“Butz’s law,” which he formulated, was “adapt or die,” and its measure of success was “P-R-O-F-I-T.”īerry is seen by many as a prophet of a different sort.
Butz had rural roots that rivaled Berry’s, but he came to see a decline from 45% of the population working the land at his birth to some 4% at the time of their encounters-what Berry labeled The Unsettling of America-as a positive development. The Seer centers on Berry’s debates in the 1970s with Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford. With their differing views of progress, both fans and critics of this farmer/writer, who has done his varied work with draught horses and a 1956 Royal typewriter, will likely see his elusiveness as fitting. The viewer sees recent interviews of his wife Tanya and daughter Mary, but the man himself is present only as a voice and in images from the past. With this juxtaposition of frenzy and forest, filmmaker Laura Dunn seems to be asking, “Isn’t this better?”ĭunn’s film is not your run-of-the-mill biopic, and how could it be? Berry, though very much alive, agreed to participate in the project, but with the complicating condition that he would not appear on camera. We are looking through Wendell Berry’s eyes, at the land he calls home-perhaps during one of the Sabbath walks that produced the poem we have just heard. A dog trots ahead, down the wooded trail. Then the screen goes dark and, after a pause, gives way to the slow rhythmic sound of feet on autumn leaves. Over this, the film’s subject, in his distinctive timbre, laments the pursuit of “the objective.” These opening three minutes culminate in the blaze of car lights circling, approaching a bridge to who-knows-where. The Seer opens with a blur of urban lights and longings: the faster freeway, the taller building, the machines that become the objects of our affections.
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