Movies - Six O'Clock News

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	Movies - Six O'Clock News

:For the BBC news programme called "the Six O'Clock News", see BBC Six O'Clock News

Six O'Clock News is a documentary film by Ross McElwee
about television news in the United States, the randomness of fate, the anxiety of parenting, and the difference between representation and reality.

The film starts off with a shot of McElwee's son, previously seen at the end of McElwee's film Time Indefinite. McElwee wonders if the mirror in his son's crib will drive him towards a compulsion towards self-documentation like the one McElwee thinks he shows in his films. McElwee muses that the world didn't seem so dangerous to him before he had a child, but that he has become obsessed with the news and its tragedies--some of the images haunt him. In voiceover, he wonders which footage is more "real"--that on TV news or that in home movies of birthdays and weddings.

Watching the news one night, McElwee sees that Hurricane Hugo has struck the island where his friend Charleen Swansea lives. The bridge has been upended; many of the houses on the island have been destroyed. McElwee mentions that Charleen's husband died years before in a "terrible fire" (the same terrible fire he described in Time Indefinite as an arson/suicide).

Charleen's son informs McElwee that Charleen was out of town when the Hurricane hit; McElwee goes to the edge of the destroyed bridge, where he films the destruction, as well filming the news crews gathering their own footage. Ross comments: "It's as if I'd been sitting in my living room watching the news when suddenly my television imploded and sucked me into the world I was watching."

Charleen's house is generally in good shape, though the roof has been ripped from one room. The poetry and other documents that Charleen was worried about are dry, though another room in her house shows water damage as high as Charleen's head. Charleen comments that she used to think things happened for a reason, but that now it all seems random and that she would never have children if she had realized it sooner.

Later, a news crew comes to film McElwee for a human interest story. The crew has learned that McElwee documents his own life in his films; and, in fact, when they arrive at his apartment he is filming as he opens the door. The crew leaves and reenters to film him filming them as he opens the door. Then McElwee is interviewed for an hour; McElwee includes some of this interview, but lowers his original audio and adds a voiceover: "Documentaries, which are more or less films about reality, are actually not considered by most people to be 'real films'; but Hollywood films, which usually have an extremely high fantasy quotient, are considered to be real." When the interview is over, the crew leaves a second time, again to come back and film him filming them as he answers the door.

McElwee wonders what it means that the crew has filmed this event twice and experienced it three times: "So what does it mean to film reality, anyway? Is it any less real that they are filming themselves coming into my apartment a third time? I don't ask people to reenact things when I'm filming, but ultimately what difference does it make? I'll edit this scene for my purposes, just as they'll edit it for theirs. But is one version more real than another?"

McElwee visits Steve Im, a man who emigrated from Korea to the United States with $50 in his pocket. He has built his wealth to about $6 million and owns restaurants, clothing stores, and other businesses. His wife worked at a wig shop but was killed one night in a burglary; the robber made off with $44.94. McElwee and Im visit awhile, and generally avoid the subject of Im's misfortune. Eventually McElwee prods Im to talk about it; Im is willing to have the audio recorded but not the video as he talks about it. McElwee shoots the street ahead as Im's chauffeur drives. Im comments that God is out of control and can't control the world--a sentiment that McElwee is coming to believe.

McElwee leaves Im and visits Arizona, which is suffering torrential floods. He arrives at a motel, is unable to leave because of the weather, and watches the flood on TV. Later he meets John and Carolyn Noeding, who live in a trailer park which has been devastated by tornados. They go across the street and start salvaging their neighbors' possessions from the wreckage. A camera crew arrives and starts asking Carolyn to hold the photos up for the camera; McElwee films them filming her, then films the crew leaving. While he is filming, another crew arrives behind him. Eventually McElwee starts filming the news crews instead of Carolyn and John, and notes three versions of what happened: the 9 seconds of Carolyn that showed on the news, the longer version that McElwee filmed that morning, and the later version that McElwee filmed as Carolyn watches herself on the nightly news. McElwee comments that none of the versions probably show the "invisible virus" of fate that apparently controls everything by making everything out of control.
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