Suddenly garnering renewed attention after a recent stint playing on the Le Cinéma Club website, the mostly forgotten 2002 documentary The Hamptons seems, at first, like a drastic departure from the movies for which its director, Barbara Kopple, is most celebrated. Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1990) were urgent, still-infuriating accounts of small-town labor-organizing efforts. Aside from some moments dedicated to the experiences of the working class — weather-beaten fishermen, career waitresses seeking out hopefully tip-generous seasonal gigs — The Hamptons relishes, by contrast, most of its attention on those belonging to the same social stratum as those earlier movies’ villainous oppressors. But though the nearly three-hour-long project was commissioned by the typically mainstream-friendly ABC, Kopple’s gaze is no less subliminally critical or class-conscious than it was in her defining films.

Shot between May and September 2001, The Hamptons was split into two parts for TV. There’s nothing like a cliffhanger dangling between its “halves,” though; there’s no real narrative velocity compared to Kopple’s better-known work. The compulsively watchable documentary has, instead, a collage-like structure, its beginning and end demarcated simply by the season’s arc more than by emotional evolution. Restlessly jumping from one subject to the next, the movie crosses paths with widely known public figures, such as, say, the Hilton family, or hyperlocal stars looking for more, like the waitress-slash-singer-songwriter Nancy Atlas. When The Hamptons is focused on uppercrusters, we can feel the existential frictionlessness the rich can afford to buy. When focused on have-nots, the weariness is palpable. 

Full of unflattering juxtapositions — a “God Bless America”-soundtracked fireworks show drowning out discussions of a power-drunk publicist perhaps intentionally plowing down with her car 16 people outside a club; a scene of spoiled 20-somethings getting ready for the night immediately following a community meeting of comparatively poor Southamptoners worrying about water contamination — The Hamptons bears out an observation made by a full-time resident at the film’s start. “They destroy the very thing they come for,” he says of the seaside community’s perennial influx of wealthy summer visitors. “… They gradually change it to where they came from.”

From The Hamptons. All photography courtesy of Le Cinéma Club.

Some of The Hamptons’ touches suggest ABC-mandated additions. There are infrequent intrusions of bouncy, reality-show-esque music, unnecessary context-clarifying talking-head interviews with celebrities like Billy Joel and Alec Baldwin. But even those blips cannot dispel the overall feeling of waste or the chronic fatigue of perpetually showing off for the fellow status-obsessed, whether stemming from discussions of the importance of “trophy” houseguests or anything happening in relation to Hamptons magazine, whose then-publisher is in one moment seen trying to anxiously get, for instance, Spike Lee and Donald Trump to come to his sugary periodical’s latest shindig. (There are tingles of Schadenfreude-tinted pleasure when something in the nearly 25-year-old The Hamptons could be charged with “aging badly”; I laughed out loud when a bride-to-be spoke of wanting her wedding to look identical to one of Diddy’s now-infamous white parties — a desire she has no trouble making happen.) In The Hamptons, a place idealized as an escape from big-city life is flatly shown as a rat race of a different kind. Its real pathos largely flows from occasionally talked-to longtime residents who mourn the days when their backyard wasn’t a hotspot for sun-soaked revelry. 

In the recent New Yorker column that brought the movie’s Le Cinéma Club spotlight to my attention, writer Naomi Fry characterized it as “almost quaint” to see, among other things, its cast of characters oblivious to travesties soon to come (like, in the shorter term, 9/11, or the premature airplane death of the briefly seen Aaliyah), and to be introduced to so many faces largely untouched by plastic surgery, which has in recent years proliferated to the extent of some kinds of looks and procedures becoming equivalent to material luxury items. 

If there’s one thing the contempt-stoking The Hamptons made me feel positively about, its era’s dearth of cell phones and social media comes to mind. Even amid the scorn I felt for people treating themselves to dinners costlier than a couple rounds of grocery shopping and trust-funded youths carefreely clubbing, it was refreshing to see it all unmediated by portable screens, follower counts and post likes not yet having anything to do with one’s placement on a social hierarchy. In that way, the hell seen in The Hamptons can seem like heaven, too.