wisconsin gothic

I finally found a film that sees the heartland through the same lens as I do. Not the clear, sharp one that captures flatlands saturated with the season's wheat crop and happy families raising Christian children among 4-H projects, but rather that old and mean heartland. Cold snowstorms, black lace and top hats and the homicidal farmer up the lane spurned by his young love. This is the heartland.

For my taste, "Wisconsin Death Trip" is a poem for the eyes; pictures to match the music of Lonesome Wyatt and Those Poor Bastards and their lyrical damnation. Black and white sequences told the stories of men and women, driven to kill and children who set fires and took lives. Feeling more like a dream, I floated among the ghosts on screen who went mad, but they did not take me with them. Color was reserved for the modern images of today's Black River Falls. Even the town name brings to mind murder shacks and gothic lawlessness with the promise of pristine nature, but a price must be paid for it. A black river that falls.

Delicate death photos of young and old faded on and off, reminding you that no matter what has happened in life, even the meanest of men seems fragile and soft of skin in death. The irony being that an empty cavity void of organs, including heart, the body is stiff and hard as a board. Women, elegantly photographed in curls, and a young girl's death face captured forever by a camera that stopped a moment in time with such clarity, that every eyelash is accounted for.

Lonesome snowfalls that brought such deafening quiet, that they silenced the madness that raged among the town's German, Swedish and Norwegian familes. These were the faces and minds from the heritages that mined the hills of Northern Wisconsin. Saddle the black mare and load the rifle and handgun. The residents of Black River Falls are the mad and murdering type.