I entered local politics in a state of total disillusionment about points of political discourse. I was tired of actors on monetized platforms larping their political ideology of the day.

TESS POLLOK: Woodworker, filmmaker, and now city council member – you wear a lot of hats. What motivated you to get into local politics?

THEODORE JACOB ANTHONY: I got elected to the city council in 2021, which was last year. I'm technically on the Democratic Party ticket but I was running unopposed. I would've done Working Families, but there was some paperwork I never filled out. I've been visiting Hudson since 2012 and living here part-time since 2015, full-time since 2018. In 2020 I was in the midst of making All Light, Everywhere and that was the summer of BLM and George Floyd, like, the world was on fire. And I found out the police were getting body cameras in Hudson and I basically wrote an email to the mayor saying, "Hey, you know, I've been researching body cameras for years and here's a few things you might want to keep in mind." And the mayor wrote me back and basically was, like, "We're starting a police accountability committee in our town and we'd love for you to be on it." And I was pretty skeptical at first because these things are often kind of just, like, PR. But the mayor here is a really great person and I really believe in what he's doing. These things [committees] are very often a way of having a difficult conversation without actually enacting difficult policy. So I ended up getting involved with that and I ended up rewriting the use of force policy and the body camera policy that they use in Hudson. I was part of a whole committee, so it wasn't just me, obviously, but I wrote some of the language, which was cool. After that, there was an open seat on the city council in our ward and I had, like, 12 people reach out to me being, like, "If you don't do this, someone really unfortunate is going to do it." So I just kind of did it. And, yeah, I was unopposed and I just walked in, and taking it all on is definitely a really strange project.

POLLOK: That's so interesting. A friend of mine from college wrote a paper on the use of body cameras in policing and there were a lot of flaws, I remember. I remember specifically that cops wanted to turn them off to avoid making arrests, like, there were situations where legally they were required to violently intervene but they didn't want to, but if the body cameras were on than they had to – with, for example, town drunks that were just guys that they knew, cops would want to just drive them home but policy dictates an arrest for public intoxication, so if the camera is on in that situation than you have to make an arrest. And so the cops in Yonkers, where she was studying, they were very anti-body camera because they were, like, "This is forcing us to adhere to a really rigid rule structure that isn't flexible to the reality of our jobs."

ANTHONY: Yeah, absolutely. I entered local politics in a state of total disillusionment about points of political discourse. I was tired of actors on monetized platforms larping their political ideology of the day. And not to be dismissive of all of those ideologies, but I was always more curious about where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Okay, what are you performing? And what is your day-to-day like? And not to say I'm the biggest activist in the world or anything like that. I was just, like, "Actually, how does this work? And where are the miscommunications happening?" And even in my short time here on city council, seeing so much petty drama being driven by miscommunication and people who are just overworked, underpaid, and really tired at every single stage. Where are conversations around power happening? Because it's very rarely where the discourse dictates. Police brutality obviously happens in these moments of acute violence, but it's happening in HR meetings, it's happening on city councils. It's happening on the budget level and when you pass laws. That's what I'm curious about now. Even if you see the police as your enemy – which, most days I do, I wish it wasn't that way, but I think the police perform a largely violent function – it's to everyone's benefit to consider these things. The police are first responders, they're medics – they're not psychiatrists, but they provide mental health services. That shouldn't be their job but because our entire government infrastructure has been so divested from over the past 40, 50 years, they're now on the frontline on all of that. And they receive the most flack. Understanding how that works is to the benefit of anyone who wants to see criminal justice reform in our country. I was recently on a panel where I was talking with a police officer who I don't really get along with – I think he's a good guy but performs a bad guy role as the leader of the police in these union negotiations – and he had a real moment with me where he was, like, "We pick up people on the street who have known mental health histories, we take them to the hospital for treatment, and at the hospital they're telling us, 'Stop bringing them here. Just arrest them.'”

POLLOK: They tell them that at the hospital?

ANTHONY: The hospitals just don't have the capacity. It's like our entire care system has been deconstructed and privatized to the point where there's no place for these people to go. Even the police, as you were talking about, are prevented from doing the right thing in these situations, because our totally gutted infrastructure just pushes them into these violent pathways, which is just the path of least resistance, which always leads to more shit down the road.

POLLOK: I think it's difficult to talk about subjects like these without getting overwhelmed by, like, the all roads lead to Rome of it all – it's just not possible to talk about them without recognizing how intersectional these issues are. And there's no one size fits all solution, but are there any common sense solutions you've worked towards in Hudson?

ANTHONY: I think it's different everywhere, but there are recurring patterns, for sure. The thing I've noticed very acutely is the total absence of local media. The way people learn about their own backyard is through Facebook, message boards, and anonymous blogs, and any sort of shared discourse is just absolutely lost. And you see the way in which how little people know about things has an outsize influence on policy.

POLLOK: I felt those frustrations very acutely in my hometown, in Los Angeles. We have a huge homelessness crisis right now and it was especially bad during the pandemic, did you see what happened to Echo Park Lake on the news?

ANTHONY: Yes.

POLLOK: Well, during the pandemic this public park was turned into an enormous homeless encampment, and I remember DSA members and even members of the city council being, like, "We love our unhoused neighbors," but it was a really unsafe situation. And I remember feeling really frustrated with the distance between the discourse and the reality of that situation, because the reality was that my friends who lived in that neighborhood were telling me they felt unsafe, but were being told they were racist or fucked up for saying that they didn't want them there. But there were heroin needles everywhere and people were overdosing, people died in that camp. I'm from the district that elected Nithya Raman and I regret it so much, she's a careerist schill and she abstains from voting on any vote that's not ideologically pure, it's infuriating.

ANTHONY: The resolution of the discourse limits the possibility of the response. If the LAPD didn't have the track record that they do as a violent organization, then maybe the public would feel more trusting with them going in and helping with the unhoused population there. And again, it's the thing where the police function as mercenaries and first responders at the same time. There's a very limited outcome to these possibilities.

POLLOK: What do you think the answer is?

ANTHONY: I have no idea. There is no answer. There's just people showing up and dealing with the question every single day. And it changes every single day.

POLLOK: Are there any cities where they have a non-police entity for police accountability? Are there any examples of that?

ANTHONY: Yeah, I have COVID brain and haven't rattled any of this off the top of my head in awhile, but there are a number of cities that are trying that. They're running into a lot of problems with the thing where, you know, as soon as somebody's window gets broken everyone turns into a Republican on crime. And it's an exaggerated version of what you're talking about with Echo Park Lake, where there are actually very real concerns around safety and people do actually want public safety. But I think what a lot of primarily white progressive activists miss is accounting for black communities who are at the forefront of police brutality, but who are also on the forefront of crime. So there's a double blow that poor and minority communities are facing in this country that needs to be accomodated for in any path forward. And it's complicated and nuanced. I've spoken to a lot of people who are, like, "Yeah, I don't like the police. But I want to be able to pick up the phone and have someone be on the other line when I call 911. It's just about finding a balance and, again, there's no answer to it.

POLLOK: What steps have you taken as a city council member?

ANTHONY: Not a lot, honestly, it's very slow. City government is very slow. And again, I got involved in this with a whole lot of other people around me and I'm not faulting them for this, but you look around and there are very few people left because they're just busy and they're tired and I'm tired. And I don't think I'm going to do this again. This was never a career path. This is a thing I was doing, but what have I done? I'm on a tech committee that's trying to update our digital infrastructure. When you have an idea of big bad big government in your mind, it's such a boogeyman of a cohesive system that acts with intention. And it's so not that, it's a paper tiger that's barely getting by. Government is literally held together by scotch tape and band-aids. And I don't mean that as a diss on public officials because they're amazing. They work so hard, but we're literally using Windows 98 and budgeting software from 1993.

POLLOK: Well, updating the digital infrastructure is probably important for making the sharing of information smoother, so that's one thing you're accomplishing.

ANTHONY: The big thing I'm working on right now is trying to set up a complaint line for the police. Right now, if I wanted to submit a complaint about the police, I would have to go to the office and submit a paper form and potentially stare down the person that I'm complaining about, and needless to say that de-incentivizes a lot of people from speaking their mind about policing. So we're trying to have an anonymous submission form that gets handled out of house and to set up a monthly meeting structure where these grievances can be addressed in an open way. But it's very complicated. You can't set up an advisory body because you need to pass a resolution to allow for that and to check if it's even allowed. I'm trying to shoehorn in some of these more systemic things under the guise of the technical overhaul of our infrastructure. So I've been doing that and I'm helping out with a new public park. It's not sexy stuff.

POLLOK: That's three big projects, I feel satisfied with that answer – public park, digital infrastructure, grievance line. That's a good docket as a city council member.

I can be a pretty anxious person, but I think I'm most at peace when I'm thinking about how little agency I have in how things ultimately turn out. And that's not to say just sit back and strap in, you just have to accept that you're in it and you don't have control and it's fucking wild.

ANTHONY: At the end of the day, I'm just a vote in the room. There are so many things that I don't understand. I'm lucky to have a network of people I trust in the community that I can talk to and be, like, "Can you explain this issue to me like I'm five?" The real power is in planning boards, it's in the business bureau, it's in the grant writing. That's where the real levers of power are, all that backroom stuff. By the time it gets to us I can make a fancy speech and stuff like that, but I have to be real that I'm also not that important. I think something I wanted to say before is that I think we're blinded by our egos. And with so many of these things, at the end of the day, you're just not that important. We need to stop acting like we could save the world individually and that might allow for some more genuine interaction and more genuine engagement.

POLLOK: I talk to my friends all the time about how depressed I feel that activism has been destroyed. I think it's all really individualistic now and it's just depressing because there's such a rich tradition in America of people like the Black Panthers who were actually able to mobilize for their community, and it's hard to feel that spirit around you now because it's so individualistic. I sometimes feel frustrated by the contradiction of "everybody can be an activist." Part of my heart says yeah, at some level, everyone should be interested in doing that type of work, and there are ways that it could fit into everyone's life regardless of personality or lifestyle. But there's another part of me that feels totally disillusioned that we live in a quote unquote activist country, especially in terms of Instagram and social media and what's become acceptable to do with your public image, because it's become really popular to be political. And because so many people are dumb they confuse their self-interest with the public good in such an obscene way. I mean, there's something really dangerous about someone who can't differentiate between the personal and the political. Do you not understand the difference between a person standing next to you and an abstraction? That type of thinking fuels really bad decisions and really bad policy decisions. I don't know where I was going with that, just thinking out loud.

ANTHONY: It's very disheartening and I definitely connect with the feeling of being disillusioned at the state of things and the limited avenues for action. I think that's why I was saying it's important we give up the illusion of saving the world and develop the tools to live in the world gracefully. That's a process that I'm always learning myself, and I hear you on the disillusionment. I think there's also a very predictable but unfortunate reactionary movement against that.

POLLOK: Against what?

ANTHONY: Against woke politics. There's obviously so much to critique with corporate woke culture, a free market that has recouped progressive causes and political action. There's endless ground to critique that and endless bad actors in that ecosystem who are just profiting off their own brand image. I think there's also a lot of issues with the kind of ironic or pessimistic detachment from these issues. It actually counteracts the supposed ironic detachment from these issues you're proclaiming if you're saying that activism is only about its worst actors, you're just validating them as the speakers of the movement. I think there's something much messier and in the middle that is able to call out the worst actors and also just to live and orient yourself towards an attitude of action or awareness. Or maybe some people are just dicks.

POLLOK: We've been called that before, I've had people tell me that Animal Blood is a reactionary publication. But I don't agree with that label at all.

ANTHONY: I do my own research, but, you know, I'm not about to cast anyone off for acting how they felt they had to in a moment of pain. I don't know, we're all suffering in our own ways. When you look at the world, most people are just trying to do the best they can. I don't know, a lot of people in our scene, in our extended scene, I have my own thoughts about the choices they're making and I probably wouldn't make the same ones. But I also don't know the right way to make the right decisions. And I'm not going to moralize what they should be doing because again, it doesn't translate.

POLLOK: Are you religious at all?

ANTHONY: I was raised Jewish. I feel pretty religious. Judaism has been really important in my life. I do feel religiously inclined.

POLLOK: Do you practice any religion now? What you're saying is very Catholic. Turn the other cheek. I studied religion; that was my degree in college. I recently experimented with becoming a Christian Universalist, which is when you believe that everyone gets into Heaven. People really don't like it and consider it a fringe belief, they call it the theologian's crack. But I am kind of interested in that doctrine of thinking, I would like to live in a world where everybody would eventually go to Heaven.

ANTHONY: I think Nietzsche or someone said that there's a God-sized hole at the heart of society. So much of Western liberal tradition has demystified the world and there's the new cult of science in the face of COVID, where science itself becomes a political issue. Science isn't actually about belief, it's consistently renewed in these rituals of truth-making. So what all those "Believe Science" bumper stickers are doing is, they're freezing this thing that isn't meant to be frozen, which is actually kind of what the worst dogmas of religion do. I understand that Catholicism is buzzy or whatever, even if I'm not with it I understand that inclination. I'm always kind of on the side of logically arriving at how illogical the world is. And there's always something beyond our grasp, beyond our capacity to engage with it. So many institutions try to kill that and just bring a glass of that and I think that's a dangerous direction as well.

POLLOK: I think anything that's really absolutist can be dangerous and scary. And with the Catholic thing, I don't know how I feel about it. Sometimes I feel happy, but there's something really dangerous about having a universal worldview. I think if you read the Bible and actually take away lessons from it that can be great, but it's dangerous to put something in the hands of someone like that. And what you're talking about with science and COVID is completely true, and also really scary.

ANTHONY: That's what I'm saying, these epistemologies are wrapped up in power struggles like they always have been.

POLLOK: What's your opinion of a good type of meaning making? Woodworking?

ANTHONY: Totally. More hobbies. I'm a big advocate of hobbies. I mean honestly, anything, wherever you're at, stick your roots in the ground and you can find it. It's not truth, just dialogue. It's like a conversation, like wood is speaking to you about the way in which it wants to be handled. And if you're a gardener, you have to be in conversation with the environment and it goes back to the ego thing. There's just so much of thinking we're the smartest beings on the planet. And I think that so much of what the atomized, modern, liberal individual conceives himself as is the apex of evolution and it's really blinded us to all the other forms of intelligence around us. The thing I've found the most joy in is finding new processes and new systems to talk with by learning more. Woodworking is a way of talking.

POLLOK: Do you think working with materials is important because it teaches us about finite limits? Like, that your sense of the world is egoic without material work?

ANTHONY: I think it's less about limits and more about how much agency you have. We have far less agency than we think. I can be a pretty anxious person, but when I am at peace, I'm usually thinking about how little agency I have in the way things ultimately turn out. And that's not to say just sit back and strap in, it's just that you're in it and you don't have the agency and it's going to be fucking wild. That's all just to say that woodworking, cooking, gardening, anything, it all just makes you realize the materials have just as much agency as you. And that takes some of the pressure off.

POLLOK: It's crazy how many people see themselves on a hero's journey. Crazy pivot: you're from Baltimore, right? That's where my mom is from.

ANTHONY: No, Annapolis.

POLLOK: Oh, you're a Maryland guy. I worked at NIMH for a long time.

ANTHONY: I filmed at the Chief Medical Examiner's office [for Rat Film.]

POLLOK: Did growing up in Baltimore, or I should say near Baltimore, fuel your interest in policing and surveillance?

ANTHONY: I grew up in Annapolis, which has it's own – it's a segregated city like any city in America, basically, but it was middle class, upper middle class. I had a very nice privileged childhood. I grew up on the water. My experience with cops as a white kid growing up in the suburbs was running from them at parties, at my friends' mansions or something like that. But growing up and then living in Baltimore, I think I understood things way more. I was traveling a lot around the world and hearing other people's stories and was starting to feel a lot of questions around my own role. Then 2015 happened, and Freddie Gray was killed by the police, and the whole world came into my backyard and I saw this weird fun house mirror version of the person I had been in other people's backyards. I was realizing how little I knew about Baltimore, how ignorant I was about my own backyard.

POLLOK: So did you exclusively come into an understanding of your white privilege when Freddie Gray died or did you ever have a moment with it before?

ANTHONY: You're going for a scoop.

POLLOK: What did your parents do?

ANTHONY: My dad's an architect and my mom was a journalist, she taught journalism at American University.

POLLOK: Any siblings?

ANTHONY: I have three younger brothers.

POLLOK: All boys. How did it feel?

ANTHONY: Awakened me to my male privilege.

POLLOK: Where were you on the hierarchy?

ANTHONY: I was the oldest.

POLLOK: But where were you on the social hierarchy?

ANTHONY: You ever see those Rasta lions on beach towels at the Boardwalk? That was me.

POLLOK: So you were the king?

ANTHONY: Yeah. I mean, I was always the more rebellious one and always pushing it with my parents and getting into trouble. And my brothers weren't – well, the youngest are twins, and one of the twins is more similar to me and was also rebellious.

POLLOK: Did you do well in Annapolis?

ANTHONY: I had a good time. I was a jock.

POLLOK: You're an athlete, too? This is going to make me shoot myself. What did you play?

ANTHONY: Lacrosse.

POLLOK: Talk about an inaccessible sport.

[Something] that's missing from our interpretation of images is the framework. It's not the image, it's the language around it, it's the courtroom it's being presented in. That's where the confusion lies. There's this mythical standpoint where the meaning is fantastically cauterized by the image. Essentially, that evidentiary images must be the same from subject to subject. But what image ever actually does that?

ANTHONY: You mean the highly abstracted version of play warfare that's predominantly played in the DelMarVa region that's home to the highest concentration of elite military families on the planet?

POLLOK: I think jocks are great. Actually, this will make you happy, I recently had a conversation with Jordan Castro about how nerds are actually the people you should be the most afraid of, because nobody has the instinct to hurt other people more than a, like, really deeply dispossessed nerd. I felt really tormented growing up by that concept that writers were like Jane Austen. Really stuffy and horrible. Anyways, nerds are horribly mean because life has treated them so harshly.

ANTHONY: I won't say that for all nerds, but I know what you mean.

POLLOK: I wanted to ask you a question about Avital Ronnell – from her book, Television and the Fragility of Testimony –

ANTHONY: Is that about the Rodney King case?

POLLOK: Yeah.

ANTHONY: I haven't read it, but this other writer I love, Thomas Keenan, references her work constantly.

POLLOK: My Avital question: In Television and the Fragility of Testimony, Ronnell revisits the Rodney King footage and challenges our erroneous assumption that seeing something on camera is seeing something that happened. She's especially interested in how displaced frustrations over the Gulf War were manifest in that situation. And she borrows from Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence in describing the police as a phantom index of various pains. Without making the understatement of the century, do you feel like these confusions over images and their representations are dangerous?

ANTHONY: I think the thing missing from that is the framework through which we interpret the image. It's not the image, it's the language and the courtroom we're interpreting it in. That's where the confusion lies. Louis George Schwartz wrote this amazing book called Mechanical Witness – which is basically a history of moving picture evidence in courtrooms in the 20th century. He looks at how it became legal for people to interpret images in the context of this new medium. But it's fascinating, because now we assume images are infallible, an index of truth. There are protocols through which an image makes it into court. The real confusion is when we're talking about images of violence. In the Rodney King case, like George Floyd, we talk about them in an affective discourse. We're talking about the emotions that arise in us. We're talking about the prejudicial acts of violence these images show. There's a mythical standpoint where the meaning is fantastically cauterized in the image. Essentially, that evidentiary images must be the same from subject to subject. And that inner subjcetivity has to be preserved, but what image ever actually does that?

POLLOK: Cameras aren't really that objective.

ANTHONY: TLDR. Yeah.

POLLOK: TLDR, for the reader. What is the goal of images? Do you feel awkward that your movies are about impartiality but are not, themselves, impartial?

ANTHONY: I think it's about the process and the film is just an index of the process. And you can almost remove whatever issue is at its core. It's an empty center.

POLLOK: Yeah, I read a really affecting quote on the companion archive for All Light, Everywhere: "The absent center is the ghost of a king." I wrote it down because I was, like, "damn.”

ANTHONY: I really enjoyed making the companion site for All Light, Everywhere. It was this way for me to take the process I love about filmmaking and realize that it doesn't just have to be confined to filmmaking. And fimmaking is what I've spent the most time developing, but I've always wanted other things – writing is my passion, graphic design. I'm excited just to produce stuff and know that it all fits together in whatever way it does, and not feel tied to the form it has to be put into the world in. That's a really fun thing I've found through woodworking, and through the creative process in general, is that the creative process isn't bound to a meterial. You find your own expressive capacity through materials. That's why I love hobbies, it's just, like, throwing yourself into a space of unknowing and that's what I'm addicted to.

POLLOK: Well, you're getting into carpentry right now, correct? You mentioned you were rebuilding your own house and doing the roof and everything.

ANTHONY: The joy and the frustration and the agony and ecstasy of measuring and cutting window trim and figuring out what the fuck crown moulding is, it's honestly the same thing as what I feel when I'm figuring out how to fit a scene into a documentary. It's the same feeling, I just have all these different avenues to pursue it. Right now it's carpentry. And that's exciting.