Proximity and Distance: Approaching Trauma in Katrina Films

Abstract

The official death toll attributed to Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive natural disaster in the history of the United States, is estimated to be 1833. The damage done to communities along the coast and especially in and around New Orleans was both physical and psychological. Just as Katrina laid bare areas such as New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, so it also exposed the poor living conditions and disadvantaged social circumstances of those worst affected, mainly working-class African Americans. This chapter considers the ways in which trauma is approached in two films made within a few months of each other and soon after the floods. It looks first at Spike Lee’s epic documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), analysing the way in which the film uses the recent crises to comment more broadly on what one interviewee refers to as ‘ancient memories’, culturally embedded historical trauma, which reveal much about racial and class divisions in twenty-first-century America. In contrast to the historical contexts explored by Lee through his close interviews with survivors and commentators, Zack Godshall’s film offers a narrower portrait in his film Low and Behold (2006), one in which an outsider’s encounters with New Orleans insiders induces in him a deep unease that, I argue, serves also to challenge our own position as spectators of others’ trauma. If Lee’s film favours an approach predicated on sympathy and an assumed closeness to the survivors, Godshall’s is one that repeatedly establishes distance and discomfort.