There’s not a single mention that I caught of the words Republican or Democrat in the entire 217 minutes of State Legislature, not even on a name tag or a sign. That may be because the place is so heavily Republican it would be like fish identifying that they’re swimming in water, but I think it’s more likely that Wiseman wasn’t interested in exploring political divides. There are too many issues which come up that are of interest in themselves. We get some glimmers of strongly conservative views, but as this was filmed during the full three-month session of 2004, maybe it was a quieter period regarding partisan debate. I think this past August there was a big disruption of the Idaho Legislature by alt-right anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, some of them armed, and the New York Times reported no arrests were made, a disturbing premonition of things to come. But either by film-maker choice or by accident, this is a film that focuses on citizen-lawmakers in dialog with each other and a lesson in how small state democracy functions when it focuses on issues of concern.
State Legislature strikes me as very much in line with Domestic Violence II, in its sticking to a straightforward plan - one meeting, hearing, or legislative session after another. There are four brief shots at the start of the outside of the building, and after that we never leave. This time we don’t even return to outside at the end for the usual matching exteriors - it’s all inside this single building, organized around a rotunda where at least a few things go on to provide brief occasional respites. In the opening scene the Speaker of the House conveniently explains how the place works to a group of touring teenagers, that it’s three months for the legislators every year and the other nine are spent at their usual occupations. “We’re not professionals, we’re just part-time legislators” and that they each serve on committees where they need to specialize in subjects which come before them and then share that knowledge with their fellow 105 other legislators and vote on what laws they feel are needed.
When the succession of meetings begins that take up most of the film, just as how Domestic Violence II didn’t show a lot of interest in the outcomes of cases, here we are likely not to see many issues resolved. Most of the time, we’re watching for the discussion, not for the outcome, and the bureaucratic workings are pretty well laid out, how proposed bills (for some reason called RS’s) have to be “printed”, at which point it’s a “public bill”, and it’s up to a committee chairman to decide if a bill goes on the agenda. As the woman who explains this puts it in summary: “RS, bill, and then action”. Wiseman uses that as one of his End of Scene Lines, which by the way have been happening pretty steadily since last we discussed this editing device a few films ago, and which we’ll come back to again some time or other. But here, what the legislators are doing and how they operate is explained clearly and early on, so what’s left is to see democracy in action, and then what they decide to discuss becomes the main concern.
There’s a difference between meetings and hearings, and we get a lot of both. Hearings invite public discussion, either from representatives of concerned business groups or from the general public. That gets examined too, in a meeting about who gets to speak at hearings (who even gets notified of them) when new dairy farms are being set up. At present, only those within a one-mile radius are permitted to speak, but there is spirited argument about this being too limited. “This simply to me is a simple free speech issue,” as one of the legislators puts it, and another gets to the point with “The government belongs to the people.” This is the kind of discussion that Wiseman is clearly after, since these matters affect a lot more than dairy farms. This is one of the rare times we stick around for the vote, which I think doesn’t go the way we expect, which hopefully had been in the direction of more open speech. The vote is 4-4, and as we’re told in another End of Scene Line, “The motion dies on a tie.” It’s an early lesson that democracy doesn’t always produce progressive or fair-sounding results in keeping with the principles we hear invoked by at least a few of the legislators.
It’s worth thinking about Meetings, which I’m capitalizing because they are a Wiseman preoccupation, and I don’t think we’ve had a single movie without them (not counting the fictional Last Letter). If you don’t enjoy watching them, pick another film-maker. I think one big attraction of them is that they are at the heart of any institution or enterprise - people have to get together and figure out what they’re doing as a group. It’s the basis of community, of society. And I’m not talking about all the encounters between employees of an institution and those they’re meant to serve. That’s another kind of situation, worth looking at in its own right. Here I mean the group of people who get together to achieve some goal or consider some question. It may be employees of a department store, a racetrack, teachers at a school, or legislators. I think we know a meeting when we see one - a group usually around a table with somebody in charge. That’s another aspect of a meeting that makes them attractive, somebody’s usually the leader or the boss, and they’re going to express some aspect of the institution’s point of view. And if there are bosses, there are likely employee/workers who will have a differing set of concerns. While Meetings are generally an excellent example of going Behind the Scenes, another great Wiseman interest, they are still public in some manner, or public enough that they’ve allowed film-makers to be present. So it can be a great way to have serious subjects presented as the inner workings of the place are explored. Big issues and a look behind the curtain are a great combination, and obviously one of Wiseman’s important talents is knowing what’s worth hanging around for.
Meetings also can have performative and dramatic aspects. Granted that we all know meetings can be deathly dull like few human experiences offer, it you wait around long enough or have a good nose for possibility, quite interesting things can happen. Observational cinema is based upon patience. You don’t set up situations or tell people what to do. You have faith that the place you have chosen has inner workings that will reveal themselves. One way this happens is that people in meetings want to express themselves - public speaking is not like private communication. So we’ve seen more than enough examples already to say that people can be a little over the top for effect, or let’s call it a bit of performing. So an appreciation of performance may be one of the elements that carries us through. Dramatic confrontations are certainly possible, or situations requiring either some agreement or resolution might also be present. So a lot can be going on - information specific to the meeting, ideas that extend well beyond, presented by emotive people interacting with others in hopes of a desired outcome. It’s a great Wiseman contribution to see the multiple values in meetings, and we need to appreciate their role in his films. When a meeting starts, it’s an opportunity, and when each one is over, we can think about what we’ve gotten out of it and how it contributes to the whole film.
State Legislature is so full of meetings that we can start to characterize some of the common themes, though it’s good to see the Speaker of the House was right at the beginning of the film when he spoke of all many areas where expertise is needed. They, and consequently the film, really cover a lot of ground, and that’s one of its points, that legislation reaches into so many areas. If we just take the issues which are the direct subjects of individual meetings, hearings, or floor discussion, it’s quite the list:
campaign contributions
gun threats on school grounds
Mad cow disease
electronic waste
tissue donations
video voyeurism
environmental effects
high cost of utilities
teacher salaries
undocumented aliens
American Heritage Monument
Indian rights and water
prisons and drug addiction
secondhand smoke
state budget
mandatory kindergarten
landline phone rates
victim impact statements
contractor registration
public transportation
charter schools
same-sex marriage
I hope it’s helpful to list them this way, as I think a few big ideas and strategies emerge. The first line we hear at the first meeting is “I would encourage you to take this seriously”, and while that relates to campaign contributions, it’s also a clear suggestion to the audience that all these meetings matter, and we should pay attention to the issues which arise. The stuff they discuss touches our lives in very direct ways. And starting with the effect of money on democracy is a good first meeting subject. From here on it will be a more indirect meeting topic, as we get our fair share of special interest speakers in subsequent meetings and sometimes it can be easy to tell which legislators might have received a campaign contribution or two. That so many issues come within the purview of the Legislature for their annual three months, it might explain why they have meetings to control which issues get no further than a first level of consideration, and which go on to other meetings. This also sets up power fights - who gets to control which issues are exposed to larger publics (even through possible ballot measures) and which die a quick committee death. There’s also a varied interest in whether the public should be heard at these meetings, and there are occasional references to public polling on certain issues as a measure of what they need to pay attention to. How issues arise becomes itself an issue. Sometimes legislators will refer to newspaper articles as having made them aware that an issue is of concern.
The legislators feel the press of new technologies all over the place. Using cellphones to spy on unsuspecting women certainly has gotten their attention, and most of their discussion on this topic is about how quickly such perpetrators should wind up on sex offender registries. Some seem to have difficulties understanding the difference between cell phones and land lines, and dealing with electronic waste recycling is just starting to show up on their radar. It’s still outside a meeting room and in the rotunda, but we even get a demonstration of virtual reality, even if it’s awkwardly described as being used “to demonstrate to lawmakers what it’s like to be a day in the life of a schizophrenia”. This is still pretty forward looking for 2004. The legislator who’s watched it does acknowledge that “it’s the first virtual reality I’ve ever seen”, and the same likely goes for many viewers. Curiously, it’s the only place where mental health issues are even indirectly referenced. Health problems generally come up the same way - second hand smoke instead of smoking itself (Boise didn’t ban smoking in public places until 2012), and drug addiction is only mentioned as a reason why there is a greatly increasing percentage of women in Idaho prisons.
There’s a little bit of looking back, not always in comfortable ways. There are still disputes with Indian tribes over water rights, and there’s some kind of weird proposal for an American Heritage Monument, which I think ultimately fell by the wayside, as it seems never to have been built. But a rabbi is already arguing over which of three versions of the Ten Commandments should go in, and some guy of unidentified affiliation reads off a long list of what he calls key documents, which go back to the “Ancient Greeks” and “Ancient Romans”. This sounds suspiciously like recent disputes over how to interpret history, and also spills out into much evident anti-immigrant feeling, which moves from one meeting into a continued rotunda discussion. The legislators seem to have a general dislike of outsiders, meaning anyone from beyond their own state borders, as even California gets blamed a couple of times for setting bad precedents to be kept out of Idaho. When Mad Cow Disease gets attention, it’s due to Canada and Mexico, sounding now like eerie precursors to Trump and Company’s “China Virus”. In 2004 you could still maybe laugh at this a little, but the irony has some bite here when a group of young Latino students performs the “Mexican Hat Dance” in the rotunda. Pointed as well is the choir performance by a group of mostly all white students of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. The racial and ethnic biases are too apparent to require much underlining, and I think the only black face I spotted was one member of this choir. The meeting too attempting to fight mandatory kindergarten sounds like one of those free-to-be-uneducated arguments that Republican states seem to enjoy, going hand in hand with another meeting lamenting low teacher salaries but not doing much to change it, and there’s funny (not humorous) business going on with charter schools in the state, and what the purpose of a charter schools commission would be. Meetings are indeed a place where deep seated attitudes and prejudices come out, and Wiseman’s ability to observe and present what people care about without heavy editorializing is a talent in itself.
The big case for 2004 we might look to is same-sex marriage, and Wiseman saves if for nearly the end and it gets a little more extended discussion than most of the issues which have preceded it in other meetings. And what we see is not a vote about same-sex marriage, but whether the issue should leave a committee. The sequence starts innocently enough, as a motion to move “HJR9” to the senate floor. We can see that emotions are running high on this one even before we eventually find out that the bill is in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. “There are things taking place in the world around us that we can’t ignore”, one legislator argues, though plenty of them are ready to do just that. “This isn’t Massachusetts. This isn’t California,” one says hopefully. There’s a now familiar fight over whether a committee chairman who doesn’t want this to go anywhere should be respected or whether this should become a ballot measure. This is one of the few times we do get to see the vote, and like the other tie vote we saw earlier, the 4-4 tie means the bill “stays in committee”, meaning it’s dead very early on. At this time, it should be noted that not only was same-sex marriage banned in Idaho, they also specifically made clear by legislation that they would not recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. They even went so far as to pass a state constitutional amendment in 2006 banning same-sex marriage in Idaho, which eight years later was overturned by federal courts. So 2004 was a little too early for things taking place outside of Iowa to have much effect on the State Legislature.
A number of Wiseman films have ended with life tributes, either with the aging person still present or as a memorial. The Store, Racetrack, Blind, and La Comédie-Française are four others which have ended with scenes like this, and State Legislature does it too with a tribute on the House floor to a representative who had died in the previous year and who had served twelve years, in addition to running her husband’s tractor company after his death. Except for the wonderful tribute in La Comédie-Française to the 100 year old retired actress, all the rest of these are to very well-to-do successful people who embody the spirit of their respective institutions in ways that we may take with a grain of salt or two. I guess we could throw Aspen into this too, without a specific person to pay tribute to at the end, as Wiseman being very interested in those parts of American life where there are people in power, and we get some glimpse into how they’ve gotten there. As in State Legislature, this can be cloaked as well in a religious veil, where prayers in front of the House begin and end the film. (The opener is a strange prayer having both an interest in the 59th anniversary of raising a flag on Iwo Jima and also of an embellished version of the Pledge of Allegiance, mixing church and state in uncomfortable ways, I’d say.) Following the closing prayer, a bagpipe player is on hand, and we get one of those Wiseman full song renditions, perhaps to have sufficient time to consider the irony of hearing “Amazing Grace” in this pretentious performance, twisting an anti-slavery song to applaud a representative of a body still pretty stuck in the past. We’ve seen democracy in action, and while the players wouldn’t, we might have some cause for concern.