Movie Review: Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? **** / *****

Directed by: Travis Wilkerson.

 

There is a murder at the heart of the documentary Did You Wonder Who Fired a Gun – but it would be misleading to really call this a true crime documentary in the traditional sense. In part, that’s because there really is no controversy about the crime itself – who did what, and who is responsible, etc. if fairly well-established, and even if it was a miscarriage of justice (and it was) – everyone involved is long since dead and cannot be punished, and no one is really pushing for more answers. Instead, what director Travis Wilkerson does in Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun is examining his family’s history in order to examine his own white privilege, and to examine the marks racism has left on America – marks that stay there long after the people involved in crimes like this are dead. The movie draws direct, explicit links to the killing of unarmed black people at the hands of the police today to what happened all those years ago.

 

It would also be unfair to call this a true crime documentary, because it isn’t really a documentary in the traditional sense either. It really is a personal journey for Wilkerson, heading back into his family’s past, heading back to Alabama for the first time in decades, and travelling along the backroads and seeing what he finds. Unlike many docs, which seem to be fully formed in the minds of their makers before they shoot a frame of footage, Wilkerson seems to be going with the flow more than anything – interviewing the people he comes across, whether or not they have that much relevance to the case itself. There are large sections of the film which are just Wilkerson himself talking over the footage of those back roads – as he exorcises all those demons of his families past. The project started out as a live show – with Wilkerson reading directly to the audience. That experience is hard to replicate on film – but this film comes about as close as you could expect it to.

 

What started Wilkerson’s journey was the story of his great-grandfather S.E. Branch who in 1946 shot and killed Bill Spann, a black man, who was in the store that Branch owned. Although there was an article saying Branch was charged with murder, there’s no actual record of him being charged, and he didn’t stay in jail for all that long, before he was just out and free to resume his life consequence free. Wilkerson begins the movie by comparing the story to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, while admitting that his family certainly wasn’t Atticus Finch – they would more likely be in the lynch mobs than trying to stop it. He’ll return to To Kill a Mockingbird throughout the movie – eventually bringing Lee’s follow-up into the mix as well – the one where Finch wasn’t the symbol of righteousness, but a racist himself.

 

The film is, in its way, trying to do something similar – to strip away the myths – both personal and national – we tell ourselves about ourselves, to find the ugly core there. The movie doesn’t try and provide easy answers or solutions. It doesn’t try to comfort the viewer. And it’s not just an exercise in easy white guilt either. It’s something far more painful and personal than that. If you want a more traditional documentary, then this isn’t that film. If you want something unique, challenging and troubling – this one is hard to shake.