Riotsville, U.S.A. Is A Nightmarish Documentary About Cops Playing Pretend

The establishment narrative of the civil rights movement in the United States is that after a nebulous period of nonviolent protest in the 1960s and 70s, Black people freed themselves from disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination. This arc of history has long been taught in public schools, passed down from (white) parents to their children, depicted in brand statements about Martin Luther King Jr. Day, etcetera. It’s also bullshit. All it takes to shatter that illusion is a glance back at how the media, the country’s white population, and the U.S. government reacted to an oppressed population’s demands in real time.

Riotsville, U.S.A., in theaters September 16, is a documentary that shows exactly that, using broadcast news coverage of the race riots in the late 1960s alongside footage of the military and police response that was filmed by the state itself. The movie’s title comes from a pair of “tactical scenario villages” cheekily dubbed Riotsville. In these fake cities, like movie sets with plywood storefronts, cops and soldiers wore costumes and pantomimed suppressing the specific strain of crowd violence that, in reality, was often sparked by police brutality in the first place. In nearby bleachers, military high-ups and top cops applauded the spectacle: soldiers handcuffing soldiers for smashing the windows of fake pawn shops and bundling them onto fake police buses. The effect is eerie.

“There are some immersive archival films where you feel like you feel like you're there in the moment,” director Sierra Pettengill told VICE. “I didn't want to make one of those. The question of, What are we looking at, and what do we do with it? comes up so many times, and that feels important to me.” 

For that reason, Riotsville, U.S.A. doesn’t actually spend a ton of time in Riotsville itself. Instead, we see panels of cops and civil rights experts debating the existence of racialized police brutality, Gulf Oil–sponsored coverage of the 1968 Republican National Convention, an armored truck spraying tear gas like it’s pesticide on a Black neighborhood in Miami, and a news commentator lambasting Martin Luther King Jr. for his apparent inability to control a crowd. Each of these clips is carefully selected to cohere into a portrait of the national mood in the late 60s—one of paranoia, denial, anger, and fear in the face of profound change. (Sound familiar?)

Pettengill worked on the documentary from 2015 until 2021, and it’s punctuated by meditative narration that pulls the viewer into the now—a moment in time where, by the way, “tactical scenario villages” still exist around the country. Just recently, a Chicago police academy announced the ongoing construction of its own contemporary Riotsville, slated to cost the city a whopping $33 million dollars. 

Ahead of its release, VICE spoke with the director of Riotsville, U.S.A. about police reform, sifting through the past to understand the present, and resisting the impulse to rewrite history, even when it’s ugly.

VICE: How did you find out that Riotsville even existed?

Pettengill: I was reading Rick Perlstein's book Nixonland in 2014. He mentions it in the context of the Hughes Commission, which was formed in response to the Newark riots. And this quote, just kind of blew me away and got me thinking about the film: 

And then Perlstein says the public was choosing illusion, and he lists all these extremist-like evocations of law and order. Riotsville was on that laundry list, and it sounded insane to me. I looked it up and found there was a little bit of contemporaneous coverage in the New York Times from ’68, but not that much, and then I found a record in the National Archives catalog. 

How does Riotsville, U.S.A. fit in with previous projects that you’ve worked on? 

Riotsville, in particular, is a really collaborative project. Tobi Haslett wrote it, Nels Bangerter edited it, and Jace Clayton did the music—everyone involved was a brilliant artist in their own right. I think it is very important to not have some auteur bullshit going on. 

I direct films, and I also work as a producer and archival researcher for other people's films. I work primarily with archival material, and my films are about recontextualizing some of the darker narratives of American history. I like looking at the right wing through fairly mainstream news and media. I made a film about the largest Confederate monument in the U.S., Stone Mountain, and which is also all archival. The process of making this project was trying to put Riotsville in a very specific historical context, and also make sure that it's touching all the larger interconnected systems. 

I have a particular interest in… I wish I had a better term for this, but right-wing “art projects,” which Riotsville was. It was this drama, some play, that [the state] was putting on. There's a lot of these freak one-off government projects, but it's not about being shocked about Riotsville, like, Wow, I can't believe we did that. There's a thousand of them happening right now. Google “scenario village!” So it was important to situate it in the context of broader police brutality and racism.

I really appreciated the way the film connected war abroad and war at home. Could you tell me why that felt important to highlight?

It's crucial—Stuart Schrader’s book Badges Without Borders points out that America's imperialist project and the way we treat citizens at home are part of the same system of insurgency and counterinsurgency, and it's a very porous border—the military and the police are very interconnected.

The main way we do it in the film is tracing tear gas as this self-perpetuating system where we can get away with using it in the U.S. for domestic riot control because we use it in Vietnam, and we can get around the Geneva Convention dictates in Vietnam by saying we use it domestically. It’s circular reasoning. 

Also, one major reason that social programs couldn't be funded was that there was a war in Vietnam. Then, as now, that conversation just shuts everything else down, you know?

Totally. Something else that struck me watching the archival footage from the military in particular is how stupid Riotsville looked. All the bad wigs, and the costumes, and the set design, it was very… “middle school play.”

Yes! The dumbness of it feels really important to me, especially through the Trump presidency. I feel like there's all this intellectual hand-wringing about his disrespect of the “conservative tradition,” his “hypocrisy,” and to me, that’s just trying to make a group of people who are just bottom feeders and idiots into some intellectual paradigm here. It is all dumb, and that makes it much more fightable to me. 

The absurdism and the violence are really tightly connected, too. What we're watching is how people in power view the people that they're meant to protect—or control—and they are so divorced from the reality of that violence that the absurdity is really telling. Moments like the callousness of an ABC News reporter laughing at this [riot control] tank, which is a ridiculous object, and then it shows up in the Miami protests later in the film and inflicts real violence within a population [by spraying tear gas on a neighborhood using an insect fogger]. To me, that shows the absurdity has a political function.

Even in the footage of Riotsville, there were a couple of moments that felt a little more serious: Black soldiers or cops under “arrest” and pretending to protest, saying the things and struggling in a way that they think people getting arrested in these riots would. Why did those stick out to you?

For me, those Black soldiers… I can't speak to their experience, but reality kind of comes into the frame in those moments and breaks the ridiculousness of the pageant. Then, cutting to bleachers full of all the [military officials] in charge who find it really funny… It feels like a real slap in the face. Trying to whiplash between those two modes, to me, is what it sometimes feels like to live in this country.

Obviously the timeline of this project, which you worked on from 2015 to 2021, is super, super significant. Can you talk about how the past few years, especially the uprisings in 2020, altered the course of the filmmaking process?

The most cynical answer to that question is that no one wanted to fund it until summer 2020. I mean, before that we got some grants, but in 2020, people were like, Oh my God, we get it now. I only make historical films these days, and the reason I make them is as a reaction to what I'm trying to understand in the present tense. Tobi Haslett, who wrote the film, writes really well about this elite capture process where riots get defanged and become protests with a few “unlawful elements.” Seeing how protesters were treated in 2020 and then watching the news coverage when I’d get home on CNN—watching that process in real time, that rewriting of a narrative as it was unfolding, definitely influenced how I was feeling about Riotsville. 

I make a point to say in the film that all of this footage is from the military or broadcast TV, and that's because I don't want it to be seen as some secret history that we didn't know about. The active amnesia feels much more politically important than the idea of, like, Eh, it's a secret program, what could we have done? So, the film feels like resurrecting an erased narrative, and watching that play out in real time in 2020 had an impact on me.

I think the scariest moment in this movie for me wasn’t directly related to state violence: It was the sequence with the suburban white women at the shooting range who were clearly so gleeful and excited at the prospect of shooting a rioter in self-defense. Could you talk about that moment a little bit?

That sequence is the hardest for me to watch. I was on the phone with my editor on January 6. I had the TV on, and I was like, “I can't solve this editing problem while this is happening, these seem related, let me talk to you later.” It's not like it literally came out of that, but it did feel important to show the ways the establishment perspective trickles down to the general population, and the ways the “war on crime” is sold as a program that then individuals take on. The riot posse formation in Chicago felt like another really important part of that—deputizing, whether literally in that case, or emotionally in the case of the housewives, everyone. Redirecting their hate.

I kept telling the editor, “Can you crank down the audio on the gunshots?” It's so volatile, and so threatening—and especially because then we cut to a [Black] community conversation where they’re talking about, “This is what they're planning for us.” That set of images is so literal-feeling.

What's your reaction to news that there's now a tactical scenario village, like Riotsville, under construction at a police academy in Chicago? How do you feel about that?

The Chicago one is particularly egregious because it's a $33 million project, and Chicago is one of the cities in the U.S. that pays out the most in lawsuit settlements to people affected by police brutality. It's a huge part of their budget. But I just Googled “scenario village” with “police” right before we started talking, and they're just everywhere. 

It’s just so indicative of the fact that we are willing to spend any amount of money to “improve policing,” in the same ways we've been “improving policing.” It all started way prior to the 60s, but it was really perfected in the era that Riotsville shows. It’s the same set of solutions—almost literally.

Katie Way is a senior staff writer at VICE. Follow her on Twitter.