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father. Your mother is no longer alive and you seem to feel left out, maybe a little bitter.
McElwee:
It's complex. I myself would not describe my mood as bitterness, but I can see how other people could say that. In fact, I was not unhappy with my station outside the closest family orbital ring. Orbiting is important, and I want a connection to family, but in that film I was exploiting the humor and poignancy of being just one step removed as a result of choosing a life-style that my family couldn't quite relate to.
MacDonald:
That opening passage where you talk about the various professions you were thinking about going into is very funny. Clearly, all the professions you list were chosen to infuriate your father's sense of what a good Southern boy ought to do. At the same time, your tone reflects your own awareness of and detachment from your earlier adolescent reaction.
McElwee:
It seemed to be impossible to make that film without making myself a character.
MacDonald:
Another thing that comes across in
Backyard
is a portrait of a certain sort of Southern Scottish Presbyterian life. You, your father, and your brother reveal an apparent inability, or a refusal, to really talk with each other about what's happening in your lives. There's a strange conversation with your brother at the end, when you ask him what he knows about your mother's death. It's a moment that prefigures
Sherman's March,
in that you seem to be using the camera to forge a new kind of relationship with your brother.
McElwee:
That's an interesting observation.
MacDonald:
Though he slams the door shut on the attempt.
McElwee:
Well, he slams it shut, but not without revealing a startling fact: that my brother, with all of his medical background and his closeness to my father, doesn't know any of the details about my mother's death. He too has never talked to my father. There's some sort of strange Scottish Presbyterian existentialism operative here: why talk about the details of the death of someone one loves; who cares what the details are, we all understand the sorrow and the absence. Also, a certain politeness about not discussing unpleasant things is very Southern. I think it's partly the Scottish highlands heritage of a restraint in living, a feeling that men should not express emotions.
MacDonald:
Would it be fair to say that because of this noncommunicativeness, your family can live within this complicated society and its racial inequities without thinking much about it?
McElwee:
The fact that they don't talk about it doesn't mean they don't think about it, or act upon it. I'm told that when my father set up his practice in Charlotte, after finishing medical school and his residency