The Boys in Red Hats
Jonathan Schroder has some good intentions in this documentary, but that results in a film which starts off as one thing, becomes something else, and has a final message that doesn’t really jibe with anything the bulk of the story its following. I’m still glad I watched it, however, because “The Boys in Red Hats” is worth considering on all of those fronts.
Schroder begins his film by saying that he is a Covington Catholic High School alumni, which is an important bias to state upfront as he explores the dynamics of the 2019 incident at the Lincoln Memorial between Covington Catholic High School students and a Native American activist, resulting in an iconic image of one student- Nick Sandmann- smirking at the activist- Nathan Phillips- while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat when two separate rallies collided. I remember when the initial video of the two surfaced, and was outraged like a lot of other people. I also remember the sea change that occurred when more footage came out, and it could be seen in the larger context. In his film, Schroder looks to set the record straight about his school, and the inherent media bias that came out in covering the incident.
It’s not wrong to say that media reporting is fundamentally broken in this country- I think the 24-hour news cycle which CNN and Fox News and other entities require is why that is the case. There are other reasons, of course, and it is not just those channels; when media really began to segregate itself between ideologies is where political bubbles began to really reveal themselves, and distance themselves from others. Would it be nice if we could break free of those bubbles? Yes. As one of Schroder’s interview subjects says, however, “I like my bubble.” I understand that impulse, and once we find that, we don’t want to let it go. What we’ve seen now, though, is that, as bubbles have distanced themselves, people almost live in different realities from one another. That’s the biggest issue right now, although it’s been an issue at play for many years.
The students and parents at Covington Catholic live in a different reality as Nathan Phillips, but as Schroder learns as he researches Phillips, he seems to live a different reality as he’s shown. There are plenty of people interviewed in this film; unfortunately, none of them are the two people at the center of this incident. It’s certainly not for a lack of trying on Schroder’s part, but then again, both Sandmann and Phillips also have realities they want to preserve. One of the things that is most compelling about “The Boys in Red Hats” is that, while certainly Schroder begins his film by doing a lot to shine a positive light on the boys, and his school, as the film goes on, the way the parents and students and former students paint Covington Catholic reveals an innate privilege that shines a less-than-flattering light on the students’s actions that day. One of the parents seems confused by the notion of “white privilege,” and look, he’s not alone- a lot of people don’t really understand the phrase. He’s certainly better than the students’s lawyer, though, who claims there hasn’t been a single significant incident of white nationalist violence in years before Schroder puts footage of several in quick succession. White people do not come off looking good in this film; even Schroder seems naive at the beginning of this film, although to his credit, he has reached a more nuanced place by the end.
I think one of the reasons that “The Boys in Red Hats” is less successful than it wants to be is that it begins at one place (wanting to demonize the media for their handling of the incident in reporting it, which was certainly problematic, and deserves scrutiny), and even with all the ways the incident becomes complicated by the examinations of race and privilege along the way, it almost wants to force an ending at that same place. All the while, important questions involving the incident are left hanging. Part of that is not Schroder’s fault- he cannot control who chooses to speak to him or not- but as the narrative gets messier around what he thought going in, he has a responsibility to follow those messier narratives where they lead, even if that means abandoning his initial premise. He tries to combine the two, but by the time the credits roll, I found myself more engaged with what he learned along the way than how he ties it in to his initial impulse, which- as some of his subjects point out- is not as clear cut as he initially thought. There seems to be a lot of that going on in regards to this incident.
