Review of Spanish Lake (2014) by Emi H — 01 Feb 2016

In telling the story of white flight from the Missouri suburb of Spanish Lake, filmmaker Phillip Andrew Morton positions impoverished African American residents as the villains, and middle-class and low-income white residents as the victims. An illustrative graphic at the beginning of the documentary shows a black stain, falling onto a white map. As the black ink spreads across the screen, a score of impending doom tells the audience that danger is coming to this once idillic community. This technique will continue throughout the documentary, as Morton pairs the sounds of danger with the influx of African Americans moving into Spanish Lake.

Interviews are conducted on the fringes of a reunion for white residents who left the area after public housing initiatives relocated low-income American Americans from the city of St. Louis, to their rural farming community (Spanish Lake). The former white residents now call themselves "Lakers." It's a name they wear proudly. Some had t-shirts or sweatshirts made with the name LAKERS printed in bold, white letters over black fabric.

On the banks of the murky lake, the LAKERS recall the good old days. Most sip from open cans of beer as they laugh and cry, remembering this place they used to call home. These recollections are intercut with colorful, heavily saturated 16mm footage from the '50s and '60s, of children playing on swing sets and riding on the backs of western ponies. The footage is deeply familiar and generic, as though it could have been taken from the attic of any baby boomers' home, in any suburb in America.

In contrast to the home film reels are the LAKERS actual stories, of their younger days. Overwhelmingly, the LAKERS nostalgia is peppered with indications that their community was not always a safe and happy one - even before the "blacks" came to town. Perhaps because Morton positions himself as a LAKER, and was in fact a person whose family left Spanish Lake in the '70s, the language his white subjects use to describe their new neighbors is most often "black" or "negro" or "them." In discussing their lives before the "blacks" came to Spanish Lake, there are numerous stories of street fights between white residents, and run ins with the law. These stories are not presented as negative by the white LAKERS, but are rather boasted about like legends from a wild party they did not want to end.

While more formal, talking head style interviews were conducted with African American members of the community, Morton's perhaps unconscious racism is inescapable within the construction of the narrative. Despite efforts to show the faults of the Public Housing projects across Missouri, which were poorly planned and underfunded, Morton is painfully heavy handed in his portrayal of African Americans, as the spoilers of a place once white and good. So deeply engrained in the mind of the majority is the idea of "black" as dangerous and villainous, that even a (possibly) well intentioned white filmmaker is able to overlook the evil and villainous acts of the white men who were responsible for enslaving and oppressing African Americans in the state of Missouri. While Morton tells the story of how Spanish Lake was founded and prospered in the ninetieth century, there is no mention of the Missouri slave trade, that began in 1720 and would bring slaves to the Larimore Plantatin, in Spanish Lake. A plantation that appears within the context of Morton's narrative as a treasured landmark of a bygone era.