A new view of Emily

Staid and stiff, remote and formal. These are the qualities that most often define “literary documentaries”: pretentious filmed inquiries rather than insightful investigations.

“Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson,” airing tonight on PBS, takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem. An exploration of the writer from a decidedly different viewpoint, “Gun” hits a lot more than the pro forma documentary. This film by Jim Wolpaw and Steve Gentile, part of the network’s Independent Lens series, has been screened at several festivals and takes an eclectic, scattershot approach in aiming at Dickinson.

There is something of Tom Stoppard’s play “Indian Ink” (which subversively turns the traditional form of biography on itself to comment on the difficulty of capturing a life); something of Ross McElwee’s nonfiction film “Sherman’s March” (a movie that sets out to chronicle Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s conquering campaign but quickly veers into a wry personal odyssey through McElwee’s love life); and maybe even something of Vladimir Nabokov’s novella “Pale Fire” (an eviscerating vamp on critical vanities and those who devote lifetimes to art’s unraveling).

In short, “Loaded Gun” registers as a dandy discourse on the nature of documentary film, its very structure challenging the notion of historical certainty. “Gun” delivers Dickinson in new and novel ways, prompting us to see the poet as more than a 19th century poster girl for America’s Most Tortured Artist, a tormented icon in white anguishing over God, love and immortality.

While a purposefully stereotypical narrative does surface periodically, scored to the “cultured” strains of Bach, its presence serves to underscore the overall off-kilter nature of “Gun.”

For instance, viewers would be hard-pressed to name another nonfiction film about Dickinson that casts her as a second baseman deftly tagging out a runner as he charges her and the base. Other irregular elements include an alternative band pumping out Dickinson lines to a jagged beat, and a clutch of young actresses auditioning to be Miss Emily while offering unscripted answers to such questions as “Why don’t you ever leave your house?” “Are you in love with Death?” and “Do you have a problem with God?”

Additional antics include a bickering panel of shrinks who delve into Dickinson’s shadow-self to divine what made her tick and caused her tics. Also heard from are Julie Harris, who appeared as Dickinson in the one-woman play “The Belle of Amherst”; U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who reads a work of his that describes stripping Dickinson of her clothes; and Polly Longsworth, a writer who has probed Dickinson’s domestic life.

And, yes, we get to hear Dickinson’s poetry, which arrives with vigorous force. Wolpaw and Gentile’s “Loaded Gun” is a postmodern blast -- funny as well as fulfilling, amusing as well as illuminating. Here Dickinson soars like a butterfly and roars like a B-1 bomber.

*

‘Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson’

Where: KCET

When: 10:30-11:30 tonight.

Rating: The network has rated the program TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children)

Producers Steve Gentile, Jim Wolpaw. Writer and director, Jim Wolpaw.