Documentaries Have Been Very Disappointing

Disclaimer: I watched a large number of the documentaries discussed in this article quite a long time ago, so some of the figures may be a little off.

I watch a lot of ABC. My housemate and I have agreed not to get ABC 24 because we’d be transfixed to the screen. One of the great things about the ABC is how many documentaries they show. Between the hours of 11 and 2 they pretty much run documentaries and documentary style programming every day. Sometimes it’s on the dam buster raids, other times on archeologically unearthing the world of the druids, and still other times about contemporary political issues. There’s also the wealth of quality in depth journalism, but that’s beside the point. What I actually want to talk about is why so many mass market documentaries, like Fahrenheit 9/11, The War You Don’t See and Inside Job are just total shit.

The things that bother me about these documentaries can be collected under two headings – I feel deceived and I’m being preached to. Inside Job is perhaps not as bad as the other two, but it still had significant shortcomings. The deceptive elements of these films are varied, but let’s start with eliciting emotional responses. If you think that you’ve got a good point to make, make the point, don’t try to cloud my perception and reasoning faculties with unnecessary emotional scenes. Fahrenheit 9/11 probably had the most gratuitous incident of this kind of mongering, when a women whose son had just died was filmed for a long time bawling and screaming out the front of her house. Is this necessary? I suppose it could be argued that Moore wanted to communicate the very real emotional cost of the war, but everyone knows that war is shit. Nobody is denying that war causes untold emotional damage. Unfortunately so did Saddam Hussein. I need reasons, not jarring scenes.

Another version of this emotional targeting is the tendency of modern popular documentaries to frequently moralise and adopt a ‘holier than though’ attitude.

I serious concern of mine is that when watching these documentaries I regular get the feeling that the reporter is not being 100% honest with me. As my housemate put it:

I don’t how I’m being deceived, but something isn’t right here.

This suspicion was driven home recently when I watched Michael Moore Hates America, which was also a bit biased, but which confirmed that Moore at least, frequently doctors and sets up footage to deliver misleading information. For example, the infamous opening sequence of Bowling for Columbine, a documentary critiquing gun laws in America, in which Moore enters a bank, opens an account and gets a free gun, was a set up. In the scene, Moore asks the bank how many guns they have in their vault, and they answer 400. He makes it seem like you can just open an account and get a gun on the spot. He also implies that the guns are kept on site. In fact the guns are kept in a different state, and you usually need to wait three weeks for clearance. Moore however, telephoned ahead to make sure that the gun was on site before he went in to collect it. Now I can understand that Moore wants to make a point, but the gun control situation in America is surely rife with enough material to preclude the need for such a doctored scene. In any case, if your position is strong enough then you shouldn’t need to present false information to make a telling case.

Another issue is the omission of certain key bits of information. For example, the most disturbing thing in Inside Job came at the end of the doco, when the narrator pointed out that the Obama Administration had re-hired many of the individuals involved in the global financial collapse. It neglected however, to spend any time at all explaining why this might have happened, and you’re left to assume that it is because Obama is a cunt, which I assume is not the case. If you want to bring intelligent, educated people over to your side you simply need to present a thoroughly reasonable argument and they’ll fall like dominoes. Unfortunately these documentaries seem to be more interested in appealing to our propensity to feel incensed and better than someone else.

The degree of contempt for thoroughly reasonable arguments is most apparent in John Pilger’s documentary on the media (The War You Don’t See). In a series of interviews with senior BBC editors and journalists, Pilger accuses them of being biased and poor news providers because they presented the official position of Israel following several incidents in the Palestine regions. What I was left with however, was the impression that Pilger was a reverse bigot, because the BBC quite reasonably pointed out that their job is to present the news, and a big part of that is the Israeli explanation of why they behaved like they did. In addition, they pointed out that there is no ‘official commentator’ for the Palestinians the way there is for the Israelis, but that while this is unfortunate, it is not their job to appoint someone commentator. I was particularly struck when one of the journalists confronted Pilger with the fact the BBC did report everything he accused them of not reporting once the information was available. For example, Pilger was highly critical of the media’s handling of the false evidence presented to the UN by Colin Powell, but the BBC pointed out that this evidence was accepted by the UN, and that the doctored/misleading nature of these photographs was reported as soon as evidence was available. It is not the job of the media to speculate widely and incite conspiracy theories. The point about conspiracy theories is particular poignant given the laughable scene where Pilger and Julian Assange discuss the likelihood (without mentioning any evidence or alternative narratives) that the world’s wars are perpetuated by arms dealers. It is truly one of the most pathetic scenes I have ever scene in something masquerading as informative and reasonable.

Something that really bothered me about Inside Job, which relates to the contempt these documentaries show for thoroughly reasonable positions, was the film’s attack on having academics on corporate boards. First we are told that academics should not be able to accept remuneration for being on corporate boards, which seems to suggest that academics must behave like Saints. Then we are presented with a scene in which an academic gets a little pissed off by an accusatory question, and tells the narrator, quite reasonably, that he has offered to give up his time for the interview and doesn’t appreciate the tone of the questions. He then informs the narrator that the interview will be completed in 5 more minutes and that the narrator should give it his best shot. Even in the out of context snapshot contained within the movie, this seems quite reasonable to me. If you are asked to give an interview for free and comply, you don’t want to walk in and start getting accused of being a bastard. I don’t see how this chap’s comments reflect poorly on him. More importantly, is Inside Job suggesting that we shouldn’t have academics on boards? Because that seems retarded. While the remunerations do seem a little high at $80 000 – $100 000, that is fraction of what other board members are paid, and I imagine that a professor at Columbia has enough corporate offers to not feel financial pressure to give misleading evidence or advice to a board. Moreover, attracting talented people away from incredibly high paid corporate positions and into academia might require that we allow them to receive a fraction of their potential salary while sitting on boards. This seems reasonable.   

I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t have documentaries. In fact, I have frequently lamented the death of investigative journalism and in depth explanations of key issues affecting our society. What I am suggesting is that it is very disappointing and confusing that the most popular documentaries do not respect our intelligence. Rather than helping me onto my high horse, I would prefer it if documentaries helped me attain the information I need to adopt certain positions in an easy manner. This was done was well by Gore in an Inconvenient Truth. Inside Job made a decent attempt at explaining the GFC, but I was left contemplating some fairly rudimentary questions, like why Obama rehired these supposedly bad people, and I was certainly not presented with an alternative position other than “hate neo-liberals”. This is disappointing considering the increasing wealth of reasonable positions to the left of neo-liberalism, like the banking policies of the Keating Labor government in Australia.  I would really appreciate it if future documentaries focused on disseminating good information in easily digestible parcels, rather conning me into adopting a certain position and fostering more us vs. them divisions in our society.