So when I started this I didn't realize that counting day by day would get waaay more difficult after the first month ended. So I'm gonna start including the day of the week and month too. 45 days down, 320 days left!
Today I watched a doozy of a doc. This transported me to a whole entire world I've never been apart of, or even know anything about. The culture is influenced by the economy, and both are in poor conditions.
The Whites are a large family living in West Virginia. They do drugs, they get in fights, they get arrested, they drink, cuss and cause trouble. They yell and scream at each other, and laugh and pull down each other's pants too. The movie's about family life in small towns, how the actions of our family members affect us, and how our environment shapes who we are.
What I learned: Okay, let me see if I can find a good starting place. Here's the White Family Tree:
Jesco White: Classy.
What I liked: It was a real eye-opener. I never realized there were people like this out there. I had thought characters like this only existed in cartoons or episodes of Bonanza. The whole point of this doc-a-day adventure is to open my eyes to all the different people who exist, and man, that totally happened today.
My parents were born and raised in small Kansas towns, and make it very clear they moved to a big town when my siblings and I were born to get us away from that environment. They wanted us to grow up with more opportunities than they had. I'm just now getting to the point where I understand why. You watch people like the Whites who have lived in the same county their parents and grandparents and great grandparents lived, and it's no wonder they never moved or "made anything" of themselves. They are trapped by their environments. One of my favorite scenes was of the White that got away; one of the siblings moved from Virginia with his family and is doing well; good job, nice house, his kids attend a good public school. He looks at the camera straight on and says if he had stayed in Virginia, he'd be dead by now; either from fighting, drugs, or mining. He's proof that at least to some degree, the Whites are victims of their own environment. If they had better schools, better job opportunities, better access to health care, who knows what kind of people they could have been.
It's easy to laugh at these people and their misadventures, or look down on them for their flaws and their problems. But it's harder to see them as real people, which is what I think the film wants you to do. By the half-way point of the film I've gotten past their thick accents and their drug addictions, and I'm earnestly worried whether or not they are gonna be able to get their newborn child back from Protective Services. I stop seeing them as characters and start seeing them as people.
What I didn't like: While I do think the film wanted us to empathize with the Whites, there were times I felt they were being used as fodder to get laughs. What do the filmmakers want to say with this movie? Are we supposed to be laughing at them? I'd be interested to see what the Whites think of the film's success and what their experience being filmed was like.
At times I was reminded of The Trailer Park Boys, a mocumentary show from Canada. Like the Whites, this show follows the adventures and misadventures of a group of rowdy, drug and drink-addicted hooligans who dream of making it big but never make it out of the trailer park. But while Trailer Park Boys is obviously supposed to be funny, it's harder to say with the Whites.
TPB: Like the Whites, except intentionally funny.
If you want to watch something that will blow your mind, make it this.
It's on Netflix instant right now, y'all.
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