Disarming at the Precipice

This piece originally ran in the Are.na Annual vol. 6, themed “document.”

The 2017 documentary The Work entrenches us in a circle of inmates and members of the public undergoing a group healing intensive inside New Folsom, a maximum security prison in California. Around halfway through the film, a young man named Dante expresses profound grief over being denied visitations with his son. The way he talks and drops his head suggests a person at the edge of an unresolvable darkness, seeing no reason to go on living. While others in the circle try to console Dante, Vegas steps in decisively to confront him. They are now the only ones standing: probing eyes attempting to make contact with vacant ones, a search and rescue taking place between two human beings within breathing distance of one another.

Vegas calls Dante’s attitude “the coward’s way out” and demands that he take responsibility for his life to become the father his son deserves. His choice of language here is stern and lacerating, with the intent to provoke. “Do you hear me?” Vegas petitions twice to no avail. “Do you feel me?” When Dante finally responds he is swiftly embraced, as if being saved from free fall. Vegas’s microphone is accidentally muffled by the gesture, losing words but capturing instead a racing heartbeat overheard in real time. It is an objective representation of reality trespassing on the intimate space of a subjective one — the human condition caught on a hot mic.

Suddenly we become privy to the inner sanctum of cardiac rhythm, a vital sign amplified tenfold, primordial lub-dubs resembling those of a child in the womb. Suddenly we find ourselves in the role of a clinician with the documentary as our stethoscope. To whom do these palpitations belong? What is their provenance, their diagnosis? The sound is so visceral that it feels like our own anguished heart for a moment. What will help alleviate the symptoms?

As Dante lingers in Vegas’s arms, the heart rate begins to slow, but not enough to indicate de-escalation; fear remains the fuel because the price of vulnerability is too high. Sensing this, Vegas steps back to make a desperate final appeal. He gently asks Dante for three months of clemency and to accept his help during that critical window. Dante nods in consent and Vegas embraces him once more. The rapid beating becomes audible again but eases dramatically this time, tempered by the presence of safety. 

“A documentary camera (especially in the hands of a skilled filmmaker) mercilessly gouges out and lays bare its subject’s subconscious; their inner soul, or what I call people’s ‘soft spots,’” writes Kazuhiro Soda, a director who practices an observational approach to documentary filmmaking. “Depending on how things go, it can leave a subject deeply hurt. In that sense, there’s a possibility for a documentarist to become an assailant, and a very real risk for the camera to become a tool of violence.”¹ In the case of The Work, the camera is around only because men on the inside gave director Jairus McLeary permission to be there, having earned their trust after years of volunteering for the program.² He positions the documentary as an earwitness to the consequences of neglect in our world outside, overriding the ease with which we distance ourselves as viewers. Sound is what bridges the moat between us and the people we so readily write off. The heartbeat serves as shorthand.

After their tearful second embrace, Vegas tells Dante to clean himself up because others are looking — men in prison are always being surveilled and potentially targeted for any perceived weakness. As Vegas returns to his seat he exhales and blows his nose; at the same time, screams of agony from someone in another circle punctuate the room tone. We are forced to listen to the psychosomatic struggle of individuals stripped of everything but their word, their voice, their breath. Every aspect of this soundscape implicates the criminal justice system — not the camera — as the tool of violence here. We come to understand this through our ears. 

The Work has no interest in perpetuating the system’s machinations by passing judgments about personal histories or crimes committed. Instead, this documentary testifies to the strength of the human will, even among the most hardened and disenfranchised. Men invited to participate in the circle are in it by choice: What compels a person to descend into the wound like this, to voluntarily face their demons and risk exposure in such a merciless environment? What are they trying to reach?

An image comes to mind of artist Giuseppe Penone sitting at the periphery of a felled cedar trunk with his entire torso inside its hollowed center. He is whittling the timber down to its heartwood, following clues from growth rings and knots to excavate the contours of a sapling within. In its final form, the piece becomes a sculptural memory honoring the young tree that once stood, a tender spine buttressing a pillar of ancient wood stripped of its tough outer bark. Perhaps the work is a similar undertaking.

The gathering space is now tranquil, dark, and quiet. Participants are lying on the ground under makeshift forts of fabric draped over chairs, guarded by other men as though they are on active night watch. “I want you to imagine floating higher and higher as you float right through the roof of this building,” a facilitator narrates from a dim spotlight at the center of the room. “Nothing can harm you. Nothing can touch you as you move further and higher and farther away from this place, until there is no place. And then off in the distance, you see something. It’s a little dot at first, a small something. But you look up and you’re looking into the face of a child. You’re looking into the face of you when you were a boy. And you’re asking, ‘What’s the deepest need?’ What’s the thing you needed? What is it, the thing that would’ve kept you safe… made you grow up whole, balanced, healthy?”

Imagine exhuming this sadness and articulating it for the very first time. An adult voice gives way to that of a child once lost within; the lifetime between them collapses. “Right there next to where we hurt the most is where our medicine is at,” says one of the men in the circle. And so at the start of each session participants are asked to go into silence together. When words fail to expel the pain they are asked to give it a sound. Listening is a mirror, being heard and received is the remedy. May we each brave this lonesome effort and be welcomed in all our souls.