DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: February 21, 2026
Frederick Wiseman–America’s Irreplaceable Documentarian:
Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96.
He consistently dismissed categorizations of his work. “I like to call them films” rather than documentaries, he said, because he found the word “documentary” limiting. But he was as closely associated as anyone with the vérité documentary.
And though he denied that his movies had any political agenda, he was no stranger to controversy. His directorial debut, “Titicut Follies” (1967), a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, remains the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security. (The ban, imposed by Massachusetts on the grounds that the film violated the inmates’ privacy, was lifted in 1991; the film subsequently aired on PBS.)
“There’s a common assumption that my movies are exposés,” Mr. Wiseman said in a 2011 interview for this obituary, “and I don’t think they are. You can certainly argue that a movie like ‘Titicut Follies’ is in part an exposé, but you couldn’t make a movie about Bridgewater without showing how horrible it was.”
Wiseman was well-known for not using tricks of the trade–music, quick cuts–and the like. Instead he relied on his ‘wobblycam’ hand-held cameras to capture an unvarnished look at a wide range of people and subjects.
Although Mr. Wiseman was a role model for generations of idealistic documentarians, his own view of the genre was the opposite of misty-eyed.
“I don’t know what causes social change,” he said in 2011. “But I don’t think it is documentary filmmaking. It’s one thing to start out with a naïve belief or the pious wish that that would be the case, but it certainly is not the case, and it’s ultimately a naïve and presumptuous view.”
Mr. Wiseman edited virtually all his own films. “A fiction film has a script,” he said, “so at the very least the chronology is determined in advance. But a documentary film of the kind I make, it’s reversed: I write the script in the editing.”
He continued: “I’m not saying there aren’t choices in the editing in a fiction film, because of course there are. But the range of choices aren’t anywhere near as great as they are in a documentary.”
His films had a particularly hypnotic effect on me–once you were in, you were in all the way.
Do You Back Out, Or Pull In? Be forewarned–there’s only one correct answer:
America, we often hear, is a deeply divided country. To our ideological divisions, allow me to add one of the vehicular kind: people who pull into a parking lot space versus those who back in.
For decades, there were generally agreed-upon standards and norms around parking. You entered a lot, saw an open spot and pulled in, like everyone else. But in the past few years, it seems to me something has changed in our national parking lots.
Perhaps you’ve noticed it at the supermarket or CVS. Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in. These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying.
William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA, confirmed my suspicion — and said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.
“We started promoting this around 2020,” he said, in curriculum distributed to driving instructors at public and private driving schools throughout the United States.
“In general,” said Mr. Van Tassel, 59, who lives in Orlando, Fla., and drives a Porsche Cayman that he indeed backs in, “it’s a good idea from a safety perspective.”
My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.
Imminent Threat Solutions, a Texas-based company that teaches people to “prevail against all threats,” as its website says, recommends “tactical parking” — i.e., backing in — for swift evasion. “Next time you park somewhere, start war-gaming it,” the company suggests. “What if I was being chased?” they advise drivers to consider.
But perhaps there are more prosaic reasons, too. Some years ago, Matthew Dicks, a schoolteacher in West Hartford, Conn., noticed that a colleague would back in each morning, despite the extra time it took her to fit between parked cars.
One day, he asked her why.
“She hated her job,” Mr. Dicks, 55, said. “She told me, ‘I just want to get out of here as quickly as possible at the end of the day.’”
Although Mr. Dicks thought backing into a space was “ridiculous,” he kept an open mind, as you might if a friend said they dressed their hot dog with mayonnaise. He decided to try it for a week.
“Right away, I discovered that backing up is always harder than driving forward,” said Mr. Dicks, who wrote a blog post in 2016 laying out his arguments, including that the narrowness of a standard parking space (7.5 to 8.5 feet) relative to the width of a highway lane (12 feet) makes it more dangerous to reverse into a spot.
Mr. Dicks also believes reversing into a spot is discourteous: Other drivers must wait while you position your car, causing congestion in busy parking lots. He concluded his study with a message for his fellow drivers: “Stop backing into parking spots. It makes no sense.”
A-men.
Before we leave the parking lots and their environs: The Nomadic Shopping Carts Of North America:
As Julian Montague drove around Buffalo, New York, he noticed them everywhere.
Tipped over at intersections, crushed by snowplows in parking lots, waiting alone at bus stops. Shopping carts had wandered away from their stores.
Montague, an artist, began photographing the wayward carts and eventually developed a complex classification system that sorted his sightings into more than 30 different categories.
Montague’s book, “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification,” humorously and rigorously documented a social problem that has been plaguing retailers and local governments for decades. Lawmakers and residents say the abandoned carts are a blight on neighborhoods, can cause environmental damage and are a costly burden to remove.
Despite some pushback, a growing number of municipalities are cracking down on shopping cart theft. In Federal Way, Washington, taking a cart off store property can result in a $50 fine. California cities can now charge businesses for the hassle of rounding up their carts. And if retailers in Phoenix don’t adequately address the issue, they’ll have to install GPS trackers on their carts.
Many retailers voluntarily hire cart retrieval companies to find and return their lost property, but often the burden of tracking down loose carts falls on local governments.
Phoenix’s Neighborhood Services Department spent more than $58,000 to collect over 7,800 carts in fiscal year 2024. The city’s cart retrieval program, which was formalized in October, can charge stores as much as $50 per cart returned to them, though Republican state lawmakers are looking to stop Arizona cities from fining businesses for the service.
‘Kid’s Food’ Didn’t Used To Be Kid’s Food. Mmmm, jellied brains…:
The most striking passages in Picky, a forthcoming book by the historian Helen Zoe Veit, describe the way famous 19th-century American figures ate as children. I found myself gripped with envy as I read—not because the foods were particularly appetizing, but because I would kill for my kid to eat like that.
To wit: As a girl, Edith Wharton adored oyster sauce, turtle, stewed celery, cooked tomatoes, and lima beans in cream. Mark Twain fondly remembered eating succotash, string beans, squirrels, and rabbits on his uncle’s farm. And during her childhood, Veit writes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton “happily ate vegetables, hickory nuts, and cold jellied brain.”
Veit’s book recounts how kids went from eating jellied brain to consuming, like my toddler, little but macaroni and cheese. A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes—which meant that they were more eager to eat anything. Before the 20th century, many children did hours of chores both before and after school, so they worked up a good appetite. (Maybe Twain was hungry for those string beans because he spent so much time hunting wild turkeys and clubbing pigeons to death.)
Few kids snacked between meals, because processed foods weren’t widely available. In addition, parents tended to be confident that children could learn to like most adult foods. If a child didn’t like a given meal, they generally wouldn’t be offered an alternative, because, due to a lack of refrigeration, no other food was on hand. But after a series of societal changes in the 20th century, Veit writes, “the children were less hungry. The food was less delicious.” And pickiness was born.
Today’s final fade-out is obvious, but inevitable:
The pull-in/back-in controversy ignores the best parking situation of all – the pull-through, when the spot opposite where you pull in is also empty, so you can face outwards without backing in. This is easier to find, of course, if you park further out in the lot.
With the proliferation of ginormous pickups everywhere, I prefer the better visibility of heading out instead of backing out.
Yep. That’s what I like to do. I get more steps in that way as well.
Too much energy is being wasted on pull in/back out. For the past 20 years, cars have developed more rear blind spots, and back up cameras still don’t have good enough coverage of the periphery to spot someone walking into your path. Backing in gives you greater assurance you are not going to back over someone/something. If you grew up in an old school DuPont/hercules household, your dad probably backed in because that was one of the safety practices drilled in on the plant.
This whole debate reeks of “old man yells at cloud”. Sometimes we collectively improve as a culture. Take the W and move on.
‘Too much energy wasted’. Yet you wasted more.
It’s not easy to be crankier than me, but you’re doing a fine job of it.
Is it proven that backing in takes longer than backing out? Because without that, the congestion issue is a wash?
My biggest issue with the backing in (besides the waste of time) is when I’m backing out of a spot and someone pulling straight out honks like they have the right of way. How am I supposed to know you are coming out? You can see my reverse lights, I can’t tell you’re moving just because your headlights are on
Wiseman’s refusal to use flashy editing or a musical score really speaks to his commitment to authenticity—his ‘wobblycam’ style forces viewers to sit with the rawness of what he’s capturing, which is especially powerful in films like *Titicut Follies*. It’s a reminder that the most impactful social commentary doesn’t need a narrator or dramatic score to be effective; sometimes, just showing the reality is enough.
I started backing into parking spots years ago because I couldn’t see around everyone else’s unnecessarily large vehicles when backing out of a spot in my sedan. Backing in is also much safer because you are better prepared to see and stop for pedestrians who are crossing by your vehicle. It isn’t a waste of time, it’s a safer way to do things. If you want people to stop backing in, get rid of these stupid big-ass trucks and SUVs that tow nothing and have one person in them 99% of the time (note: this data has not been verified by its source).
Also, have you seen the space-challenges folks who still can’t back out of a parking space in one shot even though they have a camera? A single visit to either of our area Trader Joe’s stores will give you all the evidence you need to prove that pulling in doesn’t save time.