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| Does Doug Benson really suffer from complete retrograde amnesia? |
Warning: Spoilers abound in this article. I would urge you to watch both Catfish and Unknown White Male before reading on. And if you don't understand the title of this article, add This is Spinal Tap to your list, too.
Documentarians, it is said, value and seek truth. In recent weeks, I've seen a couple of challenging docos that made me question the motives of their subjects and film-makers. The first is a relatively recent film called Catfish (which Luke Elliott and I discussed to some length in a recent podcast episode), about a young man who forms an intimate online relationship with a distant family via Facebook. When he springs a surprise visit on the aforementioned family, he learns the hard way the dangers of living your emotional life on the internet. The second film is Unknown White Male, a documentary about Doug Benson, a man who falls victim to complete retrograde amnesia. He 'awakens' one night on the New York subway system, unable to remember anything about who he is. He has forgotten all of his life experiences, has forgotten who his friends and loved ones are, and basically has to rediscover himself and the world from scratch. When he meets his parents, family and friends, he feels no emotional connection to them apart from mere curiosity at the machinations of his previous life.
The directors and producers of both Catfish and Unknown White Male assure us that they are 'real' documentaries -- by 'real', I mean that they purport to present factual events that occurred to people that are not acting for the cameras. Were the cameras not present, these events would have unfolded exactly as they did.
Or would they? While I found both films riveting -- Catfish for its car-crash like fascination with the psychology of lying on the internet, Unknown White Male for the perplexing questions it raised about consciousness and the sense of self -- there was something slightly fishy about the pair of them. To be fair, I'm sceptically inclined anyway, but something seemed off in both films. I don't mean this article to be a point-by-point dissection of the veracity of these films (I've included a reference list at the bottom of the article if you're interested), but it did seem peculiar to me just how neatly Catfish unfolded. The camera is present at absolutely every important 'moment' of the story, and a final articulate monologue that explains the film's title comes from the unlikeliest of 'characters' -- a man who up until that point seemed, as Kevin Smith put it in an episode of his podcast Plus One, "a sandwich or two shy of a full picnic".
Similarly, with Unknown White Male, throughout the entire movie I caught myself wondering, "Has this guy really forgotten all of his life experiences and memories?" The talking head scenes in which Doug describes how it feels to completely forget who you are almost feel like evidence hearings, as if he is defending his extraordinary claim. He begins to film his own experiences as he re-learns about the world and re-develops his relationship with himself and his family. We see his excitement as he sees snow for the first time, falls in love for the first time, and discovers the vast diversity of the planet's countries, cultures, food, people, and so forth. It's almost as though he's an alien with a clean slate, ready to learn all he can about the human race. All of this, as in Catfish, unfolds magnificently. It's a thrilling movie, but it does all feel awfully convenient, although Andy Dusfresne might remind us that if the films are innocent of fraud, it is decidedly inconvenient that it all looks like a set-up.
Why am I (and much of the internet) so intent on revealing everything to be a fake? Suspicion of the veracity of documentaries is certainly nothing new. Orson Welles, way back in 1973, masterfully demonstrated how easily audiences can be duped into trusting documentaries in his F for Fake. But today, this jaded cynicism and refusal to accept anything at face value seems to pervade everything. I mean, did anyone really think that I'm Still Here was real even before it was released?
Did anyone really think this was for real?
I partly blame Michael Moore, and partly blame the internet. Michael Moore's films, I think, are terrific. They're entertaining as hell, make audiences keen to learn more about the issues they raise, and Moore is one of the few people that can work the 'middle-aged, fat guy wearing baseball cap' look. I would hesitate to call his films documentaries. I prefer the term 'cinematic essay' or 'selective polemic' for his projects. Moore himself admits to manipulating facts and figures to suit the purposes of whatever his agenda is, and there are examples of this strewn in all of his films. A classic example was the massaging of Charlton Heston's exclamation of "From my cold, dead hands!" while addressing an NRA meeting. Moore shows this footage directly after a vignette about a young child killed by a gun at a primary school in a small town that was slated to host an NRA meeting. Watching the film, the uninformed viewer would infer that Heston's defiant address was delivered in the same town, just weeks after a young child was lost thanks to gun deregulation... Thus making him look like a total jerk. In reality, Heston delivered that line at an NRA convention months before the incident took place, and the NRA convention held in the town in question was a much more subdued affair, out of respect for the dead. If you watch closely, you can even see Heston's tie change between cuts.
The internet also shoulders some of the responsibility for this resurgence of scepticism. Who could blame us? The world is now constantly inundated with videos purporting to be amazing, real-life events caught on camera. So many of these turn out to be fake. Like all of these. Even the real videos are... well, downright unbelievable. Of course, manipulation of facts a la Michael Moore is one thing. Elaborately setting up a fictional narrative in the guise of revealing truth (which, after all, is what documentaries are supposed to do), is another. Now, after the advent of I'm Still Here, there is precedent for a documentary doing this. In the Internet age, someone is always trying to pull one over on us, and our collective rationalism and scepticism has adapted to this. Now, nothing is taken at face value. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I don't think it really matters whether Catfish or Unknown White Male are elaborate hoaxes. They're riveting watches, and the reflections they prompted in me were real, regardless of whether their content is or not. Mark Twain, possibly the most quotable person in human history (maybe except for George W. Bush), once said "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story." If Catfish and Unknown White Male really do misrepresent the truth, I at least commend them for doing it with style.
Links worth visiting about the veracity of Catfish and Unknown White Male:
Catfish: Real or Fake? It's a Fake... Sort of
Catfish filmmakers respond to "Is it Real?" Debate
www.iscatfishfake.com
Unknown White Male: Extraordinary Film or Hoax? (editor's note: can't it be both?)
Roger Ebert: Is this documentary a fake? (Unknown White Male)
Is it a good doc or merely a mock? (follow up to the above article)
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