“By the Roots” Remembers Where it Came From and Where it Can Go
Madison Young’s film, By the Roots, opens with a voiceover monologue about consent. How the viewer, by choosing to sit down and watch the film, is a consenting, active member in the experience of the film. It’s the only moment the film breaks the fourth wall in this way, but it sets expectations and serves as a means of rewriting what it is to be a viewer. By the Roots, based on Young’s 2014 memoir, is about memory and identity, their intrinsic connection to each other, and how the only way to move forward is to stop running from the past.
When the audience meets Madison (Emily Robinson), she’s a gallerist in San Francisco. It’s the early-aughts and she’s living the sort of sexually free lifestyle she never could have fathomed growing up in rural, conservative Ohio. This new life of hers threatens to crumble with a phone call from her mother (Brittany Blum), who asks Madison to come home for a visit. To return to Ohio means Madison must confront the aspects of her childhood she has long tried to keep buried. Still, when her mother says she’ll be selling the house, Madison feels drawn to visit one last time.
It’s strange to have a connection to people and places that were formative, yet now feel foreign. When Madison was younger, her name was Tina. Maybe that’s a simple change, but it shows how much distance she wanted to put between herself and the place and that family she came from. In every young person’s life, there’s a desire to forget everything about their adolescence that caused them pain. For a while, that’s freeing, but the past will always creep back in. Like it or not, we are the culmination of the life we’ve experienced. That’s why memories can be powerful, like the ones in By the Roots. We all have to learn how to turn the past into something we can acknowledge. That’s the first step.
Courtesy of Empress in Lavender Media
By the Roots is a film fully rooted in the world of BDSM and kink, a space the real-life Madison has found community in. For quite a few people, the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise was a first introduction to this scene, but many who are active in BDSM and kink have said it’s a pretty bad first impression. What By the Roots excels at is answering the questions many viewers likely have, based on their limited knowledge. How could something like bondage be liberating to the one who’s being tied up? There are a few voiceovers from Young’s memoir that give the viewer a glimpse into her headspace in a way that explains the lived experience of a feminist, queer sex worker. In the film, Madison’s mom asks how a feminist could be doing the things she’s doing. To her, it’s incomprehensible that there is liberation in choosing what to do with one’s own body.
“I won’t be afraid to dream,” young Madison promises her diary. By the Roots ends in the same place it began: in a forest in Ohio with a shovel. In the beginning, Madison’s dad was planting a tree. In the present, adult Madison digs for that diary. Life is a circuitous means of digging up our past while also planting our future. Young’s voice in By the Roots is so strong, not only because of the script and direction, but in the community she has entrusted to take ownership of the past to shape the future.
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