We Always Knew This Was Going To Happen
Whether it means to or not, Standoff at Sparrow Creek tells us a lot about how we conceive of Right-Wing Terror
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek was the third film to come out of Cinestate, a production company that brands itself as a maker of “populist entertainment”. After a much-lauded premiere at 2018’s FantasticFest, it was quietly placed onto on-demand streaming services. This was inevitable because, in this era, a thriller about a far-right militia realizing one of its own might have just committed a mass shooting can be a bit of a hard sell. It’s the kind of thriller that revels in nihilism, portraying a world without any clear heroes. Yet, it’s also a movie that tries to avoid taking a clear side on the highly volatile issues at play by creating a world without politics. And in this regard, it’s a pretty fascinating case study of just how difficult it is to craft a narrative around the rising threat of right-wing extremism.
We open on a solitary hunter tracking a deer through the forest. As the sun sets, he hears a distant gunshot. At first, he’s unperturbed –it’s probably just another hunter- but then he hears more shots, followed by distant explosions. He immediately drives to the isolated trailer he calls his home and pulls a CV radio from a hidden compartment. Someone on the other end tells him to come to ‘the base’; something is going down. This is how we’re introduced to Gannon, our protagonist, along with the nightmarish apocalypse that’s about to play out across 89 tight minutes.
Gannon arrives at a lumber warehouse, which acts as the secret base of a heavily-armed militia. As the other six members show up, they piece together what’s happened. An unidentified gunman just shot up a cop’s funeral, and their base is short one assault rifle and one Kevlar vest; ipso facto, one of their own must be the culprit. From here, the film becomes like if Reservoir Dogs centered around right wing gun nuts instead of pop-culture-savvy thieves. Gannon, a former cop, and the member with the most credible alibi, takes it upon himself to uncover the killer and extract a confession before the police inevitably show up and take them all down.
Sparrow Creek is the debut feature from writer/director Henry Dunham and is based on a script that landed on the 2015 blacklist. When it was picked up by CineState, the company had already made a name for itself for producing Craig S. Zahler’s first two films: Bone Tomahawk and Brawl at Cell Block 99. For anyone unfamiliar with Zahler, his movies are expertly crafted exploitation films of a bygone age, blending impeccable character writing and mood-building with nasty violence and politics that, if dissected, can be ugly. Even with the pedigree that Dunham’s script had garnered, CineState was probably the only production company that would take a chance on such a potentially volatile film, and even then they were only able to provide the film a minuscule $415,000 budget and a relatively unknown cast.
Had the movie been watched within the same late Obama era context in which it was written, it could have been appreciated on just a textual level. It’s a tight and agonizingly tense thriller, carried by subtly terrifying performances and a minimalist directing style that forces the audience to directly confront the simmering anger and hatred that’s just waiting to explode from these characters. But of course, watching it in the dying days of the Trump era, the movie transcends into an entirely different plane of terror.
The day I’m publishing this article, Trump supporters have stormed the US capitol building at the behest of a lame duck president. After a year in which media figures wrung their hands about left-wing violence and the sinister specter of Antifa, we’ve just watched pudgy, middle-agers in MAGA hats force their way into the capital building to try and prevent a democratic transfer of power. Some of the pictures coming out of the morning’s chaos depict a man in Kevlar armor with a collection of zip ties around his belt. Others depict a confederate flag being waved inside the building’s hallways. When I wrote the first draft of this article two weeks ago, the media was occupied with deciding whether the bomb explosion in Nashville could be classified as an act of terrorism or just a man trying to kill himself in the most dramatic way possible; now that feels like months ago.
As we approach the apparent end of the Trump era, there’s an overwhelming fear of the unknown. We fundamentally don’t know what the transfer of power is going to look like, or what could even be done once the dust settles. And I’ve been thinking about Sparrow Creek more and more.
Every scene in Sparrow Creek reverberates the feeling that things have been slouching towards disaster for a long time. As Gannon interrogates the militiamen one by one, they each paint a different picture of white aggrievement. One is Morris, a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood, who believes that his daughter was murdered by an undercover cop as part of a gang initiation. Another is Hubbel, a former construction foreman who got thrown under the bus after an employee’s screw-up caused a deadly five-car pile-up. Then there’s Keating, an anti-social high schooler with a homicidal manifesto written in the margins of his copy of The Catcher in The Rye. And, of course, there’s Gannon, a former cop who now lives in near-hermitical isolation, save for his activities with the militia. Through most of the movie, we sit with Gannon as he digs through each member’s nihilistic view, trying to find the proof that they’ve crossed the line from “stockpile guns with your buddies”-angry to “shoot up a funeral”-angry. Each scene takes place in a different part of the same warehouse, which somehow feels both claustrophobic and unnervingly expansive, and we feel trapped within the world these characters have made for themselves.
Our only connection outside of the militia comes from a CV radio, which soon turns the story from an Agatha Christie mystery into an apocalyptic nightmare. As Beckmann, one of the other members with a plausible alibi, monitors the radio for police activity, he starts getting reports of other attacks across the country. It becomes clear that whoever the killer was, their act of violence was contagious, and militias across the country have taken the opportunity to go ballistic against cops.
Gannon’s job is made near-impossible, not because he can’t find a suspect, but because he has to sort through false positives. Both Morris and Keating confess, seeing more appeal the fame and attention the crime will bring than their own self-preservation. Meanwhile, as the outside pressure builds, the rest of the militia questions Gannon’s plan. Ford, the militia’s de facto leader, just wants to find someone to take the blame, so they can hand them over to the cops and wash their hands of the event. But then other members of the group propose that, instead of backing down, they should take things to the next logical next step. Maybe it doesn’t matter who did the shooting, maybe a crime like this was just inevitable. Right at the one-hour mark, Hubbel delivers a chilling monologue where he lays out what everyone else is clearly thinking.
“We always knew this was going to happen. We’d been getting together every week for years to be prepared. Well, what have we been prepping for? For the day we hoped we’d never see? The day the seize happens? The morning doomsday rolls in? Well, that day may look a little different now, but that day is here. They say a militia man did this and we’re sitting here trying to make everyone think it wasn’t us… We should be arming up, going to that precinct, as one: us versus them. Because this fight has started and we’ve got to win it. So we go to war with cops; deep down, who didn’t want that?”
I transcribed the entire speech because it highlights what makes Sparrow Creek’s conception of the militia so fascinating. Hubbell’s monologue gives us the closest thing we get to an overarching ideology for the group. We know that they like guns and hate cops, but besides that one line describing a “seize” -presumably of their guns- their hatred of authority never goes beyond localized grievances. Their world view doesn’t seem to fear or hate a religious or racial other, nor does it nurture a fetishistic hatred of anarchist thugs or a communist big-government. No one is quoting passages from The Turner Diaries, nor does anyone even bring attention to the fact that the group is entirely white. As a result, the militia feels like an oddly sad collection of loners. There’s no vision or project that’s banding them all together, other than the concept of a militia, in of itself. They don’t even seem to particularly like each other; they have no investment in each other’s personal lives, and once the paranoia sets in, they start threatening each other’s lives at the drop of a hat. They aren’t fighting for a world that they think could be better, they’re just waiting for the chance to enjoy the downfall of world as it is.
In this regard, the film captures something profound about what America’s radicalization looks like. It portrays right wing terror as a force that forges bonds between different groups willing to look at their loneliness as a common cause. As we’ve seen, the modern far-right is an unlikely patchwork of gun-lovers, misogynistic “incels”, internet saturated “proud boys” and good, old-fashioned white supremacists. Yet because the film is too merciless and unforgiving to ever be sentimental, it never asks you to pity these characters. Yes, they’ve all been uniquely disenfranchised and alienated, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’ve all got access to high-powered machine guns and homemade explosives. It’s a portrayal that strips militias of their self-aggrandizing mythmaking, without ever downplaying their destructive potential. But once the film has to follow through on what this potential looks like, things start to get a little weird.
A little over halfway in, we get the movie’s only flashback, showing the moment Gannon left the police. We learn that he was infiltrating a Klu Klux Klan cell when his commanding officer forced him to kill his partner, so they could pin the murder of the cell to take them down. Back in the present the militia exhausts all possible candidates, except for Noah, a member who we learn is a cop infiltrating the group. Despite a lack of evidence, the militia decides to hang Noah and pin the shooting on him, despite Gannon’s protestations. Suddenly, an army of squad cars shows up and fires tear gas into the warehouse, giving Gannon an opportunity to rescue Noah and escape. Gannon then attempts to reason with the cops, only for the militiamen to come out of the warehouse decked in weapons and ballistic armor. After an astoundingly tense final standoff, guns go off and all the militiamen, save Noah and Gannon, go down. Then, Noah reveals the big twist: the shooting that started everything never actually happened. The cops had staged everything, including the reports of the other cells going haywire. The entire night had been orchestrated by Noah to provoke the militia and give the police an excuse to take them down. Almost as if the cops were the real gang all along…
The ending makes sense as a way of wrapping up these character’s stories. In the final scene, Gannon is offered to come back to the force, and we linger on a final shot of him staring at the squad of officers, who’re all silhouetted in the dark night. It’s nihilistic conclusion that highlights Gannon’s inescapable sense of loneliness. But it also establishes a closing statement that while the cops share the militia’s tactics, their role as law enforcement inherently places them on the opposite side of an ideological coin. If anything, the two forces are driven by an impulse to counter each other; the militia is a natural reaction to authorities, which in turn provokes more brutal and underhanded methods. The militia is essentially a atomized anarchic project, while the cops are the institution that they rebel against. But of course, if there’s anything the events of the past year have shown us, it’s that the cops and militias aren’t exactly opposing one another.
Today, pro-Trump protestors stormed the US Capitol without even a fraction of the resistance we saw during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests last year. Last August, we found out that for years the FBI has been investigating Right Wing Extremists strategic efforts to infiltrate police across the country. In September, we saw armed militiamen actively work with police to suppress peaceful protestors, climaxing with the 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and killing two activists. We’ve also seen cops increasingly view themselves as a sort of sanctioned militia, insulating themselves in a culture with their own flag, and even coopting the punisher skull –the symbol of a vigilante who murders criminals outside of the law– as an unofficial logo.
This brings us to a conundrum that Sparrow Creek can’t overcome. Because Sparrow Creek tries to avoid an explicit ideology, it portrays a militia without a clearly defined enemy other than authority itself. The problem is that most militias know who their enemy is, usually anyone who doesn’t look like they do, meaning they’re able to find common cause with anyone who hates the same kinds of people. In the right situation, that can put them on the same side as the cops. And in a year where the Republican National Convention stoked fears of lawlessness and left-wing insurgency, it can put them on the same side as the government.
Since the film’s release Dunham has maintained a firmly apolitical stance. In an interview with Film School Rejects, he tried to dissuade the audience from associating his views with those of his characters:
“I think it sucks when the story then suffers because of something that’s just — you know, this is a piece of fiction and you know in this world, in this scenario none of the shit that’s going on in the world right now exists in this story because it is basically just a novelization of an emotion and that’s it. So, it does kind of bum me out and I was talking to somebody about it last night. I was talking to my editor about it. I was like “Do people now watch The Deer Hunter and wonder who he voted for? That sucks. I look at that and I go “Okay as long as the audience can watch it and get the story still, the rest of the stuff that’s totally fine.” But I am here to 100% validate that this is not a support piece. I wrote this before any of this shit was going on. If I knew this was going to happen I wouldn’t be using those psychic abilities to write screenplays.”
I’m not going to try to parse out Dunham’s personal politics; the man is a talented writer and director, and I’m happy to leave it at that. I’m also not going to assert guilt by association with CineState. The company has found its niche in making high-quality movies that embody political views that mainstream cinema universally avoids. Their movies about school shootings and corrupt cops can be unpleasant, but in a way that feels raw and earnest. They never try to promulgate to their audience. In an age where most entertainment is becoming centralized around a handful of streaming companies, movies that are this feel raw and real, like biting down on a chunk of beef after hours of snacking on candy. Granted the company might cease to exist because of the horrible actions of its co-founder… but that’s a very ugly rabbit hole, and if this article goes down there, it’s not coming back.
If there’s a reason I think Sparrow Creek deserves this level of (over)analysis, it’s because, like it or not, it’s sort of the definitive movie on this subject. To my mind, there isn’t another film that’s willing to go into the weeds of how this mindset functions, and just what the life of a far right radical looks like. Most other attempts turn the subject into a source of vague, unknowable villainy (like 2017’s Bushwick) or caricatures that uses the right buzzwords, but conveniently sidestep any ways to to confront these beliefs (as did 2020’s The Hunt).
There are only two examples I can think of that have really tried to grapple with the magnitude of the issue. One is BlacKkKlansman which, while an incredible portrayal of the banal evils of white supremacy, struggled to try and explain the jump the 70’s Klan activities to the modern radicalization of the Charlottesville movement. The other one, surprisingly enough, is the Borat sequel, which managed to explore how modern misinformation is used to Trojan Horse a deeply sinister acceptance of fascism. One could argue that HBO’s Watchmen did a good job of exploring the evolution of white supremacy across different government and terrorist forms, but it still did so with the diluting lenses of science fiction and alternate history. All this is to say that we’re left with a gaping cultural hole where there should be a conversation about how to really deal with this terrifying trend.
Standoff at Sparrow Creek is a great movie, but isn’t going to fill that void. In a way, it’s almost disturbing that its premise is so novel. Right Wing terror is an issue that most media still fundamentally doesn’t know how to reckon with. We need to start figuring that out, and fast, because it’s a problem that’s almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better. And when people don’t know what to look for, they sometimes don’t spot it until it’s too late.
