Apologia Unmasked

"Brigham City," film noir and the future of Mormon cinema

Photo credit: Still taken from Brigham City

A widowed sheriff begins his lonely day, gradually emerging from a bed that is too large and a house that is too silent into the world of the townspeople who rely on him before ultimately arriving at his office, where a woman waits to confess to him as her bishop. So begins Brigham City (2001), a mystery thriller film directed by and starring pioneering Mormon filmmaker Richard Dutcher. Dutcher, who has since left the Church but whose work launched a new era of Mormon film, had made a name for himself the year before with God’s Army, a well-known film about LDS missionaries struggling to keep their faith. In Brigham City, however, Dutcher turned his eye to genre fiction, particularly the film noir genre, and through the community-interrogation mechanisms of the genre set a model for how effective film about the Mormon community can be created.

The style of film noir, which Dutcher draws upon in this film, developed in America in the 1930s and 40s as the destabilization of society during the Great Depression and World War II shifted audience demand away from comedies and toward more sober explorations of the darker elements of society and human nature being made manifest. In addition to a distinctive visual style marked by low-key lighting, strong shadows, and strange camera angles, films noir treats themes of crime, sexuality, societal guilt, and the corruption that lurks beneath the surface of even the most respectable-seeming member of a community. A thriving tradition of neo-noir reinvents those themes in new contexts worldwide—in contemporary America, France, or China with the films of Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, or Diao Yinan; in a science fiction setting in Blade Runner (1982) or with horror elements in Nightmare Alley (2021); and in contemporary small-town Utah with Dutcher’s Brigham City. 

While Brigham City chooses not to retain the visual aesthetics of classic film noir, it meshes well thematically with that genre’s concerns. As opposed to God’s Army, this film takes on one insular community where Mormon culture is pervasive and its residents live in enough harmony for the central character, Sheriff Wes Clayton, to consider the town a “paradise.” However, when evil makes itself known in the community in the form of a series of murders, the suspicion, cruelty, and corruption latent in the citizens of the town begins to make itself known. Although the murders were only committed by one person, the shadow of guilt falls across this entire once-paradisical town. Clayton considered his town to exist outside of the “real world,” and the film does nothing to shake his illusion that Brigham City is anything but a perfect, righteous town until murder comes to Brigham. Some contemporary critics took issue with this exaggerated juxtaposition between good and evil, light and dark, the purity of “this world” and the wickedness of “the real world” held by the film’s point-of-view character Wes Clayton; says Michael Minch of Utah Valley University, “The moral simplicity and clarity that Dutcher gives us is an illusion, a mythology. We do not live in such a Manichean world.” Minch may be correct in that the paradisical world of Dutcher’s fictional Brigham City—filmed in Mapleton and Springville with no connection to the real-life Brigham City—is a mythological one. It is, however, a myth to which many members of the Church subscribe: that of the perfection of community and soul that could be reached in a town like Brigham City, where state and Church functions are all but one and the same and people do not lock their doors at night. This myth is a piece of apologia. It is a story told by many members of the Church to defend it and comfort their own apprehensions about the gap between themselves and the rest of the world. Brigham City is a mythological town, but it is not Dutcher’s own myth, and, through the investigative and interrogative mechanisms of film noir, he first walks the audience through that myth and then challenges it. 

It is exactly this use of genre to clearly present and then deliberately interrogate Mormon culture, and particularly the mythological Zion-on-earth, close-knit Mormon community culture epitomized in small-town Utah, that makes Brigham City distinct from so many other Mormon films and so distinctly effective. As a subsection of the mystery genre with a notably societally oriented eye, film noir almost always explores the overside and underside of a whole community over the progress of its narrative. Sometimes the community is the gritty, dead-end, crime-ridden urban society of New York or Los Angeles, but sometimes it is a community of under-stimulated suburbanites like in Double Indemnity (1944), or of the suavest and wealthiest like in Laura (1944); Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) recreates many tropes of classic noir to present and explore the experience of the Black community in midcentury Los Angeles, and Chan is Missing (1982) parodies those tropes to create a complex portrait of contemporary life in San Francisco’s Chinatown; and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1982) and Twin Peaks take these themes of idyll unmasked to small towns much like Dutcher does. Idyll unmasked is the key theme in all of these films: these films all present the forward-facing façade of these communities and then explore what lies beneath. What lies beneath, in all cases, is fundamental humanity, a mesh woven from frankly considered corruption and ultimately affirmed community love. The corruption and the love, the willfully placed mask and the deeply human contradictions it covers, are the central concerns of these films noir, and they provide to Mormon film what so many other filmmakers have avoided addressing, to the detriment of their films.

Consider a film like The Singles’ Ward (2002), a romantic comedy that pokes fun at the Utah Mormon lifestyle it’s enmeshed in without doing much work to examine or interrogate it. It highlights the quirks and oddities of Mormon and particularly Utah Mormon culture, but it does so in an easy, self-deprecating way that assumes audience familiarity with and investment in that culture—leaving non-member audiences stranded; the subsequent rash of Mormon comedies including The R.M. (2003) and Mobsters and Mormons (2005) suffer from a similar superficiality and cultural insularity. Even the critically praised Once I Was a Beehive (2015), which puts in a laudable amount of work to introduce the unique Mormon cultural elements of the film to audiences not familiar with them, focuses its narrative energy on addressing the quirks of American Mormon communities and revealing how ultimately relatable members of the Church are. More recently, several costume dramas, notably Jane and Emma (2018) and the critically acclaimed His Name is Green Flake (2020), address the apologetic narratives members of the Church tell—in both cases, the narrative about the idyll of the Joseph Smith-era Church and its supposedly easy race relations—and pry open these easy narratives to examine the human corruption and love beneath. Although the genre is different from Brigham City, the mechanism is the same: take a mythological community that members of the Church treasure their narratives about, and examine it in a way that debunks that myth. These films reaffirm the faith and love still present behind the myth, but they temper it with a clear-eyed realism that smacks of honesty and brings non-member audiences into conversation with a myth that they have no vested interest in defending but may well wish to learn the truth behind.

Brigham City ends in a paradise lost. The citizens of Brigham City have begun locking their doors at night, and, rather than salvation as a community, they have found communal guilt. But, just like Eve after eating from the tree, their eyes have been opened to themselves, and they and the audience are able to frankly consider Brigham City, not as an impregnable bastion of righteousness but as a town like any other, populated by ordinary people, set apart only in the community’s shared history and desire to progress into the future together. In similar fashion, Mormon film would do well to discuss with member and non-member audiences the narratives members of the Church tell themselves and others and explore the poignant if uncomfortable humanity behind the community myths.