Director Theo Anthony draws parallels: between statistics and hunches, between logistics and subtext, between the systemic and the everyday, between the drama of history and the total lack of histrionics required to support his 100-year-old post-apocalyptic vision of institutionalized racism. This vision is Rat Film, Anthony’s brilliant docu-essay chronicling Baltimore’s city planning and resultant systemic segregation as a microcosm of the still-failing American Urban Experiment.
In it, first we hear a voice (Maureen Jones, siri-adjacent). Amidst stark black, before we see anything we hear: “Before the world became the world it was an Egg. Inside the Egg was Dark. The rat nibbled the egg and let the Light in. And the world began.” From these first moments, Rat Film introduces the idea of creation—from whatever mythos Anthony culled this intro—not as an expansion, a pushing out, but as an illusion of growth hiding something so much more claustrophobic, so much more suffocating. Rat Film is ostensibly about Baltimore’s rat problem, about how the City has historically dealt with and studied and used parts of their poorest neighborhoods to address pest control, trial-and-erroring over decades, but as Edmund the amicable exterminator with the Baltimore City Rat Rubout Program tells us, “There ain’t never been a rat problem in Baltimore; there’s always been a people problem.”
This is the parallel Anthony most wants to explore, how systems of power treat minority and impoverished communities as lab rats, expendable and experimental. The path he treads wanders wildly—his film a weaving, loosely tracked tone poem, its free form in direct opposition to the boundaries and strictures imposed on the aforementioned communities, human and rodent alike—but his themes are always clear, and the points he makes always buttressed by simple, unadorned facts. When he couples a near-nauseous digital video of a rat attempting to escape a trash can in a back alley with voice-over monotoning, “The adult Norway rat can jump 32 inches high. Baltimore city trash cans are 34 inches high,” we understand, precisely, Anthony’s logic. Baltimore is a city built to sequester, and in turn neuter, those populations with which it’d rather not deal.
In 1911, we’re told, the City of Baltimore passed a law which essentially divided neighborhoods along racial lines, passing “the nation’s first legislation of its kind.” Six years later, the Supreme Court outlawed such legislation, which only drove the sources behind such segregation further into the private sector‚—where that power always wanted to be anyway. Anthony then details how Baltimore institution Johns Hopkins University utilized such preternatural, physical class distinctions as ready-made laboratories to study rodent populations, especially in the context of rat control. Anthony’s historic documents—photographs, maps, letters, news articles—he wields with Ken Burns-like precision, demonstrating both in-depth research and a journalist’s eye for sussing out the larger ideas behind the cold facts. All of it culminates in a heartbreaking tale of how a Baltimore denizen’s barn was converted into a warehouse space wherein Johns Hopkins scientists built a cloistered rat colony, observing how isolation manifested in a rat community. The results are, of course, devastating—the rats stratified themselves, setting up ersatz social classes and generally massacring the weak, including rat babies—mostly because of how Anthony’s seeded the injustice of anti-miscegenation into his film so that, by the time poindexters in thick-rimmed glasses are smugly grinning, posing next to their sad rat prison, the audience knows exactly what Anthony’s implying.