It's a Complex World

Oscar nominated documentary short from 1985

Hundreds of scholars and biographers have tried to explain the life and work of Emily Dickinson, but the famously reclusive poet remains an enigma. In LOADED GUN: Life, and Death, and Dickinson, stumped filmmaker Jim Wolpaw uses a decidedly unorthodox approach to create a documentary about the writer whose beautiful, haunting and cryptic poetry has never quite squared with her reputation as a sensitive spinster. Wolpaw's efforts to illuminate this ethereal subject - more than 150 years after her death - yield some hilariously frustrating results.