Did You Wonder Who Killed The Gun Analysis

Haunting, hypnotic, and quite unique, Travis Wilkerson’s hard-to-categorize documentary Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is a domestic horror story that cuts well past the quick. Hard to shake and if you can accept the manner with how the film is presented, Wilkerson’s movie will stick with you for a considerable amount of time.

The title, lifted from lyrics found in Phil Ochs’ 1964 ballad “William Moore”, written in memory of a slain, white, Atalla, Alabama postal worker who stood alone protesting racial segregation, Wilkerson begins laying out the details of a terrible reality within the almost literal branches of his family tree.

His great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, owner of the local Branch’s Grocery, killed Bill Spann, a black customer

in a racially-charged act of violence in 1946. Branch was never charged, suffering no consequences for his actions. This discovery rocked Wilkerson’s world, so much so that he began litigating his own family history and connections to relatives, both living and deceased.

The movie is bookended with images from To Kill a Mockingbird, and Wilkerson’s commanding, arresting narration carries us through an almost continual montage of still images and videoclips. Prior to adding his narration to the final cut of the film, Wilkerson would bring his images to film festivals and special events, providing live narration as the images played behind him. With a strong, intimidating, yet captivating power to his voice, we listen and hang on his every fact, discovery, and detail. My wife described the film as a visual audiobook or podcast, and it is an apt comparison.

Once you dig into the meat of the story, the titular question is answered. S.E. Branch fired the gun. Wilkerson realizes the murder weapon was a gun he shot in the woods for sport when he was a kid. We also start to see members of Wilkerson’s family, including an aunt, who went from being a civil rights activist in her 20’s to a Southern Nationalist and secessionist in her elderly years.

There’s lots to unpack here.

This is a polarizing film, not so much for what the film shares, but in how Wilkerson conveys his information. The entire film is narrated, except for a stretch or two where he turns the film over to archival footage or, for an extended period of time, civil rights activist Ed Vaughn, who tells a careening, wide-ranging set of stories that may not speak specifically to what Wilkerson asked, but does give a series of ideas as to what life is like in and around Dothan, Alabama at the time of Spann’s murder.

At other moments, the movie pauses to show title cards with the names of a select number of African-Americans murdered by gun violence, with no repercussions leveraged on their murderers.

Names like Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Freddie Gray are shown to the music of artists like Ochs, Janelle Monae, and others.

To appreciate Wilkerson’s work, you must subscribe to the film’s unique rhythm and cadence. The scrapbook of still images, sometimes related to the narration, other times absent of context, could mesmerize a viewer as much as frustrate them. One lengthy sequence, near the end of the film, finds Wilkerson sharing a stream of thoughts, while a fixed camera shoots out the front window of a moving car, with a reddish-black hue altering the footage.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is original, wholly immersive, and at times astonishing in what Wilkerson uncovers. The presentation and layout can also stir some frustration in trying to determine what the movie is attempting to do. Is this a movie made for one person, attempting to rectify some abhorrent truths within his family? Does it speak beyond Wilkerson’s family and make a statement about how racism and racial violence has so permeated and become acceptable in still so many pockets of our

society?

Difficult to define, pushing on the conventions of what it means to make a documentary film, this is a movie which is hard to forget, even if, at times, you find it challenging to endure.