Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: John Powers

Aside from a few shots that follow clerks "upstairs" to another department, Wiseman's Welfare takes place in one large room. This is the main headquarters and waiting area of the New York City welfare department. There are satellite offices (one on Waverly, one on Broadway) that are mentioned but never seen. The allusions to these other offices allow them to function symbolically as alternate circles of Dante's inferno, places the unfortunate will be sent if they don't have the correct form, or if a well-meaning but overworked bureaucrat sent them to the wrong place. This is the runaround in its purest form.

By confining his footage to this one jam-packed location, Wiseman is able to direct reality, creating a pressure cooker where people lose their patience after days of waiting, employees steel themselves against tirades and entreaties, and those contained within the drama of Welfare begin to lose all perspective. Clerks and applicants alike start to behave as if there is no existence outside this one large room. People are hungry, they are about to be evicted, and these crises are handled (or not) with concern but no real urgency. As one claimant explains, she was told by one welfare worker, "I am responsible for 2.5 million checks. If a couple thousand don't go out, I'm doing a good job."

Wiseman's film was made in 1975, in what would be the final days of the Keynesian welfare state, before the election of Ronald Reagan would gut the budgets of public assistance to levels from which they'd never recover. We are witnessing a bureaucracy on the verge of falling apart, a broken system that only intermittently fulfills its mission. But watching Welfare now, it's striking to see how the United States ultimately addressed this problem. From Clinton's draconian "workfare" reforms through Giuliani's evisceration of low income housing in the city, there is one general impression. The way to fix welfare is to eliminate as many claimants as possible, a war of attrition against the urban poor.

As with most of Wiseman's films, Welfare is a portrait of a social institution, one that manages human need and misery through procedure and regulations. And as is almost always the case, Wiseman shows that there is very little wiggle room for the people working inside this bureaucracy. One man, Noel, listens to a woman whose case was closed and discovers an error. Much to his superior's chagrin, he goes upstairs and demands that the supervisor make the change, restoring the woman's benefits for the time being. ("I showed Mrs. Greenberg the error of her ways," he reports.) But toward the end, Wiseman shows us a clerk, a white woman, who is so perturbed by an angry applicants -- a Black woman representing her mother, and a Latino man seeking assistance on behalf of his wife -- that she eventually snaps. "You could just get a job," she sneers.

While it's tempting to think that the worker in question is having a mask-off moment, showing her true classist and racist colors, Wiseman isn't suggesting this at all. Rather, Welfare displays the problem of "human services," a set of rules, forms, and conflicting agendas that prohibits any genuine human interaction. On several occasions, applicants who are missing some piece of paperwork, or whose cases won't be settled until after the weekend, plead with the office workers. "I have no money to eat," "where am I supposed to stay until Monday?" From the outside, it seems crazy that the clerks don't open up their own wallets and offer a few dollars, as one might for a street beggar. 

But if that line is breached, where would it stop? Like doctors or lawyers but with only a fraction of their power, these welfare workers must draw a line of professional distance. "I'm sorry, I can't help you. Come back on Monday." Wiseman bookends this 2 1/2 hour film with close-ups of people waiting for relief, and partly he does this to show that many of the same people who were navigating the system throughout the film are back the very next day. As one distraught man says near the conclusion, "what am I waiting for? Godot?"

Mostly we see people on both sides of the desk, hamstrung by an inefficient system. But when Wiseman shows us unguarded, personal moments, they are often even more disturbing. That's because the people trapped inside this nightmare have to adopt certain narratives to explain their predicament. One of the longest single scenes in Welfare involves a middle-aged veteran ranting about how he was put in the hospital by three Black muggers. Yelling at a Black police officer, the guy describes Black and Puerto Ricans as savages, trots out the old (disproved) statistic that Blacks are 10% of the population but account for 66% of crimes, and insists that he's going to arm himself for a coming race war.

The officer is angry but calm, trying to empathize with this deranged bigot. But for me, the most disturbing aspect of this scene is the fact that the man's paranoid fantasies from 1975 are exactly the same as what one would hear from Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity today. When society is broken, there are rote, knee-jerk discourses available to make sure no one assigns blame up the food chain. In Welfare, the inability for people to relate to one another on a human level is "managed" through racism and resentment. If anything, America has only gotten more stratified and dysfunctional, and ignorance like that spewed by the man pictured above is amplified by cable news and social media. 

But Welfare ends with a different man, down on his luck, praying aloud to God, stating that despite his many obstacles, he will not give up and die just yet. Wiseman shows that even in the bleakest times, there are not only discourses of resentment, but of defiance and even hope.