How best to discuss Wiseman films? One can ask that about all films, but I’ve noticed certain pitfalls regarding Wiseman that I see myself falling prey to, similar to what I’ve seen in things I’ve read. Because of the non-chronological structure, the great number of speeches and monologs, and most pointedly the absence of simple indicators as to what’s important in what we’re seeing (through style, narration, or any other way with fairly rare exceptions), there’s a strong tendency to pick out certain scenes, say how much you like them for this or that reason, and then move on. Given the sheer density and length of the content, there’s plenty to choose from. That’s not a terrible way to chat about films - you say parts you like, what meant something to you, and I’ll say mine. I’ve done that a lot already, and I’m sure to do more. Hopefully I’ve noticed some things that maybe you haven’t, so I can be helpful that way on occasion. You have to watch these films pretty carefully, and even so, I’m sure there’s quite a lot that’s passing me by or that I should have realized had some importance. That’s just how it goes. But getting beyond I appreciated this part and I didn’t understand that part is likely to be more useful. One way to do that with his films, I think, is to be mindful of repetitions and overall structures. Also, we can come to understand style and meaning through noting consistencies or echoes from one film to another. The seeming accidents of one situation look less so when they keep happening in other movies. If we notice that some things are showing up a lot, maybe we can pay more attention to them. We should also be aware that it’s a real talent in Wiseman not to give us easy cues. Many situations seem to be presented so that we don’t even know what’s going on - who are the people we’re seeing and what are they doing - until we’re well along in the scene. As with individual scenes, so too with the movies themselves, and so too with groups of the movies. We have to do a lot of piecing together and figuring out, and that’s on purpose. The alternative in films with conventional chronological structures and more direct statements of what’s important and a set cast of people we follow for some time and maybe even some guiding narration is that we likely have an easier time of it as viewers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not the Wiseman way. When we’re left figuring things out to a much greater extent, there are pitfalls and rewards. Missing stuff and misinterpreting is more than balanced by the rewards of active engagement and theorizing multiple levels of meaning. Maybe we’re seeing things Wiseman’s way, or maybe we’re going off on our own. It’s the chance we take with complex situations.
Canal Zone takes care of some basic obligations in its first twenty minutes or so. We get a thoroughly professional presentation of why the Canal exists, how it works, and what role America plays in running it. Showing the process of ships going through the Canal is quite thorough - when we see a dredge working as we go by, the camera will then be on the dredge and showing how it operates too. It’s almost like Wiseman saying I could have given you lots more of this, but it’s not what I’m here for. When we do finally leave the Canal proper and go into the city, there’s soon another big explanatory scene, but already a complicating one. The man who is both the Governor and head of the Corporation running things lays out the economic situation of how the Canal is run to a group of visitors, but other issues are already popping up all over. He actually says, though even he himself realizes the irony, that the Vietnam War (just ended a couple of years earlier) was "Not very happy for anybody but it did occasion the flow of a significant number of ships”, so it was very good for business. That kind of offhand “not very happy for anybody” regarding a war is the sort of remark Wiseman is so good at observing and leaving for us to evaluate. He also mentions that his employees did a protest sickout that he didn't think “was a responsible thing to do” and while that’s all he says about it, I think we know in a Wiseman film that labor troubles might get voiced again, as indeed they do. But between the Governor and our opening on the Canal, we’ve had a pretty decent laying out of the basic workings of the place.
For a fairly short time, given that the movie is almost three hours, we get some glimpses of the basic institutions - a quick view of a fire truck, an observance in a courtroom of Law Day (they’re big on observances of holidays here, as we’ll see later), and then the last comment by the courtroom judge that "We have splendid law enforcement in the Canal Zone" takes us outside to next see a police van patrolling, followed by a police car. In a short stretch, then, we've seen the Governor, the fire department, the court, and the police - institutions all. To add one more, we next spend a little time in a prison, entirely wordless, but speaking volumes when we see all the prisoners are black and brown - clearly a group of the locals taken care of by that splendid law enforcement. This isn’t going to be the film that looks at those institutions. Plenty of time for that in other films, a number of which he’s already made.
Canal Zone is something of a hybrid Wiseman film, in that while it’s got that institutional start, it becomes the first of his films about a place, where we move around a good bit in the area viewing all sorts of activities. Later he’ll start naming the films after the places (Aspen; Belfast, Maine; In Jackson Heights; Monrovia, Indiana) but this one belongs in that group too, at least after about twenty minutes. And it’s a very American place, which is an obvious point, but still something of a surprise to see here. We don’t see actual Panamanians very often, except in subservient roles and doing menial tasks. The film has its fair share of the Wiseman shots of cleaning things up, here always done by the locals. A great one, colonialism in a nutshell, is our close-up on the guy whose job it is to repeatedly press the button releasing skeets (if that’s what you call them) to be shot at for recreation by some of the Americans. What Americans do for fun is an extensive preoccupation in the film, and my list of the sports and recreations adds to the skeet shooting with horse riding, dressmaking (with a fashion show to present their results), mention of an evening disco (still the 70’s after all), beaches and pools, swimming, snorkeling, fishing, water volleyball, ham radio, soccer. motorbikes, bingo, skateboarding, a zoo (also getting ready for a later film), and likely a couple or so more I missed. A clear aspect of all the recreation is part of the overall notion that we’re watching American activities and values, no matter where in the world we now are.
I won’t deal here with all the social problems which arise, but there’s plenty. Child abuse, marital problems, domestic violence, a wage freeze. Great scenes of these abound, but I’ll avoid picking my favorites. Instead, let’s consider that we’ve already seen a good number of religious services and sermons (Essene of course was loaded with them, but then there’s the end of Hospital and also Basic Training too). Here there’s a preacher’s sermon that goes on for about eight minutes, a crazy performance looking like one of those Sunday morning television gospel shoutouts - this one mostly about marriage issues after he gets going with what sounds like an anti-Semitic remark about how God supposedly told the Jews not to marry a Gentile. This one is easy to spot as an over-the-top heavy-on-the-irony presentation, an authority figure spouting all sorts of nonsense, but I guess sermons are a good place for the viewer to test how they’re responding to what they’re hearing. We can watch a person speak who can be very sincere, and there’s always a chance we’re supposed to give them a serious listen. In Canal Zone, though, it’s not just a sermon where we listen to a speaker at some length. Between awards presentations (Boy Scouts and VFW Ladies Auxiliary), high school graduation (two speeches), we even get a full recitation of the Gettysburg Address as part of a Memorial Day celebration. I think one of the points of all these speeches is how full of American platitudes they are (not Lincoln’s speech itself, but the repeating of it), that what we hear comes straight out of the American Midwest somewhere, more Iowan than Iowa. Americans can say very commonplace American things, and Canal Zone is full of them. We can add to this some military speeches, especially those which conclude the film in a Memorial Day observance. We’re told “no generation of our people has ever enjoyed higher incomes” and that we have those soldiers who gave their lives to thank for that. Both faith and gratitude for military sacrifice are reduced to self-help bromides and patriotic gestures. The two high school graduation speakers are rather painful to listen to, the first taking the dangerous position that it’s good to have friends, and the second sounding herself like a preacher or a motivational speaker who “tells us Life in America under God is a positive experience" and exhorts her classmates to "Believe in America”. There are no doubt sincere feelings in there somewhere, but one wishes for a little less uniformity. When occasional mentions of dissenting views come up (somehow there’s people out there a graduation speaker says who don’t like flag waving, or there are employees who don’t like their wages frozen) they are quickly shut down. This film can’t find any of the typical Wiseman “misfits”, unless it’s everyone else outside this tight knit group.
Let’s move on to three favorite Wiseman subjects which get heavy play here: music, show business and media, and the military. I’ll express surprise one last time for the considerable number of songs we get here - from now on I’ll just expect it. The first time we’re at the local Armed Forces Radio Station, and the on-air disc jockey plays in its entirety Jimmy Buffet’s “Kick It in Second Wind”. Get ready for my very best discovery about Canal Zone. The song includes the line “We got two more hours to go”, almost exactly when the film we’re watching has two more hours to go! Why that’s not just a stunt is that this comes at the beginning of the shift of interest from the Canal itself to our probably asking, if we know how long the film runs, what in the world it will be about for the remainder of its considerable length. I don’t think we can take song lyrics quite so literally, but that this one is just about on the dot simply can’t be an accident. Before we leave the station, we also get a full playing of a sexually suggestive country song "Rockin' in Rosalee's Boat" by the quite obscure Nick Nixon, another bit of home offering additional notions of what the Americans here are doing for recreation. Most of the music we get in the film, and it’s quite a lot, is military and/or patriotic, and in Wiseman fashion, it’s not snippets but usually entire songs. Every ceremony comes equipped with a live band, and it’s a Wiseman bit of cheekiness we’ve already seen in other films to focus on a band leader giving it his all while the ensemble plays on (and on). We get full versions of the “Star Spangled Banner”, “Stars and Stripes Forever”, “God Bless America”, and let’s not forget the “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played by a little group in Revolutionary War outfits at the start of a Boy Scout meeting. The big tunes again are very American and very patriotic, and usually performed pretty perfunctorily. And I guess I better not leave out the complete renditions of hymns we get in church, although those here sound less than uplifting too. My favorite dull lines start out being said once, and get repeated a second time: "It took a miracle to put the stars in place, It took a miracle to hang the world in space.” Not so poetic, I don’t think.
The radio station and the music performances lead us into media and show business, and we can point out that Wiseman shows a real interest in these subjects, here and later. We visit a television station several times too, and see things there that are “on air” live or on TV monitors, including a pathetically short one minute Spanish lesson ("Next week we'll be studying banking terms") and an interview with the trainer of military drug dogs. I can’t help but think too that presentations of media in Wiseman films can be self-reflexive - a way to make us aware that we’re ourselves watching media, perhaps encouraging a more distanced perspective on our part while also considering the questionable uses to which media can be employed. These fit quite nicely with what I’ve already mentioned is Wiseman’s instinct for comments which also might apply to his film-making methods. My favorite here, and it’s a big one, comes during the fashion show for homemade dresses. Presenting one, the announcer says “She started with a pattern, but then she’s completely changed it from what it originally was.” Good advice for a film-maker.
We’ve also already seen (High School, Basic Training) films within the films that are meant to be educational but are loaded with extra implications (sex education instruction in High School being one example). Here, we also get a good pre-recorded public service announcement at that radio station warning women not to drive with their purse out and their window open, ending "Remember, it's always crime prevention time”, suggesting that there may be more of a crime problem here than we’re led to believe in some of the speeches. I also can’t figure out the quite lengthy appearance of a Spanish-dubbed Abbot and Costello show playing on a television in a nursing home. There must be some joke in it I can’t figure out, or maybe it’s in the untranslatability of a very American product incongruously exported to Panama. Easier to get some amusement and food for thought from the announcements of movies playing at local theaters, all of course American, and with either jingoistic titles like “Walking Tall” or who can forget (actually all of us) “Lynn Redgrave as The Happy Hooker”. Surprising are a couple of more arty ones - the Antonioni “The Passenger” starring Jack Nicholson, and Fosse’s “Lenny” starring Dustin Hoffman. We also see the outside of a movie theater offering a "special pre-release" of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, another Jack Nicholson, a more appropriately ironic title. Taken together, television, radio, and movies abound in ways well beyond what we’d otherwise expect.
And lastly, I’d be remiss not to mention the fairly strong presence of military activity in Canal Zone, especially as it kicks off a trilogy of films about Americans abroad, as we’ll move next to Sinai Field Mission and then Manoeuvre. The great sequence turns out to be a military exercise, although it’s one of those we figure out is a simulation only midway through. It starts out with four big planes disgorging what looks like at least a few dozen parachutists. As they land, we see they all have rifles, and they go off quickly through tall brush. After burning an abandoned church, one of them gets on a military phone and starts reporting on what they’ve captured, ending with “one POW”. Bizarrely, we see someone on the ground with a canvas bag over their head, presumably acting as the captured prisoner. The enactment all of a sudden looks uncomfortably real, echoing some Viet Nam incident a little too closely. Besides the war games, the military are all over the place in Canal Zone, from kids marching around as soldiers to speakers at the Memorial Day ceremonies. One point of their presence in the film seems to be how well integrated they are with the other institutions of the community - the media (both the radio and tv station are military), the church, the government, and even the Boy Scouts. Despite the faint suggestions of problems, everyone in Canal Zone seems to fit right in and get along together all too well.