The Wild & Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

D. Ray White was a revered mountain dancer from Appalachia who, while being filmed for the documentary The Talking Feet, was murdered in a shootout in 1985. His son Jesco filled his tap shoes and has danced his way to fame in West Virginia where he performs in bars and country music videos.

The Wild & Wonderful Whites of West Virginia documents D. Ray’s family from 2008 to 2009, when it was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Whites of Boone County are notorious for celebrating life as an endless party. They sniff pills and peddle them. Get married in pharmacies. Huff gas. Shoot relatives. They order mozzarella cheese sticks from Taco Bell.

The documentary touts being “a portrait of America’s last outlaw family.”  Despite its depiction of debauchery, the film reveals the vulnerability of a family that perpetuates the fatalistic and hopeless values of the Southern mining culture.  The film’s strength lies in moments when the Whites lower their fists and support one another, when they admit their weaknesses, when their 85-year-old matriarch, Bertie Mae—the widow of D. Ray White—falls ill.

During her 85^th birthday party, Bertie Mae fans away the smoke of a joint being passed between her children. She plops onto an adjacent couch and tells the cameras, “I’m 84 years old today, and the computers and the drugs is gonna take the world over.”

After snorting crushed pills off a toilet tank at Bob & Bea’s Bar, Kirk White gazes off, her face smeared with glitter. That morning she lost her newborn daughter to Child Protective Services because drugs were found in her system. Kirk recites Matthew 21:22— “By believing, you will receive.” She says, “I’m still believing. I believe that God’s saying, “Get your shit together.”

Jesco White’s successful dance career has stifled his privacy. As the contemplative, brooding one of the family, he imprisons himself in his apartment beside a railway where he drinks beer on his balcony, watches trains pass. He desires distance from fanatics who knock on his door daily for autographs, people who steal his Go Away signs to keep a piece of him.

Tragedy pervades the family history to the point that it seems mythical. Jesco White roams the family cemetery, pointing to tombstones, recounting each loss: His brother Dorsey who “blowed his brains out;” the grave of his father, D. Ray, that a vandal chiseled illegible; his pregnant sister Ona Fontaine who was slain by her ex-husband in Cleveland; his other pregnant sister Virginia who died in a car crash.

Jesco puffs his cigarette, expresses puzzlement over the White’s misfortune, “It seems like our lives has just been a party and we’re just livin’ like it’s a story that we’re already dead but we’re still alive to tell about it.”

[For those of you who have Netflix, The Wild & Wonderful Whites  of West Virginia can be streamed on Instant View.]