An American Tragedy: The Overnighters

Jesse Moss's fine 2014 documentary, The Overnighters, is a tremendously sad story and a movie that should shock and disturb all of us: in a very low-key way (working essentially as a crew of 1), Moss examines the way in which the natural-gas boom in North Dakota has changed the entire life and culture of the small cities on the Plains. A combination of a general recession across the country and a tremendous need for skilled and semi-skilled labor has drawn thousands of men to ND, looking for jobs in oil and gas drilling. They pay is great - but prices and rents have gone crazy, and the influx of thousands of men, many of them tough roustabouts, many of them chronically unemployed, and many plagued by various psychological troubles and demons, has put the small-town residents on edge, to say the least. Moss focuses on a Lutheran minister, Reinke, who runs a temporary housing program in his church, taking in dozens of these men and advocating on behalf of all of them, trying to get his community to love and accept these new neighbors, and trying to get the men to reach out to the community, to be good citizens, to play by the rules (go to church, don't spill coffee on the carpet, don't sleep in cars in parking lots, and on and on). His task is Herculean, and he becomes increasingly a pariah in town - I won't give away any of the elements, but there are some strange and very sad twists in the tale that lift our sorrow and pity to a tragic level. And it's also tragic that our wealthy land can do nothing more to accommodate these guys looking for work other than to leave them to fend on their own. You can compare this influx of labor to the Gold Rush, the Klondike Rush, perhaps others - but it's not quite the same. These men are desperate - many have been unemployed for years, have lost their homes and families - and they're not trying to get rich but just to make a living. In spirit, it's closer to the Dust Bowl migrants of Grapes of Wrath - but those migrants were, generally, entire families; the fact that this is an movement of men traveling alone raises the tension level. At least in the Dust Bowl, the employers felt some responsibility to provide housing (exploitative though it was) for their workers. Here, we see men - those able to get jobs - working hard all day and then sleeping in a car or a wooden shed. There has to be some way that we as a culture can help - and not entrust the "free market" to sort out every problem and inequity.