Butte Magic of Ignorance
Treatment Part 3
The next morning, Frank sets off with his miner’s uniform. Irene peeks out as he walks out the door of the house and quickly puts on her coat and follows him out the door. She watches as he walks up a street and discreetly follows after. The two walk past the stately homes of the West Side, Frank about half a block ahead of Irene. Frank hears something and turns around. Irene sees him begin turning and ducks behind a parked car. The music that plays on the radio in her headphones is frantic, as if for a chase. Frank turns and continues walking. He turns again, and Irene ducks behind a retaining wall. He starts to walk back a step but thinks better of it and turns to walk forward. Irene waits a couple more seconds before setting off again, forward, following after him. She walks slowly for a few steps, then gingerly tiptoes a little faster after him.
He walks up to the Marcus Daly statue at the campus of Montana Tech and walks a circle around the statue. He pretends to look closely at the statue, at the details of face, hands, descriptive name emblazoned at the statue’s feet, while looking back, trying to see who is following him or if he is being followed. Irene ducks behind a street sign and waits for him to move on. After pausing for a moment to look down the hill and the city there, Frank walks on, deeper into the campus of Montana Tech. Irene walks up, following him, but taking a second to glance at the statue that Frank had circled.
Frank walks into the mineral museum on the campus. Irene follows him in. Frank walks between cases of rock laid out in display, and labeled. Irene quickly walks to the other side of the museum and crouches down to watch Frank through the display cases. He takes out a notebook and writes some notes based on what he sees. Irene crouches up a little to see better, to see over the cases. As he takes notes, Frank glances up at her and Irene pretends to be tying her shoe and stands the rest of the way up. She pretends to be looking at the display case in front of her.
Emily sits in an office and looks over a form on a clipboard. There is a poster behind her cautioning employees to wash hands before touching food. Emily reads the form and thinks, "Employment history, employment history. Hmm. History." She looks up and sees the mountain above the city and the small white statue that glistens in the sun. Emily looks back down at the form and begins tentatively writing, looking up from time to time. "My history is to be employed. My employment is to be vigilant." She looks up and smiles, and with a new sense of certainty begins to scribble hurriedly. "There once was a statue high on a mountain. The statue was white and made of steel and it was the Virgin Mary, it was called Our Lady of the Rockies and built up high so all the world could see. So high up you could see it from very far, for it was also a very big statue. It was made of steel and very strong, but it was hollow inside so beware of the winds! Sometimes the winds blew over the mountain very strong and the statue might fall, like a statue on a shelf, and fall down and break."
Emily writes hurriedly, madly, and when we see just what she is writing we see mostly scribbles and wavy lines, like a stormy sea.
Over the wavy lines we hear Frank’s voice. "You may notice that sometimes rocks look like faces. This is no coincidence." He and Irene walk through the rocky landscape of the Butte hill. Irene has one of her headphone speakers bent back behind her ear so she can hear him and the music that plays in the other ear. "We are based on carbon, and the earth is full of carbon, as well as all the other elements. All of the minerals in us are minerals of the earth. When we eat we gain from them. When we die we will give them back. We are made of the earth, we are made out of the soil. We are all, earth and people, just chemistry, minerals and reactions. That which holds us all together, gravitational, electrical, molecular forces, don’t just hold me as a body together or that rock as a rock together, it also unites us with everything. We share everything with everything, because everything is a part of everything. There’s no stopping us. There’s no place where I stop and the air begins. There’s no place where I stop and the earth or you begin. When my foot touches the ground there is no clear line between my foot and my boot and the earth: it is all continuous, all share molecules, they all share. When you stand in place you are a part of the earth, there is nothing between you and China -- you are part of a continuous chemical and electrical process.
"Every hour day or night miners used to be under this mountain looking for secrets. They dug into the rock far below us and dug out rock and some of that rock was made out of minerals that were worth something more than ordinary rock was. They dug out some but left most of the mountain there, above them and below them."
As Frank describes underground mining the two walk through a long narrow tunnel, the same one Irene walked through earlier with the man who offered to take her to the house in the photograph. The bright spot of light in front of them expands, until it is huge and blinding. "And then in the 1950’s the Anaconda Company started to close down the underground mines. They changed to open pit mining. They deserted the vast network of intestines under Butte and started to dig from the surface down, to dig a huge hole, to dig the whole mountain out. Imagine someone digging into your skin, making a big hole to expose everything on its way to your bones. Imagine someone trying to dig the bones out of your very body. Wouldn’t you think those people owed you to bring the bones back when they realized their error?"
Emily sits in the office and continues to fill out the form, writing wavy lines that grow bigger and smaller. She looks up now and then to see if she is being watched, then looks down to continue her writing, intensely. As she writes, she thinks, "That statue was not safe. It needed something, it needed a friend. It stood so high up, so all alone, and people could come there and place their prayers inside a slot in her, but she was not like a statue on a shelf because there were no other statues around her, no friends, no one to watch her, nobody next to her, just a mountain and a long ways to fall."
Frank and Irene look into the huge Berkeley Pit as the strange electronic sounds play off in the distance, and grow, and fade. Out of the corner of her eye, Irene sees Frank reach into his pocket and pull out a tangled ball of wire. He tosses it nonchalantly into the Pit. He pulls out some pennies and, as if throwing popcorn to pigeons, tosses them in, one at a time, as he says, "A small hole dug in the ground grew and grew until it became gigantic. It swallowed up whole neighborhoods of Butte: Meaderville, which was where the Italians lived: it was a place that bustled in the roaring twenties. Other neighborhoods had to be demolished so the Pit could be dug and expanded: McQueen and Finnville, Dublin Gulch and Columbia Gardens, the city’s prized park and amusement center. Before they stopped mining the Berkely Pit, the Anaconda Company had plans to expand it even further. The expansion would have taken in most of what remains of uptown Butte." As he describes this we see a map of Butte with the pit marked out and growing like a cancer. We hear other voices, voices from the radio report that Irene heard on her first day in the city, and more images of the pit, as well as pictures from the neighborhoods that were lost to it. We see images of the new pit next to the first, and of the open pit mining that continues there. We see newspaper headlines about the snow geese that were killed on a stopover in the pit, and about the toxicity of the Pit’s water and efforts to clean it up. The voices and pictures collide and overlap, the Pit grows, not just on a map of Butte, but we see it expand over a map of the state of Montana and then growing like a fire engulfing a map of the whole United States. We hear words about the toxicity of the water and its threat to the city and the entire system of rivers that reaches from the continental divide to the Pacific Ocean. Certain lines repeat over and over, we see the same pictures repeated, the tempo of the editing increases. Along with images of the Pit and descriptions from the radio report we hear and see quick glances and sounds from earlier parts of the film, as well as glimpses of scenes that have not yet happened. Bright flashes come between some of the images. The electronic sounds meant to scare away birds grow in intensity.
The images and sounds flash from a television set. They flash from the television in the living room of Emily’s house. The flashes coming from the screen light Irene and Frank, as images and sounds are repeated. In the living room, a few candles are burning. Emily leaves the kitchen, glancing back at her penny jar, which is nearly empty. Emily walks into the living room, tries to switch on a light and, because it does not work, she takes out another candle, lights it, and puts it on a table. Emily looks briefly at the TV screen, leaves and comes back with a cloth. She wipes the screen with the cloth as Irene and Frank try to watch, arching their necks around to see the picture despite Emily’s cleaning. "I’ve been looking for a job, looking hard," Emily says. "It’s really hard. It’s hard to find one." Emily finishes wiping the screen and turns off the TV. She moves from dusting the TV set to the small figures, the virgin Mary's and the others, that are on top of the TV and on shelves around the house, and lifts them, one at a time, and dusts each lightly and lovingly with her cloth. After seeing close shots of her dusting the Madonnas, we see a series of close shots of her wiping off several appliances, all of which have their power cords cut off, as candles burn in the background.
Irene and Frank sit looking at the TV that is no longer on, and then up at Emily, who seems to be talking to them, but also ignoring them. Irene has her box of family treasures next to her and opens it to show some of the things to Frank. Frank carefully examines one post card. She bends back one ear of her headphones to hear what he says about the card. "Frank Little’s funeral. She was involved in Frank Little funeral procession. You’ll have to come to the cemetery and I will tell you about Frank Little."
Emily looks at the two of them, looking at the things in the box, and then she looks back at the useless lamp she dusts. She leaves the living room, holding a candle in one hand and a Madonna figure in the other.
Emily lays in bed, asleep. A line of light comes in the window and makes a road that ends at her head. She rocks back and forth in bed, disturbed by a dream. She dreams of the statue on the mountain. The blazing white Virgin Mary spins from side to side, wobbling as if about to fall but also leaning down as if looking. The statue fixes its face on something, something down below, something in the valley below or on the other side of it. The statue turns and makes a double take, its eyes fixing on a certain spot. The statue’s eyes bug out like that of a cartoon character. The statue lifts an arm to point and then we see what she points at.
Across the valley from her is the copper statue of a handsome Marcus Daly. His statue stands in the middle of a street on the campus of Montana Tech. The statue of Daly leans up and his eyes twinkle. The Our Lady statue drops her arm and her eyes twinkle back.
First the Our Lady statue, then the Marcus Daly statue lean forward until they pull free from their moorings in the ground. Each disturbs a cloud of dirt and dust, but walks out of the cloud.
The statue of Daly waddles through model railroad streets while the Our Lady negotiates down a model hillside. Both waddle from side to side. The Daly statue moves through a Butte landscape, past a gallows’ frame while the Our Lady reaches a leveling off of the steep cliff of the mountain.
The Berkely Pit is lined with white snow and the lake in its center is frozen and glistening. The Daly statue stands on one side of the lake while the Our Lady waddles to the other side. The Our Lady statue waddles a step on the ice and finds herself sliding. She nearly loses her balance but soon finds herself able to easily skate on the frozen surface. The Daly statue waddles as well until it finds that it can slide on the ice much more easily.
As the Daly statue reaches the Our Lady near the center of the frozen pit, he loses his balance and begins to fall. The Our Lady statue quickly moves to him and leans down to catch him. Her white steel arms reach out for him and his copper arms come out as well. The two statues embrace on the frozen Berkely Pit.
The two statues, arm in arm, figure skate on the ice of the great polluted lake. The solid folds of Our Lady’s gown flutter in the breeze of her motion. The two statues, stiff but talented, perform some basic figure-skating pairs moves across the ice as two spotlights, one on either side of the Pit’s horizon, follow their progress. Emily smiles in her sleep.
The sun rises over the city of Butte. The sun draws a path over buildings, gallows’ frames and empty streets. We hear Frank say, "Frank Little came to Butte to organize miners for the International Workers of the World, the radical labor union that was better known as the Wobblies."
Irene, Frank and Emily walk to the gate of a cemetery on the flats of Butte. They walk in, passing between the rows of headstones. Frank continues, "Little came to Butte at a time when the Anaconda Company, the conglomerate that had grown from the original mining company started by Marcus Daly, was becoming known as simply 'The Company.' Anaconda was buying up independent mines, and growing strong enough to have strong control over all the laborers in Butte. Its wages, its labor policies, became the Butte standard.
"Little was popular, and his message was making waves, or at least seemed to be. One morning his body was found swinging under a railroad trestle. Nobody was ever brought to justice for the murder of Frank Little."
The three walk through an unkempt part of the cemetery, a place where the grass ends and scraggly weeds mark the space between tombstones, some of which are made of sticks of broken wood. Frank points out the tomb of Frank Little and we see his name and dates and the inscription beneath it. "A long procession led from Uptown Butte to this cemetery on the flats to bury Frank Little. They say that more than ten thousand people witnessed the funeral. It was the biggest funeral ever held in Butte. Your great grandmother was part of the procession for Frank Little."
Frank stays at that grave while Irene and Emily wander off. Irene passes through the rows of markers, with Emily many headstones away from her. Frank walks a few feet away from the graves and pulls the shovel off from around his head. Looking up to make sure he is not being watched he digs a small hole. As he digs we see that he has put next to the hole the copper teapot that belongs to Emily. He also pulls some copper wire and pennies out of his pocket and drops them to the ground.
As Irene walks between the rows of tombstones, she puts a tape labeled, "Stories of Dublin Gulch: Oral histories of Butte’s Irish" into her headphone stereo. She hears an elderly man talking. He says, "One of the most colorful characters of Dublin Gulch was ‘Hail’ Mary Harrington." Irene starts and stops walking when she hears it. She presses the rewind button on her tape deck and plays it again: "’Hail’ Mary Harrington, who owned a boardinghouse in the gulch. Two dozen miners stayed there, some of them sharing the same bunk: the guys working the night shift slept during the day and the dayshifters slept on the same cot at night.
"I remember Hail Mary because my family used to go to her boardinghouse for her big meals, the same meals she cooked for the miners. We used to go there, mom and pop and I and eat there, side by side with the miners at a big table. That was quite a treat.
"It seems like Hail Mary had a string of different husbands and a couple kids from each. One got killed at the Speculator Mine during the disaster there. She had a whole string of different men as husbands, but every single one of them was named John Harrington, either because that had been their name before they got married or because they didn't want to break the precedent."
Irene looks ahead at Emily, walking a few rows away from her. Irene continues walking, looking down at the gravestones, some of which have writing in a language other than English, some of which have photographs embedded into them showing the deceased.
"The thing I remember the most about Hail Mary’s house was all the statues she had. They were all little trinket things, most of them of the Virgin Mary, which might have been how she got her name. They were all little statues of women, and she used to clean them gently with a cloth after she had served the big meals she cooked up."
Irene presses the stop button on the tape machine. She catches up with Emily, who is standing at a tombstone. Irene bends down to read the name on it. The stone says, "Mary Harrington." Irene looks up at Emily, who is still looking steadily at the stone. Emily says, quietly, "My mother died last year. Her name was Mary. Her mother’s name was Mary." Irene gets up and stands beside Emily. With both hands, Irene grabs the speakers of her headphones and pulls them and the wire connecting them down to her neck. Both women stand and look intently at the grave marker.
Irene walks down a street in uptown Butte with the headphones down around her neck. We can hear an easy breeze but little else. The man who directed her to the Berkely Pit on her first day in the city is walking toward her. He sees her, smiles and waves. She smiles at him but when she gets to him she keeps on walking past. He stops at the point where they would have met and watches her walk past. The smile on her face grows.
As Irene continues to walk we see a gallow’s frame superimposed over her face. We see a series of quick images of Irene, shots of her face from various angles, shots of her looking up, turning. We see closeups of her hands, legs, we see shots of her from some scenes of the film, out-takes, images of her walking. We see these images superimposed over images of Butte, of jerky time-lapse images of Uptown Butte, of a slow pan over the city from the hills above, shots of individual streets and buildings, glimpses of historic photographs. As we see these images superimposed, we hear Irene’s voice:
"Irene came to Butte to find something, to find a story. She felt like she had none. She had lost some of the people who gave her life a meaning, who gave her life a punchline or a happy ending and she was left all to herself, without a direction, without a plot. All she had was a box, like a clue in a detective story, and so she went to Butte to solve the mystery, to make a story.
"Butte was a place with a history, with a series of stories. This city’s glory days may have been past, its population much lower, its power and position in the greater world or even the state of Montana diminished, yet those stories gave the city a certainty about what it was, they gave it a name and a reason despite the many troubles and challenges that it faced and faces.
"Irene also found people, two people who lived in Butte, and though she was much more concerned about herself and her own search than she was about these people, she found that the more she tried to ignore them, the more these people intrigued her. She has also found the same thing about herself: the more she tried to ignore who she is or who she might be, the more those very things intrigued her, carried her."
Over these next words we see images from a variety of family photographs intercut with the images of Irene and superimposed over both smooth and jerky images of Butte and its environs.
"Irene discovered that her great great grandmother was ‘Hail’ Mary Harrington, who was born Irish but sailed across the ocean and landed in Butte, Montana. She had a string of husbands named John Harrington and a collection of small statues of women, mostly the Virgin Mary. Mary had a daughter named Mary, who loved the statues, and inherited them. Daughter Mary passed them on to her daughter Emily when she died. With another husband John, ‘Hail’ Mary had a daughter Constance. Constance hated Butte and left as soon as she could. She had a daughter Irene, to whom she said nothing of Butte or her past. Irene had to find out these things for herself.
"When Irene was young, she thought she knew everything, but that was only a sign of how little she did know. Today she realizes that she knows very little, especially about herself, but she does know how magic that kind of ignorance can be."
Read about the film's characters on the Character Sketches page.
