BELL DIAMOND (Jon Jost, 1986)

It begins as a marital comedy in Butte, Montana. After seven years of marriage, Jeff and Cathy are in a rut. At home, Jeff is glued to the TV set, watching sports, when he could be making the home repairs he promised to do. Only one thing causes him to leave his chair: he has run out of beer. He leaves the door open on his way out. Cathy finishes unpacking grocery bags. On the kitchen table a Sisyphian electric train runs around and around, going nowhere on a tiny circle of track.
     Indeed, Jon Jost’s filmmaking method in this bravura opening undercuts the comedy, rendering it painfully, not pleasantly, hilarious. Jeff’s face is blank while watching the baseball game; superimposed images of his face and the televised game, with the game overwhelming (implicitly, absorbing) the face before the image goes to sheer white, suggests that Jeff is involved in a numbing experience. Cathy announces she is leaving Jeff and in fact leaves. At loose ends over this abandonment, Jeff can’t work the next day. His boss offers him a ride home, but the vehicle won’t start. “This lousy car,” the boss explains to Jeff. “It works like you. It doesn’t.” Jeff is obliged to give the vehicle a push, but as a result he is left behind on the street. Later, drinking with two buddies as they walk down abandoned railroad tracks, the camera withdraws from the trio as though it were one of the trains that used to run there. (The soundtrack assists in this impression.) Jeff, along with others, is perpetually being left behind in America. By this time, incidentally, the comical nature of the film has altogether ceased.
     Jeff, it turns out, is a Vietnam War veteran. His exposure to Agent Orange has left this “Marlboro Man” impotent. Before leaving, Cathy gives Jeff two reasons for her misery in their marriage despite her abiding love for him. “There’s no feeling of family,” she explains. “The one thing I want I can’t have. I want a baby so bad.” Jeff clings to this, noting that he can do nothing about this; but he ignores her other, more compelling explanation, that she doesn’t herself know why she must leave. There’s so much here beyond her understanding and the control of either of them. Reagan is president, and it’s “mo[u]rning in America.” Jeff loses his job, and machinery—dinosaurs—lie idle at defunct work sites. People are being left behind—not attended to—in the Land of Sweeping People Under the Rug. Writer-director Jost proceeds along a path that provides ever widening contextualization for the stress of Cathy and Jeff’s marriage.
     The solitudinous landscapes under heavy skies poignantly project an America out of joint. Pessimistic though not defeatist, Jost suggests that people would help if only they knew there was a problem. But there were no problems in Ronald Reagan’s America, only persons too weak to embrace rugged individualism, personal responsibility, the whole kit-’n’-kaboodle of official U.S. indifference. Why can’t soldiers leave war behind in foreign jungles?
     There’s a racist joke in this film, merely uttered to fill the air by one of Jeff’s buddies. It takes a swipe at both blacks and “Indians.” This joke reminded me of one of Reagan’s most shameful and bewildering moments as president. Reagan delayed signing an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while he tested the political waters to see if he could get away with this. Rumors of his racism attended the delay. Realizing that a failure to renew the act wouldn’t swim, he capitulated, disingenuously explaining publicly that “of course” he wouldn’t let the act pass into oblivion. Then he provided the oddest anecdote to demonstrate that he couldn’t possibly be a racist. He referred to his childhood, explaining that his father took a whip to him every time he used a word that was derogatory toward blacks. How then could he be racist? Obviously his dad had corrected him of that problem. With Reagan, as with the current president, there were times when he spoke that one had to shake one’s head in horrified disbelief.