In Cisco Kid, a solitary young queer person is single-handedly rebuilding a ghost town in Utah. When they’re not building, they’re bathing in an oil drum, having a smoke on their self-built porch or walking the dog in the vast surrounding desert.
There is a question hovering above Emily Kaye Allen’s debut feature Cisco Kid. And that is: why? Why would anyone want to go and live in a dilapidated ghost town? Because that is what Eileen Muza did.
A simplistic response would be: because they are crazy. But there is nothing crazy about Eileen. They are calm, composed and confident about what they are doing. They are also pragmatic. There are good days and bad days, they say. Sometimes it’s hard, yes. But you can’t beat the scenery.
Cisco is a small abandoned town in Utah, USA, along the railroad line between Denver and Salt Lake City. There are only a few houses, in various states of disrepair. All around is desert, in the distance there are mountains. It’s very cinematic and Allen uses plenty of wide shots. It looks great, actually. It looks more or less how you’d imagine a ghost town would look in frontier times. To see one person, hammer in hand, trying to revive it is mind-boggling.
So: why? The documentary offers a few suggestions. Their father told them, Eileen says, that the only way out of poverty was to own your own home – and it was simply impossible for them to buy a house in Chicago, where they are from. Then again: buying a house in Cisco isn’t really a way out of poverty. Eileen knows they are only one broken-down car away from having to give up on their dream. They may own a house now, but they are still poor.
Another reason is suggested when Eileen mentions that it’s hard to be gay in America. A lack of acceptance by others might have been a motivation to try and make it on their own. Scenes in which a registered sex offender suddenly moves into one of the other abandoned houses (only to be sent back to prison soon after) briefly highlight a sense of physical vulnerability.
But although Eileen lives alone in the middle of nowhere, and carries a big gun, a sense of physical vulnerability isn’t what characterises Cisco Kid (the name refers to a popular American movie and television character). There is something very gentle and pleasant about the documentary. This ‘Cisco Kid’ just keeps on doing what they’re doing, day after day. Dog by their side. They are creating something here which, slowly but surely, keeps growing. Keeps getting better. When there’s frustration, they have a smoke. When they are cold and dirty, they take a hot bath in an oil drum outside. They seem to have really, truly, convincingly found their place in the world. And apart from that one temporary unwanted neighbour, the people in the area come across as friendly and supportive.
This brings me to why director Allen wanted to make the documentary. On the film’s Kickstarter page (which is also where I learned that Eileen’s pronouns are they/them, although in the documentary people, including Eileen, still use ‘she’), Allen writes: ‘I believe it is vital to invest in a range of narratives told by and centering queer, trans, and nonbinary people.’ Because: ‘Documentaries about queer characters often focus on tragedy or famous figures. While I value these films, I crave (and therefore want to create) more representation across the spectrum of queer experience.’
Part of that approach, interestingly, is to not foreground Eileen’s queerness. Because when you fully accept something, there’s not much reason to keep calling attention to it. On that same Kickstarter page, Allen references Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong’s concept of ‘radical okayness’, ‘a radical new realization of being okay’ as a queer person. Which indeed seems to apply to Eileen and the way the film presents them. At least, it is the feeling I ended up with as a viewer: although the situation is quite exceptional and maybe even extreme, Eileen is okay and is doing okay.
It is interesting to compare Cisco Kid with a short item on Eileen that was shot for Vice in 2019. First of all, because that item is more journalistic and you get information that you don’t get in Cisco Kid. Like exactly how cold and hot it gets in winter and summer, when Cisco was built and abandoned et cetera. Practical stuff, concrete facts. Journalism. Allen however, who counts Kelly Reichardt among her influences, is going for a much more timeless approach. For the feel of the place. Less close-up interview and more wide shots of Eileen and their dog walking through this abandoned town in the middle of a vast desert. Less specific, more universal. Less here and now and more a meditation on time and space. “Something I’ve noticed out here is that you can’t help but live with the past. Things that have happened here before”, Eileen muses at one point. “You’re not really starting over. You’re continuing something. Hopefully improving it.”
The comparison is also interesting because Vice reports how Eileen at first didn’t dare hang their rainbow flag outside in “very conservative”, “very religious” Utah. And how an armed trucker who left their property only after much arguing got them so scared they couldn’t sleep for a week. “When I first came out here, my biggest worry was: am I going to die?”
These things aren’t mentioned in Cisco Kid. Is that because the film wants to paint a positive picture of a queer person doing something special, succeeding against the odds? Because of an agenda? Maybe. But you could equally claim that Vice focusses too much on the negative. Even when someone does something as extraordinary as rebuilding a ghost town by themselves, Vice still has to go for that journalistic trope that, yes, this is America and no, not everyone is gay-friendly. Which you can also report about Chicago.
I think there are valid arguments for Allen to accentuate the positive, the fact that Eileen has done something no one else has. And when Cisco Kid shows the rainbow flag flying proudly above Cisco at the end, that is also a fact and, one could argue, more noteworthy than Eileen’s earlier hesitance – even from a journalistic standpoint.
To return to the question of why Eileen is doing this, my personal sense is ultimately: because they are Eileen. Because of their character, their personality. They really do seem to belong here, doing this, rebuilding Cisco in their own image. When they say “It’s fun!”, I believe them.
And Cisco is indeed growing. There is actually an Artists Residency now, which probably only started (if I understand the different Instagram timelines correctly) after Allen stopped filming. But Allen, who filmed for three years, does show how Cisco evolved so quickly that Eileen was able to start renting out Airbnb cabins – very basic ones, yes, but lovely (and not available at the time of writing). Which provided Eileen with the income they needed for further renovations. And for repairing their car if it would ever break down.
So it really looks like they’ve done it. They have made their own home, they have created their own place in the world. If it takes, as they say, a village to raise a kid, Cisco Kid shows that sometimes, all it takes is a kid to raise a village.
US, 2021, 90 minutes
Director Emily Kaye Allen
Producers Elise McCave, Shannon Fitzpatrick
Cinematography Emily Kaye Allen
Editing Emily Kaye Allen
Sound Duncan Clark
Music Yma Sumac, Cat Power
With Eileen Muza, Joe Bell, Sallie Hodges
