Audience at Carpenter Center listens to Erin Gruwell’s Q&A following the screening of her documentary, Stories from an Undeclared War.
2:30pm | “You had to be there” has to be one of the most banal and redundant of comments to describe a given situation’s greatness or intensity. Banal in the sense that it doesn’t remotely describe the situation itself and redundant in the fact that the person you’re explaining said situation to obviously wasn’t there. It is the equivalent of always answering the question, “How is your day going?” with, “It goes.”
However, there are moments — particularly with art — where the melding of the art piece itself with its audience creates this larger experience beyond the edges of the projection screen. Where, in a sense, you truly had to be there to sense the way in which the film spoke beyond the celluloid.
That was Monday night at the Carpenter Center, where Erin Gruwell soft-premiered the first cut of her documentary, Stories from an Undeclared War. And given this, this review really isn’t a review at all.
I am not sure if I was expecting an intimate gathering, but hundreds — over 850 by an usher’s estimate — appeared to see Erin tell her story that goes beyond the well-known Hilary Swank version of how she altered the lives of marginalized students through writing about their experiences. Lining the stretch of the first few rows were high school students, ranging from Long Beach to Van Nuys, who mostly came not because they wanted to change the world (though one girl exclaimed just that: “Erin, you make me want to change the world”) but to hear stories. Stories that they related to and stories they connected with.
Erin Gruwell (right) stands with her Freedom Writers as they offer advice to young high schoolers on how to become better people.
These stories, like all those of war, are not easy to digest — particularly from someone as privileged as myself. In fact, I think I sit on a similar couch with Erin’s background: before coming to Long Beach for my masters, I was raised in Big Bear, an overwhelmingly white, middle-class, safe mountain haven and did my undergraduate work at Cal State Fullerton (which fellow alumn often called Cal State Full-of-White because of the enormously white student population whose drug of choice was cocaine and Vicodin because, well, they often had money). Concepts like family, home, and the future were not abstract ideals nor intangible things; they were luminous, limpid realities for me that were a part of my daily life. In fact, I would even venture to say that struggle was not a particularly deep part of my identity.
Though I am not naive to such atrocities — my education has firmly cemented my conceptualization of privilege and the many bonuses which undeservedly come with it — it is always shocking to hear someone, particularly of such a young age, speak of them; to tell tales of murder, loss, lack of identity, homelessness, crime, drugs, and the various other go-tos we hark to when we think of the “bad” part of society. It never loses its sting.
Erin Gruwell greets and addresses viewers following the screening of her documentary.
It is overwhelmingly difficult to remain psychologically calm hearing a teenage girl, strapped with a house arrest monitor, read Anne Frank’s diary — not knowing who she was, mind you, because her access to knowledge has been limited thanks to her environment — and relate to feeling like a bird in a cage, afraid to stick their hand out the window for fear of getting “caught.” Caught, for this particular girl, involved getting caught up in gang violence or even losing her life.
Most devastating was when she reached the end of the diary. Reading it like we read most books about strong people, she thought Anne would undoubtedly survive. Upon discovering that Anne never quite made it, she begs an overwhelmingly sad question: if someone as strong as Anne didn’t make it, where does that leave her?
To have a 14-year-old question her own future before she has even experienced a decade-and-a-half of existence never loses its sting.
In this sense, it would be deeply disrespectful for me to intellectually and badly recount the stories which were told because it severely misses the point of documentation, being that they must be experienced in their fullness by their original authors. They aren’t monologues but life tales.
And if these tales from the 90s might seem like they are not applicable to today, one just had to watch the many youths stand up and proclaim otherwise. In the words of one boy, “I’m not good yet. I’m trying to get better, I really am. But you give me hope [that I actually] will.”
Stories from an Undeclared War will be screening next at the Newport Film Festival .
A high schooler offers a heartfelt admission that the film makes him want to be better.