Documentary directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ most popular documentaries, Boys State and Girls State, follow two groups of carefully selected high schoolers tasked with hypothetically creating a democratic government from the ground up, as part of a prestigious summer program. In the process, the subjects of Girls State and Boys State often find themselves disillusioned by popularity, deceit, and furtive sidestepping leading to power, instead of integrity, truth, and fairness reigning supreme. McBaine and Moss’ latest documentary, Middletown, tracks this same arc of teen disillusionment regarding the governmental system, only this time, from the perspective of outsider activism.
In an Electronics English class in 1991, a group of teenagers began working on a journalism project – documenting the seepage of landfill waste into their town’s aquifer. The project quickly snowballed into a deep-dive revealing endless and often surprising layers of systemic corruption. Middletown’s key players are a small handful of the now-adult students who spearheaded the investigation, as well as Fred Isseks, their cool, creative, and slightly unorthodox Electronic English teacher.
Middletown documents a microcosm of a true movement taking place in a small-town suburban high school. Throughout Middletown, students partake in civil disobedience, are stymied by The Man (even when they are moving through appropriate and legal channels, which they almost always are), and generally choose to function, as described by Isseks, by way of “civic courage”, which is “acting as if you’re living in a real democracy”. The implication here is an important one; these kids become increasingly aware that there is much that limits the powers-that-be from functioning as an actual democracy.
By combining in-depth interviews with Isseks and the former alum in the present day, a seemingly boundless amount of archival footage shot by the students in the early 90s, and a charming recreation of the Electronics English classroom, Middletown has an air of nostalgia for the era of the camcorder and the civic-minded teen. But the presence with which Isseks and his now-grown band of high school activists speak of their work implies that one could tap into this eagerness here and now.
At one point, Isseks jokes about titling Middletown “Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed 2”, a sequel to the title of the amateur documentary eventually produced by over half a decade worth of footage and investigation from many, many different Middletown high school students. But frankly, Middletown doesn’t feel all that much like a sequel—it’s as much a documentary made by these kids in 1991 as it is a documentary made by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, utilizing so much of the students’ seemingly endless original footage.
Middletown is a reminder that the ways we can enact civic courage are vast. The ways we can be radicalized are vast. At one moment in Middletown, one of the alumni muses that there are much bigger issues now than a local landfill — our melting ice caps, our scorched coral reefs. But I think what gives Middletown meaningful purpose is its function as an ode to doing what we can about the issues that light us up. Your specific community deserves clean drinking water. You can start literally at home. You can start with what interests you. What matters is that you’re helping to improve the state of this world at all.
