I used to watch a lot of movies when I taught down at Duke University. That was before newborns and post-tenure administrative responsibilities conspired to pummel my spare-time into bloody submission. Not that I’m complaining about my two kids or that promotion, especially since it is probably a little amazing that I can even boast of such changes at all given how many film screenings used to get squeezed into one of my average weeks back then. Of course, as a filmmaker and media ethnographer, it was all part of my job. That’s at least how I rationalized a schedule that was so arguably decadent.
One of the annual high points of my life in Durham, N.C., besides the Tobacco Road basketball showdowns and the pulled-pork delicacies, was the Full Frame Film Festival every April. Full Frame is a documentary film festival, all nonfiction films, and its advertising slogan prodded would-be attendees with one simple question: How Much Reality Can You Take?
And they really meant it.
Some of the documentaries they premiered were truly tough to watch, often brilliant, clearly powerful, but all the more difficult to stomach for the access they flaunted and sometimes seemingly abused. Films of parents videotaping their kids’ lives from birth to adulthood, almost as an alternative to actually raising them. Tales of teens working out their own angst-riddled sexual identities with confessionally raw first-person vulnerability. The terrifying realization of siblings who find out that they have lived all their lives (well into adulthood) with a mother that they didn’t really know, discovering a lifetime of hidden diaries in an attic that exposed the lie and pain she masked for decades. The films I’m remembering are moving and poignant, but they are also extremely personal, uncomfortably intimate, which makes them painful to watch and almost impossible not to. It seemed like a kind of filmic rubbernecking, watching lives crash and burn right before one’s eyes.
This weekend, NBC aired its documentary about Farrah Fawcett’s ongoing fight with anal cancer. It was gripping and disturbing on so many levels: her stubborn resilience, her son’s sincere secret, her boyfriend’s awkward pleas. I’ve heard some critics dismiss it all as a kind of slow-burn snuff film, an unethical and gratuitous exploitation of human tragedy. That may be too harsh, but I know what they are getting at.
We live in a Reality TV moment when everything can be (and often is) televisualized, the communicative equivalent of (and handmaiden to) contemporary global capitalism’s ubiquitous and totalizing logic. This logic allows for no outside. Everything can be bought and sold on the open market: debt, air, environmental fines, make-believe financial concoctions. In a similar way, everything can be Reality TV’d today: celebrities dancing badly, fictive roommates squabbling over something petty, and endlessly derivative examples of people losing weight and eating worms and battling addictions and swapping wives and dating Flava Flav and dating the person who dated Flava Flav and just about anything else we can plop in front of a mechanism for visual reproduction. But some people have asked that we draw a line at watching celebrities preparing themselves to die.
Filmmaker Marlon Riggs released Black Is, Black Ain’t, his final film, posthumously in 1994. It was his fearless and political attempt to document his own physical decline and eventual death from AIDS. We see his last moments in a hospital bed, too tired to do anything but rest and talk to the camera about his T-cell count. Some detractors called the Riggs film gratuitous, an elite version of the snuff film.
Of course, Riggs didn’t produce an actual snuff film, not in the way that the snuff films of urban legend are usually defined, and what NBC aired this past weekend also wasn’t a snuff film. But there was something about the network’s attempt to broadcast this terrifying story that did make for some surreal viewing. For instance, the commercial breaks during heart-wrenching sequences of Fawcett’s saga seemed like the height of media trivialization. Fawcett’s crying, the screen goes black, and a pitchman is hawking the latest flavored soft drink.
The positive spin, if there is one, would be that NBC’s commercial interruptions represent a form of refreshing honesty. Documentary films not shown on broadcast TV are also made for profit, but they can hide such commercialism behind unbroken narratives and the bedazzled pedestal of high art. The chopped-up Fawcett story places her harrowing plight in the pre-fabbed time chunks carved up for TV advertisers. It seemed so completely inappropriate. I watched for about 10 minutes, got to a commercial break, and decided that I couldn’t watch anymore. But there is also something uncannily accurate about such a rendition of things. For better or worse, it might do a perfect job of capturing the contradictory and frenetic nature of our contemporary social order. Maybe the most real TV puts such underlying commercialism right in the middle of the story, even when it doesn’t ostensibly belong, the pretext conspicuously sutured to the text itself.
