Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story (2002) User Reviews

Insightful if slightly confusing document of poor working class whites

[ChungMo · 8/10 · 26 February 2005]

It's not easy to describe this hour long documentary. There is no narration to tie everything together so the story is told by the interviews and footage. There are several aspects that you could loose if you don't pay close attention to what is being said.

I remember when the story broke and I've seen the tank footage repeated in various chase shows on TV but I never got the story about the guy in the tank. The despair and drugs make a lot of sense now. It's amazing that a lot of the people interviewed are so frank about their drug use, especially when it's clear that some of them were high during the interviews. The downfall and bubbling insanity of Shawn Nelson is made very real. Even his druggie friends were unable to deal with him towards the end. All except one major league paranoid conspiracy driven guy.

The real reason that this is a documentary worth watching is the clear picture of a side of the United States that most of us don't see. Miserable, drug-addicted poor white communities that the system has forgotten.

This is not a "perfect" documentary but it's faults do not ruin it's quality.

Thought Provoking

[ThePrinceofPeas · 9/10 · 3 July 2005]

Cul de Sac is a great flick. It's about Shawn Nelson, the unemployed plumber and former Gulf War vet, who took an M-60 tank on a six mile rampage across San Diego. There's footage of it on shows like "World's Most Dangerous Police Chases".

Shawn was suffering from depression after a divorce, drug addiction (meth) and the death of his parents. It also sounds like he had a unhealthy dose of paranoia. Shawn used to tell his buddies and co-workers that one day he'd steal a tank and drive up the steps of city hall. There's some cool interviews. Shawn's older brother talks about how much he misses him and said what a nice guy he was, as he gets choked up. Shawn's buddies were heavy crystal meth users but he spent a lot of his free time teaching them the basics of plumbing so they could find work.

Shawn was pretty out there too: he dug a 25 foot deep mine shaft in the basement of his small San Diego home in a quiet residential neighborhood. He became detached from reality when he believed he was finding gold dust and flakes in the dirt beneath his house. Supposedly, there were small amounts of gold in the rocks so he filed with the city for mineral rights on his property. His claim was denied. Enter disillusionment. Shawn was obviously a heavy crystal user and the goldmining sounds like a tweak thing. Shawn had generators in the basement and had even converted his jacuzzi into a sluice for his goldpanning. His buddies, all former meth addicts, were telling stories about all going down the mineshaft to dig for gold. It became a community tweak project. "Let's go to Shawn's to dig for gold". Meth heads and parolees would stop by Shawn's, do drugs, and then "head down the mine". Shawn's backyard was brimming with mounds of dirt. The neighbors must've been freaked out.

The documentary attempts to link Shawn's erratic methamphetamine-fueled behaviour back to the defence industry in San Diego. During the Cold War bomber crews would use methamphetamine to stay awake and alert for 24 hours straight. The filmmaker suggests San Diego, a post war community made up of military families and defence contractors, was a haven for meth as early as the 1950s.

When his mineral rights were denied by the local government it was probably the last straw for Shawn. His grip on reality seemed to be tenuous at best. His disillusionment now turned to anger. The rest is history. He stole a tank, crushed cars and RV's, knocked over utility poles but eventually tried to cross a concrete highway divider. The tank was stuck. San Diego Police opened the hatch with bolt cutters and shot 35-year-old Shawn Nelson to death. From the helicopter video, it looked like he wanted to cross the divider and drive headlong into oncoming traffic. Based on that, I think the officer's actions were justifiable.

A sad story but in a sense he's gained immortality. No one who has seen the video of his tank rampage will ever forget it!

insight into America's most dangerous police chase

[ShimmySnail · 10/10 · 12 November 2003]

This is an amazing documentary, perhaps the best I've ever seen. In 2002, during the war in Afghanistan, the Albuquerque nonprofit Basement Films brought Garrett Scott to show and answer questions about his new documentary about the big picture surrounding the now famous footage of an army of police cruisers taking down a tank on the freeway outside Clairemont, California.

Scott is originally from the same neighborhood as the tank driver, Shawn Nelson, and he builds a comprehensive picture of the decades long relationship between the defense industry and northern California. You go in wondering how this tank chase could happen, and you walk out wondering why it didn't happen sooner.

Nelson was a Gulf War veteran, and Scott explains how most of Nelson's friends and neighbors are children of WWII and Korean War vets. He maps a journey starting with the boom in northern California during the 1950's when those veterans were considered heroes by all, employed in lucrative if blue collar jobs in the defense industry, to today after the jobs steadily evaporated and addiction to a drug called methedrine (a.k.a. crystal meth, originally created by the Air Force to aid pilots) spread from veterans to their children and from the northern Pacific through California across the United States.

Scott interviews Nelson's friends and family, many of whom fell victim to the same substance abuses Nelson did, neighborhood cops who have been dealing with the drugs and crime now their whole careers, he culls footage from local news broadcasts about the incident, and brings in archival footage of the defense industry and the area's better days.

The minuscule romp across a Fox TV special contains a dramatic but slow chase that ends with the tank driver being killed off camera. Scott's film humanizes both Nelson and his friends and neighbors and the people who spend their lives dealing with the area's enormous underlying problems that boiled over in such a unique way, and he makes it clear the pot is still boiling. Obviously, if this is ever available for home viewing, I'm buying a copy instantly to show all my friends, and I recommend you do the same.

Not worth the effort!

[DaTramp · 3/10 · 18 May 2004]

And an effort it is watching this. This disjointed, almost incoherent film has no clear narrative thread and seems to have been assembled pulling together whatever bits and pieces that could be found in the local TV network's video files to make an hour's worth of film. The interviewing is unfocused, the narrative jump's back-and-forth and all-over-the-place without any seeming plan or intent. This is documentary journalism at it's worst, taking a sensational story and exploiting it without really looking below the surface. It meanders and then fades out into nothingness with lots of questions raised and almost none answered. Contrast this with "Bus 174", a fascinating case of a bus hijacking in Brazil that truly demonstrates how to show the factors leading to an act of urban terrorism.

Life imitates art?

[mlstein · 9/10 · 22 June 2006]

I'd say that these events were a strong influence on Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," except that the book came out in 1977 and Shawn Nelson's tank ride took place 18 years later. The echos of Dick's great book are everywhere, though--the decaying California suburb, pervasive meth use, obsessive, pointless projects, and increasing paranoia. Scott's collage of news reports (including a hilarious on-the-spot sequence where the Talent does little except talk to his cameraman), industrial promo films from the heyday of San Diego's aerospace industry, and revealing interviews with Nelson's friends and family conveys the story with telling economy while placing it into the contexts of the marketing and disposal of a neighborhood and work force, the dependence of a city on the military-industrial complex and the drugs that came with it--methamphetamine having been developed for bomber pilots--and the personal disintegration of a nice, talented, regular guy. Moving and illuminating.