God Is All the Context We Can’t Hold In Our Heads: A Review of David Shields’ New Documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE

Yesterday, I realized that the 2024 presidential election season is within scheduling distance and excused myself to vomit out my breakfast. I live in Florida. It seems possible that by the end of next year the whole country could turn into Florida. In the process, our pummeled brains will shrink from the discourse, a word we still use but which may not exist anymore, or which never did. In Florida, I teach English and basic rhetoric. Regarding communication, I explain to my students, we’ve been fucked since the beginning of the time. The gaps between our perceptions are amazing and terrifying. I must be careful with what I say next. There are laws now.

Another thing I teach in my English class in Florida is context. My students have lived without it their entire lives and I have trouble teaching it as a concept for the same reason. I say things like, There are always bigger pictures than the subject that shape the subject. And bigger pictures than that to be seen only later or not at all. I say, The thing we’re looking at is determined by a lot of other things we’re not seeing at the same time or can hardly hold in our heads at once. Like history or culture. I do a little fist pump by my waist when I pronounce the word culture. My students often don’t know what that word means either. At times, I question whether I do. When election season comes, I will cower behind my curriculum, and instead of trying to explain the definitions, I’ll teach students tools they can apply on their own to election discourse. But in the end, the varying information will be too expansive and twisted for even their teacher to parse alone.

So I was grateful tonight to have watched author and filmmaker David Shields’ new documentary, How We Got Here, a film which argues that to understand the political moment of the last seven/eight years, we must understand the last one-hundred-seventy (or so) of philosophy, art, literature, and scientific theory; we must put it in historical and cultural context. We must watch ideas evolve and mutate as powerful people grapple with them and turn them to weapons. We must watch the powerful fall and the more powerful rise and do it anew.

Throughout the film, Shields provides doses of exactly that. An animated and narrated timeline runs us, in pieces, from Moby Dick to the Truth Social app. This timeline of the last one-hundred-seventy-years of human intellect anchors the film as it weaves in its two other threads: 1) a series of interview responses from literary non-fiction writers discussing ideas about truth and their relationships to it, and 2) a series of more writers playing Two Truths and a Lie (and never revealing the lies). The intellectual history, which is expertly narrated by the writer and voice actor Elena Passarello, takes us through Darwin, impressionism, the industrial revolution, Nietzsche, yellow journalism, Einstein, WWI, Dada-ism, War of the Worlds on the radio, existentialism, WWII, McCarthyism, quantum physics, psychedelics, Foucault, Reaganism, Baudrillard, Wrestlemania, DNA evidence, sex/gender ideology, The Real World, Bush/Iraq, the digital revolution, Putin, “alternative facts,” and much more in ninety minutes. The compression reminds us that none of what we’re seeing today is new and, despite this, finding a solution still doesn’t seem possible, but the resulting context provides something like a catharsis, a remove, an understanding. It’s an illusion, of course: we can’t possibly hold it all in our heads for ninety minutes, but it’s a welcome illusion, and I haven’t come closer to holding it all in there some other way.

While the centerpiece of the film is the timeline, the interviews with literary non-fiction writers about truth and their relationships to it, recorded during the NonfictioNow 2018 conference and conducted by Shields and collaborators Nicole Walker and Robin Hemley—provide most of the film’s shading. These interviews prompted responses to six core questions: How do you know what you believe? Is there an absolute truth? Why are you here rather than canvasing for Stacey Abrams? How have your siblings taught you that you are wrong about everything? Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe evidence matters? Some of the responses are critical. Some are personal. At their best, the responses comment—often unknowingly—on the timeline in exciting and profound ways. I appreciate, too, that the writers take time to reveal the ways these concepts of truth and reality (and their inaccessibility) manifest in their own literary nonfiction writing. Part-liars working in attempt to find truth through art provide insights into the actions of full-liars working in attempt to manipulate behavior in the world. The name Trump is evoked three or four times—mercifully spaced out evenly through the film—but the years 2016 – 2020 in the US are always in the background. We know we’ll end there in the muck.

In the meantime, the edited collage of interviews provides what I consider the most interesting part of the film. It happens at about the halfway point. Shields asks a writer the question about why she is at a writing conference rather than canvasing. The writer describes herself as apolitical. She has not heard of Stacey Abrams. She just votes down the line Democrat. She seems like she almost realizes what she is saying as she is saying it, but then she doubles down. Emotions all in the limbs, she says she doesn’t have to explain what she just said. This is easily the most pronounced “reality” element of the movie, and it provides an opportunity to realize that, underneath, this is not just a complete onslaught of the political right. Shields is, of course, not without bias—while critical of the left in his thinking and writing, he is still clearly on a side—but the writer’s confession about strictly voting down party lines exposes that, objectively (possible?), the human mind on all sides is flawed, complicated, and, above all else, self-protective. The naked moment in the film stands as if to say, Read these people and this film critically the way we’re saying to read this world.

In between the timeline and interviews, the Two Truths and a Lie segments bring some levity and time to process what we’ve seen. By the end, the purpose of all these segments between the interviews and the timeline(s) becomes clear. The segments, rubbing against everything else and each other, exemplify our shared mediated experiences of the world: the zone, in Bannon’s words, is flooded with shit. So much information, false, true, a little of both, contradictory. It’s all coming at us and impossible to know what’s what. We find no reason left to try, and when those of us do try anyway, the only tool we have to sort out the mess is language, which loops us back to the initial problem.

Frankly, this film should be required viewing for every Intro to Humanities course in the country. It does the seemingly impossible: reinserts some context to our mostly decontextualized lives. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, the film's pace and structure prevent it from ever feeling even slightly boring, despite the heavy lifting it does to excavate the ideological roots beneath our country's growing social and political turmoil. We might get into trouble teaching the film in our classrooms here in Florida, but maybe you can.

As one of the writers at the NonfictioNow 2018 conferences explains in the film, “Everything seems to point to god, but we can never touch it . . . Everything seems to point to truth, but we can never touch it.” All we have is communicating our proximity to either. We’ll never get it fully right, but the film itself proves that sometimes we do. It seems obvious that this world at its most fundamental is beyond overhaul, most likely beyond change more than painfully won here-and-there tweaks, but as thinkers and writers in the last fifty years have told us: in the absence of truth, the only real decision-maker in the world is power.

Want some yourself? Watch this film.