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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > August > 21
Friday, August 21, 2009
Editorial: ‘Last Truck’ captures a story for our time
“GM’s messed up. We were one of the best plants.” — A Moraine assembly plant worker, in “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant.”
It was a remarkable scene at the Schuster Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night, Aug. 19. Not exactly a celebration, to be sure. But not exactly a wake either. But some of both.
The event was the premiere of the movie, “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” about the last days of the last real General Motors plant in metropolitan Dayton, as seen through the eyes of workers losing their jobs.
The movie was made by Dayton’s distinguished documentarians Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar. It was produced with HBO and will be shown on that network starting, appropriately enough, Labor Day. The workers and their families constituted most of the movie-goers in the packed house.
There were lots of tears and lots of laugh; lots of bad feeling and lots of good. What’s bad here hardly has to be noted — though the movie’s documentation of it in dramatic terms is an experience worth having for anybody. It is most certainly worth having for any resident of this old car town, for anybody who wants to understand the place and its history.
By the thousands, good people have lost their livelihoods and their work families, their homes away from home. Saddest of all, perhaps, they have lost a good part of their confidence in the American dream.
Many were dedicated workers with physically demanding jobs that paid decently but not as extravagantly as legend has it. (Figure $50,000 for a middle-aged person). They were full of pride in the jobs they did, fully aware of the importance of the workmanship necessary to turn out a safe family vehicle.
They are mainly high school graduates. They know that generations coming after them continue to include many people with similar educations, and that those people do not have the same shot at the good life as earlier counterparts.
The situation for these former workers at the Moraine assembly plant is even worse than it might have seemed during the making of the movie in 2008. At that time, the Dayton job market was already bad. But that was before the national collapse into the most severe recession in the lives of most Americans.
So what could possibly have been good about the evening? The fact that this story has been told well and respectfully and will be seen by millions of Americans.
Ultimately, it’s not just a story about Dayton. The same story has played out all across the country. That, surely, is why HBO was interested.
Often in its history, Dayton has served as a sort of symbol of what’s happening in the country as a whole. For better and for worse.
So it was good to have a story about Daytonians told by Daytonians; good that Wright State University has the film studies program out of which the project grew; good that HBO has now come to Dayton twice this year for premieres, the other being for “They Killed Sister Dorothy.”
“The Last Truck” is not the last word to be said about the GM workers. It’s about loss, not about the recovering and adapting and reinventing that must follow.
The movie-makers spare us the usual talking-head experts about how people cope with loss or should cope. They spare us judgments about individual workers and debates about whose fault it all is (though they capture some workers’ defensiveness on that score and some hard feelings toward management).
They tell what it’s like to be caught up in economic forces beyond’s one’s control, a story for our time.
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