Locating “Waco” After Thirty Years, It Isn’t at Mount Carmel Center
2024; University of California Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nvr.2024.a929281
ISSN1541-8480
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoLocating "Waco" After Thirty Years, It Isn't at Mount Carmel Center Eric Michael Mazur (bio) FBI True: Waco. Season 1, episodes 5 and 6. Directed by Mike Schultz. Paramount+. Premier date 28 February 2023. Scandalous: Waco. Season 1, episodes 1, 2, and 3. Directed by Paul Perrymore. Fox Nation. Premier date 17 April 2023. Ten Steps to Disaster: Waco Siege. Season 2, episode 8. Produced by Blink Films. The Smithsonian Channel. Premier date 14 May 2023. Waco: The Aftermath. Season 2, 5 episodes. Directed by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle. Showtime/Paramount+. Premier date 14 April 2023. Waco: American Apocalypse. Three episodes. Directed by Tiller Russell. Netflix. Premier date 22 March 2023. Waco Untold: The British Stories. Two episodes. ITVX. Premier date 2 September 2023. [End Page 96] For some reason, thirty is an awkward anniversary. Scholars of American patterns of spatial memorialization like historian Edward Tabor Linenthal and geographer Kenneth E. Foote tend to identify "major" anniversaries—fifth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth, and even seventy-fifth—as fundamental to the process of marking American spaces of memory.1 But rarely is mention made of a thirtieth anniversary. The words do not even appear in Linenthal's book, Sacred Ground (1991), and are used only to identify the anniversary of the founding of another nation in Linenthal's 1995 book, Preserving Memory. The thirtieth anniversary of the siege by federal agents at the Branch Davidians' Mount Carmel Center outside of Waco, Texas, from 28 February to 19 April 1993, however, seems to have aroused some interest.2 A cursory search of "Waco" and "Koresh" in the Library of Congress database reveals that four new books were published in 2023, while a Google search of "News" using the same terms produced just under three hundred entries. It is likely that there is continued interest in the events at Mount Carmel Center for a variety of reasons. In the present review, I will examine briefly the content of five documentaries and one drama series based on the events and issues related to that siege. We will see that, as scholars like Linenthal and Foote suggest, in the process of memorialization the foundational event becomes less of a moment in time and more of a symbol, a tablet upon which is written often competing narratives. The narratives surrounding the events at Mount Carmel Center only prove scholars like Linenthal and Foote to be correct. In the thirty years since the tragic conflagration at the Branch Davidians' residence, "Waco" has come to represent something that only nominally reflects the complexity of the events that actually took place about ten miles outside of that city. The issues for us to ponder are what the 1993 events at Mount Carmel Center mean now, whether the programs being reviewed here represent those events, and if so, how. On the surface, these programs purport to represent the events leading up to and occurring at Mount Carmel Center and, in several cases, their ramifications. FBI True: Waco (hereafter FBI True) is a two-part program within the FBI True series on Paramount+. Hosted by retired FBI special agent Kristy Kottis, the series comprises a combination of agent interviews and pertinent audio and video clips related to various historic FBI cases. Fox Nation's Scandalous: Waco (hereafter Scandalous) is similarly part of a larger series, which focuses on (often salacious) infamous national news stories. The only single-episode program, Ten Steps to Disaster: Waco Siege (hereafter Ten Steps), is part of a series from the Smithsonian Channel that provides close analyses of identified failures leading to specific contemporary disasters. A stand-alone limited five-part dramatic series from Showtime, Waco: The Aftermath (hereafter Aftermath), is a follow-up to the 2018 six-part Waco drama series, written and directed by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle (reviewed in this journal February 2019).3 Aftermath, starring Michael Shannon [End Page 97] reprising his role as FBI negotiator Gary Noesner, and with a cast that includes Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Cassidy (of The O.C.), David Costabile (of Suits), Gary Cole, and John Leguizamo, picks up about a year or so after the conclusion of the siege and fire at Mount...
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