In my experience, there are two formats for a documentary that work really, really well. The first – the old-fashioned, narrative-heavy kind – are the “studies,” the documentaries that parse a person (The Imposter, Dear Zachary, The King of Kong) or something else worth dissecting for 90 or more minutes (The Corporation), the category most docs fall into. It's easy to imagine why that is so: most documenteurs (in fact most moviemakers) have a point to further, however veiled or banal or controversial. Even if you decide to film a subject for years without having a preordained opinion on it, it is rather difficult to stay passionate about a project for those years without developing some sort of loaded perspective on it. It’s not to say that point-making documentaries, whether politically or socially charged, or supportive of some obvious-if-relevant point (i.e., “maybe you shouldn’t play Donkey Kong too seriously”), are a bad thing. Often, they’re an essential thing. But the other documentaries are the ones that let you observe, the ones that, for the most part, let you draw conclusions, let you imagine the effects of what you’re seeing, and let you grapple with the fact that what’s being shown on-screen really did (or does) happen.
You could posit that all documentaries are open-ended, in that they allow the audience to gauge their legitimacy and come to terms with them; but the documentaries I'm interested in are the very special handful that allow you to breathe in and breathe out the world and all its weight, free of agenda and without any requirements of the audience. Commentary-free visual feasts, like Koyaanisqatsi (really how it’s spelled) and Samsara, are probably the codifiers of this style, but I find that nature docs, namely David Attenborough’s work, have a similar world-sweeping, jaw-dropping tone and purpose. All are meditative works, and it follows logically that worldly meditation is a necessity in these kinds of movies. But even though the world strikes awe into any and all fortuitous enough to marvel upon it and its wonders, or whatever, it’s also a funny place, at least when us human beings stop and look around at each other. That’s why the 1994 movie The Plutonium Circus is, in a roundabout way, poignant and important and cosmically funny.
The Plutonium Circus walks a thin tightrope, though. At once, it ran the risk of becoming the four hundred thousandth anti-atomic war piece made since the Manhattan Project, a King of the Hill-style tour of wacky Texan stereotypes, and/or a sneering census of Amarillo that concludes not only that city slickers just don’t get it, but proclaims the sheer extent of their misbegottenness. Maybe the reason it works so well is that the seeds of all of those (hypothetical) movies have been sown in this footage, and that a viewer is welcome to cultivate any or all of them. I think the main reason it succeeds, though, is that it transfers the duty of coagulating a greater meaning onto the audience along with the blame of any implications those readings might entail. If you think the movie is biased toward or away from hippies, or Yankees, or jingoists, or capitalism, or country folk, that’s fine; but it’s on you to recognize that YOU read that in-between the lines, not the filmmaker.
The Plutonium Circus is not, however, without self-awareness. Certainly it has a great deal more awareness of film as a form than most competing flicks. The common image of a documentary is a plodding encyclopedia trek reenacted through camera footage, so, whether consciously or not, docs have compensated with a general trend toward snippy edits and fast motion. Ordinarily, this is a non-issue. I prefer a faster pace simply because of the economy of attention. But The Plutonium Circus rather smartly opts for infrequent cuts and long, unbroken sermons delivered by the movie’s subjects. It’s like wandering around someplace where everyone has something to tell you. The only flashy technique the movie employs is occasionally interlocking two or three interviews at a time, alternating to a new clip when the previous has peaked in interest. It’s a classic tactic, but it’s used to great effect, and it never gets intrusive. The result of this slow, traipsing editing is a movie that is objective, presenting facts only as the original presenters did. No good movie is without paradox, and for The Plutonium Circus, it’s that the movie feels so aimless, when in fact it must have taken a great deal of directive to make.
The movie has a thesis, too: it pretty conclusively proves that it takes all kinds. Amarillo might just be the only town to have ranchers of upturned Caddies, a city commissioner that sings original tunes at square dances, purveyors of meaningless road signage, a commune of environmental activists who actually protest the disassembly of nukes, a big game hunter eager to talk about swaddling his irradiated “atomic pacifier,” amateur cancer case trackers, a collector of antique rat traps… and others. It’s not that Plutonium Circus makes fun of people so much as it makes fun of People, collectively and generally. It’s weirdly, subtly, uncomfortably relatable, too, in a way that it’ll make you double-check that you didn’t leave your own mousetrap collection for all to gawk at.
Fair warning: this is not a movie for everybody. You need to have a certain cerebral, dry-humored mindset when going in. If you’re looking for light-and-airy comedy with ten jokes per minute, you will consider this dull. If instead you expect something that will make you dig for jollity in a slew of just-funny jokes, you will, eventually, burst out laughing at something in here more heartily than you have laughed in a long time. For me it came in the credits’ subtle sort-of twist ending. You can watch The Plutonium Circus for free on YouTube here.
Prepare to curse the Whittenberg family forevermore.
