‘The Dells’ Review and Interview

The Wisconsin Dells, also called “The Waterpark Capital of the World,” is a tourism-based region in a pocket of southern Wisconsin known for its massive waterparks and extensive nature trails. It boasts five million visitors a year despite its relatively small size: 20 square miles and 5,500 permanent residents. Summer labor in the area is generally staffed through J-1 visas for cultural and educational exchange, promising foreign workers a chance of experiencing America.

In her documentary The Dells, Nellie Kluz explores the lives of these workers, effortlessly walking the tightrope of recognizing the parasitic nature of global capitalism while emphasizing the joy and connection that comes from bonding with strangers over a shared experience. Watching this documentary exploitation and strong connection, I recalled my time working on a cruise ship last year. I felt a strong suspension of reality; I was far away from home in a unique touristic and man-made ecosystem. With The Dells, the frustrations and joys of cruise life came rushing back to me. Because of this reflected experience, I was delighted to interview Kluz about The Dells.

Kluz was drawn to The Dells because of her interest in “the mechanics of tourism and spectacle” and the “staged elements…that go into maintaining illusions and spectacles.” We start with the mechanisms before we’re brought into the point of view of a tourist — an American taxi driver coordinates moving J-1 workers and points out that he’s picking them up at “Walgreens” and not “Walmart,” looking out at a typical highway intersection. Not only does this scene give us an aspect of unseen day-to-day life in the Wisconsin Dells, it humorously breaks apart the experience of “American life” that the company advertises to the J-1 workers — large spans of homogenous highway zones, confusing two of the largest chains with similar names.

The documentary introduces us to multiple subjects through snippets of short conversations, many of which take place in a taxi driven by an American. As one of the only Americans working on the cruise ship, I related to this character. Although I was a crew member and in the same social circles, I was conscious of the level of privilege an American citizenship grants you: ease of visas, cultural dominance, and better job opportunities on land. Early on in my contract, I went to a bar with employees from Guyana and Kenya, and they remarked how Americans (in particular white Americans) were treated as gods when they visited their country. At one point in The Dells, a passenger in the taxi mentions how much better healthcare is in America, and the taxi driver immediately interrupts her to explain how devastating the healthcare system is on the average American, and she counters with how great the quality and availability of healthcare is in comparison to a third-world country. The tensions of the fallacies of the American mythos and the realities of geopolitics are a fascinating aspect of both The Dells and my cruise memories.

Kluz structured The Dells to “feel like one summer” with a strong edge of temporal confusion. Her goal was capturing the area as both tourist and employee. “It's character-driven to an extent, but it's more about place and rhythms and interactions and vignettes,” Kluz says. She emphasizes time’s “strange quality” while working in a tourism-oriented city. “You’re staying up really late. Sometimes you’re sleeping during the day. Sometimes you get up at the crack of dawn,” she explains. A taxi driver emphasizes his odd hours. A featured tourist store manager works 85 hours a week. At the same time J-1 workers let loose at a nightclub after a long week of work, housekeeping employees clean the waterparks. The connections between the J-1s feel both new and lifelong. A key subplot explores fired J-1s having car troubles; there’s a rushed sense of “what to do next” and also lingering stretches of frustration. There’s a certain ennui and intensity to American capitalism that puts time in flux, a flux intensified in an insular tourist region. 

Amidst the portrayal of the ideas of American exceptionalism and American capitalism that drew me into the film is a real heart and genuine sense of connection and camaraderie. Employees from multiple departments in the region have a barbecue as they joke about their jobs and share what they miss most from their faraway homes. Kluz found interacting with the J-1 workers to be “really refreshing and fun [for her]” because of the fast friend-making. The workers are “curious, they’re asking questions.” When you’re miles away from home in a new experience, you’re eager for connection - I found the cruise ship to be an exceedingly friendly experience. Kluz was “figuring out and making sense of” the Dells as both a place and documentary through the connections she made.

My memory of the ship feels like both a short blip and the longest six-month stretch. There’s almost a sort of Groundhog Day-like quality on cruise ships. I worked in the entertainment technical team, and many of the tasks are repetitive and each cruise repeated its activities for the itinerary. Guests rotate in and out on a ten day basis so they all start to blend in with each other. I formed deeper connections with the workers who are there for six to ten months, but every friend had a different start and end date to me, creating a strong sense of impermanence. My first friend left in my second month onboard. I spent hours in Cartagena talking to a new friend during an overnight stop and felt crushed when I realized I only had five days left to spend with her. The international aspect heightened the impermanence – it would be exceedingly difficult for me to visit any of the friends I made onboard without another contract. The Dells explores the beauty and tragedy in bursts of momentary connection.

Nellie Kluz talked about the connections found in the filmmaking and editing process  — the fleeting connections and the longer-term relationships that developed. “I enjoy the process of meeting people and talking to people and filming with them.” One of the J-1 workers, Ömer Emre Aka, became an associate producer who helped Kluz understand the place and connected her to other workers; “When we met, he's, like, super friendly, outgoing person, and it was his second year in the Dells, so he was really savvy about the place and knew a lot of people.” 

Watching The Dells, I felt a fast sense of connection between filmmaker and location, filmmaker and person, and person to person. In Kluz’s words, “It was a movie that I wanted to make both about the people I met specifically and as a group and then the place itself.”  Kluz did not grow up going to The Dells, but was rather recommended the place by a friend for a potential film project. Kluz remembers the start of filming “being a tourist and making a film at the same time, and then getting to know these J-1 workers.” Because she was also new to The Dells, she was discovering the place with the J-1 workers. “Their perspective aligned neatly with mine.” The workers had a “curiosity and openness” with each other and with Kluz. This newness gives the final documentary an “exploratory feel” in which Kluz feels pride. “That’s kind of what I aim for in making a film.”

One of the most striking aspects of The Dells is its fly-on-the-wall quality. Kluz was drawn to its most genuine moments in editing. “Obviously, when there's cameras around us all the time, it affects our perceptions of the situation. But I think there are moments where you're able to transcend the apparatus a little bit.” We feel like we’re walking along the wooded trails with the tourists. We’re in the taxicab singing karaoke. We’re at the picnic table sharing first impressions of America and griping about wages and hours. Memories of dancing at crew parties and similar conversations at crew mess tables rushed back so easily because of how effortlessly Kluz puts her audience in these moments and conversations.

I loved the ending image: a storm brewing over The Dells. In the image, the area feels both massive and insular, trapped by the clouds and thunder. The plastic of the waterslides and American flags juxtaposed by the violent nature of a midwestern storm and gorgeous scenery. Kluz mentioned what she found compelling about the closing image; “To me, it felt like a little bit of a microcosm of the place. And then the thunderstorms were something that a lot of the students coming from other places were always really impressed by.” In talking about this final moment, Kluz revealed that behind the camera, she and the crew and other J-1 workers who happened to be watching the storm on the hill after walking home were behind the camera “marvelling at it together.” As I know intimately from personal experience, the tourism industry is held together by strong, genuine, temporary connections. And thus the final image, film, and interview came together - shared moments with new friends at the core of the complex sociopolitical dynamics of tourism.