With the expansion of the importance of political documentaries on our culture, and conflict has arisen: the dichotomy between the sensational (and often treacherous) vision of the world as seen through this new media, and the realities of the mundane world of factual cause-and-effect. To the masses, life keeps getting worse and something must be done about it. Reality- though mundane- actually shows us something different.
It is as if my online video rental service likes to play tricks on me. This last week, they sent me two of the same documentary DVD's. Now, they didn't each have the same title- one was entitled "Michael Moore Hates America" and the other was entitled "Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction."
After a few hours wading through "real life" situations calculated to the point of dramatization, quotes spliced far beyond their context, and edits that read like a script, I realized that for all intents and purposes both of these "documentaries about documentaries" were really the same damn movie.
In the Moore movie, director Michael Wilson attempts to debunk a few of Michael Moore's documentaries through his own supposedly straightforward and truthful investigative filmmaking. In the Faces of Death expose, the original "Faces" director somehow attempts to scrutinize the legitimacy of his own movies through supposedly straightforward and truthful investigative filmmaking.
When examining these two films (and the hundreds of others like them) relative to our culture as a whole, we begin to see a perilous condition that may help explain a lot about the way the modern masses digest and shape our political and socio-economic landscape. Life in our culture is generally good- or, at the most pessimistic, just normal. Fine. Manageable.
However, that's not exciting enough. Fact-based reality has become far too mundane to hold most people's interest in politics and social issues. Thus, we'd rather policy be based on a mix of sensationalism and an edited version of reality, focused only the worst or best effects of any issue.
Okay, so documentaries are often journalistically corrupt and blinded by agenda. Big deal. Well, it does become a big deal when you look at the reasons why, realizing that these reasons apply- acceleratedly so- to most forms of media, which in turn is almost always the initial impetus for political action.
You see, real life is boring. Or, better put: real life is, in actuality, rather sparse on disastrous social problems, downward trends, and all of the various issues that "make good stories." This is not to say issues don't exist- of course they do. This is also not to say that the incidents of socio-economic problems which are rare have no place in the national debate merely because of their rarity.
The missing piece of nearly every socio-political documentary or media exposé is disclosure of or information on the relative rarity of the underlying issue. Documentaries are supposed to show a slice of real life. While viewers expect to see only a slice, that does not absolve the filmmaker from explaining exactly how big the slice is relative to the proverbial whole pie.
Take, for example, the city of Flint, Michigan. Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" focuses on the areas of economic devastation supposedly caused by flaws in the free market exploited GM. Wilson's film makes an attempt at "balancing out" Moore's vision by showing the complete opposite: a safe city on the upswing where opportunity abounds because of policies like tax breaks. The reality is, however, that even by combining these two distinct angles one does not get anywhere near the complete picture. This is because the complete picture is, well, unremarkable.
