Documentary Film and the Flint Water Crisis: Incorporating the Sociological Imagination

Abstract

nor any drop to drink: flint's water crisis (2018) focuses on the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan. As a cost-cutting measure, in 2014, the state switched Flint's water supply to the heavily polluted Flint River. Almost immediately, residents complained of the water's color, taste, and smell. Over the course of many months, they expressed concerns about rashes, hair and tooth loss, miscarriage, childhood developmental problems, and Legionnaire's disease. Belatedly, officials admitted that the water was contaminated. On January 2, 2016, the state of Michigan declared a state of emergency, which was followed by a federal state of emergency on January 16, 2016. As the crisis unfolded, the public was inundated with media images of protests, lead testing for children, and crowded water distribution sites. Today, Flint has largely dropped out of the headlines. However, the horrors faced by many residents remain. Punctuated by interviews that document the experiences of ordinary residents, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis sheds light on how the failure of government and economic policy created the Flint water crisis. The film seeks to better understand why today in Flint, a city in the Great Lakes State, there is neither trust in governmental institutions nor any drop to drink.The film, which was my first foray into documentary filmmaking, was a collaboration with other faculty and staff at Central Michigan University. Daniel Bracken, one of the film's producers, had previously served as a producer at WCMU public television and produced eight episodes of the award-winning documentary series America from the Ground Up (2014–18). Eric Limarenko, associate professor in the School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts, served as both producer and editor for the film. Donald Blubaugh, a student at Central Michigan University who would go on to work on the Discovery Channel's The Incredible Dr. Pol (2011–present), served as coproducer and as a camera operator for the documentary.Since its release in 2018, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis has been screened across the United States and internationally in a variety of venues1 and has served as a launching point for difficult but important conversations about the true nature of American society.2 The film's open-access status3 represents a continued commitment to facilitating those critical conversations across diverse communities and among activists, educators, scientists, engineers, and all those who care deeply about social and environmental justice. During Q&A sessions that follow the screenings, I am invariably asked, primarily by fellow social scientists, “Why did you choose to make a film?” There is the precedent of anthropologists and sociologists utilizing documentary film as a research tool (Harris 63). However, many colleagues see my filmmaking as an educational and creative endeavor but not a traditional vehicle for sociological work. My responses to such queries and perceptions are that documentary filmmaking is an essential component of public-facing sociology and that my identity as a sociologist is not separate from my work as a documentary filmmaker. Indeed, a sociological background shaped my roles as writer, director, and coproducer of the documentary. This article further elaborates on those responses by presenting an analysis that showcases how documentary filmmaking can serve as a form of public sociology. Moreover, it highlights how specific sociological perspectives and approaches enrich documentaries, shedding light on the profound interconnectedness between historical context and the lives of individuals.The first section of this article explains the departure from traditional scholarly activities in favor of documentary film as a form of public sociology. The second section introduces sociologist C. Wright Mills's concept of the sociological imagination, which is “the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (Mills 1). Sociological imagination is the ability to see how an individual's experiences (what Mills termed “biography”) are shaped by or interconnected with the larger social context (what he termed “history”) in which they occur (Mills 6). The second section further explains how the sociological imagination shaped my contributions in making a film that contextualizes the experiences of its subjects within the broader contexts of globalization, neoliberalism, and racism. In the third section, I discuss how an interpretative approach can complement the use of the sociological imagination in appreciating how individuals understand and navigate their experiences within larger social contexts. The section discusses how techniques within an interpretative approach such as photo elicitation were used to understand the subjective experiences and perspectives of Flint residents.By the time I received tenure and attained the rank of associate professor, I was struggling with a feeling of disconnection from the needs and concerns of the broader public. I believed that the discipline of sociology could bring valuable insight to society's most pressing social problems and had the potential to reform, if not revolutionize, the world. Yet how accessible were these insights? Were sociologists engaged in work that truly mattered to the public, or were too many engaged in esoteric work? These questions pushed me toward a more public-facing sociology, bridging the growing gap between what Michael Burawoy calls the sociological ethos (values, attitudes, and beliefs that are central to the discipline of sociology) and the “world we study.” A move toward public sociology meant incorporating the sociological imagination to highlight the impacts of inequality on real individuals, families, and communities. Importantly, it also meant identifying the root causes of and developing effective solutions to address environmental injustice.Environmental justice concerns the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies (Environmental Protection Agency). This definition recognizes that marginalized communities and vulnerable populations often bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards, such as pollution, toxins, and other environmental health risks. When the Flint water crisis began to be covered consistently in the US news media, it was apparent that environmental injustice had occurred. Flint residents never had input in the decisions that would ultimately expose their community to contaminated water. Further, when residents demanded action, various levels of government were dismissive and slow to act (State of Michigan, Flint Water Advisory Task Force Final Report 4–8).When the media finally began to take notice of the crisis, there was initially little questioning of official and expert pronouncements that the water was safe (Jackson). On the front lines of one of the most tragic public health disasters in recent memory, Flint residents were rendered invisible and voiceless at the outset and throughout the crisis. Their environment and health were sacrificed in the interest of capital and fiscal expediency. Although some headlines in the media outside of the Flint area alluded to issues and concerns about water quality in the aftermath of the city's switch to the Flint River as its water source, there was no significant examination of the context that gave rise to the Flint water crisis. As these events unfolded, it was clear that there was a role for public-facing sociology to go beyond superficial assessments to illuminate the context behind the water crisis.A documentary film was an ideal vehicle for public sociology focused on the Flint water crisis for several reasons. First, documentary films have been a platform for long-marginalized communities whose voices have been excluded from mainstream media and public discourse. Concerning the Flint community, dominant narratives regarding the nature and causes of the water crisis could be challenged. Second, geographically and socially distant publics could be presented with information to promote a more nuanced and informed discourse around the nature, causes, and consequences of the water crisis and, in the process, bridges of empathy could be built (Billings 5). Third, a documentary film that utilized the sociological imagination could push back against superficial yet dominant narratives about the water crisis and provide an impetus and platform for change action (Bacha). A documentary on the water crisis could thus serve as a means of engagement and participation where community leaders, activists, policymakers, and other stakeholders could dialogue around the causes of the crisis and move to collective action.Like many other social issue documentaries, Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis utilizes personal stories to engender empathy with and/or emotional connection to the people and issue at hand. Three of those stories are featured in this section. However, incorporating subjects’ stories is also a necessary part of utilizing the sociological imagination. This section will discuss how, in the process of telling a fuller story, personal stories can be connected to broader social issues.The opening three minutes of the documentary convey how the event profoundly shaped residents’ relationship to water. Viewers see Lendra Brown, the main subject in the film, microwaving plastic bottled water in her kitchen, then entering a cramped bathroom. The older woman awkwardly hovers over a tiny sink, wiping her face, arms, torso, and legs with the warmed bottled water. There is no dialogue or narration, but the sounds of a worn washcloth scrubbing her flaking, blemished skin can be heard. This scene is only three minutes long; however, it feels like an eternity for the viewer. The monotony breaks when Lendra, discovering she does not have enough water to complete her bath, calls her niece to microwave and bring more warm bottled water. In the next scene, Lendra is in her living room, preparing a homemade concoction of mineral oil, tea tree oil, Bio-Oil Skincare Oil, and hand lotion in a Styrofoam bowl. She says: All rashed up . . . I don't want anyone to be looking at my skin. But I don't have psoriasis, I have symptoms of the Flint water [chuckles]. It takes so long to get dressed and go somewhere. Sometimes I don't go through this procedure because I'm in a hurry and I have to use the Flint water, and then I come back home, and my skin is worse. It's like . . . When I take off my jeans it's like snowflakes coming off. See? You can even see the white stuff on the inside of my pants . . . I can pop it, and it will be like it's snowing. You see the flakes of skin there?Another scene in the film features Nakiya Wakes, an African American single mother who, in 2014, moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Flint with her children. She recalls: I found out that I was pregnant in April of 2015. I started having pain five weeks into my pregnancy and went to the emergency room. [The doctors] told me then that I had miscarried the baby. So I was like, OK, it's over with, it's done. [Afterward] they set up an appointment with my OB. And when they did the ultrasound, they were like, “We have a heartbeat.” And I'm like, well, the emergency room just told me that I'd lost it. Then they gave me the picture, and they were like, “You lost the first one,” and I'm like, “What do you mean the first one?” They were like, “It was twins.” And so, at five weeks I lost the first one. I figured that the next twin would make it and be my miracle baby.Approximately thirteen weeks into her pregnancy, Nakiya Wakes lost her second child.In the film, she also reveals that the crisis has had a detrimental impact on her two other children, who tested positive for elevated blood lead levels. Her seven-year-old son Jaylen began exhibiting aggressive behavior at school. Halfway into the school year, he had been suspended over fifty-six times. During her interview, Nakiya answers a call from her son's school. She learns that Jaylen kicked a teacher, and four adults were required to restrain him. Administrators want her to retrieve her son immediately. Her lavalier microphone records her child screaming on the other line.Yet another scene incorporated in the film to invoke an emotional response was news footage of the “switch.” On April 25, 2014, at the Flint Water Plant, then mayor Dayne Walling and a host of local and state officials, including emergency manager Darnel Early, assembled to switch Flint from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) system to the Flint River. After a three-two-one countdown, Walling pushed a button on a valve, which soon indicated that the water supply from DWSD had been closed off. To celebrate, those in attendance raised glasses filled with Flint River water and toasted, “Here's to Flint!” This scene often elicits a verbal response from audiences, and thus far none of those responses have seemed empathetic. During a screening in the city of Flint itself, the audience's collective negative response was so loud and prolonged that the organizers had to pause the film until the venue had quieted down. Folks in attendance were angry. The images that showed Walling physically pushing the button have ever since made him a symbol of the city's water woes (Worth-Nelson). It was the beginning of the end of his political career.It was important that Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis not be considered an example of disaster porn. I wanted to avoid a singular focus on the sensational aspects or personal tragedies associated with the Flint water crisis. Rather, the stories of subjects are a starting point in the exploration of the underlying structural factors and historical contexts that gave rise to the Flint water crisis. Incorporating the sociological imagination in my approach to the film results in a richer story that reorients audiences’ thinking about the water crisis.As previously mentioned, the sociological imagination involves the ability to see the interconnection between an individual's personal experiences (biography) and the larger social context (history) in which they occur (Mills 6). According to C. Wright Mills, an essential tool of the sociological imagination is identifying the distinction between personal troubles and public issues (Mills 3). Personal troubles are private problems that individuals experience within the context of their personal lives and are often attributed to the individual's personal and moral failings. The reality, however, is that what appears to be an isolated individual problem is a public issue rooted in larger social structures and institutions. It follows that Lendra's struggles to maintain basic hygiene with bottles of water, Nakiya's recount of her traumatic miscarriages, and Dayne Walling's career-killing actions are not isolated individual/personal troubles but stem from the Flint water crisis as a public issue, which in turn emerged from the social, political, economic, and historical context.The call for a reorientation to see the connection between an individual and a broader context is echoed in Vicki Mayer's chapter “Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory.” Mayer highlights the need for production studies to connect macro and micro factors, and she argues that analyzing production cultures (the practices and values of those involved in the creation of media content) is critical to understanding the larger social context in which media is produced and consumed (15). Put another way, by “bringing the social back in” and employing social theory, one can better understand the larger social and economic dynamics (e.g., power relations and labor practices) that shape media productions (Mayer 15).Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis seeks to impress on audiences that personal troubles experienced due to water contamination are not isolated but instead are part of a public issue: thousands of people in the city were exposed to the contaminated water. From there, the next step involves uncovering the social context behind the water crisis as a public issue. By providing varying perspectives from expert voices, such as Michigan's former state treasurer Robert J. Kleine, US Representative Dan Kildee of Michigan's Eighth Congressional District (which includes the city of Flint), and Claire McClinton, a retired auto worker, longtime union activist, and grassroots community activist, the film reveals the economic, political, and historical context behind the water crisis to the audience.The documentary conveys to audiences how Flint, once a thriving center of the automobile industry, was a city in decline by the 1980s and 1990s due to corporate abandonment, deindustrialization, and disinvestment. While corporate abandonment was famously addressed in Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989), the expert interviews in my film sought to offer nuanced explanations of Flint's demise that ultimately led to the water crisis. Experts can be thought of as authoritative sources and are typically interviewed to provide in-depth analysis and insight. The expert voices in my film gave viewers a clearer understanding of the contexts in which public-issue troubles occur.One expert, Robert Kleine, Michigan's former treasurer, gives a detailed description of Michigan's economic circumstances beyond General Motors’ departure. He explains that the city's difficulties could be placed in the context of the global 2008 economic crisis. He says, “Property values in Michigan dropped; in cities [they] dropped about 20 percent from 2008 to 2012. So the combination of all of these things put many cities in an untenable position. If they raise taxes, if they are able to, people are going to move out . . . if they cut services, people aren't going to want to live there, and people are going to move out. It's sort of a Hobson's choice.”The city has had little capacity to pull itself out of its financial predicament. As Kleine explains, state revenue sharing with local governments was one of the things that got cut, and he thinks “there was maybe some justification for doing that,” but when he was treasurer, he “always argued against it because [he] knew what the final outcome was going to be for cities.” Moreover, Kleine acknowledges that when “budgets are so tight, you know it's difficult to fund everything that you should be funding,” but he continues, “Since Governor Snyder came into office, they've kind of accelerated this reduction. Revenue sharing. What they wanted to do rather than properly fund revenue sharing to the cities is they cut business taxes. We've cut business taxes by a total amount of about three billion dollars since the governor has been in office.” The decisions of the Snyder administration compounded the social issues impacting Flint residents. Audiences of the film learn that revenue sharing, a system in which the state government distributes a portion of its tax revenues to local governments, has been redirected from cities to the state level for several years. Through Kleine's interview, audiences also learn that this reduction in city funding, combined with a lack of viable options to raise revenue, helped push Flint into an untenable financial situation. This state of affairs led to the state of Michigan appointing an emergency manager to take over Flint in 2011.In her interview, Claire McClinton, a longtime activist with the grassroots advocacy group Democracy Defense League, characterizes the emergency manager as “a dictator with superpowers.” She goes on to explain how the political elite tapped into long-standing stereotypes about African American and low-income communities, which are often portrayed as inherently dysfunctional and needing external intervention. She says: They sold the law to the public or tried to sell the law to the public by using the race card. They said that African Americans [were the cause] because most of the cities [under] emergency managers [were] predominantly majority-minority cities. [The same was true for] most of the school districts. So what they said was that African American elected officials are incompetent, they are corrupt, . . . they don't know how to manage money, they spend their way into debt. And that's why these cities are broke. That was what they tried to sell to the public to get that law passed. And they did pass it, and then they went about going to taking over the cities and school districts.Claire McClinton describes how Public Act 4 (2011) gave emergency managers the power to unilaterally enact new laws, disregard existing local law as contained in municipal charters and ordinances, terminate collective bargaining agreements and contracts, dismiss elected officials, privatize or sell public assets, and dissolve the local municipality altogether (Fasenfest 38). Emergency managers report only to the governor and can usurp the power or authority of the elected local government or school board, and they are not accountable to the communities in which they operate (Fasenfest 37).The emergency manager law was unpopular in Michigan. After much activism and organization, the law was put on the ballot and repealed by referendum in 2012, but it was immediately replaced by a new emergency manager law, Public Act 436, which cannot be repealed by referendum because legislatures included an appropriation in the bill. McClinton does not mince words regarding what she felt was an attack against democracy: People say you can't put lipstick on this pig! This is anti-democratic. You know we have people who talk about voter suppression. This is voter suppression on steroids. Because they don't keep you from voting—they just take the vote away! We saw this law as a fascist law, a dictatorial law, as an asset-grabbing law, as a corporate coup d’état . . . that's the way we saw the law. We did not know that it would manifest itself in the water crisis . . . in the Great Lakes State, the state with the largest freshwater reservoirs in the world!Claire McClinton's insight reveals that the personal troubles experienced by Lendra Brown, Nakiya Wakes, and Dayne Walling were not simply a matter of individual misfortune, but an outcome of broader social and political issues. The public issue, water insecurity for the entire city, stemmed from laws empowering unelected officials to make decisions affecting local communities without democratic oversight. It was, after all, an emergency manager who, in the interest of lowering costs, switched Flint from the DWSD water source to the Flint River, even though the city's water plant was significantly understaffed and underequipped for such a change (Kaffer). That decision ultimately led to the contamination of the city's water supply and the public health crisis that ensued. Residents and elected officials were effectively disenfranchised, and their voices were excluded from decision-making processes that directly impacted their lives and well-being. Former mayor Walling may have been the one to push the button, but as Claire McClinton would highlight, like other Flint residents, Walling was living under the dictatorship of an emergency manager.McClinton's remarks on the role of race add another level of complexity to the root of the public issue, in which racial ideologies among the general public, as well as the state legislature, contributed to marginalized communities, like Flint, being subjected to emergency management and the laws that support it. McClinton's assessment allows viewers to see how history, including the racial context of Michigan, created the social problem of the water crisis. Because this glaring example of environmental justice could take place in the “Great Lakes State,” the film's audiences might see that it could happen in many other places where racism and a corporate siege on democracy exist.During my conversations with Flint residents, the question of who is to blame for the water crisis frequently comes up. Though many names are mentioned, invariably, Flint's emergency managers and Governor Snyder are implicated. However, Rep. Dan Kildee's interview gives a more nuanced answer: Who's to blame? I think mainly it's a philosophy of government, that frankly this governor has brought to the state of Michigan. He is responsible for a philosophy of government that puts dollars and cents, quarterly reports, annual financial statements at the very top of the decision-making tree, not the life and health of a community . . . If I blame anyone in particular, it's the people who supported and elected someone whose philosophy does not work in the public sector.The selected quotations from former state treasurer Robert Kleine and local activist Claire McClinton have helped audiences exercise their sociological imagination by speaking to larger forces that ultimately impact the health and well-being of Flint residents. Corporate abandonment, globalization, deindustrialization, and a declining tax base were part of the economic and social context behind the Flint water crisis and ultimately the personal troubles experienced by Lendra Brown and Nakiya Wakes. However, Dan Kildee adds another layer of insight to the social context by highlighting the state of Michigan's embrace of a neoliberal approach to governance that emphasized austerity measures. This pushed Flint into a financial crisis, which justified the city being taken over by state-appointed emergency managers who were not empowered by the Snyder administration to address the structural problems facing the majority Black and poor city in an era of neoliberal disinvestment.The emergency manager's powers, the legal framework that undergirds those powers, and the loss of democracy for a poor and mainly Black community are occurring within a neoliberal context. The experts interviewed illustrate for audiences how a philosophy of government—an ideological framework that privileges capital and fiscal expediency over the health and welfare of communities—creates public issues such as the water crisis in which real people like Lendra Brown and Nakiya Wakes experience private troubles.Having been shown the social context behind people's individual problems, audiences of Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis are likely to see comments such as Nakiya Wakes's with new eyes. At one point in the documentary, Nakiya expresses profound pessimism: No, I don't trust the water, and I will never trust the water again. I've lost all trust in everyone in Flint, really our government, local, state. I've lost all trust in everyone. I don't care in 2020 when they claim everything will eventually be done. I still don't think this water will be safe. I will never drink Flint water ever again, and I think if I move somewhere else, I still will be on bottled water. I will never trust water anywhere ever again.Over the course of the documentary, the audience sees that Nakiya's mistrust is not merely a personal trouble but instead a symptom of a widespread public issue. Nakiya may not realize it, but her personal experiences take place in a society where globalization, neoliberal policies, and other accoutrements of modernity have increasingly resulted in risks and uncertainties being fundamentally connected with the organization of society itself (Beck 3). What Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis suggests is that the risks are unequally distributed in society, with low-income and minority communities bearing the brunt of the fallout. Social theorist Ulrich Beck argues that when neoliberal governmental policies fail to effectively serve and protect the government's citizens, these public institutions inevitably face a crisis of legitimacy (4). In the case of Flint, the decision to switch the city's water source from the Detroit River to the Flint River was made as a cost-saving measure, reflecting the neoliberal emphasis on cutting costs and privatization. This decision was made without adequate consideration of the potential risks and consequences; it also reflects a lack of institutional accountability. The documentary argues in its storytelling that this neoliberal lack of care is why Nakiya, like so many other Flint residents, will never trust governmental institutions again.For C. Wright Mills, neither the life of an individual nor the history (or context) of a society can be comprehended without understanding both (Mills 3). A more thorough grasp of what he termed the (individual) biography was necessary to understand the full picture. It is within this vein that Nor Any Drop to Drink: Flint's Water Crisis also explores how Flint residents themselves experienced and understood the water crisis. Such an exploration required what sociologists refer to as an interpretive perspective/method or an “etic” epistemology in which the subjective experiences, beliefs, and behavior of people are considered on their own terms (Robertson and Boyle 44). This perspective emphasizes subjective interpretations of human experiences and behavior, rather than relying solely on objective data or measurements. In sociological work, it typically includes the collection of qualitative data with interviews. To give audiences an understanding of the subjective experiences and beliefs of residents, it was necessary to travel to Flint to conduct interviews.When our small production team arrived in Flint in mid-2016, grassroots organizations and religious groups were holding rallies and forums across the city. The energy at these community events was palpable. Residents across the city's racial/ethnic and socioeconomic spectrum came out in large numbers, showing a determined, united front. Our