Never trust a documentary!

I make no secret of my love of documentaries, and I assure you I'll be back here enthusing about them again shortly, but for now I thought I'd take a pop at them. In the interests of fairness and all that.

The trigger for today's chat was the Oscar-nominated documentary ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, which tells a scary story of how a few shady individuals managed to rip off a whole lot of people, pocket huge sums for themselves and drive a couple of America's largest companies into the ground. But then you watch the news, so I guess you know how it went.

The opening of the film features a reconstruction of sorts based on the suicide of one of the parties involved in the Enron affair. I don't question the inclusion of this scene because I think it's a bad decision artistically, nor because it's in bad taste (it's not, and it's not shown in close-up or anything like that). What struck me was that, while clearly a reconstruction, it was not explicitly described as such. That in turn made me question whether or not anything else I was watching had been fabricated in any way.

It's a similar reaction to the one I experienced when watching Werner Herzog's GRIZZLY MAN, a superb film about Timothy Treadwell, a guy who went into the mountains for several summers to live with bears (under the impression that he was helping them - the viewer can decide if that's the case or not) only to end up being killed and eaten (along with his girlfriend) by one of those same animals.

What I took issue with in that particular film was some of the interview footage featuring a couple of Treadwell's friends. Without there being anything particular that I could put my finger on, it just didn't feel right. The interviews felt scripted, or staged, or something. It was like the people being interviewed were either acting or at least playing up for the camera and as a result the interviews felt false somehow - a little too theatrical.

The upshot of these two incidents was that I once again found myself questionning the validity of some of the events shown or described in documentaries and how, with the rise in popularity at the box office of such films, more and more people could be duped by unscrupulous filmmakers using the documentary format to present their own views, safe in the knowledge that many members of the audience will accept what they see without question.

Two of the recent documentary successes at the box office illustrate this point. Morgan Spurlock's SUPER SIZE ME was a deserved success but its central conceit of having a person eat nothing but McDonalds' meals every day for a month was a somewhat extreme representation of the truth; and Michael Moore's FAHRENHEIT 9/11 was an enjoyable and welcome shot at the Bush administration but was clearly more about Moore's views than an objective look at anything.

These are films that just massage the truth slightly - but there are other examples that, while nobody is likely to believe them, illustrate perfectly how well the documentary format can be mimicked.

I'm thinking for example of the Guest/Shearer/McKean vehicles - the most famous being THIS IS SPINAL TAP, but a personal favourite of mine being A MIGHTY WIND (think SPINAL TAP but with folk music replacing heavy metal). Both are too funny to be accepted as a real documentary (or at least you'd think so - but some people did accept SPINAL TAP as being real on its first release) but they both do an incredible job of duplicating the documentary format.

At the other end of the "mockumentary" scale lies the work of Peter Watkins. Taking the idea of a documentary crew covering situations that they really couldn't cover, Watkins crafted some unforgettable films that, if not for the events they covered, could easily have been accepted as truth. Whether it be the documentary look at CULLODEN, his depiction of a nuclear strike on Britain in the Oscar-winning and controversial THE WAR GAME or his acclaimed look at reality TV gone wrong (long before the term was even known) in a futuristic American police state in PUNISHMENT PARK, Watkins used the full potential of the documentary format to make some truly special films. But he also demonstrated how plausible it was that the format could be used to show something other than the truth.

There are no shortages of other examples of this fiction masquerading as truth: there was the 80s Halloween made-for-TV spookfest GHOSTWATCH, which caught out a number of unsuspecting viewers, thanks to the inclusion of such honest folks as Sarah Greene and Michael Parkinson; the BBC's April Fool gag about the "spaghetti tree"; the Coen brothers lent some extra credibility to their Oscar-winning film FARGO with an on-screen credit proclaiming that the film was based on a true story (it wasn't); and in the shockumentary MONDO CANE 2, Prosperi and Jacopetti portrayed several stunning images of cultures from across the globe including the legendary incident of the protesting Asian monk who deliberately set himself on fire - without informing the audience that this particular scene was actually an elaborately staged reconstruction.

I was going to cunningly illustrate my point about people accepting lies if presented in a suitably truthful-looking way by adding in a reference halfway through this blog entry to a completely fictional film - but I'm too nice, and I'm sure I've made my point without needing to stoop to such lengths to dupe you (although I hope I've now got you questionning whether or not I did).

So next time you're watching a fascinating documentary I hope you enjoy it, but just ask yourself who made it and why. And if it mentions anything about a spaghetti tree, be extra vigilant...

This blog entry was based on a true story.