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.

Flint, Michigan is like the sheer majority of towns (I may even go as far as saying every town) in America. Crime is present, but few people actually feel the effects of it. There is a small percentage of debilitating poverty, a small percentage of wealthy people, and the sheer majority are doing just well enough and will continue to do so forever. Things are okay, and slowly getting even better. If a filmmaker did take a camera around Flint with no agenda in mind, the end result would inspire as much political action as the average family's vacation movies.

While a complete picture of real life may not make for good media, voters and thus politicians are supposed to enact policy according to real life and real issues- most importantly, the factual rarity or frequency of issues. Unfortunately, our culture has increasingly tasked the very media, documentary filmmakers, and activists- who inherently must focus on the most extreme and narrow evidence of issues- with both inspiring and laying down the entire framework for change.

To the masses, life keeps getting worse, something has to change, and thus laws are written. The flaw here is that life doesn't keep getting worse. By nearly every social and economic indicator, life keeps getting better. Exponentially so. At the same time (ironically, often because of this), media becomes more omnipresent. More news channels, more blogs, more documentaries. With that, we're tricked into thinking that the underlying negative issues which the media focuses on are also increasing.

Culture often ignores this somewhat complex yet subtle dichotomy. When it comes to socio-political documentaries, we tend to absorb them in one of only two ways: viewers either wholeheartedly agree with the underlying agenda and thus believe every word of it, or they don't and thus critique the work for its purely factual errors and falsehoods.

This, however, misses the issue. Michael Moore and Michael Wilson may or may not shade the truth here and there. The more important flaw is that while most of their issues probably do exist somewhere, in some small form- they don't exist nearly to the magnitude that one is led to believe.

Just as the Faces of Death series forgot to tell you that death isn't often as gruesome as their picture portrays it, political documentaries often forget to tell you that the issues within often will never affect you or the country to any significant level.

In the end, though, people do vote, make decisions, and demand action based off of the fractional vision of the world you see in documentaries and the media. Thus, the real unheard voices in our culture are minority of people who have relegated themselves to the mundane and boring universe of cause and effect, facts, and a reality that's rarely great or treacherous.