With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and far between. For every educator who’s made a positive impact on students’ lives, there seems to be a dozen who only entered the profession because they loved Harry Potter or wanted to be their town’s next storied football coach. It’s rare that a teacher — especially today, given the systemic constraints around what they’re actually allowed to teach and the recent rise of pre-fascism with regard to book-banning — who meets students on their level and inspires them to think beyond their current worldview and experience. In Middletown, directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State) shine a spotlight on the rare, electrifying presence of Fred Isseks. As one student recalls, Isseks “never felt like a teacher, in the best way possible. He talked to every student as if they were an equal.” Imagine that.
Middletown unfolds as a documentary centered on Isseks’ “Electronic English” class in the early 1990s, which encouraged students to film and investigate real-world issues rather than passively absorb information (a skill society writ large would have benefited from developing before the advent of social media): “Be creative, use your talent. Use it to make stuff instead of consuming stuff.” Under Isseks’ direction, students at Middletown High School began investigating the local landfill, uncovering toxic waste, corporate negligence, government complacency, and organized crime involvement.
McBaine and Moss structure the film in traditional documentary fashion: a combination of extensive archival footage (all meticulously preserved on the original VHS by Isseks) and present-day interviews with Isseks and four of his students, reflecting on the scope of what they revealed. While this construction plays things pretty safe with regard to form, it does draw compelling parallels between the problems of that era and today’s challenges. Comparing the almost level-headed and somewhat well-spoken local politicians — the kind who could have only existed in a pre-Internet age — to the palm-greased buffoons whose presence in public office grows exponentially every year is both laughable and utterly depressing, and while the film never explicitly touches on that subject matter, it’s impossible to view Middletown in a vacuum. Blanket eliminations of environmental protections, non-existent journalistic ethics, and strongmen who throw tantrums because someone “didn’t say thank you” have left many of us justifiably cynical, if not outright hopeless.
One of Middletown’s greatest strengths lies in its meticulous documentation of what was, for the students, a genuine investigative triumph. Armed with bulky camcorders and a healthy dose of skepticism, they didn’t just report on the problem, but confronted it head-on, even going so far as to trespass on private property to capture footage of dumped medicine vials and leaking barrels of toxic sludge. Much like the inclination demonstrated by an embarrassingly large swath of Americans to trust billionaires to improve their economic circumstances, this narrative thread represents one of the United States’ most enduringly naïve notions — that doing the right thing is all it takes to get a positive outcome. Yet therein lies the film’s central tension: while Middletown might initially aim for a “hearts and minds” appeal, it mostly underscores how bleak our current situation remains. Issues of environmental degradation, corporate malfeasance, and political corruption have reached all-time levels of evil. As Rachel Raimist, one of Isseks’ former students shares, she left Middletown and ended up buying a house within a few miles of a landfill with similar problems, decades later.
But perhaps McBaine and Moss’s goal isn’t simply to uplift viewers in the face of pervasive dysfunction or convince them of the lie of American democracy and the power of the people . Instead, they remind us that personal stories can offer us all a lifeline when the larger system seems beyond repair. Even if the work of these teenagers didn’t result in a triumphant fix to environmental abuses or the cesspool of American politics, it shows how a teacher like Isseks and his students managed to spark tangible action at least once, on a local scale, however fleeting the victory was. Their experiences become a kind of testament: sometimes it’s not hope for sweeping change that keeps us going, but the human narrative of ordinary people trying that helps get us through when there seems to be no hope.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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