Urban Divergence: City So Real & City Hall
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the particular responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. In Chicago, in our own curious span, we have seesawed between blind assault and blind counter-assault, hanging men in one decade for beliefs which, in another, we honor others."
- Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
If the future of civilization is cities, which one will we choose? To answer this question we must address the issue of the increasing difficulties in defining “we”. Whose cities? Whose civilization? In a divided, hostile and reactionary political atmosphere, in which the corruption and dysfunction of society’s gatekeepers and their power is ever increasingly transparent, a great reckoning looms over the future of the American large city. Corruption, crime, class warfare, discrimination, nepotism, police abuse, gentrification, civil rights, budgetary struggles, bureaucracy, the nastiness of a mayoral election; still remaining are the same sisyphean struggles so old and shopworn that they’re seen by citizens as being inextricably bound up wth the natures of the cities themselves. A part of the fabric of their deepest essence.
Within this bizarre and scary twenty-first century landscape, two exemplary documentaries, made by two real masters of the medium, examine these challenges as they’re faced by two great American cities. Both films arrive on the scene at a pivotal point when national emergencies and shocking developments beg the question of to whom a city really belongs be more openly addressed - with hitherto underrepresented demographics seeking to claim more seats at the table.
In a way, the global COVID pandemic and racial unrests of 2020 (which have not gone away) brought to light injustices and inequalities that were much easier for governments at all levels to avoid dealing with before - back when it was all still under the banner of Business As Usual. Sadly, these exposures or hard lessons have come at the cost of many, many lives and so a kind of internal stock-taking becomes necessary for a city to imagine moving forward. What are big cities able to accomplish at this point? How are they serving or failing their populations?
Steve James’ City So Real and Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall were made right around the same period of time. Both are epic investigations of major subjects that can perhaps best be looked at comparatively. The structural similarities of both films are rather interesting. The differences however, in terms of the courses and fates of the two cities, are very much deserving of a closer look.
Two epic portraits of American cities and two sets of people with thick, vowel-straining accents deciding their fates
City Hall runs just over four and a half hours. City So Real is presented in five chapters totalling five and half hours and the long durations of both items are an essential tactic for accommodating the monumentality and weight they deserve. It takes time to get a sense of how complex civic processes actually run, what political, legal or financial hurdles they face, and how taxpayers and players of the game alike appraise them. Both filmmakers assemble their documentary materials in ways that eloquently paint an intelligent impression of their subject cities, Chicago and Boston respectively. At no point in either film about change, unrest and continuity in urban American life do discursive or didactic overtones ever seep into the proceedings. The films are expository pieces whose polemical power arises organically out the stories they tell. Each film showcases both institutions and individuals, special events and quotidian practices, ordinary citizens and elected or aspiring leaders and the places where they all interact.
But the similarities end there.
What’s striking is the divergence of fates and attitudes offered by the directors of both films with respect to the trajectories of both cities. The more vibrant of the two features, City So Real’s Chicago inhabitants have hope and motivation but not much proof that any lasting or meaningful change will prevail against a system that’s functionally dysfunctional, racist, and set in its backward ways. It’s enough just to be able to survive in Chicago, whose political system as a force for inequity seems part of its DNA. Its longtime citizens and would-be leaders know this, and this casts a pall over everything we see them do.
Meanwhile, City Hall gives us meetings, committees, essential services, a seemingly dedicated and resourceful Mayor and everyone seems to be of a larger purpose. Whatever they believe, they want what is best for their city. There is unity and a noble purpose in Wiseman’s presentation of Boston. Each scene is like a rebuke to every dismissive remark people make about all politicians and government workers being no good. There are good, competent, hard-working people in government, Wiseman argues. Maybe they occupy a minority, are routinely unchampioned, or are drowned out by fashionable (and understandable) cynicisms. But with these tools in place, large government can work, and it’s in looking at the divergence in these two object lessons that we get hard-hitting charcoal sketches of very different possible civic fates: Boston is imagining itself succeeding. Chicago is watching itself fail.
City So Real begins with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s announcement of his refusal to seek another term and the subsequent 2019 Mayoral election in which the unlikely frontrunner and eventual winner was Lori Lightfoot. Its timeline leads all the way up to the pandemic shutdown and police retaliation in the wake of the riots that followed the police murder of George Floyd (among others) in the summer of 2020. James jumps from neighborhood to neighborhood, ward to ward, affording time to the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the disempowered, the nescient and the sentient.
It’s not hard to see where his political sympathies lie, but whatever the color, social class. background or political affiliation of his subjects, they all seem to agree on one thing: The city and its system are a borderline hopeless cause and this is The Chicago Way. On no fewer than three separate occasions in Episode Three alone of City So Real does an individual who’s stymied by the city’s ossified system of clockwork graft, nepotism and red tape look into the camera and say something to the effect of, “Welcome to Chicago,” or “That’s Chicago for you,” or “That’s The Chicago Way.” They acknowledge a dysfunctionality so total, a political stasis so ancient that it seems to have a kind of charm. Dismantling it seems historically unthinkable in the long and wild-eyed history of this city, which I call my home. There’s a sense of defeatism among citizens running through the series that’s especially hard to take.
I’m all too familiar with the unwieldy beast that is Chicago politics. Chicago is the city of both Mayor Daleys. It consistently ranks at the top of the most corrupt large cities in the U.S. The word “clout,” as we know it was invented here. It’s the city of people like 14th Ward Alderman Ed Burke, who’s shown arriving at a hearing on his latest charges of racketeering and attempted extortion in a pinstripe gangster suit and fedora. It’s also the city people like Tim and Katie Tuten, co-owners of The Hideout in Lincoln Park - a venue with an exquisite long history of music and left-wing political action. They face an extravagant and seemingly unstoppable impending land development in the surrounding industrial district that would force them out of their historic tavern, severing a vital contribution to the city’s legendary music industry.
It is not paranoia, James depicts, to wonder why such people need help, then when desperate, are hounded by City Hall until they abandon their property as worthless, and it suddenly no longer belongs to them. Is it also not unduly suspicious to think about the big kickbacks for the Alderman’s offices and for the Zoning Board that come from the big real estate people, who later come in and acquire huge neighborhood tracts of this abandoned land for development of their high-end tourist traps?
Chicago’s electoral process in City So Real looks like an utter nightmare. I wonder if people in other cities will doubt that the arduous process of legally challenging the petition signatures necessary to get on the ticket is a real thing as I did. Watch as all the legal jockeying that’s expected in courtrooms spills out onto the news and into the city’s already fraught discourse about power. With fourteen Mayoral candidates trying to distinguish themselves, the process of filing and petitioning would wear you out before you even got on the ballot, which is cut more ways than a large pizza (parlor style in this town). This is the tragedy of the Chicago of James’ series. How does anything get done, people wonder? What chance does the little guy have?
Note the sequence in which funding for that land development project - called Lincoln Yards - is passed with nary a dissenting voice in elected office against it. Chicago City Hall meetings look mostly like a business hub for dead people. Look at the officials in the City Council; bored out of their skulls as respected business owners and community leaders argue for the survival of their livelihoods into which every cent they have is invested. Walking, talking dead people, completely indifferent to the misery they inflict on working people. The Council Chamber must reek of Hell.
That there are any actual human beings working in such an environment is incredible. Sure enough, as we watch Alderwoman Sue Garza gas up her car with an emergency gas can she keeps on hand because there’s only one gas station in her ward, we’re again confounded by a system in which it seems many people working within it actually see the problems as clear as crystal. Her 10th Ward seems to be an ongoing expanse of scrap yards and landfills that no one asks for. Sixty or so acres of pollution in an area where nine steel mills once stood. It’s so desolate, you can apparently legally hunt ducks there.
one of the abandoned steel mills in Chicago’s 10th ward
James’ subjects are angry but it’s an anger charged with a sense of fear and grief over what’s been lost. The stakes seem higher than they’ve ever been. I didn’t vote for Lori Lightfoot and I’m no great fan of hers but at least she doesn’t hide from James in the final chapter of City So Real. She’s interviewed at length, speaking to the unprecedented simultaneous crises faced by her administration. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, and then the public frustration with the police all reach a boiling point. If James’ humanizing of ALL his subjects has the effect of confounding our prior appraisals of a political or civic issue, then perhaps these appraisals were too simplistic. Or misinformed.
I thought in the years after sixteen shots were fired into Laquan McDonald by police in 2014, that Mayor Lightfoot should have done something more punitive and confiscatory to the CPD for its recklessness and unaccountability than what she actually did, which was nothing. Apparently, the guilty verdict of Officer Jason Van Dyke was supposed to be enough. She wasn’t The Mayor when the state sanctioned murder happened, so it’s not her problem, even if it still happens in some form or another all the time. But I also don’t think it was a good idea that a thousand protesters showed up at Lightfoot’s home in Logan Square demanding justice. Making people afraid in their home is not an effective means of getting what you want - even if it did turn into an impromptu dance party in very high spirits. Hey, that’s Chicago for you.
It’s a responsible documentarian who presents his materials in this way. There is literally always more to an issue than what the media reports; not just on TV but in print and on the internet. And there is so much that doesn’t get even a mention at all. People shouldn’t riot and loot and damage property, but it makes very good sense to see the whole thing as a kind of acting out coming from a deep sense of powerlessness by those who are without prospects and hope. Radio host Maze Jackson is correct to point out as he drives though predominantly black South and West Side neighborhoods in which riots took place that only businesses that extracted money from the community - like corporate franchises - were attacked. We see that black-owned businesses and those giving back to the community were mostly left alone. The chaos was tragic and lamentable, but it had a kind of internal logic and despite such unnecessary violence, many rioters kept in mind who their real enemies were.
James’ series is the latest in a career consisting of nonfiction features and short subjects for the Chicago-based Kartemquin Films, the 5013 nonprofit whose political and social documentaries are among the best being made in this country in a given year. Since 1966, founding partners Gordon Quinn and Jerry Blumenthal have promoted a diverse line of filmmakers dedicated to producing work that would “foster a more engaged and just society.” With an eye towards empowering the underprivileged and spotlighting new talents in filmmaking - those interested in people and stories the mainstream media routinely overlook - Kartemquin’s output is an essential voice for championing the documentary format as an instrument in the promotion of true democracy. With films like Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, Stevie and Abacus: Small Enough To Jail to his credit, Steve James might be the organization's most successful and well-known director. That may make him ideal to take on a project like City So Real, perhaps the biggest and most ambitious production in Kartemquin’s history.
James has virtually one simple tactic up his sleeve that never loses its effect. With each major development in City So Real, James creates juxtaposition by cutting from one ward to another across town. A given scene is like a point in a debate and the next scene is something that complicates or refutes the point that was just made. He traverses from North Side to South Side, from predominantly white residents and neighborhoods to predominantly black or brown, or he jets between affluent areas and those with working class or lower income populations, like the one in which newcomer candidate Amara Enyia still goes jogging late at night. Jefferson Park to Cottage Grove. Gold Coast to Back of the Yards. Economic and social pressures hit various communities differently. The different ways citizens and political groups see them paints a portrait of a city with little sense of unity to anchor it.
In a city like New York, all kinds of people live virtually everywhere. But with a longevity that is kind of stunning, Chicago’s staunch tribalism and nativism keeps it America’s most segregated major city. Its ethnically, racially and economically insulated neighborhoods face successive waves of gentrification, with all of the inherent racisms it carries added to those many nonwhite residents already face from the City Council, The Department of Housing and the Chicago Police on a regular basis.
Demonstrators and police clash in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood
James’ contrasts are striking. The gentlemen’s barber shop is shown to be a form of town square. A South Shore Barber Shop is the site of an activist’s announcement of his candidacy for Alderman on the basis of his community’s struggle against the habitual criminal abuses of the Police Department. Note the kind of discussion going on in the black-owned barber shop among the barbers and their customers, some of whom were lucky to have escaped the cyclical incarceral system as youths. It’s a contemplative, honest and lucid dialogue about the racism that’s shaped their lives. Cut to a Bridgeport barber shop staffed and patronized exclusively by white ex-police officers. Listen to how they speak, their grievances, how they use the words “us” and “them.” The dehumanizing jokes they make. Look how comfortable they are on camera saying the things they say about Amara Enyia as she debates their candidate, former Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy on TV.
For another hard contrast, consider the footage of the no-frills beach at Jackson Park and then a hard cut to the yachts and jet skis in the enclosed stretch of skyscraper-adjacent lake turf known as “The Play Pen” at 700 N. Lake Shore Drive. A mess of expensive pleasure craft seemingly doing their best to conspicuously despoil the landscape, their New Money captains and crew members locked in an ongoing competition to see who can be louder and more obnoxious.
The telling differences between Jackson Park Beach and “The Play Pen” at 700 N. Lake Shore Drive.
Time and again, James shows us that the people of Chicago, entrenched in their factions and ideologies as they are, have a capacity to get up and continue fighting and surviving, which makes them the only force for real social change. The regular Chicago folk in City So Real - you will like them immediately. We meet a dog walker who has to bike to the Gold Coast all the way from Logan Square and likes the detachment from his employers and the rest of the world afforded by his job. I understood him. There’s a Lyft driver wearing a Care Bear onesie whose story of police misconduct must be achingly familiar to so many in the black community, who must be tired of talking about how tired of it they are. I feel for her. We see first hand the emotional toll police abuse takes on its victims.
I attended a few of those demonstrations in June of 2020. It’s a shame the police have to fire rubber bullets indiscriminately into a crowd because some punk outsider from another state had to break a window. If we’re not to judge the police harshly as a whole because of a few bad individuals, perhaps it would make even less sense to do the same to protestors, who don’t have the benefit of an inflated operations budget, expensive military gear and an all-powerful union to excuse or cover up their crimes.
The good nature and humor of people about their predicament is humbling and inspiring, even if it always seems tinged with an overshadowing belief that things won’t change much. Many things are moving in the right direction, but at no point in City So Real does any serious challenge to The Beast present itself. In the face of addressing the problem of Chicago’s fundamental malfunction, people just sort of throw their arms up in frustration and walk away.
The bridges went up in the loop in June of 2020 to trap demonstrators and close off their routes to escape and the actions of a number of yet to be identified agitators were held up to justify violent retaliation against a newly forming social movement. The city’s reckoning with its unique political deadlock was eventually superseded by the chaos of 2020 and its exacerbation by Donald Trump’s wretched antagonisms.
Chicago fails in City So Real. It is stuck with itself. Its people crave a deep, structural change. But they can’t seem to imagine such a thing is possible, even when the entire idea behind social movements is to dream the impossible dream. So the city's ignoble guardians and watchmen shrug and go back to what they were doing. And it’s in all that apathy and wasted anger at the wrong targets that the sparrows are winged instead of the vultures.
Unusually for director Frederick Wiseman, City Hall meanwhile focuses on a central individual: Boston’s Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who appears cooperative and consistent in his communications with the organizations and individuals he’s supposed to serve. He’s not especially charismatic or eloquent, but he appears to have a genuine passion. When speaking of himself as a childhood cancer survivor or a recovering alcoholic, it’s to the right crowds and for the right reasons. His cabinet looks like a diverse, forward-thinking bunch who genuinely want what’s best for their city. Their brand of public service looks like just that: serving the public. It’s a look at a political instrument that actually bears a sense of hope. Walsh and his officials appear to strive for a government that, despite inherent biases found anywhere else, CAN work for its citizens.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh at work in City Hall
In his assemblage of footage, one could conclude that Wiseman - a Boston native - also believes local government can work. Not that it does work or that it should work a certain way but that this particular big city government has all the elements in place such that it can work. In the face of mass social and political cynicism, from which Wiseman himself has not been immune in some of his previous portraits (Aspen), this is comforting and sobering. It also parts slightly from Wiseman’s oeuvre, which has never been politically reactionary.
The effect of watching the film is like a tonic. I don’t doubt that the Nelson Algren quote above* could also apply to Boston, or that there isn't also a fair share of corruption and incompetence in Walsh’s administration. In September of 2019, a former official at the Boston Development and Planning agency pleaded guilty to accepting a $50,000 bribe, making this the third of Walsh’s aides to be facing conviction for misconduct during his tenure. I also don’t doubt that Walsh has made some boneheaded decisions himself during his time as Mayor any more than I doubt Chicago’s local government is absent of the kind of upward-striving, forward-thinking individuals and groups visible in City Hall.
Wiseman is not holding Walsh and his officials up as any kind of miracle of governance. Quite simply, his focus is strictly on the duties and functions of City Hall, how this institution works and what its many challenges are. We’re always shown rather than told what they are, right down to garbage pickup. The closer we observe the proceedings, the more we understand just how much is required to keep a big city from descending into chaos. It just so happens that it all adds up to something more than a sum of the parts.
As usual, Wiseman’s subjects never address the camera, which simply observes the process of governance; a budget proposal, a meeting on bridging the income inequality gap, another meeting with police regarding procedures for a Red Sox World Series celebration, a seminar for Hispanic business owners, a meeting regarding services available for homeless youth. From the looks of things, Walsh’s City Hall believes in social justice and a social safety net as a thing that can lift people up out of poverty and better their communities. Something in the city’s best interest. We see not apathetic bureaucrats but real people, personally involved in the projects they’re trying to push forward.
The task of extolling the virtues of The Greater Boston Food Bank’s commitment to feeding the hungry while trying not to look over at Wally The Green Monster and crack up
Watching this process feels like exactly what’s needed at this particular moment when people feel so cut off from their governments and their communities. But maybe it’s in this way that those same people can be encouraged to resensitize to the needs of communities and fellow citizens. These are real people being hurt by the rampant injustice and inequity of our society. The act of simply seeing them try to make government work for them is a badly needed counterpoint to the tribalism and antagonism promoted by the corporate media.
It’s a popular thing to say all politicians everywhere are no good but this complaint looks lazy, immature and whiny in the face of the reality faced by Walsh and his team. Their progress looks to be hampered only by poor communications, simple conflicts of interest and the intricacies of what is undoubtedly an immense job. Whatever the political implications are, Wiseman doesn't see them as an obstacle to the Walsh Administration’s ability to get things done. City Hall is a noble use of the medium, doing the work of filling in the immense information gaps citizens have about the actual role of government in their lives - gaps attributable to the colossal failures of our news media and education system.
The absence in the Wiseman film of any kind of footage that would fashion the material into a dialectic can be attributed to his avoidance of easy topics and themes. He is simply a masterful essayist, patiently unpacking his materials and guiding the audience to the lessons he seems to be learning along with them. It all seems politically impartial and neutral. But I’ve long since come to believe that the absence of bias in Wiseman’s work is just an illusion (as if such a thing were possible or desirable in art and media, anyway), evidenced by who Wiseman films and what footage he chooses to leave in.
One incredible sequence depicts a question and answer session for the owners of a new dispensary to be established in North Dorchester, one of the city’s poorest communities. Residents demand to know what the business will do for their neighborhood. They’ve seen plenty of businesses extract money from the community and the time has come for businesses to start giving back. They don’t want the dispensary to pull police resources away from where they’re badly needed elsewhere. The owners seem attentive and empathetic but are unable to promise too much, claiming it's largely in the City Council’s hands. They look to be under immense pressure to do the right thing by the residents, who are right to be suspicious. Everyone means well, though there’s a contention that nobody is ever able to get into a room with exactly the people they should be talking to. This extended sequence is a perfect snapshot of the strain in current political relations in urban areas. It’s vital that City Hall mediate between these parties, but there are so many clashing valid concerns. And everyone has their reasons.
The Dorchester Dispensary meeting in City Hall, which should be studied in classrooms for its insights into the current state of power relations
Walsh is shown addressing a meeting of senior citizens about predatory scams, a demonstration for nurses and care workers demanding better compensation, a memorial for military veterans at a mason lodge, a volunteer-run food bank on Thanksgiving, the crowd at Fenway Park, a banquet honoring Goodwill employees at which he has to serve food, a high-profile law firm being consulted by the city about an ambitious new development project. It seems endless. But we never witness a single event or cause which Walsh isn’t able to relate to personally. He always has lived experiences to draw upon in relating to people.
All this while getting no help for Boston at the federal level from Donald Trump’s administration and having to fend off its racist threats to immigrants must make for a nerve-racking job to say the least. Both Walsh and Wiseman stated in an interview that the officials of Boston’s City Hall were the only ones that would agree to filming and while I wouldn’t call appearing in a documentary conclusive proof of transparency in government, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
As always in a Wiseman film, there are big meetings and conferences and then small moments. They’re not simply there for padding. They’re smaller elements of a larger statement. Everything that you can do at City Hall, and everything City Hall is responsible for in Boston is given privilege alongside the longer sequences of deliberation, commemoration and memorial among city officials. A lesbian couple gets their wedding officiated. People dispute tickets for parking violations and appear to get the tickets squashed, which seems like it would never happen in my hometown. The traffic management center identifies traffic patterns using their giant aggregate of camera feeds. The snow has to get shoveled and salted. A pest control expert and a building code inspector do their thing. Road workers creating a bus lane. Thank heavens for all these “socialist” services. Our communities can’t function without it.
Wiseman’s selection and arrangement of the footage very subtly shades in his sensibilities. He believes deeply in governments that can work for people because, and only because, people sit at the heart of those governments. Piece by piece, bit by bit, in a film with no unnecessary sequences, he dutifully and subtly makes a case for the idea that Big Government, despite its multiple avenues for malfunction, can actually work for the people. Perhaps it’s the obscenity and mockery of the American process that came out of Trump and his supporters that moved Wiseman to allow for the immediacy of political concerns raised in the meetings not to overshadow their larger political significance.
Whatever the motivation, the problems we face locally and nationally, actually appear to have solutions. All of them. Of course politicians and their corporate masters make off with our money. Of course there’s a delight in watching them squirm whenever they try to act like human beings. Of course governments can screw up anything they touch. But it needn’t be that way. The answer lies in action and agency on the part of citizens. The work of holding them accountable falls to the public at large because democracy is not a spectator sport. Those not part of the solution are part of the problem. Is this all really so revolutionary?
I’ve come to believe there’s always a “sweet spot” in a Wiseman feature in the form of a single scene that sums up the film’s observations like a thesis statement. City Hall ends with what appears to be a State Of The City address at Symphony Hall. The Mayor touts his accomplishments. He has the most diverse staff of any American city government and we’ve just witnessed a direct link between that diversity and the city’s ability to address a greater and deeper set of problems. In what hasn’t felt like four and half hours both times I’ve viewed it, the film has presented the audience with all the evidence necessary to back up each claim to progress and success Walsh makes in that speech. In his own quiet way, Wiseman has made a deeply anti-Trump film by simply showing a messy but focused democracy at work.
Those aspiring to power in City So Real should watch City Hall and take notes.
*Found along with this quote in the essential compilation, “Chicago: City On The Make,” is the original passage about Chicago where City So Real gets its name: “Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
At the time of this writing, City So Real is available for streaming at nationalgeographic.com. City Hall is currently available for streaming on Mubi.
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