‘An American Pastoral’ Puts A Human Face on Democracy

Since its premiere on the international film festival circuit in 2024, An American Pastoral has been a darling of the European documentary scene, for good reason. Auberi Edler’s film depicts the 2023 school board election in Elizabethtown, in Lancaster County Pennsylvania. It’s an all-too-rare look at what American democracy actually looks like in practice outside the quadrennial drama of the general election. Presented with no editorial commentary, and only minimal context, the French documentarian Auberi Edler exposes a farce — the modern Alexis de Toqueville we deserve for this noble cause.

An American Pastoral ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Auberi Edler
Written by: Auberi Edler
Starring: James C. Emery, Kristy Moore, Tina M. Wilson
Running time: 118 minutes

What is this noble cause? Well, it depends on who you ask. To the moderate Republicans who lost their seats and the Democrats who took them, winning the school board election was about fighting censorship and supporting democracy. One of the very first things we hear from canvassers for these moderates in the school board election is the importance of maintaining democracy in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. As in other places, this well-meaning invocation loses sight of the fact that the January 6 insurrection has pretty much nothing to do with any issue directly under the school board’s purview.

These Democrats and moderate Republicans are opposed by Christian nationalist republicans, who broadly believe that the United States has turned away from God. In a more immediate sense, they’re trying to take over the school board so they can censor library books, allegedly for containing content inappropriate to children. An American Pastoral does not discuss the merits of the claim. Edler avoids being sidetracked by the merits of the claim, as what’s actually in the books is rather besides the point. It’s not clear how many of the people in this movie have even read them.

Nor does the Christian nationalist position on this issue make much sense. Desperate to avoid being accused of censorship, they go to great pains to say that they only want to move the books to a different part of the library and require parental approval for children to check the books out. As one librarian points out, a child can still find and read a book regardless of where it is in the library. By coming up with convoluted opt-in and opt-out solutions to try and avoid being called censors, the Christian nationalists end up proposing a system that probably won’t really do much of anything, and isn’t worth anywhere near the amount of effort and passion everyone is putting into this small town election. There’s only 11,639 people in this borough, most of them white, as far as we can tell, the main implication about the books being that they’re helpful for kids trying to come to term with their sexual or gender identities.

In scenes reminiscent of the sitcom Parks and Recreation, Elizabethtown citizens make impassioned pleas to public officials based on tangential stories that have little, if anything, to do with the school board’s actual responsibilities. Much of their frustration seems to stem from policies not being clearly explained. A guy at one of these sessions comes up and rants about “bureaucratic entitlement” to applause from the crowd, none of whom seem to have much faith in the school board’s accountability. Then another guy comes up talks about how his great-grandfather got shot in the leg during the civil war as a preamble to the importance of civility. If you think this sounds like a person opposing the censorship, you assume incorrectly. He actually thinks people are being mean to Christians.

One of the more bizarre ironies of An American Pastoral is despite everyone acting as if the town is engaged in a bloody civil war, we only see people being polite to each other. On two separate occasions, one of them featuring Glenn Beck, of all people, powerpoint slides relate how taking over the school board and censoring books is necessary to prevent the rise of a new Hitler, as America circa 2023 is basically the Weimar Republic.

But there’s some deep humanity nestled even in these moments. One man, a leader for the radical Republicans, discusses how he literally “came to Jesus” when he was 17, and got his second girlfriend pregnant after already having two kids with his first girlfriend. It’s a grim story, and it’s easy to see why he fell in with Christian nationalists. He attributes his awful teenage years to growing up in a godless world, and the supposedly oversexed library books, to him, are just another manifestation of that. An American Pastoral gives him room to explain his story. It’s an arresting tale in its own right, quite separate from whether — and the documentary leaves this implicit — he should project his own narrative solutions onto others.

Humanizing moments like this leave all the principal figures in An American Pastoral feel broadly relatable despite the documentary’s hyperlocal context. An American Pastoral reflects a larger American political culture: highly organized conservatives mobilize against a real, but petty, problem which they probably can’t actually solve; liberals treat the very idea of democracy as a generic vote of confidence that whatever the government bureaucracy is doing at the moment is the way things ought to be. Incidentally, not that much seems to have changed in the last couple of years since this election took place. What progress has been made on saving the books, though, has been accomplished by doing precisely what the moderates in the documentary failed to do — namely, discussing the immediate issues at hand relevant to the community, rather than the greater grand narrative of American democracy.