“Since the first humans etched images on to cave walls,” a narrator says early on, “others have been there to erase their work.” That claim lacks substantiation here, but seems too obvious to need any. The point is about human nature, and that fine line between expression and oppression, between culture maker and busybody. And it’s about what we mean when we say that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
So maybe Max Good and Nathan Wollman’s highly participatory documentary Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression could do without its earnest and spotty history-lesson narration. Being a movie about impermanent street art, it’s at its best on street-level, hanging out with a handful of self-appointed “buffers” who dedicate their lives to eliminating graffiti, often by secretly painting over it.
The filmmakers also supply a roundtable of talking heads on the subject of vigilantism. These include a psychologist, a hip academic, and Dirty Harry, saying, “The law’s crazy!” To political theorist James Q. Wilson’s idea that graffiti “conveys the sense that decent people do not control the neighborhood, and that is what makes it so unsettling,” Good retorts that he finds the “officially sanctioned messages” of corporate advertising to be just as unsettling, “sinister” even.
And then, with the peculiar milieu of dueling defacers and their mutual indignations so established, things get interesting. Most stirringly, Good and Wollman stake out and get in with Berkeley’s Jim Sharp, also known as the Silver Buff, who calls them “stalkumentarians,” but lets them follow him around and argue about the semantics of visual pollution. (Sharp points out that he does some weeding and trash pick-up too.)