Faux-scars: Best Documentary
I find this category really difficult, ultimately because how much a documentary grabs you and stays with you is some part the sheer skill of the documentarian in making something that’s usually rather dry relevant to you, but the rest of it comes from your exusting interests and passions. If I go by the documentary that most changed my worldview, it would have to be Blackfish. I saw it at a preview all the way back in June before it had caused much of a splah (ba dum ching). And in this case, while I thought the filmmaker, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, did a fibe job, I was surprised that it didn’t… hit harder. There was some nice use of graphics for the testimony from the EEOC-waged workplace safety case, some very moving footage, but I just didn’t think she held the red-hot poker to the topic the way she could have. It’s very subjective, I know, but I kept coming back to that. Ultimately, though, the documentary totally changed my opinions and behavior. I’d never been to Seaworld and hadn’t been eager to rectify that on any level, but I most definitely cannot go there now. An organization I have done some work for held a big, splashy event there and I made myself sit in my hotel room and watch Law & Order: SVU instead of swilling free booze with my very fun colleagues. More than that, though, it fundamentally shifted how I think of zoos and really any trapping and displaying of animals. Anyone who’s been to an ape exhibit has felt it, something doesn't feel right. One of the most interesting parts about the book Life of Pi (not the movie, they barely covered this part and what they did was… strange IMHO) relates to zoos. Pi’s father is the head of a humble zoo in Pondicherry and the experience teaches him a great deal about animals, both their feral natures but also how man can soothe the intrinsic fear of being exposed in the wild through excellent zoo design. And while I haven’t been to that many zoos (the story of the time we went to the Dhaka Zoo with my cousins, however, will forever be a part of family lore forever), I’ve always enjoyed the experience- looking at strange, interesting animals from all around the world; their grace, their ferocity, the intriguing glimpses of their social lives. That impression of zoos as a fascinating window into the wild stuck with me since I was a child. As I got older, looked into the eyes of a gorilla that was unquestionably looking back at me, I soothed my disquiet with all kinds of logical leaps: zoos help people connect with the need to care for animals and their habitat (though that doesn’t seem to have done shit for conservation on balance) or like what Pi tries to say in the book, perhaps life in a zoo isn’t so bad, though I didn’t go so far as to pretend the animals themselves might actually prefer it to nature [being a wild creature myself since I can remember, no one could ever convince me cages > freedom]. Walking out of Blackfish though, I realized my justifications don't hold water. If capture and imprisonment is wrong for orca, it’s wrong for every other animal. I’m sure those adorable prarie dogs at the entrance to the Washington Zoo would prefer to be doing it out in the open too. Now, I’m not militant about animal rights, though I respect if you are. I’m a raging carnivore, so I acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy of my position. I would prefer that the meat I ate was treated with dignity, but I am OK with it ultimately going in my belly.
Anyways, after all this talk of Blackfish, I have to admit that the actual best documentary of the year for me is Dirty Wars. It probably comes back to what I was saying about how your feelings about a documentary reflects the documentarians’ skillz partly but also, to a great extent, your own passions. I have crazy strong feelings about how this country uses surveillance, extrajudicial assassination, drones, secret prisons, torture, secrecy, rendition and all the other ugly shit in the national security toolbox to supposedly keep us safe. I fundamentally believe that doing shitty things to people, both your own citizens and the people of other countries, will come back on you. Before I became an American citizen, I would tell myself that this country was very ambivalent towards my continued presence, so what the government did was for and by Americans and I was decidedly not an American. Americans elected and re-elected Bush. Americans allowed their government to prop up dictators, sell arms to unsavory people, start wars in countries they don’t like, etc. This stuff still made me angry (and the extra layer of having absolutely no power was no peach) but I could comfort myself that it was decidedly not done for my benefit. Upon naturalizing though, I didn't have anything to hide behind. Plenty of people would dispute my legitimacy as a capital-A American (an authority no less than the obamacare website made sure to ask after my naturalization certificate because answering yes to the citizenship question only means actual yes if you’re native born) but I felt it. My family embarked on the not-short, not-inexpensive and not-easy road to becoming citizens because this is our home. We have another home as well, we always will, but we worked our asses off to make this place our home too. When the judge in that courtroom in Chicago told me (and a crowd of exactly 100 other ‘new citizens’) to raise our hands and repeat the oath, I really, really meant it. I forswore all those other princes that had commanded my fealty (like a romance novel, no?). Long story short, the pain of what we do as a government and a country both domestically and abroad hit me in a new, much more acute way. It was so direct: this is my country, it is supposedly being done for me. This was a good 7 years after 9/11, the aftermath of which had crystallized how foreign I would always be to some segment of America. What does this have to do with Dirty Wars? Well, everything really. Dirty Wars is the story of how we murder people in other countries with very flimsy ideas as to why they might deserve to die all in the name of protecting Americans. The Snowden revelations about the NSA hadn’t come out when the doc was completed, but they add even more detail and nuance about the national security state but I maintain, we didn’t need it to be incensed by what’s happening. They’re doing it in our names. They are slaughtering families in Pakistan and Yemen, they’re facilitating the torture and imprisonment of people. What do you think the people in those countries, the families of the dead and destroyed, think of us? What would you do to someone who sent a machine or a group of assassins to your house to murder you? What if we knew the people our government calls terrorists frequently aren’t terrorists, they’re a wedding party or a family gathering to celebrate a newborn? How can we continue to live in a world where our government and others boldly proclaim that the value of an American life is intrinsically higher than that of others? That’s what we’re saying when it’s OK that a grandmother can’t pick herbs in her garden in Afghanistan without risking death, that we will sometimes apologize for those mistakes but not change the fundamental trajectory or logic of our actions. Glenn Greenwald and the narrator of Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, just came out with new revelations that the justification used for many signature strikes (a nice clean name for the mechanized murder of distant bodies) does not include one bit of human intelligence or confirmation. We think a terrorist uses or has used this phone number and that phone is what we’ll bomb. They might not be a terrorist (which we’ll never verify with a trial with actual, you know, evidence or proof), they may have stolen it from someone else, they may have loaned it to someone else, but whoever’s holding the hot potato doesn’t get to defend themself, it’s too late. There’s a bomb with your name on it, as well as the names of anyone else unlucky to be in your vicinity. Do we even cross our fingers that there aren’t any civilians nearby (beyond the possible-civilian we actually want to murder)?
Oy, this post has gotten exceedingly long, but I think this movie should be required viewing for every single person in America. I cannot imagine a conversation about what actually keeps us safe that elides past THIS- this crazy shit we do out there (and that’s not to say that we’re not doing horrible things to our own people in our own country). Sigh, /rantover. My runner-up would be 20 Feet from Stardom. This is a great illustration of how, even when it’s a topic you don’t know much about, when handled right can make an impact. 20 Feet from Stardom is about backup singers (Wikipedia called them background vocalists) generally, but focuses in on, to great effect, the legendary background vocalists of the 50s and 60s. Women who bestowed the authenticity of their experiences growing up in church choirs for everyone from the Rolling Stones to Joe Cocker. The standout for me was the story of Darlene Love. Essentially a victim to Phil Specter’s megalomania, Love had ger dreams of stardome dashed time and time again. Her vocals and lyrics were covered over with white singers repeatedly. When she finally frees herself from her contract with Specter, her new company turns around and sells it right back to him. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but there’s a moment where she describes having to work as a maid to make ends meet and hearing her own song and voice on the radio. Her story has a pretty happy ending, but nothing wipes away the distaste of how these women were frequently exploited for their voices, their looks, their blackness by an entirely unabashed industry. There’s another story in here about chasing your dreams and sometimes realizing the dream you can actually chase is actually 20 feet from where the spotlight points. There’s a lot to this documentary and it was overall, excellently edited- the story moves along on the strength of these voices.
Another contender I totally forgot when I wrote this is After Tiller. I wrote a review back when I saw it and the power and potency of its message and messengers hasn't decreased at all in the intervening months. This is an important movie about a topic that somehow still remains taboo. It deserves some mad props, but don't expect the Academy to send them their way...
