Family Circle

Watching Don Howard’s new film, Nuclear Family, and talking to him about it, one has the unshakable feeling that the guy who got our attention with his quirky 1996 doc, Letter From Waco, is trying to tunnel his way even further out of the documentary “box.” He’s cocooning something new, something without a label, a documentary stripped of most of the filmmaker guidance we’ve come to expect of the form, with a more ambiguous social observation conveyed through vérité scenes that pack the punch of good photography. And of course he’s aware of — OK, even a bit anxious about — the kind of will-they-get-it risks a leap like this entails. But deterred? Not in the slightest.

Most simply put, Nuclear Family is a film in three parts about Texas-style cheerleading tryouts, high school football, and weddings, and how these cultural rituals — shot through, as they are, with outrageous stereotypical excess and hubris — are handed down from one generation to the next. We’re introduced to the world of Texas high school cheerleading by Kathleen, a former cheerleader, now a mom, who actually thought about how each of her three daughters’ names would look on the backs of cheerleader sweaters before naming them. Before our eyes can roll back too far, Kathleen rolls out her sincere belief that — though it may look for all the world like a silly, sometimes-damaging obsession of the teen years — the process of cheerleading tryouts is actually fraught with important life lessons for girls. A ritual that fairly credible moms like Kathleen deem worth promoting — whether we buy it or not. After shooting this segment, Howard came to see the cheerleading ordeal as “something that seemed so cut and dried and black and white and easily dismissed that I wanted to open it up so we can see that in a certain way, it’s a field for interaction between women and a negotiation about what womanhood means.”

The football segment reinforces all of our notions of football as a way for boys to legitimately channel their insuppressible violent impulses and at the same time become men. “In every little Texas town, football is more important than it ought to be. Everyone comes together once a week on Friday night to enact this thing, and it’s all around rites of manhood, supposedly, but everyone agrees to pretend that it’s boys coming of age,” says Howard. Take the pregame locker-room scene in which the coach of the team that for 17 consecutive years has beaten the opponent they’re about to play exhorts his squad, in effect, not to let up even if the score is 85 to nothing and there’s two seconds left to play, because, if they were in your place, that’s what they’d do to you. To this day, Howard — himself a former high school football player — has vivid memories of being in the middle of one of these huddles and at the same time being blind-sided by the craziness of it all: “What that coach is really telling them — and bear in mind, this isn’t a team that’s so beaten and pissed off that they want to kill somebody; this is the winning team he’s talking to — is that this isn’t about mercy; this isn’t about good sportsmanship. The coach’s lesson for these guys is never let up!” The lesson of high school football, says Howard, is that “there are winners and there are losers, and fuck the losers.”

The wedding segment features scenes and interviews with couples who are about to be married. We hear what the girls and their soon-to-be life mates are thinking and expecting as they prepare for their Big Day — all more or less cognizant that the odds of long-term viability are not great. Not surprisingly, the guys and the girls have pretty different expectations, but, by and large, hope still manages to spring eternal. The camera hovers on a little flower girl at a wedding who’s really an observer of the ritual, and we’re left to wonder what she’ll be thinking when she’s the bride’s age.

That, at least, is the microreading of the film, and at the Texas level. But Howard is hoping you won’t stop there, instead ascending to the next level of meaning, understanding that each of these segments — the first, female-specific (labeled “Mom”); the second, male-specific (“Dad”); and the third, a blend of both (“Kids”) — has broader anthropological implications, beyond Texas, for the larger culture: “I don’t want people to think this is only about, say, the pressure and violence of football or the incipient arrogance in the nature of cheerleading. I want people to see that this is really about the society that creates these institutions and the way these individuals struggle with their place in that. The intention is not to say, oh, football is the most interesting thing in the world, but simply to say this is one way that human beings work out culture; this is culture asserting itself. These are the stakes as an individual; if you’re a Texan, this is the game that you would play — or decide not to play — and that in itself is being enculturated in a certain way.

“The goal we went for in this movie was how much can we communicate visually, how much can we create film in its purest form to create these higher layers of meaning instead of telling you what to think about it.” However, for the viewer who might be overly absorbed by the details of the life rites presented, Howard has strung a Jungian quote among the segments, in which the psychoanalyst observes, in essence, that he’d originally believed that the psychic disorders his patients were presenting were of an individual nature, but the more he learned about humans, the more he realized that what he was seeing were symptoms of a social situation. That quote, explains the filmmaker, is a heads-up to the viewer to, “Be thinking here, stay awake, this isn’t about just chilling out and saying oh, football is so visceral, or little girls are so sad when they’re crying or so two-faced.” It is hard, when you’re making a documentary, to work completely without a net.

The footage for two of the three segments was captured, vérité style, by three ace cinematographers — Lee Daniels, Deb Lewis, and Geoff Winningham — who fanned out across the state in various combinations to those locales where cheerleading competitions and weddings were happening. The football footage was shot by Winningham in 1984 and was actually the impetus for the film. Winningham wrote a book, The Rites of Fall, about high school football in the Seventies, and then began a documentary about it but never finished it. Howard was so impressed by Winningham’s footage — “I thought it really, really captured the reality of high school football in a way that Hollywood never has or will” — that he asked if he could fiddle with it, and it ended up as the football segment of Nuclear Family.

Austin Chronicle: OK, so that brings us to the issue of the title, Nuclear Family. Go for it.

Don Howard: The problem with the title of the film is that it only makes sense after you’ve seen the film. After the film, the title makes sense, because what I wanted to confirm was that yes, you were seeing gender roles or gender-related roles being played out and developed, and in the family setting, this is how our gender formulations get carried forward to the next generation. That’s why I liked landing on the little girl at the end, so that the idea is not oh, look how weird cheerleading is, look how strange and exotic football is in this culture, but more, this is how she learns about who she is supposed to be and that it’s likely that she will then forward that to her own daughters. So hopefully, the idea was this cyclical thing that’s introduced by this concept of family. And also, this male-female thing does come together to create something else, it’s not at all just a fight; it’s mutual absorption. In a weird way, it’s like cheerleading has to have football and football needs cheerleading. The family — who knows where it goes from here, but it’s this continual combination that happens. It’s almost like a sexual thing, though the movie stays way away from all of that. While I’m watching the cheerleading part, I always feel like, wow, girls really are in some ways a lot different from guys — I fight that in everything I do; I don’t believe that sex has a determining effect on anything — and yet when I see all these girls hugging each other and see the guys — there is something there. I didn’t want viewers to come away with anything I said or forced on them; it was more that the camera kind of reveals that.

This article appears in September 19 • 2003.