According to documentary filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the decisive turning point in public opinion for George W. Bush. It was after his cataclysmically lackluster response to the devastation in New Orleans, according to The Wall Street Journal, that his approval ratings slipped irreversibly into the 30s. Compared to other Katrina documentaries (notably Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke), Bush plays an ostensibly peripheral role in Deal and Lessin’s Trouble the Water (opening this Friday in Toronto), but the atmosphere of political outrage lingers over every frame.
Trouble the Water, one of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary, follows Kimberly and Scott Roberts, two residents of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, as they attempt to piece together their lives after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The opening scenes, filmed by Kimberly on a mini-DV cam, document the events up to and including the hurricane with startling immediacy, including a devastating scene in which the couple climbs into their attic, panicking as the water levels rise higher and higher. This is some of the most gripping documentary footage in years.
“Our original vision was to do a story about the Louisiana national guardsmen who had been in Iraq when Katrina hit,” says Tia Lessin in an interview with The Varsity. “These are people who had signed up to protect their own communities in case of storms or what have you, and they were ten thousand miles away.”
“Most of them were in tours of duty in Iraq, and had just come back and were sorta shell-shocked,” says Carl Deal. “All of a sudden being at home in this post-apocalyptic nightmare, [they have] to pull guns on American citizens and recover dead bodies. We just felt like those soldiers aren’t the problem. The problem is the people who make the decisions of where they go and what they do.”
After losing their access to the Red Cross shelter in Alexandria, Louisiana (for “asking one too many questions,” says Deal), Deal and Lessin had a chance encounter with Kimberly and Scott Roberts. Impressed by their footage, Deal and Lessin followed them back to New Orleans, where relief was slow and insubstantial. By the end, the film suggests that New Orleans today is in worse condition than ever.
The National Guard, Deal and Lessin’s original subjects, aren’t given a flattering portrait in Trouble the Water. One of the most excruciating scenes sees Kimberly, Scott, and other homeless people escorted away from an abandoned naval base at gunpoint, despite the fact that their base could have theoretically sheltered hundreds.
For Lessin, the blame lies not with the guardsmen. “It was the Bush administration [and] the commander in chief that failed to change the standing order. I mean, the standing order at a naval base is to keep civilians out, but at this time of crisis that standing order should have been changed and the person to do that was the commander in chief, who at that time was George W. Bush.”
With any documentary about the aftermath of Katrina, the elephant in the room is the president, whose well-documented response (or lack thereof) to Katrina’s devastation could be charitably described as tepid. I ask Deal and Lessin why they think Bush demonstrated such a lack of caring. Lessin is surprisingly direct in her response.
“First of all, I think the federal government, after a quarter century of conservative rule in America, had been systematically dismantled by the right wing. The safety net in our country has been systematically dismantled. So I would say the institutions had failed Kimberly and Scott long before Katrina, long before the levees broke. And I guess it’s not even a surprise considering that the Bush administration was so out of touch with the suffering of people around the globe, and had caused so much suffering. It’s not surprising…although it’s still an outrage.”
“These were poor people in America who he had been turning his back on, and he and his father and the Reagan administration helped create this level of inequality. So it’s not even that they didn’t care, it’s that they systematically, as a family empire, created this kind of institutional neglect. He had turned his back on poor people a long time ago, and this was the logical extension of that.”
For Lessin, who worked with Deal as an archivist on numerous left-wing documentaries (including several by Michael Moore), outrage over Bush and the Republican Party has been a central motivating factor in her career. “It’s not just about New Orleans—it’s about America. I think a lot of America looks like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Many communities in cities throughout the country have failed public school systems, people without healthcare, failed infrastructure…just a mess.”
She pauses. “It almost gives him too much credit to say he didn’t care.”
Trouble the Water opens Friday, February 13th.
