June 2024 Bonus Review: An American Bombing
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK. The explosion killed 168 people, 19 of them children.
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The story
If I didn't "have to" watch An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th, if I didn't assign it to myself, I knew I'd never sit down with it. Something about the "The Road To" part of the subtitle just exhausted me, the way that part of an extremist-violence story always exhausts me…all the off-ramps not taken, all the bad or self-serving choices that fanned the flames, that the road in question never ends at the riot or the bombing or the massacre.
So, I picked An American Bombing for the bonus review to force myself to watch it, and I can't say I made the right call, because…well, AAB is of course not the kind of documentary you "enjoy," but you do hope when gritting your teeth through footage of bloodied little kids and sundered floors that the film has something else to offer you for your trouble. AAB may not do enough that's informative or thought-provoking to justify the experience of, you know, reuniting with Timothy McVeigh’s scrawny ratface.
Director Marc Levin is experienced in the genre (Rikers, Brick City, and many others), and keeps the Netflix-y overdetermined-drone-shot filler to a minimum. (...Mostly. The pre-credits roll of a lightning storm on the plains, scored with snatches of right-wing radio, is a little much.) And he gets excellent participation from victims, victim advocates, attorneys on both sides of Timothy McVeigh's trial aisle (as well as Jeffrey Toobin, who I guess we've decided as a culture to pretend is still as virtuous a commentator as we thought in the Before Time), a "former extremist," and Bill Clinton.
The ex-prexy’s talking-head interviews are fascinating, but made me wish for a docuseries featuring just his recollections of the big cases of his presidencies – Clinton's Justice Department, something like that; the loose division of the doc into various "waves" of white-supremacist and/or anti-government organizing and incident starting in the 1970s made me wish for a docuseries focusing discrete episodes on each one, each community or aggravating factor or whatever. It's not that Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the CSA siege get short shrift, narratively, and I think if a documentary is trying to get this story done in under 20 hours, never mind two, you can't spend too much time on any one radicalizing influence.
But at the same time, I felt like a handful of sections needed more time, like the strange saga of informant Carol Howe, the Elohim City "community" generally, and grandmother of two very young victims Kathy Sanders beginning a correspondence with Terry Nichols in which he claimed a "rogue FBI agent" helped coordinate the events of April 19, 1995. Sanders's journey alone seems like its own documentary (her son Daniel Coss, who also appears in AAB, is a Capitol police incident responder, ergo was on site on January 6, 2021). Again, I don’t think definitive expansiveness is what Levin et al. were going for, but watching it, it’s what I found myself wanting instead.
Given everything it's determined to fit into a 104-minute runtime, AAB does a pretty good job with what it is probably going for: furnishing a general overview that it underpins with personal testimony. For viewers who really know nothing about OKC beyond the where and the who, it's a useful survey of the case and some of the questions around it. For me, it's more of a gateway property, a springboard into books on my TBR shelf, or docs and podcasts on this ugly history – narratives that take more time with these cases and conflicts, and how we might read them in this particular post-1/6 moment.
Thanks for subscribing to Best Evidence! We appreciate your support. Sorry I don't have a more enthusiastic recommendation for you this time around…but if YOU have recommendations under this topic umbrella, we'd love to hear from you in the comments.