When we were watching the documentary of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project one of the things we saw was the destruction of the building. At first I was wondering what am I watching because I just couldn’t imagine something like that happening in New York City. In fact, the only time I feel I’ve seen buildings falling to the ground was on 9/11, but that was an act of terrorism. However, in this case it was done by choice, it just goes to show how much of a failure the project really was and I think the documentary did a good job of personalizing as well as analyzing this fact.
The documentary does a great job of ‘putting a face to a name’. In other words by watching the documentary you would understand the topic better if instead you just chose to read about it. The reason the documentary does a good job of that is because for one thing it has visual cues (such as the imploding of the building), which can go a long way. But, more importantly the documentary has the one-on-one interviews with people who experienced this time period in St. Louis’s history first hand. By bringing in the people it sort of adds an empathic aspect where others are more inclined to listen to what the people are saying because to a certain extent it appeals to the emotional side of the audience so the audience would like to understand it better. This can be seen where one of the people in the documentary talks about how she felt like they were being penalized for being poor, a lot of people will be able to relate to this and will be able to better understand the topic being discussed for that reason. In this regard the Documentary proves more efficient than if someone was just reading about the topic because it gave you a face to see and shows you that someone is actually being impacted by this as opposed to if you were reading this you’d just see a paper in front of you,
The documentary also attacks the audience in a more analytical sense as well. For example, the video talks about acts of legislation, such as the Housing Act of 1949 (which was actually one of the causes for the building of Pruitt-Igoe). The documentary then goes on to explain how this ties into Urban Renewal which will lead to a lot of people moving out of the city and into the suburbs. Since so many people were now moving into suburbs the cities were emptying which had a negative impact on the city and more specifically the residents of Pruitt-Igoe as a whole, where the citizens now had to adapt to a harsher society where violence was growing prevalent. From this aspect the documentary is trying to engage its audience in a more analytical standpoint and build credibility.
The underlying message that the documentary was trying to give off was that although public housing is a good idea, Pruitt-Igoe is a demonstration of how it will fail. In the case of Pruitt-Igoe the residents were given a nice place to live where at first everything was good. However, the government stopped caring and the workers stopped caring and because of this everything got out of hand; Pruitt-Igoe became the very thing that the government was trying to get rid of (slums). Now, Pruitt-Igoe is deemed one of the biggest failures in public housing and when public housing is even mentioned Pruitt-Igoe is brought as a defense against it. It’s a shame that the workers and government stopped giving care to Pruitt-Igoe because had they actually put in some effort into the project we might be having a different discussion about this housing project and instead of watching a documentary about how it failed we’d be watching one about the effects of its success.
In conclusion, the documentary “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” attempts to draw in its audience from all angles. It uses the emotional aspect by way of stories and visual cues, as well as through a logical standpoint by bringing in facts and analyses. In my personal opinion the documentary succeeds in these regards and does a great job both in captivating the audience as well as portraying their opinion about the failure of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project.
