U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Photo / AP
In the opening moments of the documentary "Knock Down the House," candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is looking in a mirror, dabbing on makeup and talking to the camera about the widely divergent standards for male and female politicians.
As a neophyte in an entrenched system, she says, she is bracing herself. Then again, she adds, "How do you prepare for something you don't know is coming?"
That's the question that "Knock Down the House" tries to answer, as it follows four long-shot candidates, all women, vying to unseat veteran Democratic politicians — all men — in the 2018 primaries.
Arriving this week on Netflix and in select theaters, the film has already received rapturous attention and produced floods of inspired tears on the festival circuit, earning a top audience prize at Sundance this year, where Netflix bought it for a reported $10 million, a record for a documentary.
For AOC fans — and probably her critics, too — it offers revealing footage of the upstart New York congresswoman before she became a media and political sensation: hauling ice at her day job as a bartender; confessing insecurities and reciting affirmations inside the modest Bronx apartment she shares with her boyfriend. She and the other women, in races across the country, deliver a warts-and-all look at what grassroots campaigning means, with few restrictions for the filmmakers.
"I kind of wanted to make the process as raw and as accessible as possible," Ocasio-Cortez, 29, said in a recent interview. A few months into office, she's still adjusting to the trappings of the role. "Hey, this is Alex," she said at the beginning of the call, then caught herself: "I guess Congresswoman ..." Nope, not right either. "You can call me Alexandria," she concluded and laughed.
She agreed to let a filmmaker tail her even before she filed her paperwork to run — even before she had decided to run, really — because she wanted to document how to organize an insurgent campaign, she said, especially as a working-class person.
That sentiment was echoed by the other candidates: Cori Bush of St. Louis; Amy Vilela of Las Vegas; and Paula Jean Swearengin, from Coal City, West Virginia.
"I felt that we had to stop reinventing the wheel every single time a normal person decided to run for office," Ocasio-Cortez said, "and make it accessible, so we can learn and iterate. Our democracy is supposed to belong to everyday people."
For Rachel Lears, who directed and shot the movie, co-written with her husband, Robin Blotnick, who also edited it, it was a boots-on-the-ground investigation of how to change political power. "I hope that this story does push people to think about participating in different ways," Lears, 41, said.
She approached the progressive organizations Brand New Congress and, later, Justice Democrats, which were recruiting novice candidates; she interviewed two dozen of them, she said, including some men, before settling on the four women, because she thought that win or lose, they'd be compelling to watch.
"They all had very personal reasons for what they were doing," she said, catapulting themselves into politics out of family tragedy, economic hardship, environmental anguish or a quest for social justice. Their geographic diversity, gender and race — in what became a historic midterm for women and people of color — was meant to illustrate "a group that would make a national movement," Lears said.
Still, said Blotnick, "we were totally prepared for all four candidates to lose."
Ocasio-Cortez's story became the movie's spine, in part because the couple was also based in New York — their shoestring budget didn't allow them to travel to the other candidates as much. (They filmed for a year before getting outside financing, via Kickstarter; only after Ocasio-Cortez won her primary in June 2018 did they feel confident about securing industry backing.) Their son, now 3, also accompanied them on the road. "We didn't have child care, so that was my job," Blotnick, 39, said.
Their working-parent juggle endeared them to their subjects, three of whom are mothers in their 40s and all of whom went without as they campaigned, too. Vilela, running for a House seat, quit her job as a financial executive and sold her family's home. "We had to downsize everything," she said. "We ended up going into debt." She wanted to be part of a political shift "more than I loved the benefits of my lifestyle and the career I held."
Equally tough was the choice to depict the emotional moment when she lost. "As a businesswoman, you're always told, 'You should never let them see you cry,'" Vilela said. "But at the end, it came down to: Darn it, I wish more of our politicians would cry."
On primary night, she got a supportive call from Ocasio-Cortez. "What I love about the vulnerability that we see, throughout this entire film from everybody — it shows the world a different model of strength," Ocasio-Cortez said. "You know, I'm like ugly crying on a screen."
That her vulnerabilities may now be fodder for Republicans doesn't faze her. "I already know they're going to screen grab shots of me crying and make memes out of it," she said. Bring it, was her message. "I think the fact that you have nothing to hide is a huge and intimidating strength," she said.
Despite the filmmakers' repeated requests, Lears said, none of the women's opponents agreed to be interviewed for the documentary. Swearengin, a coal miner's daughter and environmental activist, who works as a medical biller, challenged wealthy West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Institutional resistance, she said, came "not only because I was a woman, but because I was a poor girl from the coal fields — which was the appeal to a lot of West Virginians." (In a red state, she earned more votes than the winner in the Republican primary.)
Cori Bush, a St. Louis nurse who was active around the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and who ran against a long-term congressman, Lacy Clay, said she, too, felt pushback because of her identity. "I heard things, wow," she said, like, "I need to have a husband in order to run. I also heard that I needed to change my hair, that braids looked unprofessional. And if I wanted to get into certain rooms with real people who were real donors, I could never look like a nurse."
But for her, part of the point of running was looking exactly like who she was. "Representation is important," she said. "I'm a nurse because I saw a black woman working as a nurse and that taught me that I can do this. And in the same way, I want other black girls to see that it's OK, that you can do this."
She has already filed to run again.
Given the filmmakers' access and Ocasio-Cortez's unprecedented trajectory, the movie could have just been about her. But they never considered eliminating the other women, said Blotnick, the editor. "If we were only to show what happened in her race, we could risk falling into fairy-tale territory," he said.
If anything unsettled Ocasio-Cortez, it was exposing her relationship with her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, which the couple has otherwise tried to keep under wraps. "It is this one part of my life that I've been able to take refuge in," she said. She was most nervous, she added, that Roberts, a web consultant who doesn't have a visible social media presence, would face the same scrutiny she has. No more sweatpants in public, she warned.
But being in the film was also therapeutic for her, she said, allowing her to reflect on the campaign as it happened. And as an origin story, she hopes it provides some clarity. "Sometimes when I'm in D.C., people think I'm like this alien, you know?" she said. Why are she and her squad of boundary-breaking newbie congresswomen so outspoken, so demanding? The movie has an answer: "Because you see the blood, sweat and tears that it took just for us to get a seat at the table. It brings a different intensity and urgency."
Watching the movie motivates her, too. "It's a reminder of the energy that it took to get here, and what an enormous opportunity this is. It makes me feel like I have to squeeze every drop out of it."
Written by: Melena Ryzik
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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