Three and a half years after the floodwaters rose and swallowed New Orleans, popular culture doesn't quite know what to do with Hurricane Katrina and its ongoing effect on the city's and the country's identity.
The diminishing news reports vacillate between patly hopeful -- Mardi Gras is back! -- and numerically dispiriting as the city faces funding issues and the overwhelming challenge of recalling a diaspora.
Attempts to explore Katrina artistically have been less than wildly successful. "K-ville," Fox's 2007 attempt to set a cop drama amid the reconstruction, fell flat, and even the most delirious reviews of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" note that the screenwriter's decision to set the modern portion of the film in New Orleans as the hurricane approaches seems out of place and manipulative.
"The Old Man and the Storm," a "Frontline" documentary by June Cross that premieres tonight, tries to construct a middle-ground narrative, with mixed results. As Cross notes in the film's opening, "you could fill this building with all of the studies done since Hurricane Katrina, you could read them all and still not comprehend what it means when 500,000 families are displaced; what it means to lose 200,000 homes, 220,000 jobs, 600 congregations. You wouldn't understand what it means to lose even one neighborhood."
Like many journalists before her, Cross attempts to combat the mental lockdown that often occurs when trying to comprehend an event of this magnitude and enormity by telling the story of one man and his family. The old man of the title is Herbert Gettridge, father of nine, seven of whom are still living, grandfather, great-grandfather and a 65-year fixture in the city's now famous Lower 9th Ward.
Though his close-knit family was spread across the country by the storm, Gettridge returned to the ruins of his home. While the rest of the city attempted to celebrate the 2006 Mardi Gras, Gettridge got on with the Sisyphean task of rebuilding brick by brick.
He became a bit of a media star in those early years, and no wonder. In 2006, he was 82, possessed a no-nonsense approach to the tragedy that had befallen him and could still push a wheelbarrow. His short-term goal was to rebuild his home so his wife, Lydia, who was living with their daughter in Wisconsin, could return to him. His long-term goal was to rebuild the life he knew, in which his yard and house were full of chatter and laughter and all his children. Even Billy Crystal could not stay away.
