Plutonium Circus is not one of those earnest little documentaries that gets nominated for an Oscar. It's more like Roger & Me, very telling but also funny as hell. Plutonium Circus is about Pentex, a Department of Energy facility which is essentially the world a-bomb headquarters, and it's place in the town of Amarillo. Pentex builds atomic weapons and also dismantles them, the latter being their current activity. Ironically, the dismantled weapons pose more of an immediate threat to the townspeople than the assembled ones because the removed plutonium is kept right there at Pentex.
The facility is defended by Pentex and government employees who think the only real issue is jobs. They think that Pentex's PR tactics of slick Earth Day booths and literacy training make up for endangering lives and potentially poisoning the land forever. They aren't bad people or even greedy, they're just incapable of understanding Pentex's detractors are saying.
Much of the humor comes from just letting the camera roll on the "characters" in particular the eccentric owner of The Cadillac Ranch and another wealthy fellow who is more interested in killing animals, large and small, and collecting the bizarre than in roadside art(one petty annoyance is that the people appearing in the film are not really identified). I think I drifted somewhere because I heard the hunting man talk about how his family worked at the bomb plant way back in the beginning but my partner-in-all-things said that his family started the plant. If so, that adds another twist to a very bent man. He proudly displays such household items as a shrunken head stuck on a Christmas tree angel, a stuffed monkey at the dinner table (with it's own meal before it) and Charles Manson's fingerprints from Folsom Prison. The humor is heightened by the filmmakers' juxtaposition of these guys with people like the straight-laced PR man for Pentex.
The movie also features an appearance by a Fringeware contributing editor, Don Webb. Don talks a bit about how the conservative elements of Amarillo don't suppress odd people like himself but rather force the "different" out into the open where they can find each other. (Don edited Fringeware Review #6(66), the Satanic issue).
Plutonium Circus was preceded by a hilarious short film called Performance Anxiety about man's struggle to "perform" in bed. It starts right off with the man and his girlfriend falling into bed and frantically making love. He tries to keep going to get her to orgasm but he fails. The problem is, when he tries to have sex, people from his past appear before him to make comments. It starts of with his mother (of course) but later his psychiatrist and his ex-wife also put in appearances. The psychiatrist tries to cure him of this anxiety but he only makes it worse. the man's conflict with these people continues but it isn't real to the woman sharing the bed, presumably it's all in his mind. Eventually the shrink comes up with the key to curing his patient of his performance anxiety in an ending which infected the viewer with a similar bliss. In case this synopsis hasn't tipped you off, Performance Anxiety is funny but not for prudes (you know who you are).
I failed to mention on the A More Perfect Union page the short film which preceded it,"Direction Man." It too is an Austin production. What it consists of is simply a little establishing narration then a home video of a man giving directions to a Motel 6. I swear it could not possibly be funnier if it were fictional. Unfortunately it won't be shown with A More Perfect Union at the other times in the festival but it's too good never to appear again.
3/12/95