The fundraising headline of The Gas Station Attendant was clearly that director Karla Murthy’s father, H. N. Shantha Murthy, worked in a gas station while Ms. Murthy was in college. But his life was considerably more complex than the stereotype mainstreamed into American society by The Simpsons. What clearly started as an attempt to rip apart the simplistic image America has of its immigrant service workers improves a whole bunch once it gets into specifics, since Mr. Murthy’s life was considerably more interesting than any TV show normally allows its characters. Ms. Murthy did an excellent job of balancing her father’s version of events with her own memories to develop a clear-eyed picture of a man who made something of himself on his own terms, but not that of his adopted society. It’s the schism between the two that makes for a fascinating watch.
Ms. Murthy was raised in Texas, where her parents met at university and settled down into the precarious part of the American middle class. But after the death of her mother, herself an immigrant (from the Philippines), Ms. Murthy and her sisters were raised alone by him until he married again and had a few more children with his new wife, though all was happy there. As Ms. Murthy went off into her own adulthood, she would call her father at his gas station job asking for stories about his very tough childhood and the unusual way he arrived in the USA. She was a film student so she had the good sense to record these, which are now the spine of this film. By the time Ms. Murthy was an adult, her father’s work was selling jewelry at trade fairs in the American south, making chitchat with hotel waitresses like any good travelling salesman. This is not exactly a champagne and caviar lifestyle but it’s considerably more wonderful than how he was raised.
And how the movie loops between Mr. Murthy’s stories of an unusually difficult childhood, the highly improbable piece of luck that brought him to Texas and the restlessness in work that has characterised his adulthood gives an unusually full picture of the decisions – and the luck – which make up someone’s life. The need to provide for many children without a cushion of secure work or local support might explain many of the career choices made, but it’s also a quiet indictment of the American capitalism that treats its workers as disposable. This capitalism was designed around the idea that there will always be someone willing to do whatever work there is on offer in America, regardless of how difficult or badly paid or depressing it is, because people are willing to travel from half a world away to do it (the politics of the current American moment are a little too recent for a documentary based around home movies to address). But the quiet contrast with Ms. Murthy’s life – living in Brooklyn with two cute kids and a supportive husband – shows how the American dream of going up a class within a single generation used to be possible. It needed luck and a whole lot of hard work and organisations (like schools, or people who finance personal documentaries) designed to recognise and develop talent no matter where it comes from. And it may well be that what brought The Gas Station Attendant to the Sheffield DocFest is not just that it is one family’s story, well told. It’s the fact that family stories like this one in America have suddenly stopped being possible. So Ms. Murthy has not made a celebration of her family. Instead her documentary is an elegy for an entire way of life.
It’s impossible to chase the zeitgeist, everyone knows that. But we all also know the importance of luck. The Gas Station Attendant has managed to land in the world at exactly the right time to become a huge symbol of what America used to be. This was probably not the director’s intent, but if her father taught her anything, it’s about how your entire world can change just by being in the right place at the right time.
The Gas Station Attendant recently premiered at Sheffield DocFest.
Learn more about the film at the Sheffield DocFest site for the title.
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