Aaron's Thoughts
My grandpa died in the coal mines of West Virginia long before I was born, so I know very little about him. All I have are the stories that have been passed down from my mom & her siblings.
At the time of this documentary, he was 200 miles away going through things not too dissimilar from what is portrayed in the film. Horrific working conditions. Working under the thumb of a company that didn’t care one lick about the miners underneath them. Showing up day in and day out to get by.
Never have I felt as connected to him as I was watching this. It moved me to tears.
The picture it paints of the time and place is unlike anything I have ever seen in a documentary. The tie in of the Appalachian music to tell the story is masterful. The searing portrait of class struggle. The way Barbara Kopple just rolls the camera and lets real life play out is breathtaking in certain scenes and terrifying in others. It’s so visceral that you feel like you are there yourself in Harlan County. But it’s also haunting in a way that I can’t quite explain. It’s like you are watching ghosts tell their tragic story.
There are two particular scenes that I want to note which will stick with me forever.
One involves a doctor in WV that specialized in Black lung. He is explaining to the camera how when someone first starts to show symptoms of Black lung, common sense would tell you to pull them out of the mines to stop working. But the coal companies required someone to be in bad shape to pay them disability. How bad? Well after showing signs of Black lung, the doctor would encourage them to keep working so that it could get bad enough that they would then get disability. Obviously you can see how horrifying & backwards that is, but it also illustrates something that I learned at a very early age about coal mining. It often wasn’t a choice or decision someone made, it was a way of life. It was a right of passage when you hit a certain age. And the doctor saying that to the camera so perfectly encapsulates that idea into a small, tragic statement. There was no way out of this except continuing to go underground. There was no real alternative for so many of these men.
The second moment takes place when a few of the miners go up to Wall Street to try and impact the share price of the mining company. There is a candid conversation captured between one of the miners and a NYC police officer. The police officer is asking the miner questions and they get into a conversation about pay differences between their two jobs. It’s a remarkable moment because to me it so beautifully captures a different time in our country. A time when two strangers, that will never see each other again, took a genuine interest in one another’s lives for 3 minutes. There is something about them just caring about each other as humans first and foremost that caught me off guard. We don’t even know what the police officer thinks about the strike! Because it doesn’t matter. It isn’t about that. It is simply about two people from two different walks of life seeing the humanity in the other and genuinely taking an interest in them.
There are so many things that were wrong during the 70s and plenty more that were backwards, but in that small moment we see that they didn’t have it all wrong back then. In fact, quite the opposite.
One wrinkle that I didn’t mention earlier about my grandpa - he wouldn’t be portrayed as the hero if this documentary were filmed in his town. He was always a company man through and through. When there were disputes and strikes at his mine, he was the one crossing the picket line to keep things running.
I would give anything to be able to sit down and watch this with him to hear his thoughts and his stories. Would we see eye to eye on everything? Probably not, but like the police officer and the miner in the film, I like to think that it wouldn’t matter.
