Garden Party: Frederick Wiseman’s Society of the Spectacle

By Christoph Huber

In an irony worthy of some of the finest ambivalent moments in his work, Frederick Wiseman’s fantastic new documentary The Garden remains invisible for the time being. Pulled at the last moment from Sundance and Berlin, as well as from a near-complete retrospective at the Vienna Cinematheque, due to “unresolved issues between me and the Madison Square Garden,” as a dry statement by Wiseman put it, rumours have it that those issues are rather puzzling, at least for those outside the dispute. For one thing, the new Madison Square Garden management seems unhappy with the inclusion of board meetings that show the old management discussing union negotiations (The Garden was shot years ago, as evidenced by the footage of the artist now known as P. Diddy performing as Puff Daddy); there’s another theory about the management wanting to keep a low profile due to New York’s 2012 bid for the Summer Olympics. Wiseman’s statement ends with the assertion that “we are discussing these issues with the goal of resolving them so that the documentary can be screened in the near future,” but until then one can’t help ruefully shaking one’s head. After all, Wiseman is no stranger to controversy. His first film, Titicut Follies (1967), which exposed the inhuman conditions in the Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Bridgewater, was withdrawn from circulation until 1992, and quite a few of the following films have stirred up heated debates on topics ranging from animal research (the underrated Primate, 1974) to Public Housing (1997). So Wiseman, who completed a law degree at Yale, then practiced and taught before embarking on a directorial career, has made a point of always entering a legal contract with the institutions he films. Which works both ways, of course—although in this case certainly to the detriment of the cinephile, at least until matters are resolved.

There can be little doubt that Wiseman is the greatest American filmmaker alive—as Olaf Möller pointed out recently, he is for modern US cinema what John Ford was for the classical era: the most ceaseless chronicler of the way society works, never neglecting the human efforts made to keep it running, yet ever so acutely aware of the weariness and contradictions that inevitably arise along the way. Wiseman’s body of work is furthermore enhanced with every expansion, each subsequent “reality fiction” (the director’s preferred term) commenting on, fine-tuning, and even partially revising (often according to societal changes) the others. As Wiseman has pointed out, you can see his oeuvre as one long film, basically the Great American Novel of the last 40 years, comparable to the touchstones of 19th-century literature, just with the protagonists removed. This point is cogently illustrated by the inclusion of a high-school teacher’s fascinating lecture on Moby Dick in the superb Belfast, Maine (1999). In itself, that film probably works as the most conclusive representation of that one mammoth complete Wiseman film, patiently and diligently tying together many of his central themes and motives with the marvellously subtle, nondidactic intelligence that shines through most clearly in his late epics.

The Garden is another such junction, an alternately hilarious and unsettling account of the going-ons in the titular center for popular live entertainment on New York City’s Madison Square. Bringing out the clowns and elephants right in the beginning, Wiseman certainly doesn’t conceal that this is his—as Kent Jones aptly phrased it—“Society of the Spectacle.” Although the hugeness of the whole operation, let alone the mind-boggling diversity of events in the arena, makes it look like a universe of its own, it couldn’t be clearer that this is a film about society at large, with Madison Square Garden serving as terrain for the daily depiction of national identity. Laconic, thorough, and attentive as usual, Wiseman neither succumbs to the spectacle(s) on display, nor does he embrace that rhetoric of self-definition; instead he prefers to unpack the way they are assembled these days—in an unholy alliance of pop culture and politics, religion and regulation, show business, sport, and science, a grand carnival that ostensibly also functions as a spiritual centre. (Pointedly, the film begins and—practically—ends with circus numbers.)

Shrewd choices highlight the way events are staged. In concert scenes—besides P. Diddy, Wiseman includes Mary J. Blige, Salt ‘n Pepa, and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical!—he often focuses on other cameras recording the action, or how the stage lights are operated. At another point, there’s a remarkable sequence about ten minutes in length in which he meticulously details the preparations for a hockey game, with special attention lavished on the careful painting of the lines on the ice, which, it is clear, soon will have to be removed again. Indeed, the actual “great events” are given less screen time than the work that’s put into preparing them, creating a sense of constant flow of come-and-go that’s clearly at odds with the monolithic self-definition of the site, so crucial to attracting its customers. (They’re of course unified by the capitalist rationale: “Be welcome for whatever you want, just leave your bucks.”) In between Wiseman characteristically includes many fascinating stretches devoted to food, that most essential wheel for keeping the machine humming—food being processed, packaged, cooked, sold, and eaten in vast amounts. Not to mention being thrown away.

A marvellous scene depicting a professional wrestling match becomes a showcase for virtuoso vérité, which Wiseman makes exciting as ever: of course, here any editorial strategies would seem highly unnecessary, as being staged is part of the fight itself. Applied to some rather weird industry conventions, the vérité method yields insights into the way business is run as a show. Coffee promoters poke and stir in their cups while being lectured on the finesses of taste and how to communicate them to their customers; in the end, it’s revealed that they’re hawking instant coffee. The “International Cat Show” culminates in a demonstration of the right way to massage your cat, including pseudo-scientific blather such as “the grand florage—a French word that means stroking,” with the three different correct speeds for massage being fast, slow, and no motion, a.k.a. “no-mo.” In this culture, entertainment, science, and business have become indistinguishable.

Before attending to her demonstration, the cat-massage lecturer tries to impress the audience with her credentials: “I wrote my thesis on massage from a feline point of view.” It’s one of the many moments in The Garden that points to an important strand in Wiseman’s work—the relationship between man and animal, a topic that he’s been treating in a very unconventional way ever since Primate, whose title pointedly and tellingly does not distinguish between the two species of man and animal. Indeed, the near-Marxist Meat (1975), a paradoxically spiritual masterpiece, considering its almost exclusive depiction of the most desolate proceedings—it’s about “animal processing,” as the owner of the portrayed meat factory, calls it—goes one step further, in having a fearful worker suggest that the humans may soon be treated like the animals. Indeed, the flak Wiseman took for Primate—which involved his extensive, frequently context-free depictions of animal experiments—seems misguided. Why chide him for a breach of etiquette, when he achieves such queasy objectivity. Refusing to take a pre-conceived stand, his portrayal in Primate seems surprisingly even-handed, matter-of-factly, registering that the monkeys are clearly on the losing side of the equation. That also makes the moments where the human folly (and man’s self-asserted supremacy) is exposed, so funny—as in the scene where a scientist, with due dedication, shows a monkey how to use his swing. Wiseman’s black humour is on full display here, as it is at times in The Garden: notably in a scene where the audience is seen at its most attentive during a dog show, where absurdly and perfectly tailored rare species are paraded. Second thoughts about the animals, unavoidable in Wiseman’s earlier “animal films” (see also: Racetrack [1985] and Zoo [1993]), are naturally unwelcome here: that could disturb the show.

Aptly, the central scene in The Garden—usually crucial in Wiseman’s films—is a press conference by none other than born showman Don King, promoting the venue itself: “The Garden is the Mecca of boxing.” (He also drops an intertextual reference that I challenge even the most dedicated Wiseman followers, accustomed to exploring the myriad of interconnections between his films, to have expected, by extolling Madison Square Garden as the place where “the great Sonia Henie” was ice-skating. I Miss Sonia Henie is the title of a little-known collaborative short from 1972, instigated by Karpo Godina at the Belgrade Film Festival, and pairing Wiseman with such unlikely co-directors as Tinto Brass, Milos Forman, Paul Morrissey, Buck Henry and Dusan Makavejev.) More importantly, King touches on another leitmotif of The Garden, declaring, “It’s a spiritual thing that goes beyond the money.” After that point, further scenes centre around this theme, climaxing when a preacher lectures basketball stars on the parallels between their “struggle” and the biblical antagonism of good and evil: “We gotta battle!” “Amen!” With this chain of links established—from the American Dream to the Garden’s self-definition to fighting—it’s hard not to read the last movement of the film as a political gesture. After the final scene—a woman is shot from a huge cannon, the acrobats line up behind the theatre entrance of the arena, the curtain closes, and then there’s applause—Wiseman inserts a last, brief montage of the exterior shots of New York that have punctuated the film. In the twilight you can see the World Trade Center’s then-extant twin towers protruding from the clouds.

The Garden

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