's solution, I am skeptical of the notion that the government throwing money at a problem is the only or best way to tackle it.
Having access to healthy food is important but it's certainly not sufficient to alleviate poverty and I'm not convinced that it's even necessary. I think that Englewood is suffering in much the same way that neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit are suffering. Manufacturing is gone and people who would have worked in a factory 60 years ago haven't found an alternative vocation that pays like those factory jobs. Building parks where kids from poor neighborhoods can go and have a swim when it's hot out instead of opening fire hydrants is nice and perhaps addresses the issue of fairness but, to me, it's a minor thing when confronting extreme poverty.
As I noted above, we saw a rough cut of Cooked so the following may or may not apply to the final cut. I found the movie to be inconsistent stylistically. The opening is very Michael Moorean with Helfand being on camera and interacting with the subjects. Then she fades into the background, adding voice-over narration periodically. Then she's back in front of the camera for the conference sequence and gone again. The narration was inconsistent as well. It felt like she ran out of ideas to get something across visually and defaulted to narration or simply had some statistics to impart. Her scheme just felt choppy to me. Does she want to be an active voice in this story or not? Hopefully she'll get it smoothed out.
I can't find an embeddable trailer for Cooked but I did find this interview with Orrin Williams, a community activist in the Englewood neighborhood, who is featured in the movie. I believe he was here in Madison to attend the Tales From Planet Earth festival a few years ago.
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