The Mothman of Point Pleasant
Ian E.H. Thompson
Professor Michelle Clark
English 105
23 October 2022
Prior to my viewing of this film, my knowledge of “The Mothman” was very limited. I was aware, broadly speaking, that it was alleged to be some manner of East Coast cryptic — a modern mythological being, an unproven entity — that was the subject of no small number of folk tales and urban legends. My impression was that Mothman “fans” were of the mind of being “in on the joke”, which is to say that they were aware that there is no such thing as a Mothman. I was under the impression that, going into this film, I would be seeing something exploring the anthropological history and evolution of The Mothman and the myths left in its wake. Imagine my surprise when filmmaker Seth Breedlove presented a played-straight, testimonial anthology featuring a host of interviews with all manner of people who claim to have seen “The Mothman”. I was not disposed to be receptive to this kind of earnest conspiracy, and unfortunately after having watched the film several times in order to gather quotes and refine my impression thereof, I am left with the flat, lingering taste of disappointment in my mouth.
Now, a fair question put to any skeptic is “What would it take for you to change your views”, and my answer to that is straightforward. If there is documented evidence able to be repeated under other circumstances, I would be very willing to admit being wrong about the Mothman’s existence. Indeed, a world with a Mothman in it would be significantly more interesting than one without, I think. Unfortunately, the film’s arsenal of persuasive rhetoric exists entirely within the realm of the cheap, the shallow, and the unverifiable. Breedlove presents the audience with a veritable gauntlet of interviews, an interminable series of static medium-shot extended stills of a variety of persons dictating answers to the camera. The intended rhetoric Breedlove employs here is simple — with all of this “firsthand testimony”, how can they all be lying? After all, “The people of Point Pleasant represent the best of blue collar America — a people who are both hardy and resourceful” (0:04:07). These are honest, salt-of-the-earth Americans! Surely, Breedlove intimates to the audience, these people are trustworthy beyond any reasonable doubt. Notable about these shots is that all of the energy comes from the desperate, almost manic, need of each interviewee to tell their own story of their encounter with “The Mothman”. It is entirely on the back of these two appeals — the ethos of establishing credibility through mass testimony and the pathos of demanding attention and belief through earnest emotional plea — that the film’s premise of the Mothman’s existence rests its case.
Interspersed between these too-still and yet too-energetic interviews are amateurish depictions of the events described in the firsthand testimony, complete with ever-changing depictions of “The Mothman” from one sequence to the next, with inconsistent styles of animation and depiction. What is most confusing about the filmmaker’s use of these testimonies to generate credibility, belief, and trust among the audience is the very real dissonance from one person’s version of events to another’s. “Throughout much of December 1966, activity is rampant around Point Pleasant, much of it going unreported. In the streets, and in diners and barber shops, residents all have a story of their own, usually whispered in hushed tones. They tell of voices in the sky, strange lights in the forest, flying creatures, and mysterious dark-suited individuals asking questions” (0:44:29). While some versions of firsthand encounters have much in common with one another, there are many that stand apart, segregating themselves into disparate families of genuses of Mothman lore. There’s the “buzzing noises, compound eyes, and proboscis” branch, as well as the “dark-furred, glowing red eyed, bat-winged” cadet house, and we cannot forget the “leaping up into the sky like a helicopter” cousins as well. These accounts all come with very strong feelings by the witness that their version of events is as true as they lived it, and yet they each paint in aggregate very different pictures of the Mothman, both physically and spiritually. There does not seem to be any clear consensus among the interviewees for whether the Mothman is an agent of supernatural evil or merely an esoteric but otherwise mundane organism.
I wish that I could say that those two theories were the only two in consideration among those that believe in the eponymous cryptid, but I cannot. Interwoven jarringly throughout the film, and with disastrous use of images of little grey men, the filmmaker insists on shoehorning in as much possible content to suggest alien involvement as is reasonably possible without necessitating a title change to “The Mothman of Neptune IV”. It is apparent that Breedlove sought out interviewees who either share or were unwilling to contest this interpretation, with one strange exception — the government conspiracy crowd. Having watched this film multiple times, I could not explain how one would find the United States federal government to be involved in the Mothman’s existence, reasonable, if I were put to do so under duress. These catastrophic fixations destroy any credibility the filmmaker may have had, either through prior works (of which there are many, about the self-same subject matter) or (somehow) over the course of the film. A filmmaker cannot in the same breath put forward that the firsthand testimonials are true and honest, and insist that the Mothman is secretly a government helicopter drone, or an alien abductor, or also a CIA blacksite agent here to lay eggs in the townsfolk for government research.
In conclusion, “The Mothman of Point Pleasant” was a strange exploration into the stories of those who claim to have had firsthand contact with an unnatural or otherworldly creature. In and of themselves these tales do not make for poor entertainment or even bad thought exercises, but when strung together in the mummer’s farce that Seth Breedlove put together, they become disjointed and contradictory in a way that does not support the central premise of the film. The lack of variety in shots taken — different interiors of rooms where a Point Pleasant local is being interviewed; amateurishly-performed dramatizations reenacting prior events that may or may not have happened — makes this 1 hour 7 minute film feel three times as long. There were numerous places in the film where the filmmaker references historical record throughout the 1920s and the 1960s, and I wish that he would have expanded more on the zeitgeist of those eras and how they had an impact on Mothman lore and sightings in those times.
Works Cited
Breedlove, Seth. The Mothman of Point Pleasant. Self-Published.
www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B071H824ZJ/
