Endangered 2010: The Fictional Documentary
I’m Still Here
Casey AFFLECK
Catfish
Henry JOOST
Ariel SCHULMAN
Exit Through the Gift Shop
BANKSY
Netflix has discovered my true relationship to documentaries. Perusing the selection of those that I have not watched yet, I realized suddenly that the program designed to predict my reaction to these films had, without fail, predicted them all at three stars. That is to say, the rating in the exact middle of all possible ratings. Netflix knew that I liked documentaries fine, but not enough to even compare to the joy I get out of good fictional films.
In a way, I think this is a product of the documentary genre over-determining itself. There became two standard bearers of the documentary formula: the talking head-heavy subjective exposé and the cinema verité objective gaze. I am not unaware of the many distinctions that have been used to define films within these two organizing elements, but in general documentary filmmaking has divided itself in half on an axis that defines the films’ relation to the truth. In other words, is the truth presented in the recollection of true events, or in the appearance of a completely objective portrayal of the events in question?
This is why I am delighted that documentaries in the year 2010 took a step back from this division and began to again re-ask questions that began with the documentary genre. Questions such as, is it possible to represent truth in film? What is the relationship of the documentary to the subject matter it attempts to represent? What fealty does a director of a documentary owe his/her documentary subject? The difference between the way these questions were asked at the genesis of the documentary form and how they were asked in the previous year is, the best documentary directors of 2010 managed to weave these questions into the formal content of their films. In other words, the documentaries themselves presented reality as if it were fiction, and a nervous movie going audience was left to wonder what (if anything) was really true.
“I do not know how the camera came into my hand,” the vintage clothes huckster Thierry Guetta says at the beginning of Exit Through the Gift Shop. It is, in retrospect, the perfect line to address the role of the camera in a standard fictional film. Usually, it is as if we, the audience, have somehow found a camera in our hands that is privy to the private lives of the characters we come to know through the action of the film. Exit Through the Gift Shop dramatizes this trope within the nonfiction genre, which is one among many reasons the film is suspected of being a fake.
The fact that the distinction between genuine and fake became the critical trope du jour for Exit, Catfish, and I’m Still Here demonstrates both the populist fetishization of “the true” and the desperate need for art that brings that fetish into the light of day. The watershed moment of my life in the building public attraction to the “facts” came when Oprah lead the witch hunt against James Frey, author of a partially fictionalized memoir. The entire event, although hilarious in all its aspects, was brought into sharp focus by David Sedaris, who summarized it by saying, “I can’t believe the drug addict lied to me.” Of course, Sedaris had his own ass to cover; the same reading public that was outraged that the hopeless drifter they so gleefully pitied in A Million Little Pieces was fake could probably be trusted to be horrified that an impish, gay Dorothy Parker embellished his familial eccentricities.
In film this predominant attraction to the true is even more pronounced because the visual record of events is more charismatic in its appeal to the truth. One need only think of the difference in a court of law between video evidence and written testimony to verify that. It’s for this reason that documentaries in 2010 began what I hope is a growing trend of making people question the need for “truth” as such. Watching the brothers in Catfish investigate their way into the spiraling madness of a single woman, only to find two primordially defected brothers who threaten to smash your head in with a pot, was as rewarding as any fictionally plotted film of the year. The same could be said of moments in I’m Still Here (a bewildered Joaquin Phoenix re-watches his own bizarre David Letterman appearance) and Exit Through the Gift Shop (Mr. Brainwash shouting out ludicrous sums for paintings he hasn’t produced yet). The end product of these films is not a political critique, not an appeal to reason, and not a cause to stop and ponder how lucky we truly are. Rather, they present what an engaged movie audience can usually only hope for; engaging films that contain Truth.
