Today was a good day for movies. I started the afternoon with seven shorts grouped under the theme “Out of Character.” Each focused on the eccentricities, light and grave, of one person. All but one are worth taking in. Roughly ranked, they are as follows: Irma, Two, Lost Every Day, The Bowler, Mr. Happy Man, Passion, and Oil and Water.
I followed that up with Cafeteria Man, a doc about Tony Geraci and his truly visionary efforts at reforming the food services of Baltimore. It’s a short film and ultimately an important one, given the unnecessarily poor quality of the way many American children eat. Check out the website to find screenings; you can even apply to host one.
The last, and perhaps best, film I screened today was Alex Gibney’s Catching Hell, produced for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. Gibney dives painstakingly and expertly into the infamous Steve Bartman incident during the eighth inning of Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. It is a film as much about our relationship with sports and the media as it is about the mysterious circumstances that surround scapegoating. Destined to be a classic sports doc, even if it does seem to imply that there is only one baseball team in Chicago
What I’d really like to talk about, though, is not any one movie. Rather, I’d like to talk about the curious nature of the doc film Q&A.
I should clarify before going on. There is nothing specific about the way Silverdocs does their Q&As, nor is there anything substantively different in the way the crew of a doc discuss their films versus the crew of a fiction film does. What’s really different is the Q&A that features those onscreen.
When the actors of a narrative film are brought out, the audience reacts to the presence of their celebrity, their genius, their performance. But when the subjects of a doc are brought out, the audience reacts to who they really are. Think of it thus: to attend a Q&A with Big Edie Bouvier Beale would certainly be different than attending a Q&A with Jessica Lange, who played Beale in the 2009 HBO remake of Grey Gardens. In the former, we can ask questions (if we dare) about the subject’s actual life; in the latter, only questions about the act of performing a life.
And that layer of make-believe that an actor sheds when doing a Q&A (certain comedians notwithstanding) is important, because its absence leaves some distance between the audience and the role. In a documentary, however, that distance vanishes.
In some cases, this isn’t especially important. If a subject played a minor role, or if his or her presence in the film was an inconsequential one, the audience does not feel especially moved by that person’s presence. Such was the case when I saw Brian Stelter discuss Page One. If the role is one of levity, the dynamic may be a little chummier during the Q&A. Tony Geraci’s Q&A would fall into this category.
But most of the time it is the subjects of consequence that come to these sessions. And many documentaries are not light but emotionally taxing and intimate. It is this combination, which crops up more than you’d think, in which I am somewhat uncomfortable partaking.
The Q&A session following Where Soldiers Come From is a great example. The film allows us great proximity to its three main subjects: Dominic Fredianelli, Cole Smith and Matt “Bodi” Beaudoin. Dom, in addition to the TBI from which we see him suffer, feels guilty for convincing his friends to enlist; we see Cole learn that he has been screwed out of his GI Bill money due to a clerical error; Bodi confesses that his injuries are such that he might be braindead by 50. These are deeply personal moments, and moments which we get to observe. The problem, though, is that this situation sets up a totally asymmetric relationship: we know these subjects far better than they will ever know us.
So when they are brought in for a Q&A, as Dom, Cole, and Bodi were, so shortly after the screening ends and with no time to distance ourselves from the material, one almost feels ashamed, voyeuristic. In reality, there should be no shame, because they have consented to the filming, and we have not seen anything they would not want us to see. But the fact of asymmetry stands nevertheless, and I believe that watching someone onscreen allows us a degree of abstraction that helps us digest the artificially distilled emotions of their stories. They don’t quite feel like people, so we don’t quite feel compelled to treat them as such. But when these subjects become flesh and bone, and we can no longer treat them as anything but real people, then we are all at once hit with the reality of the film. On one hand, that may only further our appreciation of a documentary. On the other, our access to the subjects’ lives, access which is only indirectly conferred upon us, may start feeling crude or disrespectful.
I recognize that my thoughts here are strange and scattered. There is no actual voyeurism at work, nor any make-believe. All that we see we have been allowed to see. Maybe I’m being oversensitive. Maybe I just haven’t quite figured out what it is about these kinds of Q&As that disquiets me. What I do know is that being able to put one’s feelings aside for these events can allow for privileged insight into the people documentarians spend so much time with. For that, I’ll try my best to suppress my blushing.