Join or Die (2024)
dir. Pete Davis, Rebecca Davis
Rated: N/A
image: ©2024 Abramorama
As I write these words, the culmination of another Spooky Season, Halloween, has recently passed. I’m still fighting a slight post-Halloween hangover brought on by Rae and I participating (for the second year in a row) in the Letterboxd horror movie challenge known as Hooptober; thirty-four horror movies, one each day in October plus three extra credit titles.
If you were anywhere close to this level of saturation in all things horror for Spooky Season, I’d understand if you looked at the title of the movie for this week’s review, Join or Die, and thought, “No thanks, I’ve had my fill of horror for the year.” But Join or Die isn’t a horror movie, at least not by any conventional standard. It’s a documentary about something much scarier than an American werewolf in London or even killer klowns from outer space.
Writer and civic advocate Pete Davis, alongside his director and producer sister, Rebecca, have made in their documentary an extraordinarily convincing case for why it feels like American society is in the throes of complete disintegration. This is Pete Davis’s first film. It’s also Rebecca Davis’s feature directing and writing debut, after spending a decade as a producer for NBC News and as the supervising producer for the second season of the Netflix/Vox collaboration Explained.
(I quite enjoyed Explained – the show ran between 2018 and 2021 and was co-created by Joe Posner and Ezra Klein – which presents 15-to-30-minute bitesize explainers on myriad topics ranging from the racial wealth gap to cults to the history of pirates.)
Pete Davis was a former student of a man named Robert Putnam, whose work Join or Die probes for answers as to why our American institutions and, not coincidentally, our basic civility to our fellow citizens, are crumbling. It is, according to Putnam, all about clubs.
Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, saw a golden opportunity to practically be able to study democracy in a laboratory setting when Italy made structural changes in the 1970s to how its government functioned.
In the aftermath of World War II, Italy made a major change from its formerly centralized government to a collection of twenty semi-autonomous regions. When those changes began to take effect in 1970, Putnam traveled to Italy in order to collect and analyze data concerning how these regions organized political power, how they met (or didn’t) the needs of their citizenry, and why some were more successful, well-regarded, and produced a more contented population than others.
The nuts and bolts of Putnam’s study were as straight forward as possible. If a regional government promised that X number of child care facilities would be built by Y date, Putnam looked at if they met their goal or not and why. His work, which culminated in the 1993 book (cowritten by Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, made the claim that, other factors being constant, the best predictor of a successful government is a strong tradition and practice of civic engagement from the general population.
Does that statement resonate with you in any way? It certainly did for me. Afterall, how civically engaged do you suppose the average US citizen is, and how well do you think our government is functioning? Between working 40 hours a week (or, more realistically, 40+ hours when you consider uncompensated travel time to and from work, overtime to get everything done, etc.), getting the kids fed and to school or other functions, and the seemingly limitless other time-consuming and draining activities that need to be done, who wants to join and participate in something that will further eat into the already woefully scarce resource of our free time?
According to Putnam and Join or Die, it’s imperative that we all find the extra time, lest we risk our democracy. Pete and Rebecca Davis’s film, using Putnam’s substantial body of work as its basis, argues that you can draw a direct line from declining membership and engagement in something as frivolous-seeming as a bowling league to our government becoming less responsive to the needs of its citizens.
That might seem like a tenuous connection, but Putnam made the case in his follow up book about the issue called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. With Bowling Alone, as in Making Democracy Work, Putnam argues that the concept of social capital – a term that Putnam didn’t invent, but certainly popularized – in which ordinary people form groups through common cause (even if it’s only getting together once a week to bowl and hang out), leads to a more engaged, informed citizenry that demands more from its local, state, and federal governments.
Join or Die walks us through Putnam’s realization that the decline, which began in earnest in the 1960s, of membership in PTAs, book clubs, or rotary organizations, separates us, making us forget about our greatest strength in standing up to tyranny: people power. The Davises remind us that organizations for change can take many different forms, like when they mention a nineteenth century women’s sowing society that had one additional concern: it was an anti-slavery sowing society.
It's exactly this kind of free association built into the United States Bill of Rights, which guarantees our right to assemble with anyone we choose, that can lead to the other fundamental human right enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution: the right to petition our government for change. It’s only when people get together on a regular basis and build meaningful relationships with each other that we begin to realize our shared struggles and can organize for a redress of our grievances to those in power.
As Join or Die unfolded, I wondered if the picture would present a systemic explanation for why we’ve all checked out when it comes to checking in on our fellow citizens and building collective power through shared community. It does, although in an almost frustrating, off-handed way. One interviewee quickly covers the phenomenon of our society’s move (even more) in the direction of rugged individualism as a reaction to racial desegregation that began in earnest with the 1950s Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
Reactionary conservative activists – which, not coincidentally, more often than not represent institutional wealth and power – sold the image of the Marlboro Man in the 1960s and ‘70s, a cowboy figure who didn’t want anything from society and didn’t expect society to want anything from him. It was a cultural way to convince us to keep our heads down and forget that our greatest strength is in our numbers.
I want to go one further and suggest (as I wished the movie had done) the idea that the only organizations with any power that bring disparate groups of people together now are corporations and employers. We are defined by our productivity in these spaces and nothing more. We’re not citizens, we are employees. If the only group associations modeled for us are ones with top-down, hierarchical structures (read: authoritarian and dictatorial), it’s not surprising that the vast majority of us feel like we’re powerless and have no say in how our society is run.
Aesthetically, Join or Die tries to come up with exciting graphics and sound effects to distract from the less-than-exhilarating parade of talking head-style interviews we get throughout the documentary. These packages of graphics and sound effects put me in mind of an MSNBC show more than anything else, which isn’t the worst strategy to zhuzh up the format a little.
The Davises could have had Ben Stein read the script in front of a white background for 90 minutes and it wouldn’t have detracted from the importance of their message. The message itself is so unassuming that it’s easy to forget how vital it is to the health of our society: our strength is in community. Something that seems inconsequential, like joining a bowling league, can forge connections that make us realize we’re more alike than we are different. We can make the society we want to live in through collective action and organizing to make it happen.
Why it got 4 stars:
- If you couldn’t tell in the review, I bought into the Davis’s — and, by extension, Putnam’s — argument that our nation’s best strategy to get a government that works for all of us and that provides the basic services to enrich American citizen’s lives is for us to talk to each other. We need to form groups of all shapes and sizes as a way to build solidarity and make change.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The film makes a good point about something we atheists know all too well: it feels like the Church has a monopoly on community, but that’s not actually the case. As Join or Die shows, movements like the Chicago Gig Alliance prove solidarity and community can be built outside of religion.
- It all really comes down to fighting the common American sentiment of “I’m not really a joiner.” As someone who practically lives this ethos, I can relate first-hand how much of an uphill battle we’re all facing. Still, hope springs eternal, and every new day is another chance to turn it all around.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I had an opportunity to see Join or Die when I covered SXSW 2023, but, because of other screenings, I missed my chance. It’s currently available to stream exclusively on Netflix, which is how I screened it.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I wrote the bulk of the first draft of this review on the second of November, and it was supposed to be published on the eighth. Then the election happened. Over the following two weeks, I basically lost the will to do… much of anything. I’ve been despondent since Trump won reelection. That’s a state I expect to be in at least until the new year, but I refuse to give up hope completely. I think Putnam’s work, and, by extension, Join or Die, provides a path forward. I’d like to form a group that screens Join or Die and other movies with progressive, leftist politics with discussion and fellowship afterwards. I don’t know how feasible that would be, especially considering the prohibition on screening movies without paying for the rights. Whatever I end up doing, I’m adamant that money should not be involved in any way. If anyone out there has ideas, or wants to discuss it, please let me know. Hopefully there will be more to come on this. Watch this space…