colin spoelman

I was raised in and around Harlan, Kentucky, an isolated town in the mountains of Appalachia. My father was a Presbyterian minister and presided over three small rural churches set in ex-coal-mining villages near the Virginia border. In this unique environment, I grew up learning Appalachian values: respect for the land, Christian morals, and a social tradition of storytelling.

My senior essay in the Architecture major focused on the vernacular building and urbanism of the company towns in eastern Kentucky. I struggled with the paper, wanting to tell more and more of the story that existed outside the realm of architecture. I wanted to tell the folk history, the social legacy of the company town system, and the political powerlessness that exists today. I finished the paper, but felt that it did not tell the full story.

The story that I wanted to tell then is the story I still feel compelled to tell, and one I may try to tell my whole life long. The story is the true story of Appalachia, one that has yet to surface outside of the isolated mountain hollows of Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee.

Like most economically depressed areas, eastern Kentucky has poverty, lack of educational opportunities, and lack of social capital to build strong communities. Unlike inner city economic depression, the Appalachian social and political environment is tempered with racial homogeneity and intense geographic isolation. Add to this a history of injustice stemming from the exploitation of opportunistic property barons, the hegemony of the coal companies, and the paternalism of the company town system. Later, the coal companies moved on, leaving a vacuum of a fractured political, educational, and economic structure that continues to plague the region.

Today, coal is still pouring out of the mountains in record amounts, though the mines are owned and operated by an absentee power structure and the massive industrial operation that goes on literally under the feet of the Appalachian people has yet to benefit them economically. One of the most wealthy regions in terms of natural resources remains, in fact, the poorest.

Government programs try to provide quick fixes to problems that remain in the wake of the coal economy. More than a third of the county residents are on some form of supplemental government income. To qualify for government assistance, residents often need to be diagnosed with some form of disability. Medical professionals are eager to diagnose illness as a means to qualify people for assistance. The result is a population with a surplus of relatively weak prescription drugs. In a region where marijuana is easier to find that alcohol (most of eastern Kentucky is dry), the stage is set for an epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

Coming Down the Mountain begins here, with Oxycontin, a buzzword to the urban media and a human interest column in the national newspaper. But to the people of Appalachia, the epidemic is the visible product of the social conditions of poverty, isolation, and neglect. The Oxy story is an entree to the complex Appalachian history of injustice and broken dreams and as a filmmaker, it provides the opportunity to justly represent the region I know so well.

My hometown, Harlan, is known to most film people as the subject of Barbara Kopple’s award-winning film, Harlan County, U.S.A. Kopple’s film is one of the better films of a whole sub-genre of documentary film that use the representation of Appalachian people as a vehicle for political statement. The best of these films have shown mountain people as a Walker Evans archetypes: strong but quaint, ignorant people, stuck in unfortunate circumstances. The worst of these films show Appalachians as Diane Arbus sideshows, meant to shock the urban middle class into pity, reinforcing a cycle of paternalism.

To me, these filmmakers fail to adequately address the complexity of the Appalachian experience and I think the true story is yet untold. It is a story of regular people, fighting against a legacy of injustice manifest today in a fractured economy. It is a story of people with an intense Christian faith, steadfast in the face of hardship. It is the story of a people complicit in their political weakness yet proud of their social traditions and eccentricities. Coming Down the Mountain is narrative fiction, in the Appalachian tradition, that places emotionally rich characters in complex environment of contemporary Kentucky.