[Coursework Essay 2019]: Reversing Roe: Documentary Modes and Values

The following is a slightly edited version of one of my pieces of written coursework from my undergraduate university studies. I have posted it here with a slightly altered title alongside my later works for the purpose of showing the development of my academic research and writing skills.

I wrote and submitted the original version of this essay for university coursework in 2019.

Content Warning: this essay features occasional references to violence.

Reversing Roe (Stern and Sundberg, 2018) is a Netflix documentary about the ongoing US political conflict over the issue of abortion and its legal history. The film’s central focus is the supreme court case Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) ruling abortion access a constitutional right (Planned Parenthood, 2019). The following is an analysis of the documentary’s cinematic techniques within the framework of Bill Nichols’ six documentary modes (Nichols, 2010, pp. 167-211), and an evaluation of its documentary values using Michael Rabiger’s questions to “distinguish a documentary from other non-fiction forms,” (Rabiger, 2015, pp. 27-29).

MODES AND FILMIC TECHNIQUES

The dominant mode of the film is expository, but traces of the other modes, especially participatory, are also present. Interviewees such as gynaecologists Colleen McNicholas and Curtis Boyd offer “voice-of-authority commentary” like in an expository film (Nichols, p. 167) to propose a pro-choice perspective on the one hand, and on the other visibly respond to off-screen questioners, i.e. the filmmakers, like in a participatory film. A montage of news reports covering the murder of abortion providers by pro-life activists between 1993 and 2009 (00:36:40) uses expository editing that sacrifices the spatiotemporal continuity of the images (Nichols, 2010, p. 169) to advance an argument about the violence of the pro-life movement. It also uses tense, sombre music that plays over the entire montage; this is an expressive use of sound typical of the poetic mode (Nichols, 2010, p. 211) because the tone of the music implies a sense of tragedy to the killings. However, the music fades out as Reverend Tom Davis of the Planned Parenthood Advisory Board says, “[the] people who shot these people at the clinics […] were all religious.” Hence, it is also a rhetorical device akin to the expository mode; the sound yields to Davis’ comment, thus emphasising the significance of his argument.

Another expository technique in the documentary is the use of motion graphics denoting historical and statistical data in most of the interviews to present a pro-choice argument. Abortion historian Linda Greenhouse describes “the right to terminate a pregnancy” according to Roe’s original trimester framework and a red caption highlights the legal cut-off point (00:30:02). The ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project’s deputy director Brigitte Amiri (ACLU, 2019) refers to the American states where abortion providers are “under siege,” and a graphic of the US map appears with the states low on abortion providers in red (00:41:26). As former Texas state senator Wendy Davis describes the “pretty demoralising” lack of abortion clinics in central Texas after the reinstatement of Texas Senate Bill 5, red graphics denote the abortion clinics that shut down as a result (01:23:07). The interviewees’ word choices in the voice-over narration reflect the negative connotations of the colour red: the graphics represent the oppositional force of restrictions on women’s constitutional rights and an unfortunate attack on their reproductive healthcare.

The film’s general storytelling methods serve the expositional function of making an argument. Traditionally, the narration in the expository mode has come from a male “voice-of-god” commentary (Nichols, 2010, p. 167), typically the director. However, Reversing Roe (Stern and Sundberg, 2018) uses the “voice-of-authority” commentary (Nichols, 2010, p. 167) of its interviewees, many of whom are women including feminist activist Gloria Steinem (00:10:25) and US congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (00:15:37). Boyd and Davis aside, female voices of authority dominate the pro-choice interviews; sans National Right to Life president Carol Tobias, male voices of authority dominate the pro-life interviews like Texas Right to Life member John Seago (00:22:25) and Operation Rescue president Troy Newman (00:32:27). The choice to frame the conflict this way creates a binary opposition in which women, with support from allies, are fighting for their rights against patriarchal forces and the institutional restrictions they place on healthcare for pregnant people.

In addition to the interviewees’ voice-over commentary is the on-location filming of relevant parts of their daily lives, e.g. McNicholas travelling across the country to work (00:05:27) or Boyd and his colleagues operating on a patient (00:21:40). This is a common technique of directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg: the emphasis on personal individual experiences (Breakthru Films, 2012). Usually, this emphasis on the effects that an issue has on people’s personal lives would constitute a performative technique (Nichols, 2010, p. 203). Although, since it focuses mainly on the experiences of the pro-choice movement, it functions narratively to distinguish them as the protagonists. As such, it also serves as an expository technique because by placing the pro-choice movement in this role, it encourages the audience to sympathise with their struggle and support the arguments they bring to the debate. Additionally, the film closes with an expository sound technique that conveys a tragic ending to the story: poignant music that accompanies McNicholas’ voice-over narration (01:35:23), “the rights granted by Roe are almost gone for many women already.”

 

DOCUMENTARY VALUES

The filmmakers stated in a Film Society of Lincoln Centre interview (2018) that they worked with Netflix to ensure the information in the documentary was up-to-date; therefore, it depicts a real and recognisable social reality. In addition to the archive footage corroborating the historical chain of events, the film cites accurate data on Roe’s original ruling (Roe v. Wade, 1973) and the number of people who have abortions in the first trimester (Gunter, 2016). This information supports the filmmaker’s pro-choice beliefs via the interviews which present the issue of abortion from the viewpoints of doctors, feminists, female politicians, and women’s rights historians. The film intermixes these interviews, which constitute the first twenty minutes of the documentary, with archive footage and motion graphics representing the relevant statistics. By dedicating the first twenty minutes to these interviews, the filmmakers encourage the audience to sympathise with their perspectives and by verifying the information they give with archive footage and on-screen data, they convince the audience that pro-choice beliefs arise from clear, hard evidence.

The two human values fundamental to the film’s conflict are pro-choice versus pro-life; these come from feminist, historical, medical, and religious perspectives via the respective interviews of people such as Steinem, Greenhouse, McNicholas, and Tobias. The film is more concerned with examining the conflict between pro-choice and pro-life ideologies than raising awareness of abortion since the debate over this issue has already been a well-known and contentious one for decades. However, the film does raise awareness of certain nuances that exist on both sides of the debate, e.g. religious people who are pro-choice such as Davis, or pro-life women like Tobias. By raising awareness of these nuances, the film teaches that the beliefs on either side of the abortion debate are not exclusive to one group or another.

An example of the conflict between the interests of pregnant people’s healthcare and bodily autonomy versus the pro-life doctrine of Christianity is the use of statistics regarding late abortions and the concept of ‘partial-birth abortions.’ The pro-life movement uses this term to convince people that infants die in the abortion procedure (01:08:52). McNicholas disputes the concept by explaining that 98.7% of abortions happen in the first two trimesters, long before any degree of birth could possibly occur; an animated on-screen pie chart accompanies this interview segment as a visual aid to highlight the data. Newman speaks of the campaign of his organisation based on the 1.3% of abortions that happen after the first twenty-one weeks, by which point it is uncertain if the foetus is alive or not. Reproductive rights attorney Kathryn Kolbert describes Newman’s use of this outlier to construct a narrative that “women late in pregnancies were killing their babies […] Totally false.” Not only is there a tangible conflict over ethics, but a clear distinction between the scientific approaches on either side of the debate and how the differing interpretation of the data forms their arguments and political strategies.

The documentary’s social critique of the pro-life movement implies systemic problems beyond an extremist opposition of religious parties to people’s reproductive rights. An image of a church window accompanies audio from a 1960s women’s meeting on the issue of abortion (00:14:37): “the laws are made to keep [a] woman in her place.” This, along with footage of Donald Trump’s debate with Hillary Clinton where he promises to appoint pro-life justices to the supreme court (01:29:17), suggests a patriarchal agenda in American politics and law suppressing people’s bodily autonomy. There is a montage of pro-life speeches from Ronald Regan, George W. Bush, and Trump with a news reporter explaining how they all went from pro-choice to pro-life (01:28:40); it depicts the way politicians change their abortion stance to gain the support of religious and pro-life voters. Consider also the archive footage from earlier where Steinem argues that the state has a vested financial and military interest in prohibiting abortion (00:15:55): “We produce the soldiers, we produce the workers, and [the state] fear the loss of that control.” Capitalism, the military, and patriarchy in law, politics, and religion. All these points form the nuance of the social critique: that the ultimate goals of the pro-life movement are power and profit.

 

FILMOGRAPHY

Reversing Roe (2018). Directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg [Film]. USA: Netflix.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Nichols, B. (2010) Introduction to Documentary. 2^nd edn. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 167-211.

Rabiger, M. (2015) Directing the Documentary. 6^th edn. New York and London: Focal Press, pp. 27-29.

 

Blogs

Gunter, J (2016) ‘How many late term abortions are really performed in the United States?’, Dr Jen Gunter, 27 October. Available at: https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/how-many-late-term-abortions-are-really-performed-in-the-united-states/ (Accessed: 20 Feb 2019).

 

PDF of webpage

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Available at: http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/us-rep/usrep410/usrep410113/usrep410113.pdf (Accessed 24 Feb 2019).

 

Video on YouTube

Film Society of Lincoln Centre (2018) ‘Reversing Roe’ Q&A. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EdHnkBKTZM (Accessed: 23 Feb 2019).

 

Webpages

ACLU (2019) Brigitte Amiri. Available at: https://www.aclu.org/bio/brigitte-amiri (Accessed: 21 Feb 2019).

Breakthru Film (2012) Who We Are. Available at: http://www.breakthrufilms.org/who-we-are (Accessed: 24 Feb 2019).

Planned Parenthood (2019) Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion. Available at: https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-v-wade (Accessed: 10 Feb 2019).