This is not a review of Bucks County, USA. It is a heartfelt endorsement of an effort that helps us understand the splintering of the United States and how to put it back together.
In 2021, filmmakers Robert May, indie movie producer (The Station Agent) and documentary director (Kids for Cash), and Barry Levinson, producer/director (of Rain Man and Bugsy fame), talked about making a documentary about political division in the U.S. “Barry loves Our Town,” says May, fresh off an interview at WHHY on Wednesday. “And he suggested, ‘Pick one town.’” Instead, they picked a whole county, Bucks County, and began shooting in Doylestown, the bucolic borough and picturesque seat of Bucks.
After 100 days of shooting over four years, they amassed 500 hours of footage. They edited down to roughly five hours, and the result is Bucks County, USA, an ambitious, five-part documentary that will air on WHYY beginning Sunday, September 20. It is an extraordinary mirror of American discord and, more optimistically, a film that diagnoses the sources of discord and suggests possible remedies.
They went to Bucks to explore why, since the Covid outbreak, there seemed to be a secondary viral pandemic, one of infighting and outrage. One that traded in name-calling and hate speech that got amplified on social media. Every hairline fracture in the national body politic — race, class, sexual preference, books on the shelves of the school library, and images tacked onto the classroom bulletin board — got magnified to chasm proportions on the internet. What to do?
Katherine Semisch, now a retired Doylestown educator, quietly reached out to a colleague on the opposite side politically, third-grade teacher Vonna DeArmond, in the hopes of building a bridge between the ideological combatants. To Semisch, it felt like the citizens of Bucks were “tearing apart the fabric of our own community.” Though she and DeArmond often disagreed, they are not disagreeable. They commited to organize a student round table to talk respectfully about issues at the school and in the community.
Bucks County, USA is not a typical movie experience. It is a formidable experience experience. To one constituency in the county, its School Board meetings are the verbal equivalent of WWE face-offs. To another, the School Board recommendations of DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion) are, in the words of another observer, a covert way “to weaponize children for politicization.”
Each episode opens with two young women — redheaded Evi Casey and raven-haired Vanessa Martino — best friends and witnesses to the splintering of their community. Evi is extroverted and chatty; Vanessa, self-contained and attentive. The two were 14 when the shoot began and 17 when it was completed. During their middle and high school years the Central Bucks School District was a seesaw teeter-tottering between majority conservative and majority liberal school boards. As the Casey family is liberal and the Martino clan conservative, there is the lurking threat that their parents might forbid their friendship.
A bellwether for the rest of the country
It is unsurprising that “Covid rage” had taken root in Bucks County, which boasts the necessary preconditions. Political demographers identify it as a “bellwether county,” one showing early signs of economic or social trends before the rest of the nation. As a purple county in a purple state, Bucks County’s population has enough Democrats, Independents, and Republicans to be predictive of the next national election. Given these demographics, and the Constitutional protection of freedom of speech, it’s not hard to see how the idyllic region devolved into a political battleground.
And yet. I was not prepared for the toxic emails reproduced on screen, gotchas from those across the political spectrum who bait and shame their perceived enemies. Nor was I prepared for the fact that those who shared my political beliefs (left of center) often were just as venomous as those I disagreed with. I wondered, why were adults name-calling other adults “dykes,” “transphobes,” “Xenophobes,” and flinging imprecations such as the N word?
Aren’t these the debasing, verboten words that parents tell teenagers are demeaning and hurtful? In the 1960s, I was taught that using them was a violation of the first rule of civility. In the 2000s, I taught my kids that using these words likewise violated the first rule of email, namely: “Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the local newspaper.”
Thus my heart cracked when I watched Donte King, the soft-spoken Black man whose wife, Adrienne, ran for school board in Perkasie, and was called the N word. “I’ve been called everything,” he says with a steely sigh, adding, “except neighbor.” Adrienne remembers that she graduated from high school largely “ignorant of my own culture.” She does not want that for her children.
While happy to see how Bucks County students like Steven, Evi, Lily, and Vanessa find teachable moments amid the School Board faceoffs, some adults were not deescalating. Were they not listening?
Meanwhile, Evi and Vanessa, avid history geeks, spend Christmas Day watching the annual “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” re-enactment. Vanessa notes, “We put aside our differences,” she says, avowing, “It’s good to listen to views you may not agree with.” It’s a relief to see these schoolgirls and their classmates acting like grownups. This, even though Semisch says, “The kids talk about School Board meetings as though they were bad episodic TV.”
Each time a case polarized a Central Bucks school board meeting, I wondered how I would have voted.
While it seems reasonable to me that Adrienne King would like the assigned reading for her children to include books by Black authors such as The Bluest Eye by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, this doesn’t sit right with all the stakeholders. The email messages imply that there are some that fear if such a thing came to pass, it would portend a Black takeover of the school board.
It also seems reasonable to me that for LGBTQ students, a pride flag pinned to a classroom bulletin board would be welcoming in a place where many feel isolated. Yet when the majority conservative Central Bucks County School District board passed Policy 321 in 2023, it banned teachers from hanging pride flags, political signs, or banners that take sides on public or social issues. Unsurprisingly, a subsequent, majority liberal board, suspended the ban.
To many LGTBQ students, including Lily Freeman, a Central Bucks high schooler, the banning of books with gender nonconforming characters compounds the alienation of those who have gender dysphoria. For many preteens and teens, such books affirm that they are neither freaks nor alone. I watched my knee jerk because I knew I would have voted with conservatives to ban one book, the hugely popular Gender Queer, for students under 16. The graphic, and occasionally pornographic, memoir by Maia Kobabe, is both very moving — and very explicit. I believe in freedom of speech. In this case I am not yet fully on board with freedom of imagery.
I don’t watch much episodic television, yet I tore through the documentary in record time, joyfully engaging with, and often annoyed by, its characters. Some seemed to be missing the empathy gene.
Everyone, no matter their politics, shares the same goal
In the Hollywood version of Bucks County, USA, Paul Martino, Vanessa’s father, a venture capitalist who financially backed conservative candidates for the school board, would be the antagonist. Though I recoiled reading the emails he sent, I admired his devotion to his wife, Arati, a software engineer, and his thoughtful daughter, Vanessa. Like most of the parents in Bucks County and across the nation, the Martinos and the Kings have the same goal: They want their children to grow and learn in places where they are respected and enriched intellectually.
Steven Belder is a good example of another Central Bucks student who wants to turn conflict into positive action. He recognizes how partisan media has become. “We gotta find the middle ground!” he exclaims at the student round table. The School Board clashes have encouraged him to seek multiple news sources, not just Fox and Newsmax.
While happy to see how Bucks County students like Steven, Evi, Lily, and Vanessa find teachable moments amid the School Board faceoffs, some adults were not deescalating. Were they not listening?
Signs point to no. Just this week, on the morning of a sold-out pre-screening of the film, Bucks County Community College had to relocate the event. Authorities had, the college wrote in a statement, received “information that raised concerns about our ability to provide a safe environment for campus visitors.” The venue was changed to Jenkintown’s HiWay Theatre, where the film was shown and PBS anchor Judy Woodruff moderated a lively Q & A afterwards.
The entire situation recalled a religious school assignment: Find a Biblical inconsistency. Leviticus 24:20: “Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury.” Five chapters earlier, in Leviticus 19:18: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people but love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mahatma Gandhi didn’t like 24:20. He said, “An eye for an eye makes the world blind.”)
Buck County, USA challenged me with its implicit question: How do we proceed from “an eye for an eye” to “love your neighbor?”
I don’t know what Gandhi would say, but I think the answer is “listen to your neighbor.” May calls it “generous listening,” which means, he says, “don’t interrupt, and replicate the speaker’s response, so you know they know you understood correctly.”
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