Welfare, like Primate, is a title with more meaning than it first might suggest. Welfare is the name of the agency, but it can also ironically mean happiness or well-being, as several people in the waiting rooms longingly wish for rather than only for financial assistance. This film is often called one of Wiseman’s best, though we can always wonder how many of the others the person saying this has seen. But it is indeed a great film - long in the finest Wiseman kind of way - rich with incident, full of accidental poetry, depressingly loaded with social problems that temporarily land here.
This is not the first Wiseman where we’ve heard about welfare. One place it came up earlier was in Hospital, when an insistent and concerned psychiatrist reached out on the phone to try to get immediate help for a patient he’s just seen. He keeps insisting to an unseen Miss Hightower how desperate his patient’s situation is. She keeps saying no, until finally she hangs up on him, as he ruefully informs us. As “luck” would have it, late in Welfare, we see a black woman employee complain to one of her white male bosses, probably with good cause, that she’s been passed over for promotion a number of times. Impressively arguing her case, but in the reversed position she’s usually in of receiving entreaties from others, she can reel off the names of the graduate courses that should qualify her for better. ("Casework One, Casework Two, Personality and Behavior One, Personality and Behavior Two, Administration, and Juvenile Delinquency”) She's getting the same kind of "shuffle" as the welfare recipients, and naturally, the discussion ends with her boss telling her she should be complaining to someone else and not him. Late in this scene, we hear him address her by name, and of course it’s Miss Hightower - she who did the hanging up in Hospital. It’s a strange coincidence, but also a weird reversal - the woman who was being complained to is now doing the complaining and one unsolved problem in Hospital becomes another different unsolved problem in Welfare. The shared frustrations of multiple institutions reference each other in films shot five years apart. Plus ca change, and all that.
Welfare is so packed with interesting stuff it would be easy though rather boring just to keep describing scenes I like. Let’s go a different route this time, and I’ll try to sort out some key issues and list a bunch of incidents and people quickly. As always, these things will probably make more sense if you’ve already seen the film.
The common situations (these occur multiple times):
Welfare feels like a set of variations on depressingly similar situations. It’s what makes the film a tragedy with some comic moments, and a commentary with much broader meaning than just the troubles involving welfare. A few of these are
1. Being sent back and forth between Social Security and Welfare, each claiming the other should deal with the case - other institutions may also be involved: unemployment office, Veterans Administration. As many times as not, people are told they are in the wrong place or talking to the wrong person. Welfare is a study in bureaucracy - departments on different floors (“go first to housing on the fifth floor, then to employment on the fourth floor"), hiercarchies of authority, frequent denials of responsibility. We hear so often about the Social Security office at 39 Broadway that it’s easy to imagine another whole film from there, full of scenes sending people to where we are now.
2. Waiting, and needing an appointment to come back. The film starts and ends with people waiting, and we see lots of it in between. It takes a long time to see someone, and when you do, you may be told you have to make another appointment to come back tomorrow. We hear this many many times.
3. Needing to present forms, and not having the right forms. How you prove things are as you say they are often depends on paperwork. The forms (which often need to be notarized) may come from husbands, landlords, building inspectors, employers, and other welfare departments (sometimes local, sometimes from other states), and can easily be lost, misfiled, or doubted. Among my favorite moments in the film is a quick couple of wordless shots of a hapless employee going through folder-stuffed file drawers in search of the proper spot to file a single sheet. Twice he fails to find a place for it, and then walks away. It’s easy to speculate that he will just crumple it up and toss it once out of camera range. While we see some evidence of computerization, pretty good for 1975, it still looks like records are handled in a haphazard manner, piled all over the place and not always located. Much like people.
4. Not being able to verify something. Beyond just forms, much has to be proven. A short list would include identity, citizenship, residence, income, employability, marital status, whether your case is open or closed. Welfare can be looked at as a film of doubt. Everything is up for grabs unless you can persuade someone that you have met frequently unstated requirements.
5. You can get lost in the building, lost in the city going from office to office, your records can get lost, lots of times checks have been mailed and lost. What to do when something is lost or missing or hasn’t been responded to is a continual problem.
The range of problems is huge. Let’s list a few:
I hate to say this a lot, but Welfare is not just about welfare. A key talent of Wiseman’s is sensitivity to situations which raise larger questions. There’s almost no such thing as a routine encounter in the film, even though so many follow similar patterns. As people talk, and especially as they talk longer, as Wiseman so often allows, their circumstances become more complicated, and their explanations for the straits they are in speak to broader impact. Here are some of the bigger-than-just-needing-welfare issues that are directly referenced:
hunger and food
housing and rent
poverty
race
unemployment
divorce and marital responsibility
child and pet problems
medical and mental problems
veterans
old age
people who just want or need money
social misfits
That’s just a few of the concerns that come out, again often more than once. Providing welfare is meant to be some sort of response to these overwhelming issues. It can obviously only accomplish just a very little.
Wiseman likes role changes, or reversals
The basic situation ought to be a poor person coming to the welfare office and speaking to an employee about getting regular help. Real simple, like going for a driver’s license. Instead, and another Wiseman talent for spotting these, situations are reversed, or the roles aren’t so clear cut. A few examples:
1. Miss Hightower has already been mentioned. She was the unseen person on the phone saying no in Hospital, now we see her on the pleading side.
2. A funny/sad situation very early on sets the scene for the movie as a whole - a married couple, except not to each other, who manage to get a welfare worker on their side, though she pretty clearly understands they’re not telling the truth. The worker’s kindness extends even to letting the guy bum a cigarette. (These seventies movies are packed with smokers.) First the woman tells her probably tall tales of a variety of mental and phsyical problems, and then in near Nichols-and-May type dialog of never seeing her husband (“The last time I seen him was in the summertime”. "I used to see him at night. Very quick.") Then she lets slip that her boyfriend next to her also has a wife, a clear mistake to divulge, and which she quickly tries to back off from. The twist in this is that the man used to be a welfare worker himself, so the woman who’s interviewing him seems ready to look past the holes in their story in deference to his now being on the other side.
3. If a welfare worker comes to understand and sympathize a complex set of circumstances we’ve just seen told to them, they then have to go to their superiors, we’re they now take on the role of those they’ve been listening to, and have to repeat the same set of problems in search of either a solution or a higher authority than they know they themselves possess. It’s a bit on the comical side when this happens, though their role playing can be touching as well. Their chance of success is not necessaily better, even though the welfare applicant has won them over in the first round. )I don’t think, actually, we ever see someone physically receive a check. The best they can do is be told one will be sent, even though we’ve seen a number of situations where this has failed to occur.
Employment difficulties
Unemployment was on that list above, but maybe needs special attention for the many ways it comes up. There are those who just can’t find jobs, those who lack education or training, or those who just haven’t done so well in life. I’ve already mentioned the former welfare worker now asking for welfare, he’s probably bookended by the guy at the end who says he used to make $22,000 a year, although it’s clear he’s something of a wacko as he talks about how “a billion dollars of original research" was stolen from him. “Psychic research. Mind control research.” Now he says he steals candy bars to eat. He seems very similar to the inmate in Titicut Follies who in the midst of extended rants speaks of his time as a math teacher. Wiseman is good at showing people who might not be so different from us who have now wound up in bad situations.
Some others with employment problems include a released prisoner (11 years for homicide, he says) who had some tailoring training while in prison but gave it up. Probably I should have included prison rehabilitation issues on that list above. Welfare gives the strong impression that much larger social problems are given band-aids here, and the blood is still seeping through.
The one-act plays and monologs
Sometimes the pleadings to a welfare worker and exchanges with them can rise to the level of a dramatic situation, but even beyond those encounters, Welfare has a fair number of discussions between people waiting or someone just talking to themselves that make clearer this isn’t just a movie about welfare, it’s a movie that can be about the lives and concerns of the people who have happened to wind up in a welfare office. One such longish segment is a German man mostly talking to a long-haired kid while they’re both waiting. He tells the story of his life and bemoans his feelings about suicide and the seriousness of death. There are reports that Wiseman collaborated a bit on an opera based on Welfare that eventually fell through, but one can certainly see the operatic possibilities in stories such as these. (Another conversation where a fellow improbably says he’s married to Gov. Rockefeller's sister and he's worth a fortune just kind of flies by.) Of course he excels at recognizing good telephone material, and there’s an excellent one where a woman reporting to someone about her bad welfare experience thinks it would be of interest to either the Village Voice or Geraldo Rivera. (The paper is long gone but of course Geraldo is still around.) And the most like an Off-Broadway play is a long conversation between a crazed ex-Marine racist and a calm and patient black security guard that ends with the guy pushed out the door because no one wants to hear him anymore. And in the “summary” position of the last big monolog of the film, the psychic research guy goes on a long sad rant about his life, as a woman sitting next to him uncomfortably ignores him. Wiseman has an ear for wise tidbits amidst craziness, and often his films sound far more like literature and drama than they do reportage.
Beckett, Kafka, Absurdism, Illogic
It can be sad and funny at the same time, another thing I’ve said too often already. To finish Welfare on this note, here are just fifteen short quotes that would not be out of place in Waiting for Godot or The Trial. The last crazy guy who speaks snippets of wisdom amidst his laments even makes the Beckett reference specifically, which probably earned him his summary place at the film’s conclusion. I’ll show him the same respect here.
“I know it sounds complicated.”
“It gets more involved as we go along.”
“This is very complicated, Mrs. Johnson.”
“There's more involved, but we have to go by what's on this paper here.”
“They have to process it until our investigation is through. whatever manipulations they have to make."
“It's much easier to settle things out before they happen.”
“The big question is, who is he?"
"A whole rigamarole of forms. Papers, papers, and papers.”
“If they don't want me, I think I must look for a nice place to hang.”
“Everybody has to die. there's nothing you or me can do about it."
“We have artificial phone calls coming in from central office.”
“It's not my fault. Whose fault is it?"
“We're going into a vicious cycle again, and I'm getting tired of it"
“You're just killing a dead horse.”
“You know what happened in the story of Godot. He never came. That's what I’m waiting for, something that will never come"