‘The Sixth’ Recounts the Day a Storm Struck the Capitol (Review)
"The Sixth" delivers an urgent eyewitness chronicle of the Capitol under siege from people who feared for their lives that day.
“It was the crowd that was the weapon,” observes D.C. Metro police officer Daniel Hodges, in his harrowing account of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol in the gripping new documentary The Sixth.
Hodges was on the front line that faced the surging mob outside the Capitol, and inside the narrow West Tunnel entrance, where he was nearly crushed between a door frame and the intruders determined to breach the building.
“We were comically outnumbered,” he says, as archival footage details scenes of relentless attack by a crowd thousands deep wielding pipes, poles, bear mace, batons, and unbridled rage.
The officer’s testimony — direct-to-camera, and corroborated consistently by video sourced from all sides by Oscar-winning filmmakers Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine — is among the film’s most compelling. Each of the six main subjects interviewed offers a riveting first-person, “I was there, and, Hallelujah, made it home” play-by-play of a day that will live in infamy.
The Fines and their crack editing team weave the individual, occasionally overlapping, threads into a tense narrative right out of a disaster movie — or a zombie movie George Romero might have dreamed up.
This actually happened, though. The Vice President was in the building. So was the Speaker. And just about every member of both chambers of Congress.
They were gathered there to perform the solemn task of certifying the votes for President. As Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin puts it, “We weren’t aware of the medieval-style fighting going on outside the building.”
Officers Hodges and Christina Laury evince the awe and terror of defending the Capitol from the storm, while also radiating residual anger that anyone would deny or downplay what they experienced.
Congressman Raskin, and Erica Loewe, former staffer for Congressman James Clyburn, capture the event from the frightened point of view of those forced to barricade themselves inside offices, hiding from extremely motivated trespassers who had not come for a quiet, contemplative chat.
“They were closing in on us,” Loewe recalls, as she describes being told to pack a bag and prepare to run for her life. “Then they got inside.” And we see exactly what she’s describing through photos entered into the Congressional record and video that has already helped convict folks of the various crimes they often recorded themselves.
The Sixth — much like HBO’s 2021 doc Four Hours at the Capitol — presents a strong rebuttal to the gaslighters who deem this violent onslaught a “normal tourist visit.” No one here is talking about tourists, least of all the photographer, and D.C. resident, Mel D. Cole, who was embedded the entire day among the rioting crowd of Confederate flag-waving Stop the Stealers.
In addition to capturing some of the most powerful and startling images shown in the film, Cole also shot in-the-moment interviews, including with one avowed insurrectionist, a seemingly polite middle-aged lady, who declares, “I’m prepared to die today.” Recalling this nice woman wrapped in a Trump flag, Cole says he couldn’t believe his ears. He had not come to the Capitol prepared to die: “I was scared for my fucking life.”
Cole wasn’t the only one. Raskin and his family had held a burial service for his beloved son Tommy just the day before. The congressman’s daughter, and his other daughter’s husband, had joined him at the Capitol on the sixth, excited and honored to be part of history, and witness our democracy in action.
Raskin, separated from them in the chaos, spent the day frantic with worry, fearful for their safety, while his daughter and son-in-law, cowering under a desk inside the office of Congressman Steny Hoyer, definitely witnessed history.
In the eyes of Robert J. Contee, who was then four days into his job as D.C. Metro’s Chief of Police — and, notably, left the MPD for a job at the FBI two years later — we all witnessed history. American democracy was under attack that day, as was the city of Washington. Both sustained damage and still survived, but so did the strain of madness that rallied the storm up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps.
The Sixth (★★★★☆) is available for purchase on Prime Video, AppleTV, GooglePlay, and YouTube.
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