EC Online Response 1

Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture is made up of “webs of significance” people create for themselves is actually a useful way to think about Minding the Gap. Geertz argues that culture is not just behavior or tradition but a whole system of meaning people use to interpret their lives. When I look at the film through that lens, it feels a lot like an ethnographic study of a Midwestern skate community. Liu is not just filming Zack, Keire, and himself as individuals. He is showing how their lives make sense only when you understand the cultural environment they grew up in and the shared symbols they use to navigate it. That is where Geertz’s idea of “thick description” shows up in the film.

Skateboarding is the easiest place to see this. A thin description would say the boys skate to escape their stressful homes. A thick description pays attention to how skating becomes a whole language between them. It is a ritual they return to whenever everything else feels unstable. The long shots of them drifting through empty parking lots or cruising down the street tell us more about their emotional world than anything they say in interviews. They express friendship, freedom, and identity through motion. Geertz would probably argue that skating is the symbolic system that shapes how they interpret their own growing up, and the film treats it that way.

Nichols also helps make sense of how Liu approaches all of this. In the participatory mode, the filmmaker becomes part of the situation instead of pretending to be invisible. Nichols says this mode creates a shared space where the filmmaker’s presence influences how people act on camera and how meaning is created. Liu is very much inside the world he is documenting. He asks the questions behind the camera, he talks about his own past, and he shares experiences with the other characters. That connection shapes the film’s tone. It also makes the cultural interpretation stronger because Liu understands the world from the inside.

One scene that stands out is when Liu talks to Keire about his father. It is not a detached interview. Both of them grew up with complicated and often painful relationships to discipline and authority. Because Liu has lived through similar experiences, he does not need to ask Keire to explain the emotional logic behind it. He already knows. Nichols would describe this as participatory filmmaking, but it also lines up with how Geertz thought ethnography should work. Meaning is easier to interpret when the person doing the interpreting is part of the culture they are analyzing.

The film also treats the boys’ personal choices as reflections of larger cultural pressures. When Zack struggles with fatherhood, it is not presented as a random failure. The film shows how he grew up around ideas about masculinity, responsibility, and control that he still carries with him. Geertz’s theory fits here because it emphasizes that people understand themselves through the cultural systems they inherit. Zack’s behavior makes more sense when you see it inside that web of meaning. The film never excuses him, but it gives enough context to understand why he interprets the world the way he does.

Minding the Gap works well with Geertz because it treats culture as lived experience. It is not an abstract concept or something you only see in big public rituals. It is in the everyday actions, habits, and emotional patterns that shape how people think and behave. By placing himself inside the story and letting the boys define their own experiences, Liu ends up creating something that feels very close to thick description. The film shows how culture shapes them and how they try to shape it back.