Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship 2013032570, 9780415721073, 9781315863603

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Documentary’s Awkward Turn

Despite the prominence of “awkwardness” as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a subgenre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often interconnected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present. “This book brilliantly analyzes the formal techniques, affective qualities, and ethical implications of the comedic turn in documentary film and reality television that was instigated by the work of Christopher Guest and Michael Moore and has culminated in prank films and reaction videos. Jason Middleton presents a sophisticated and readable rumination on a serious subject, drawing upon theoretical discourses of comedy, spectatorship, and shame to argue that intentional and unintentional awkward moments define the temporal and emotional lacunae of the post-Fordist workplace depicted in The Office; destabilize documentary authority itself in films by Sacha Baron Cohen and the Yes Men; and promote ethical detachment in de-realized images proffered by reaction videos.”—Maria Pramaggiore, North Carolina State University, USA “While there have been many studies that theorize the idea of the spectator with relation to class, race, and/or gender, ‘awkward’ humor has never really been examined with such a precise focus as it in this book. It will make a unique and lasting contribution to spectatorship studies, and moves well beyond work already done in the field, in a style that is refreshingly free

of jargon, and written in a direct, accessible manner.”—Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA “This book offers a brilliant plumb-line that cuts through, and links, unanticipated bodies of contemporary nonfiction media to the affective, ethical, political and funny claims they make about the world and for their audiences. Looking to a diverse and complex body of programming, including mockumentary, reality TV, social media, and television, Jason Middleton uses the most contemporary of tropes—Awk-ward—to reveal how and why we are forced to, or enjoy, looking away. The disrupted encounters he focuses upon, which induce shame, contempt, implication or insulation, tell us much about our contemporary spectatorial delight in a documentary unknowing that occurs through broken encounters fuelled by misrecognition, deception, displeasure, or the absence of an ethical response.”—Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College, USA Jason Middleton is assistant professor in the English Department and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, and director of the Program in Film and Media Studies, at the University of Rochester, USA. He is coeditor of the book Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (2007).

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

27 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body Cassandra Jackson 28 Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory Russian Literary Mnemonics Mikhail Gronas 29 Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory Brett Ashley Kaplan 30 Emotion, Genre, and Justice in Film and Television E. Deidre Pribram 31 Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies Matthew Rubery 32 The Adaptation Industry The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation Simone Murray 33 Branding Post-Communist Nations Marketizing National Identities in the “New” Europe Edited by Nadia Kaneva 34 Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation Across the Screens Edited by J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay 35 Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet Olga Goriunova

36 Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television Melanie E.S. Kohnen 37 Artificial Culture Identity, Technology, and Bodies Tama Leaver 38 Global Perspectives on Tarzan From King of the Jungle to International Icon Edited by Annette Wannamaker and Michelle Ann Abate 39 Studying Mobile Media Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson 40 Sport Beyond Television The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport Brett Hutchins and David Rowe 41 Cultural Technologies The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society Edited by Göran Bolin 42 Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography Natalie Purcell

43 Ambiguities of Activism Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed Ingrid M. Hoofd 44 Generation X Goes Global Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion Christine Henseler 45 Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture Gender, Crime, and Science Lindsay Steenberg 46 Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media Historical Perspectives Edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley 47 De-convergence in Global Media Industries Dal Yong Jin 48 Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture Edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik 49 Reading Beyond the Book The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo 50 A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media Jesse Drew 51 Digital Media Sport Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society Edited by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe 52 Barthes’ Mythologies Today Readings of Contemporary Culture Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

53 Beauty, Violence, Representation Edited by Lisa A. Dickson and Maryna Romanets 54 Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction Edited by Michał Głowacki and Lizzie Jackson 55 Transnational Horror Across Visual Media Fragmented Bodies Edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer 56 International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies “This World is My Place” Edited by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton 57 Comics and the Senses A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels Ian Hague 58 Popular Culture in Africa The Episteme of the Everyday Edited by Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome 59 Transgender Experience Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility Edited by Chantal Zabus and David Coad 60 Radio’s Digital Dilemma Broadcasting in the Twenty-First Century John Nathan Anderson 61 Documentary’s Awkward Turn Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship Jason Middleton

Documentary’s Awkward Turn Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship Jason Middleton

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Jason Middleton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Middleton, Jason, 1971– Documentary’s awkward turn : cringe comedy and media spectatorship / by Jason Middleton. pages cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Documentary films—History and criticism. 2. Documentary television programs—History and criticism. 3. Social interaction in motion pictures. 4. Social interaction on television. I. Title. PN1995.9.D6M46 2013 070.1ʹ8—dc23 2013032570 ISBN: 978-0-415-72107-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-86360-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Eden and Marek and for Cy Rawls (1975–2008)

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Awkward Moments

xi xiii 1

1 Awkward Aesthetics: Michael Moore and Christopher Guest

23

2 Awkwardly Reflected: Mirroring Anticelebrity in the Portrait Film

52

3 Awkward Satire: Comedies of Deception

83

4 Awkward Extremes: Reaction Videos and the “Reactive Gaze”

109

5 Awkward Moments, Endless Days: Feeling Time in The Office

140

Conclusion: Post-Awkward?

171

Bibliography Index

175 183

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Figures

1.1

Reaction shots of filmmaker Marty DiBergi parody documentary film conventions (This Is Spinal Tap). 1.2 Juxtaposed with Moore’s deadpan reactions, “the bunny lady” is a comic figure (Roger and Me). 1.3a, 1.3b A shot/reverse shot sequence reinforces a sense of pathos (Roger and Me). 1.4 Moore’s “ambush interview” with Hollywood star and NRA president Charlton Heston (Bowling for Columbine). 2.1 Little Edie’s exuberant musical performance (Grey Gardens). 2.2 Shot composition in American Movie suggests the magnitude of Mark’s challenges (American Movie). 2.3 An awkward moment in which Mark challenges the filmmakers (American Movie). 3.1 The Yes Men’s political adversaries shame themselves on camera (The Yes Men Fix the World). 3.2a, 3.2b, 3.2c Horrified reactions to the sight of two men kissing in Brüno (Brüno). 3.3 Surveillance-camera footage enhances the authenticity of Borat’s assault on Pamela Anderson (Borat). 3.4 Literalizing Borat’s lack of critical distance from media imagery (Borat). 4.1 Reaction videos feature children terrified by computer-game pranks. 4.2 “2 Girls 1 Cup” provokes reactions of disgust and amusement. 4.3 Reunion videos as emotional spectacle. 5.1 Firing an employee as practical joke for boss David Brent (The Office [BBC]). 5.2 The Wernham Hogg building windows as obstruction of view (The Office [BBC]).

34 42 43 45 61 68 71 92 95 100 102 116 125 131 144 148

xii

Figures

5.3

Collective good feeling among Michael Scott’s staff (The Office [NBC]). The office as site of heterosexual romance and collective sentiment (The Office [NBC]). Jim’s proposal to Pam foregrounds the documentary framework (The Office [NBC]).

5.4 5.5

159 164 165

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation in the Literature Program at Duke University, supervised by Jane M. Gaines, whose guidance and innovative scholarship helped me to imagine new possibilities for theorizing documentary film. I am also grateful to my other committee members, who made important contributions to the project and whose seminars played key roles in my intellectual development: Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt, and Kenneth Surin, and Joanne Hershfield of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My graduate school experience was enriched by challenging and inspiring conversations and collaborations with other students. I am particularly indebted to Roger Beebe, Andrew Cole, Nayeli Garci-Crespo, and Alanna Thain, and to the members of the editorial collective of Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics. I was very fortunate, as well, to learn 16mm and digital filmmaking through Duke’s student-run Freewater Productions, knowledge that has deeply informed my scholarship and pedagogy in film studies ever since. My colleagues in the Department of English and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester have provided valuable support for the development and completion of this book. I particularly wish to thank those who read work in progress and offered me crucial feedback: Sharon Willis, Joan Saab, and John Michael of the University of Rochester, Eden Osucha (Bates College), Shilyh Warren (University of Dallas), Joshua S. Malitsky (Indiana University), and Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College). Too many others to mention here have also contributed valuable conversations, reading recommendations, and advice on the writing process, including Rachel Haidu, Cynthia Chris, Alexandra Juhasz, Elena Oxman, Jason Peck, and Joel Burges. Audiences at the Visible Evidence and Society for Cinema and Media Studies conferences provided critical input on portions of this project, and I am grateful for their engagement and suggestions. I also wish to thank the conference organizers for providing opportunities for me to present this work at key points in its development. I have worked through my ideas about many of the films analyzed in this volume with my wonderful undergraduate students at the University

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of Rochester in my course on documentary and mock documentary. In my seminars, graduate students from the Department of English and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies have challenged me to discover and rediscover theoretical frameworks that have clarified and deepened my arguments in this book and my broader outlook as a scholar. I am deeply grateful to my parents, John and Karen Middleton, and to my sister, Lee, for lifelong love and support. Your advice, assistance, and forbearance at crucial junctures have been beyond measure. I am fortunate to have been raised in a household that so strongly valued education and encouraged ongoing critical inquiry. This book simply would not exist in its present form were it not for the almost daily contributions of Eden Osucha, who has been my most important interlocutor. You have repeatedly foreseen the ideal shape and direction of the project, suggesting crucial texts for me to read, provoking me to rethink my interpretations of the films, and consistently offering essential debate and discussion without which I could have lost my way. Thank you, Eden, for this invaluable form of partnership. Finally, I want to thank and remember Cy Rawls, who knew how to inhabit a principled awkwardness, almost as a form of artistry. And who knew, equally, how to transcend awkwardness at will, with the creation and sustenance of community.

Introduction Awkward Moments

Few situations could be as awkward as the demand to “just be yourself” on camera, and to proceed with your activities as if the camera were not present. Documentary’s Awkward Turn presents an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. Awkward moments may be staged intentionally in the service of a filmmaker’s perspective or argument, as in the work of documentarians like Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore—usually with the goal of shaming one of the film’s (political, ideological) “villains.” I analyze this by-now familiar strategy of staging awkward moments for rhetorical effect. But the book’s greater concern is to make visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present. Even as the concept of awkwardness illuminates documentary film of this period, documentary helps us to critically define awkwardness itself. Awkwardness is created by unexpected shifts and ruptures in representational systems, moments when differing perceptions and investments among filmmakers, social actors, and spectators are forced into view. These moments foreground conflicting expectations about the documentary’s meaning and purpose, and may alter the rhetorical, ideological, and affective framework of the film itself. In the period since the 1970s, the documentary tradition in the United States has been transformed in two significant and interrelated ways. First, documentary styles and the use of reality-based footage have proliferated across a range of media formats and genres, including reality television, mock documentary film, viral Internet videos, and various hybrid forms. As critic A. O. Scott puts it in a 2010 New York Times piece surveying the state of documentary film, “[d]ocumentary is, at present, heterogeneous to the point of anarchy.”1 Second, in conjunction with this proliferation of new technologies and formats for the production and dissemination of actualitybased media, much documentary work has become increasingly reflexive and ironic, flouting older models of authority and sobriety.2 When street artist Banksy’s feature film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) was nominated

2

Documentary’s Awkward Turn

for an Academy Award in the documentary category, considerable confusion and debate remained as to whether some or all of the film was an elaborate hoax in the service of Banksy’s satire of art-world commercialism. This book provides a theoretical basis for understanding such surprising cultural developments. It examines awkward moments in documentary film and media that include deliberate rhetorical strategies, inadvertent but revealing ruptures, and radical efforts at destabilizing existing documentary conventions and producing new aesthetic forms. Awkwardness is a defining principle of popular television comedies like The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation; the work of influential comedic tastemakers such as the filmmaker Judd Apatow and writer-performers Sarah Silverman, Louis C. K., and Lena Dunham; and websites like Awkward Family Photos and FAIL Blog. MTV currently broadcasts a series about teenage life titled Awkward, and YouTube features the video series The Mis-adventures of an Awkward Black Girl. Many reality television shows (such as the Real Housewives franchise) trade on engendering awkward encounters among the members of their casts. The term’s prominence extends beyond the domain of popular culture. It was frequently used not only to describe the personality of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but also to explain his failure to connect with voters and his ultimate defeat.3 Significantly, the terms awkward humor and cringe comedy first rose to prominence with the success of mock-documentary sitcoms like The Office. The creators of such shows exploit the mock-documentary framework to heighten their awkward humor, through devices including long periods of dead air, and contradictions between characters’ self-representation in interviews and their behavior captured on tape. The distinctive forms of awkward humor that these shows construct point to the structurally significant role of awkwardness in documentary filmmaking itself. In the period since the original British production of The Office first aired, awkward humor has become not only a common and readily identifiable category of film, television, and Internet comedy, but awkwardness itself has emerged as a trope to describe a wide variety of intersubjective experiences of everyday life. As Adam Kotsko points out in one of the only existing studies of awkwardness as a contemporary cultural logic, young people are quick to apply the term to an unfolding situation “with their simple exclamation”—“Awk-ward!”4 In doing so, they label the moment as a means of comically defusing the qualities that summon its description. Why has awkwardness emerged as such a significant cultural formation? Even as we can better understand documentary film through the lens of awkwardness, awkward moments can be understood in a sense as documentary moments. They are moments when an encounter feels too real: unscripted, unplanned, and, above all, occurring in person. Contemporary social interactions are increasingly virtual and mediated by social media through which we

Introduction

3

carefully tailor our self-presentation to others, and enjoy comfortable delays within which to draft and edit our conversations. In this cultural context, moments in which dead air or social miscues disrupt a face-to-face encounter feel awkward because they are too unmediated and immediate. Indeed, it is precisely the apparent lack of expectation that their images will be subject to a public gaze that confers a structural awkwardness upon the families in the Awkward Family Photos. The website consists entirely of real photographs submitted by users featuring couples and families in posed photographs and snapshots. A consistent set of criteria qualify images for inclusion on the site: people proudly sporting fashion and hairstyles that now appear terribly dated and unattractive; studio portraits striving for glamor and sexiness but with questionable means (a couple posing half naked with the man holding a loaded crossbow, for example); or snapshots capturing moments wholly unintended by the family photographer (a welldressed family posing in front of a church with their newly christened baby; grandma visible in the background physically beating the family’s two other children). A majority of photos featured on the site were taken prior to the era of digital photography and social media. This fact is key to understanding the basis of their awkwardness in the context of the website. The gazes of the photos’ subjects seem to anticipate only their own future returned gaze. They are awkward family photos, after all, made by couples to commemorate their romance or by parents to remember the stages of their children’s lives. With smartphone photography and image-sharing websites like Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr, we increasingly anticipate a much wider range of eyes upon our own photos of family and friends. They are often posed, shot, or selected on the basis of how effectively they will serve as “shared” media—how many “likes” and comments they will generate. The family photos on the website appear awkward precisely because the subjects cannot anticipate the public gaze that is directed toward them through the images’ recirculation. Appearing on the website confers a retroactive shamelessness upon them. In other words, the subjects of the profilmic event are without shame: They project a sense of pride in an image intended for their own gazes. But the subjects of the images’ reception on the website are reconfigured as shameless: They fail to recognize how silly they appear to the proleptic public that now looks and laughs at them. Despite the prominence of awkwardness as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a subgenre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn examines disrupted encounters in documentary film and media: encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator.5 These forms of encounter are, of course, often interconnected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly

4

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challenged, stalled, altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. I have suggested that culturally pervasive awkward moments can be understood as documentary moments—that is, as encounters with “the real” in unexpected and often unruly forms. This conjunction between a widespread cultural trend defined in affective terms and a mode of representation historically defined by its claim upon reality is rooted in significant shifts and new developments in documentary filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the influences of mock documentary and reality television. These shifts are characterized by a turn toward humor, irony, reflexivity, and subjective and confessional modes of expression and argumentation. Several scholars in the 1990s called attention to these developments and their significance for documentary film and for culture more broadly. Dirk Eitzen notes the increasing use of humor in documentaries of the 1980s like The Atomic Café (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty, 1982) and Roger and Me (Michael Moore, 1989), and he questions whether comedy contributes to such films’ political efficacy or reduces viewers’ sense of the consequence of their subject matter—an issue I explore in Chapter One of this book.6 Paul Arthur observes an “unprecedented degree of hybridization” in documentary filmmaking during the 1980s and early 1990s.7 Arthur points out that films such as Roger and Me and Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1987) foreground the filmmaking process and present an ironized “inscription of the filmmaker as (unstable) subject, an anti-hero for our times.”8 He describes these trends in documentaries of this period as “an aesthetics of failure,” suggesting that this aesthetics functions as “an inverted guarantee of authenticity.”9 Similarly, Jon Dovey argues that reflexive documentary filmmaking during this time replaces an older regime of truth with a new one based upon an “ironic self-referentiality” and a highly controlled exposure of the filmmaker’s personal identity.10 Dovey links this emphasis on first-person perspective and personal exposure as ways of constructing authenticity and authority to a broader “confessional” mode in media culture of the period. He suggests that confessional and exhibitionistic media forms like television talk shows refashion older models of the confessional into “confession as an open discourse, de-ritualised, one in which intimate speaking is validated as part of the quest for psychic health, as part of our ‘right’ to selfhood.”11 Mimi White makes the related argument that “therapeutic discourse” on popular television talk shows of this time functions to reconstitute couples and families within a consumerist ideology via networks of confessional exchange and communication among host, participants, and viewer.12 The qualities of irony, comedy, hybridization, and self-referentiality that scholars identify in documentary films of this period destabilize more

Introduction

5

conventional modes of documentary authority and spectatorial positioning. They engender new forms of persuasion, identification, engagement, and desire—as well as the opposites of these terms. Confessional media culture as analyzed by Dovey and White also fragments a unitary position for the spectator, offering no stable point of identification. As White puts it, “[T]hese programs include distanced, derisory, and superior attitudes as acceptable forms of spectatorship along with the more conventionally recognized and imputed positions of involvement, identification, pleasure, and sympathy.”13 My argument is that the unstable configurations among the positions of filmmaker, social actor, and viewer during this transformative period in the history of documentary film and media generate multiple forms of awkwardness as these alignments shift or break down. Awkwardness in this context emerges from differentials and misalignments in knowledge, affect, or desire among filmmakers, social actors, and viewers, when these differentials contribute to conflicting or altered expectations about the documentary itself. Altered expectations are produced, for example, when a social actor realizes that the filmmaker has intentions different from what he or she was led to believe—as in Michael Moore’s interview with Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine (2002) that I analyze in Chapter One. They can be produced when a social actor wrests control of a scene, challenging the filmmaker or taking things in an unexpected direction—as in a scene from American Movie (Chris Smith and Sarah Price, 1999) discussed in Chapter Two. Viewers may experience altered expectations when they believe they are privy to a filmmaker-performer’s satirical hoax, only to find that they have been misled and the joke is equally on them—an effect of certain scenes in Sacha Baron Cohen’s work that I examine in Chapter Three. These and other permutations of documentary awkwardness emerge within a period of upheaval for older expectations concerning the authority, authenticity, and—due to the advent of digital technologies—very ontology of documentary film itself.14 As Arthur and Dovey suggest, some documentarians such as Moore develop aesthetic and rhetorical strategies that reconstruct new forms of authority. Essentially, these scholars argue that filmmakers of this moment operate from within a cultural field imbued with irony and that they deploy irony as a means of authentic social and political intervention—an aesthetic strategy Amber Day refers to as “ironic authenticity.”15 Day argues against Jedediah Purdy’s critique of irony in his well-publicized book about 1990s culture, For Common Things. For Purdy, irony creates a protective layer around people that prevents them from speaking earnestly about either private matters or public issues, thereby undermining civic culture and engagement. Day suggests, by contrast, that irony can enable “a mode of engagement rather than a cynical dismissal of politics,” suggesting that, “the personal and ironic can offer a more comfortable way of getting to authenticity” because ironic texts reflexively foreground their own “flaws and fakeries.”16

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I do not think that the multivalent capacities of aesthetic irony can be reduced to one side or the other of this debate; rather, individual cases may produce the forms of political engagement and spectatorial implication in which Day is interested, or the kind of detachment and insulation Purdy describes. My concern is to analyze how awkwardness frequently arises through various attempts in documentary film and reality-based media to negotiate this pervasive cultural irony. The first-person, confessional, reflexive, and ironic strategies that become prevalent in the films of the 1980s and 1990s and continue through the present often do proceed from a desire to “get to authenticity” (as Day puts it) and authority in new ways. But they do not always succeed in doing so in the intended fashion. Their moments of tension, misdirection, and failure create unexpected effects and affects that can offer us even greater insight to the social, political, and intersubjective issues with which these films engage. Sometimes awkwardness is a deliberate strategy with methods and goals similar to those Day ascribes to modes of “ironic authenticity”; some (though not all) of Moore’s work analyzed in Chapter One and the efforts of The Yes Men discussed in Chapter Three fit this description. At other times, awkwardness may subtend a film’s dominant representational strategies, ever-present but often remaining displaced or disavowed. In Chapter Two, for example, I analyze the awkwardness generated by incongruous forms of need and desire between filmmakers and subjects in portrait films that depict eccentrics and social outsiders. These incongruities, I argue, are disavowed in what I term a “fantasy of mutual recognition.” Like Moore’s rhetorical strategies, however, this fantasy is unstable and subject to moments of rupture. Finally, awkwardness can exist primarily as a relation between spectator and screen. This form of awkwardness may be present not just when the film deliberately undermines the viewer’s comprehension (as in some film hoaxes), but also when differentials in perception between viewer and social actors open up the prospect for affective responses that do not sit well with the film’s ideological or ethical framework.17 I am generally in agreement with Kotsko’s point that after the 1990s, awkwardness supersedes irony as a dominant cultural logic. Kotsko’s central argument is that awkwardness can be explained as an inconsistency in, or absence of, “unspoken norms of a [given] community.”18 He describes an “everyday awkwardness” produced by the actions of an individual who is ignorant of or unskilled in the navigation of these norms, and a “radical awkwardness” in which no single set of norms seems to govern a given situation—often “because of an encounter between two sets of norms.”19 More specifically, he situates awkwardness historically by tracing its roots to the social upheavals of the 1960s. For Kotsko, “the events of the 1960s threw the normative social model significantly off-kilter . . . and yet they did not produce any viable positive alternative.” Many people could no longer comfortably embrace older social norms, but neither had many of the goals of equality and more radical ideals of 1960s social movements been

Introduction

7

truly achieved. Kotsko writes, “It is from this tension that there emerged the experimentation but also the paranoia and occasional nihilism of 1970s culture,” and it is unsurprising that Woody Allen emerged as one of the most prominent American filmmakers of this period and one of the true “pioneers of awkwardness.”20 This is a broad but compelling analysis of 1970s American culture, and it resonates with my book’s examination of outsider portrait films from this period as an early example of the documentary awkwardness that I argue grows increasingly prevalent from the 1980s onward. Kotsko suggests that the jingoistic and triumphalist ethos of the Reagan era can be seen as an attempt to defeat awkwardness, and 1990s irony (in the context of the “tech boom” and rise of the virtual economy) as an attempt to shield oneself from it. Both ultimately fade, leaving us with “the reemergence of the awkwardness that I have claimed as the ‘default setting’ of American culture since the 1970s.”21 Kotsko traces the emergence of awkwardness in terms of a broad cultural and discursive destabilization and fragmentation that helps to contextualize the changes in this same period in documentary films’ conventional approaches to and claims upon authenticity, authority, and “reality” itself. Documentary film has historically been invested in rhetorical and stylistic conventions that minimize awkwardness: the comforting authority of the voice-of-God narrator, the reassurance provided by the problem-solution structure in many expository films, and the privileged and sometimes voyeuristic position granted to the viewer of Direct Cinema with its claim to offer a “fly-on-the-wall” view of the world. Documentary’s Awkward Turn begins in the 1970s with films like the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975), in which Direct Cinema’s ideal of “unguarded moments”—where subjects reveal themselves intimately on camera—begins to shade into awkward moments. These awkward moments trouble documentary film’s strategies of rhetoric and representation, the ethical implications of the profilmic event, and the ideological, affective, and embodied dimensions of spectatorship. This book explores the undertheorized issue of documentary film spectatorship, bringing scholarship in documentary studies into dialogue with major concepts in narrative film theory. Chapter Two, for example, draws from psychoanalytic theory to explore desire, narcissism, and fantasy in portrait films. Chapter Three examines the imbrication of epistephilia with scopophilia in hoax film spectatorship, and the forms of (dis)pleasure that attend the experience of oscillation between possession and dispossession o f knowledge. Chapter Four analyzes the ethical implications of Internet reaction videos that interlock sadistic/projective gazes with their masochistic/ introjective obverse. Phenomenological film theory figures prominently in Chapter Five, but influences my analysis in other sections of the book, as well. Awkwardness has existed as a kind of undercurrent or potentiality throughout the history of documentary film, but emerges as a prominent

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aesthetic in the 1970s and 1980s. The first two chapters address featurelength documentary and mock documentary films of this period and draw from genre studies, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophical perspectives on comedy and laughter. But the book examines awkwardness across a range of media formats and takes account of the distinctive nature of each medium in shaping the creation of awkward moments and the textual strategies and forms of spectatorship they engender. Chapters Three and Four analyze prank and hoax films and videos that traverse the formats of feature film, television, and the Internet. In the fourth chapter’s analysis of reaction videos, I discuss the gradual narrowing and privatizing of the sphere of activity in the movement from televisual prank formats like Candid Camera and America’s Funniest Home Videos to Web-based reaction videos. Between these two chapters, I demonstrate how theories of spectatorship developed in narrative film theory, ethical debates in documentary film studies, and cultural theories of affect must be adapted and nuanced in medium-specific ways in order to adequately analyze interrelated cultural phenomena that span the variegated formats of the contemporary media landscape. Chapter Five returns to issues about mock documentary raised in Chapter One, but expands my previous analysis to examine the bridging of mockumentary conventions with televisual qualities such as “liveness” and “intimacy” in the British and American versions of The Office. Throughout the book, I argue that documentary’s awkward moments are rooted in, or produce, responses of shame (as I have suggested in my discussion of Awkward Family Photos). Drawing from the work of affect theorist Silvan Tomkins, I approach shame as a breakdown of intersubjective relations. Tomkins’ explanation of shame demonstrates the affective core of the awkward moments I analyze. He describes shame as “a specific inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment.”22 The shame response is “an act which reduces facial communication,” linked to “any barrier to further exploration . . . [which] might be because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger.”23 Tomkins’ enumeration of shame-based situations that provoke barriers to facial communication, and lead to a desire to look away, offers a striking set of connections to awkward moments in documentary film. A documentary subject’s confrontational gaze toward the camera and filmmaker—and, by extension, the viewer—represents a quintessential awkward moment. For example, following a protracted and difficult hunt in Robert Flaherty’s iconic documentary Nanook of the North (1922), the title character glances with a flash of impatience at a camera thrust in his face to capture the exoticized spectacle of a man eating the raw flesh of a walrus. Flaherty’s film is structured to foster viewer identification with Nanook; its representation of his “exotic” characteristics is tempered and contained by depictions of

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him as a warm-hearted and industrious family man. The film wants the middle-class Western viewer to “commune” with Nanook, but this impulse may be troubled when Nanook, eating the raw flesh with an unguarded look of irritation, suddenly appears “strange”; where the film has led us to “expect . . . him to be familiar . . . he suddenly appears unfamiliar,” and the viewer may wish to look away.25 As Eve Sedgwick points out in her writing on Tomkins, one must negotiate his “formidably rich phenomenology of emotions” in relation to his “highly suspect scientism.”26 In this spirit, I do not attempt to use Tomkins’ affect theory as an overarching framework, but rather derive key concepts from this “rich phenomenology”—particularly his analysis of the affect of “shame-humiliation,” and, secondarily, of “contempt-disgust”—and place them in dialogue with paradigms in film theory for the analysis of documentary, comedy, and spectatorship. In Tomkins, shame breaks down identification and communication, but also implicates subject with object, provoking profound and “torment[ing]” self-consciousness. Contempt, by contrast, minimizes self-consciousness and is linked to “an intense consciousness of the object,” which is regarded with disdain or disgust, and from which the subject distances or insulates itself.27 Documentary’s Awkward Turn explores these contrasting, but dialogically related, effects of implication and insulation in the context of documentary film and media spectatorship and its political and ethical considerations. Neither effect maps easily or consistently onto a politics of documentary’s awkward moments. For example, Michael Moore films such as Roger and Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2002) frequently offer the viewer an insulated position of superiority from which to laugh at people targeted by the films’ political rhetoric. As I discuss in Chapter One, however, certain moments in the films reflexively, and sometimes inadvertently, rupture this insulated spectatorial position. Depending on the context, such ruptures may either reinforce or undermine the films’ rhetorical goals. This book explores the implications of awkward moments for our understanding of documentary film and media at multiple levels: generic and formal innovation and transformation, ethical considerations, the affective and somatic experiences of spectatorship, political strategies and effects, and the potential for new forms of knowledge production.

THE CULTURAL FIELD: DOCUMENTARY COMEDY New York Times critic A. O. Scott’s description of heterogeneity in the contemporary field of documentary doubles as a demonstration of the centrality of comic approaches within this arena of reality-based media. Scott describes a messy field in which possible hoaxes like Exit Through the Gift Shop, reality-TV “docu-soaps,” the Jackass films that feature young men performing absurd and dangerous stunts, and mock-documentary sitcoms

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like The Office stake as much claim to the label “documentary” as does more conventionally serious fare. With such an ever-multiplying array of forms, Scott suggests that at present posing the perennial question of “[w]hat is a documentary?” may be less appropriate to ask than “what isn’t?” He qualifies as “harmless fun,” however, significant instances of the boundary transgressions between fact and fiction and among various media formats and genres. Specifically, he points to the example of how “fake-documentary methods of the kind popularized by Christopher Guest” in This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) and his other films “have become staples, or perhaps clichés, of the small-screen-sitcom.”28 But the spread of these “fake-documentary methods” has been far more extensive than simply in the recent proliferation of television shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation and raises complex issues pertaining to documentary spectatorship and politics not easily dismissed as “harmless fun.” The style of Guest’s films, originally intended as parody of documentary conventions, has been incorporated to the language of mainstream documentary film. This influence is particularly apparent in the work of Michael Moore and filmmakers following his lead in taking a comic approach to social and political issues, such as Morgan Spurlock and Larry Charles. It is visible as well in the many documentaries of the 1990s and 2000s focused on eccentric individuals and groups, including such highprofile films as American Movie, Trekkies (Roger Nygard, 1997), The King of Kong (Seth Gordon, 2007), and Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008), among countless others. Released a few years after Reiner’s seminal This Is Spinal Tap, Moore’s Roger and Me (1989) popularized the idea that documentary films could be funny and entertaining rather than socially valuable but difficult to sit through. Roger Ebert celebrated the film for being a “stinging comedy” rather than a “dreary documentary.”29 Achieving greater financial success than any previous documentary film, Roger and Me also challenged categorical assumptions about what did or did not count as a documentary. The title of a New York Times article posed the question, “Roger & Me: Documentary? Satire? Or Both?”30 With supporters and critics equally vocal, the controversial film set in motion persistent debates about veracity, ethics, and political effectivity when comedy is mixed with documentary. Comic elements were present in reality-based films prior to Roger and Me, such as “mondo” compilations, offbeat character portraits like the films of Errol Morris, and early travelogue and ethnographic films including Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922)—often considered the first documentary feature.31 But the mainstream success of Roger and Me and This Is Spinal Tap ushered in a period that saw, along with a wave of comic documentary and mockumentary films, reality-based humor find a home in the ascendant formats of reality TV and the viral Internet video. This trend has been particularly apparent in the U.S. and the U.K. but is visible in other national media contexts as well. Certain strains of reality-based humor

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have thrived across multiple media formats. For example, a proliferation of stunt- and prank-based comedy that builds upon (and often significantly transforms) the premises of Candid Camera has gained popularity on film, television, and the Internet. This form of documentary comedy ranges from the gross-out slapstick of Jackass to the social satire of Sacha Baron Cohen and the activist politics of The Yes Men. Critics of Roger and Me have charged that Moore deceived his subjects about how they would appear in the film, making them unwitting comic butts. They contend that the film allowed audiences easy laughs at peoples’ expense and promoted a form of detached superiority that reduces understanding of—and engagement with—the political issues. Films based upon pranks and hoaxes like Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006) and (possibly) Exit Through the Gift Shop have raised even more complex issues about documentary’s capacity to deceive. Not only are many of the people who appear in these films (what Bill Nichols terms “social actors”) potentially duped and made the butts of the joke, but these strategies extend to the films’ audiences as well. Viewers are left to wonder what was real and what was not, to debate what points were being made, and to potentially— through their own credulity—serve as objects of the films’ satirical projects. Hoax films specifically, but comic documentaries more broadly, imply a privileged position for the viewer who “gets the joke”—who is not deceived but, rather, understands the maker’s intentions. Nichols suggests that when watching documentaries “our expectations of access to a shared exteriority increase . . . The claim that ‘This is so,’ with its tacit ‘isn’t it?’—a request for consent that draws us toward belief—makes objectivity, and the denotative, a natural ally of documentary rhetoric.”32 Documentary comedy’s version of this ideal of “shared exteriority” rooted in mutually understood objectivity is shared access to a joke. It affords viewers the pleasure and satisfaction of being “in the know,” of possessing a sensibility similar to that of the filmmaker or performer that allows them to laugh. Laughter becomes the privileged sign of knowledge and understanding. In Freud’s framework, a joke is always triangulated among teller, audience, and object or butt of the joke.33 As Susan Purdie describes this triangulation, joking represents a “mastery of discourse,” wherein a bond is formed between teller and audience. This bond excludes the butt as someone who is denied “discursive potency—the power to be an agent who has intentional effect in the world.”34 Given the conventional ideal for documentary film to “effect action and entail consequences” in the historical world,35 positioning the viewer as ideal, knowing audience for the joke offers a sense of agency shared with the filmmaker—a position on the right side of politics and history. As I discuss in Chapter One, a centerpiece of Moore’s filmmaking style is to frame his political adversaries as objects of humor. Performer-activists like The Yes Men and James O’Keefe examined in Chapter Three stage and

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document pranks meant to expose what they see as the outrageous views of their opponents. The ideological orientation of such performers ranges across the political spectrum, but the strategies are similar: By positioning the duped opponent as butt of the joke, these activists seek to undermine their “discursive potency” and their actual social and political power. On television, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert host comedic “fake news” programs that skewer conservatives in particular, but politicians and other media outlets in general. For many—particularly younger—viewers, Stewart’s and Colbert’s lampooning of public figures and current events actually feels more authentic and authoritative than conventional news programming.36 A survey of Academy Award-winning documentary films since 1989—the year of Roger and Me’s release—reveals a group of films on consistently sober subject matter. The films focus primarily on topics including war, poverty, the Holocaust, crime, and the Earth’s environment, and generally employ conventional expository documentary techniques. Other than occasional lighthearted moments in 2005’s anthropomorphizing nature film March of the Penguins and 2009’s Man on Wire, a portrait of high-wire artist Philippe Petit, the only film on the list to make significant use of comedy is Moore’s own Bowling for Columbine (2002)—whose satirical approach is tempered by scenes of genuine tragedy and the filmmaker’s impassioned stance against gun violence. The list of the top twenty grossing documentaries of all time, however— also comprised entirely of films released since Roger and Me, provides a very different picture. The list features five films by Michael Moore, three films with explicitly comic approaches that mimic Moore’s style (Religulous [Larry Charles, 2008], Super Size Me [Morgan Spurlock, 2004], and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed [Nathan Frankowski, 2008]), three portraits of celebrity musicians, four nature documentaries, and Babies (Thomas Balmès, 2010)—a depiction of four babies from different parts of the world that trades on soliciting affectionate laughter from its audience while exploring the theme of cultural differences in parenting. Of the remaining four films in the top twenty, two (both directed by Davis Guggenheim) are conventionally sober political tracts (An Inconvenient Truth [2006] and Waiting for Superman [2010]), and the other two focus on inner-city youth who aspire to basketball stardom (Hoop Dreams, 1994) or participate in a ballroom dance competition (Mad Hot Ballroom, 2005). If we were to expand the categorical boundaries of documentary to include sensationalistic reality-based comedies like the Jackass franchise, then the list of top-grossing documentaries would look significantly different: Jackass 3D would be the number two–grossing documentary of all time, Jackass: Number Two would be fourth, and the original Jackass: The Movie, sixth. Borat would be the number one–grossing documentary of all time. Many popular nonfiction films since Roger and Me have taken a humorous approach toward portraits of artists (Crumb [Terry Zwigoff, 1994]), musicians (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster [Joe Berlinger, 2004], Anvil!

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The Story of Anvil [Sacha Gervasi, 2008]), or nonfamous but eccentric individuals who display single-minded dedication to a given task, however improbable the likelihood of success, as in American Movie, Speedo (Jesse Moss, 2003) and The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998). These offbeat character portraits have proved consistently popular, including a related subgenre of documentaries that present portraits of a group of people united by their participation in a shared activity or competition, such as the Scrabble competitors in Word Wars (Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo, 2004), and the amateur singer-performers in Karaoke Fever (Arthur Borman and Steve Danielson, 2001). All of these films are descendants of documentaries from the 1960s and 1970s that shifted the focus of the portrait film away from politicians and celebrities and toward eccentric individuals and social outsiders, such as Grey Gardens, which I examine in Chapter Two, and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). In sum, while the Academy still for the most part favors documentaries that conform to a “sober informational function,” the top twenty list and the wider field of popular documentary film indicates a viewing public drawn to story, spectacle, celebrity, and humor. Of course, the prevalence of comic elements in many of these films does not preclude their political engagements. All five of the Moore films, of course, tackle major political issues. Supersize Me uses broad comedy to critique the American fast-food industry. Released in the same year, Religulous and Expelled both employ caustic humor in an effort to debunk organized religion and Darwinism, respectively—reinforcing the point that documentary comedy can be employed from quite different points of the political spectrum. While 9/11 and the “war on terror” may have spawned a wave of serious and earnest documentaries, they did not quell the public appetite for comic approaches to social and political issues.

DOCUMENTARY “ATTRACTIONS”: BEYOND (DIS)BELIEF In her Introduction to the volume Collecting Visible Evidence, Jane Gaines describes the reinvigoration and expansion of documentary studies in the 1990s.37 One major theme in this wave of scholarship has been a reconsideration of elements in documentary film that do not fit easily into Nichols’ “discourses of sobriety” model (including many of the sorts of films cited in the previous section). Attention has turned frequently toward films and media better characterized by Tom Gunning’s description of early “actuality” films as a “cinema of attractions” emphasizing exhibitionism and spectacle.38 Gunning argues that the birth of film was characterized by the recording and display of real-world spectacles that “envisioned cinema as a series of visual shocks,” provoking the spectator to a “vacillation between belief and incredulity.”39 Nichols touches on this point as well, suggesting that media in the lineage of this “cinema of attractions” constitute a

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“‘cabaret of curiosities’ [that is] often an embarrassing fellow-traveler more than a central element” of the documentary tradition.40 Nichols’ attempt to maintain a distinction between a respectable dominant tradition and a separate “shadow” tradition is unconvincing, however. Elizabeth Cowie formulates the issue more helpfully in the opening of her essay “The Spectacle of Actuality,” citing the “disreputable features of cinema usually associated with the entertainment film, namely, the pleasures and fascination of film as spectacle” that stand alongside and intermingle with the more conventionally serious features of the documentary tradition.41 Following Cowie, we might better describe the relation between sobriety and humor or spectacle as symptomatic of a diverse and sometimes schizophrenic documentary mode of filmmaking, rather than as two discreet modes—the respectable and the “embarrassing.”42 At the level of spectatorship, Cowie describes an interpenetration of the desire for knowledge and evidence with a desire for the image as spectacle—what Baudrillard terms a “brute fascination” outside of political or aesthetic judgment.43 Gaines suggests that the “‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ quality” that even many mainstream documentary films display can invite further spectatorial engagement and investigation. I argue that filmmakers often try to harness and exploit this “Ripley’s” quality, this “vacillation between belief and incredulity,” using astonishment or fascination as a means of engaging the viewer toward various ends—rhetorical persuasion in the films of Michael Moore, narrative interest and character identification in portrait films such as American Movie. Attempting to balance these poles of spectator response, however, may lead to breakdowns in the films’ modes of address to the viewer. These are the moments in which awkwardness irrupts—moments in which, as Tomkins writes, “one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or . . . one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar.”44 Translated to the context of spectatorship, documentary “astonishment” often produces a simultaneous desire to look and to look away from the onscreen spectacle, a desire that doesn’t always (or even often) reinforce the dominant message or emotional tenor of the film. Moreover, given how frequently this astonishment is directed toward an onscreen social actor’s words, appearance, or behavior, such moments tend to be fraught with ethical and political problematics that are rooted in differences of class, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. In other words, these awkward moments bring to light differences of identity and social position that trouble the filmmakers’ rhetorical frameworks or narrative goals. An exemplary awkward moment of this type can be found in the portrait film American Movie, which I analyze in Chapter Two. On the one hand, the directors represent the film’s two subject-protagonists—working-class low-budget horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt and his best friend Mike Schank—as hilariously incompetent and un-self-aware (indeed, many viewers questioned whether the film was a mock documentary in the Christopher

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Guest style). At the same time, however, they employ devices derived from narrative fiction film in an effort to develop Mark as a “character” with an interiority accessible to the viewer, a character whose aspirations and the obstacles he faces toward achieving them make him a locus of viewer identification. These two modes of representation mutually reinforce the film’s representation of its subjects as lovable losers, figures the viewer can laugh at while also empathizing with them. At a number of moments in the film, however, Mark and Mike’s self-destructive and sometimes aggressive behaviors threaten to exceed the bounds of these framing devices. Late in the course of one very drunken sequence, Mark actually confronts the filmmakers directly, staring at the camera and demanding that they tell him what they “really think” of him and his endeavors. The dead air that results leads to a quintessential awkward moment in which class-based differences in cultural capital between filmmaker and subject that the film must normally repress are brought to the foreground. This moment ruptures the film’s framing of Mark and highlights the viewer’s own ethical complicity in this framing. Older scholarship on ethics in documentary film is focused primarily on questions of “informed consent” among documentary subjects, and whether some measure of “deceptive practice” on the part of filmmakers might be justified in obtaining stories that serve the “greater good.”45 More recent work by scholars including Michael Renov and Michele Aaron has expanded the discussion to a consideration of the ethics of spectatorship. Both cite the work of Emmanuel Levinas to suggest the importance of “recognition of the other, and a taking of responsibility for this recognition and of one’s own desires.”46 An ethics of spectatorship considers whether a film implicates the spectator in a reflection upon his or her own moral framework, or insulates him or her from a sense of responsibility for others.47 By analyzing scenes (like Mark’s confrontation with the filmmakers) that provoke a spectator’s unexpected implication in the ethics of the image, Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes an original analytic framework to these contemporary discussions of documentary ethics. Sharing the focus of ethical analysis between filmmaking practices and the embodied and affective responses of spectators, I argue that our experience of awkwardness as viewers indexes the imbrication of ethics and ontology in a cultural context marked by everdissolving boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the mediasphere.

CHAPTERS Chapter One analyzes the extraordinarily successful films of Michael Moore, suggesting that they represent a turning point in rhetorical and aesthetic styles in mainstream documentary film. Moore’s films incorporate representational strategies developed in the mock documentary films of Christopher Guest; in both cases, the filmmakers create moments

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of awkward humor by constructing differentials in perception among filmmaker, subject, and viewer. Guest’s films develop a distinctive comic syntax intended both to satirize their subjects and to parody the conventions and authoritative claims of documentary film itself. This mockumentary syntax is palpable in the form and style of Moore’s films, but it complicates his efforts to address real-world issues of social and political consequence. Moore’s use of awkward comedy often recuperates the authority of the filmmaker’s perspective. Rendering the targets of his political critique as comic butts, Moore conveys his arguments through viewer laughter. He strategically places himself and his subjects in awkward positions, but tries to allow the viewer a safe space from which to appreciate the joke. When this safe space is ruptured, however, an unintended form of awkwardness implicates the spectator and foregrounds the limitations of Moore’s selfreflexive gestures. Moore intends to shame his political adversaries, but some awkward moments in his films may create a tension between his rhetorical strategies and the affective responses they can provoke. The concept of viewer identification is woefully undertheorized in documentary film studies as compared to narrative fiction film studies, and this book contributes to recent scholarly efforts to redress this imbalance. Chapter One examines how Moore positions the spectator to identify first and foremost with his own onscreen persona. I argue not only that Moore’s awkward humor sometimes undermines this intended identification, but that certain scenes engender affective and embodied responses that can contradict even the spectator’s own predisposition toward the subject matter. Chapter Two addresses models of the cinematic “gaze” in the context of documentary films constructed as portraits of eccentric individuals, or “anticelebrities.” It focuses in particular on Grey Gardens and American Movie. The fascination these films engender is rooted in a set of mismatched gazes among filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. Celebrity portrait films in the Direct Cinema tradition were premised upon the inherent interest to the public of their subjects. In “anticelebrity” portraits of eccentric social outsiders, much of the films’ interest is generated by the awkward interactions between subjects and filmmakers. These relations are expressed through a set of gazes that instantiate misrecognition, unstable identifications, and disjunctive forms of need and desire. The films I examine in this chapter are about social class. Grey Gardens depicts wealth and social privilege lost, while American Movie addresses class aspiration—low-budget horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt’s relentless pursuit of the success he repeatedly describes as the “American dream.” In both films, social class is subject to misrecognition or faulty vision: The Beales cannot quite see what they have lost, and Mark cannot see how little he will ever gain. Misrecognition characterizes not only the subjects’ class positions but also the relationships between filmmakers and subjects. Grey Gardens’ Little Edie, for example, looks to the documentary to provide an

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idealized self-reflection. The filmmakers mirror to Edie an image that fulfills her desire, but they also convey to the viewer perceptions of Edie incongruous with her own desired reflection. Chapter Three builds upon Chapter One’s analysis of the political effects of awkward humor in a documentary context and explores new ways of theorizing concepts of spectatorial “unpleasure” and “dispossession” originally articulated in the suture theory of Daniel Dayan. It examines reality-based films and videos that purport to offer social and political critique through pranks, hoaxes, and other forms of deception. One type creates an easy alignment for the viewer between knowledge and pleasure: Aware of the ruse, the viewer is positioned to laugh at the dupes who serve as the films’ political targets. In other cases, however, the viewer himself or herself may be the dupe, confronted by uncertainty that can be experienced as unpleasurable. Texts that sustain this uncertainty indefinitely move beyond the simple structure of hoax and revelation to open up new possibilities for social critique and the subversion of documentary conventions within a nebulous zone between truth and fiction. The first type of comedy of deception is embodied by the work of activist filmmaker-performers like The Yes Men and James O’Keefe. Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here (2010) and the work of performer-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen represent the second type, in which the forms of knowledge and pleasure associated with documentary spectatorship are challenged and perhaps reinvented. This chapter argues that comedies of deception may function subversively by dispossessing the spectator of what Bill Nichols describes as the sense of “imaginary plenitude” produced by alignment with documentary’s instantiations of the “subject-who-knows”: be it filmmaker, voice-of-God narrator, or other formal qualities that comprise the film’s mode of narration.48 These films and videos intend to pierce through perceived social and political hypocrisies, using awkward humor as their vehicle and positioning their opponents as objects of shaming and contempt. Chapter Four analyzes another example of mismatched gazes, an unusual spectatorial configuration in which viewers are positioned to direct a sadistic gaze toward someone else’s masochistic gaze—looking directly at them as they look away in shame or disgust. The media object that instantiates this configuration is the YouTube–based trend termed “reaction videos.” In these videos, people record one another’s ostensibly spontaneous reactions to shocking, scary, or disgusting Web videos. Reaction videos distill preceding forms of comedy like Candid Camera and America’s Funniest Home Videos into a mechanistic formula for producing extreme affective responses that erases the sociopolitical critique present in the prank films examined in Chapter Three. Reaction videos solicit an affective response from the viewer through their capacity to represent extreme responses in their subjects, but create a disjunction between subject and spectator. We are invited to laugh at the subjects’ various forms of distress. I analyze two prominent types of reaction

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video as well as the related form of “reunion videos” that feature tearful family homecomings for soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan staged publicly for the camera. Like the related form of reaction videos, however, these reunion videos substitute visceral response and bodily mimicry for an ethical form of spectatorship that would compel a viewer’s sense of implication in the representation. In other words, affective intensity substitutes for a critical and political response to wars that other citizens are fighting and for which other families are suffering. The first chapter of Awkward Moments features an analysis of the seminal mock documentary film This Is Spinal Tap and its impact upon the work of Michael Moore and the field of documentary more broadly. I end the book with a return to an analysis of mock documentary, now a mainstay of broadcast television and Web videos. The BBC series The Office holds a status among television mockumentaries comparable to This Is Spinal Tap’s iconic place in mockumentary film. The Office pokes holes in the idea that “flexible” labor in the post-Fordist workplace can offer a creative and personally fulfilling professional life. It depicts the persistence of the numbing routines obscured by this fantasy of the information-age workplace. Exploiting television’s conventional associations with liveness and intimacy, The Office compels the viewer to feel time at an affective and bodily level. The “cringe” in The Office’s “cringe comedy” stems not just from boss David Brent’s awkward behavior, but from how the show conveys the embodied experience of time for the characters, trapped in their repetitive white-collar jobs in perpetuity. The original British Office deploys televisual conventions in a subversive fashion by channeling them through a mock documentary framework to create a biting satire of the postindustrial workplace. But in the American adaptation, conventions of narrative and character development derived from more traditional sitcoms contribute to a retrenchment of the satire. The show does not excise the representation of economic precarity and the threat of un- and underemployment that adds gravity to the British version’s satirical project. But where the British Office conveys a bleak experience of daily routines with little aspirational horizon, the American version offers an imaginary resolution to the problem of diminished prospects. The office does not offer economic opportunity for the characters, but it is rehabilitated as a site of intimate belonging and romantic/domestic possibility. Where the British version offers a critique of the displacement of private life by work, the American Office depicts the workplace as the point of origin for meaningful intimate attachments. In rehabilitating the painful awkwardness that the British Office locates in the contemporary workplace, the American version of the show also contributes to a normalization of the mockumentary framework in the televisual medium. The humor in This Is Spinal Tap is entirely dependent upon its mockumentary style; part of the film’s project is to parody the awkwardness of many documentary film conventions themselves (as intended

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means of constructing discursive authority). This book argues that awkward moments can often be understood as documentary moments—as intrusions of the real in unexpected and unmanageable forms. But as the American Office wends its way through multiple seasons and plotlines, the documentary framework gradually recedes from view. When it is foregrounded, it is not to underscore the awkwardness of the daily routines, but rather, the emotional intensity and significance of the depicted event. By converting awkwardness into other, more pleasurable types of affect, the American Office lays the groundwork for less challenging forms of “managed awkwardness” in a range of contemporary entertainments including American sitcoms like Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. Despite the inclusion of mockumentary conventions including characters’ interviewstyle direct address to the camera, in these shows the concept of a diegetic documentary film-in-production is irrelevant. It is ambiguous whether or not the viewer is meant to infer the presence of a diegetic camera recording the action. Even the producers of Modern Family admit that they are not quite sure whether or not the show is premised upon the diegetic production of an actual documentary, or if it is simply made in a documentary style.49 In effect, the documentary filmmaker’s camera both is and isn’t there: If it is there, we ignore its presence; if it is not there, we still feel its presence. If we agree with A. O. Scott that documentary is everywhere in contemporary culture, it is, perhaps, equally “nowhere.” That is, documentary is, on the one hand, a critical arena for political, ideological, and ethical issues. But it has also become a commonplace to view it, in the words of Modern Family creator Steve Levitan, as “just our style of storytelling”—as simply one of many aesthetic options available in contemporary media culture.

NOTES 1. A. O. Scott, “Documentaries (in Name Only) of Every Stripe,” The New York Times, October 13, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/movies/ 17scott.html?pagewanted=all. 2. The scholarship on this point is too extensive to summarize here, but much of it will be referenced throughout this book. A few particularly relevant texts include the following: Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), especially pp. 56–75; Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000), especially Chapter Two, “Klutz Films”; Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 126–134; Amber Day, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011). 3. See, for example, Maureen Dowd, “The Son Also Sets,” The New York Times, September 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/ sunday/dowd-the-son-also-sets.html. The dissemination of a video depicting

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

a fundraising dinner at which Romney dismissed 47 percent of the American public as entitled and irresponsible government dependents was a damaging moment for his campaign, forcing him into awkward efforts to backtrack from his statements. Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness: An Essay (Winchester, UK: O-Books, 2010), 2–3. Nichols uses the term “social actors” to refer to the human subjects who appear in documentaries; as compared to actors who portray fictional characters in narrative cinema, social actors portray some version of themselves (Nichols, 42). Dirk Eitzen, “Tipsy Discourses of Sobriety: Documentary and Humor,” Paper presented at Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference, La Jolla, California, April 5, 1998, 3. Cited with permission of the author. Arthur, 127. Ibid. Ibid., 126–128. Dovey situates the work of McElwee, Nick Broomfield, and Alan Berliner in this category of “klutz film.” Dovey, 27, 36. Dovey further argues that Moore’s regular guy affect and “klutz” persona represent attempts to create viewer identification and rhetorical force through “accounts of failure, clumsiness, confusion, and ambivalence” (36). He situates the work of McElwee, Nick Broomfield, and Alan Berliner in the category he terms “klutz films” (27–28). Dovey, 107. Therefore, Foucault’s analysis of confessional discourse as a “structuring process which generates the whole experience of individual identity” within relations of power provides a basis for, but does not fully explain, these forms of confessional media culture (Dovey, 105). Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 54. Ibid., 52. See, for example, Mark J. P. Wolf, “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Kay Hoffman, “‘I See, if I Believe it’—Documentary and the Digital,” in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel, or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: 1998). Day, Chapter Two, “Ironic Authenticity.” Ibid., 27–28, 32. Satire and Dissent addresses some of the work examined in this book, including the films of Michael Moore and the political theater of The Yes Men. Adam Kotsko’s view of irony aligns more with Purdy’s; he suggests that it “amounts ultimately to an escapism” (Kotsko, 22). Of course, as Miriam Hansen has long since pointed out, “the very category of the spectator developed by psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory seems to have become obsolete.” (Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations in the Public Sphere,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997], 135). When discussing the spectator, I do not sustain this older model in an unproblematized fashion. But I do seek to examine destabilizations of documentary films’ modes of address to the viewer. Throughout the book, I engage with and challenge existing models of documentary spectatorship (such as Bill Nichols’ concept of “epistephilia”), exploring, in particular, productive tensions between films’ rhetorical, ideological, and ethical frameworks and the affective and embodied dimensions of spectatorship.

Introduction 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

21

Kotsko, 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 24. Regarding the persistence of awkwardness through the 1990s and its resurgence in the new millenium, Kotsko points to well-meaning attempts to develop modes of communication across cultural lines that are “pilloried by the right as ‘political correctness.’” They contribute to this pervasive awkwardness, as even those who support their goals are not always comfortable inhabiting them. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 134. Sedgwick and Frank, 134–35. See Fatimah Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Sedgwick and Frank, 135. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 94. Sedgwick and Frank, 136, 135. Scott. Roger Ebert, “Roger & Me,” http://dogeatdog.michaelmoore.com/ebert.html. Richard Bernstein, “Roger and Me: Documentary? Satire? Or Both?” The New York Times, February 1, 1990. The “mondo” film cycle was inaugurated by Mondo Cane (Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti, 1962) and spawned many sequels and imitators. Morris’ Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981) are early examples of sort of “offbeat character study” examined in Chapter Two of this book. Nichols, 30. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960), 99–100. Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 58–59. Nichols, 3. Scholarship on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report includes Amber Day’s Satire and Dissent and many essays in Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, eds. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson (New York: NYU Press, 2009). Jane M. Gaines, “Introduction: ‘The Real Returns,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). See, for example, Keith Beattie’s Documentary Display: Re-viewing Documentary Film and Video (London and New York: Wallflower, 2008). Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 820, 823. It takes no stretch of the imagination to recognize the continuity between Jackass and early slapstick gags that predated narrative or were incorporated into only the most rudimentary of narrative structures. Citing Tom Gunning, A. O. Scott makes this point in an article on the third installment of the franchise, Jackass 3D (2010). Scott suggests that the move to 3D “cements the place of ‘Jackass’” in the cinema of attractions tradition, ensuring that spectacle remains the basis of the gags and, as creator Spike Jonze puts it, they are “not trying to disappear into a narrative.”

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40. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 86–87. 41. Elizabeth Cowie, “The Spectacle of Actuality,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19. 42. As Brian Winston points out, the history of journalism preceding the era of documentary film establishes a precedent for this: “Entertainment, impure perhaps, also set up a stall in this market place, right next to the one selling information. By the nineteenth century the goods on both were inextricably jumbled.” (Brian Winston, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries [London: British Film Institute, 2000], 121). 43. Cowie, 27–28. Recent scholarship has built upon analyses like those of Cowie and Gaines, focusing on the importance of “spectacle” in reality-based media. In particular, Geoff King’s edited collection, The Spectacle of the Real, contains essays on subjects including media coverage of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, reality TV programming ranging from romance shows to representations of medical operations, and other forms of reality-based spectacle such as professional wrestling and the incorporation of real death and real sex into narrative fiction films. (Geoff King, The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond [Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005]). 44. Sedgwick and Frank, 134. 45. A paradigmatic example of this type of analysis is Calvin Pryluck’s “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking,” in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 46. Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower, 2007), 114. 47. Aaron, 109, 116; Michael Renov, “The Address to the Other: Ethical Discourse in Everything’s For You,” in Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 48. Nichols, 31. 49. Alan Sepinwall, “Modern Family: Co-creator Steve Levitan weighs in,” http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2010/01/modern_family_cocreator_steve.html.

1

Awkward Aesthetics Michael Moore and Christopher Guest

The work of Michael Moore represents a significant shift in the style, rhetoric, and public visibility of mainstream American documentary film, a shift rooted in Moore’s signature device: awkward humor. In popularizing documentary film to an unprecedented degree in the United States, Moore’s films also had a major impact on public perceptions of what a documentary film was. Critics argued that Moore’s creative chronologies and selectively edited interviews undermined conventional ideals of objectivity, and his bumbling screen persona reconfigured expectations concerning the authoritative voice of the documentary filmmaker. This chapter argues that Moore’s films incorporate representational strategies developed in the mock documentary films of Christopher Guest. Both filmmakers create moments of awkward humor in part by constructing differentials in perception among filmmaker, subject, and viewer. As I discuss in section two of the chapter, Guest’s mockumentaries also parody the awkwardness of many formal conventions in documentary filmmaking itself, subjecting these conventions to comic incongruities that subtly undermine their role in the construction of documentary authority. The films by Michael Moore examined in section three defuse mockumentary’s parodic intent while enlisting some of its comic strategies toward a critique of realworld social and political issues. But Moore’s rhetorical frameworks cannot always contain and channel the filmmaker’s awkward humor and the multiple forms of shame and shaming it generates. Through the work of these two filmmakers, documentary and mock documentary grow in popularity while the distinction between the two grows increasingly blurry; taken together, their work stands as a significant aesthetic influence on the subsequent wave of reality-based entertainments including offbeat portrait films, reality television shows, prank and hoax films, and other documentary/fiction hybrids. As a group, these media forms represent what Tom Gunning terms a “cinema of attractions” that flouts documentary film’s traditional claim to a sober informational function, is premised upon provoking for the viewer an oscillation between belief and incredulity, and often relies upon awkward humor to provoke its desired effects.1

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Guest’s characters are marked first and foremost by their painful lack of self-awareness. One of Moore’s signature rhetorical strategies is to frame his political opponents to make them come across as if they were fictional Guest constructions: We laugh in disbelief as they look straight at the camera and make un-self-conscious proclamations of viewpoints the films frame as ridiculous and offensive, amazed that these people could be “for real.” By framing his adversaries this way, Moore aims to suggest that they are without shame. One goal of his films, then, is to use humor and pointed rhetoric as forms of public shaming. Moore presents his own on-screen persona as an awkward everyman up against powerful forces. But for the most part, Moore himself doesn’t inhabit shame; he is thoroughly confident not only in his political positions but in the deliberate strategy of his methods as well. When Moore puts himself in awkward positions such as being detained by security guards while trying to board an exclusive elevator to the office of General Motors CEO Roger Smith, his naïve protestations of ignorance are a pose meant to cast shame upon a corporation that ruins the lives of its workers while remaining utterly inaccessible to their questions and demands. However, the shame generated by Moore’s awkward moments takes multiple forms, in different contexts implicating not only Moore’s political adversaries but also sympathetic figures in his films, the filmmaker himself, and the spectator. It can vector in unexpected directions, disrupting Moore’s own representational strategies and rhetorical goals. More specifically, scenes such as Moore’s prolonged ambush interview with an aging Charlton Heston at the conclusion of Bowling for Columbine (2004) (discussed in section three) may produce what Malin Wahlberg terms a “frame breaking event,” in which the spectator’s embodied and affective relation to the scene comes into conflict with the film’s mode of address and ideological framework.2

I.

THE SUBJECT OF LAUGHTER: INCONGRUITY AND SUPERIORITY

The idea that laughter represents a feeling of superiority toward the object of the joke marks one of two or three major conceptual umbrellas for grouping theories of humor. Others commonly cited include humor derived from a sensation of psychological relief and humor based upon a sense of incongruity in the object of laughter.3 Freud’s analysis of wit and jokes articulates one version of superiority theory. He points to some jokes’ “hostile” or “tendentious” quality, describing how they clear away social barriers and provide an outlet for aggressive tendencies.4 Freud also links the concept of schadenfreude—or pleasure in someone else’s misfortune—to a feeling of superiority that he characterizes as childish in nature.5 In its broader cultural usage, schadenfreude is generally taken to mean happiness at the ill fortune of others whom one believes to deserve this ill fortune.6 Superiority theory is often traced to Hobbes’ formulation in Leviathan of laughter as “Sudden

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Glory . . . caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.”7 Jerry Palmer goes back even further, noting that for “Plato and Aristotle, laughter derives from the inadequacy of the laughable person,” but, like Hobbes, they suggest that this pleasure “is in itself not a worthy aim.” The primary justification for it is that “it can serve to educate wrongdoers by deriding them.”8 This notion of an educative function points toward the view of laughter as a form of social correction articulated by Henri Bergson. Bergson’s theory of laughter is widely known for his analysis of what he terms “mechanical inelasticity”—when something living behaves in a manner that suggests the “rigidity” or involuntary movements of a machine. When passers-by laugh at a man who falls while running down a street, for example, Bergson argues that the source of humor is “the involuntary element” in his fall, the “lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy,” that causes him to continue the same movement when circumstances (e.g., a stone in the road or change in the pavement) should have demanded otherwise.9 But he situates such points in a broader discussion of how laughter has a “social meaning and import” and that “the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society.”10 Comic figures, then, are often characterized by their “unsociability”—their cluelessness to the world around them and, especially, to how others see them. Bergson claims that laughter contains “an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor.”11 In other words, laughter expresses a sense of the need for social correction, even as it defers an explicit statement of that correction.12 Superiority theories may be imbricated with analyses of comedy rooted in ideas of formal incongruity. Not all spectacles of incongruity produce a sense of superiority, but often both elements are present in the production of comic effects. Noël Carroll demonstrates this point in his seminal essay “Notes on the Sight Gag,” arguing that the comic moment proceeds from a marked divergence of perspectives on a given scene: the way the viewer perceives the situation on the one hand, and on the other, the way the character is perceived to understand the situation.13 Writing about the sight gags in Buster Keaton films, Carroll argues that they often depend for their effect upon the character’s inattention to or unawareness of his surroundings. He argues that the formal object of the humor, even in sight gags as simple as the clown slipping on a banana peel, is the incongruity between our perception and the clown’s: He doesn’t see that which is in plain sight for the viewer—and we can see that he doesn’t see it. So, while the clown is the “comic butt” of the joke, Carroll suggests, “[o]ur amusement is not purely sadistic pleasure at someone taking a fall. Rather the pleasure comes of a visually motivated conflict of interpretations over the nature of the scene.”14 Carroll’s explanation, then, is not far from Bergson’s superiority theory—in Bergson’s discussion of the man who stumbles

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and falls, we laugh at the incongruity between his movements and actions and our superior perception of what they should have been. The object of “tendentious” joking in Freud or of the “sudden glory” felt by Hobbes’ laugher; the “absentmindedness,” “physical obstinacy,” and lack of “adaptability to society” in Bergson’s comic figure; all point to the sort of person that, in the contemporary idiom, we might label as ineluctably awkward. Carroll’s essay is rooted in a more purely formal analysis of differentials in perception and so uncovers comic logics in scenes from films like The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) in which the characters are not inherently awkward or even necessarily comic. The situations Carroll posits as exemplifying the logic of the sight gag, however—ranging from the simple slip on the banana peel to the more complex scene in Hitchcock—all confer awkward moments upon the characters involved. Awkward humor in the context of documentary film and other reality-based media is rooted in differentials in perception and affect among filmmaker, subject, and spectator, sometimes fostering a sense of superiority in the spectator. The viewer may vacillate, as Tom Gunning puts it, “between belief and incredulity,” between perceiving the onscreen subject as plausible and as utterly implausible—a tension that may extend to questioning the filmic referent’s documentary veracity or constructedness. Jerry Palmer explains a structural basis for this vacillation or tension in the sight gags in silent film comedy. He argues that a major structure of comic gags is the coexistence of two contradictory syllogisms to explain an action or spectacle. In other words, in comedy, a scene or action can often be simultaneously understood in two different ways; however, one explanation is more logical and plausible than the other. He illustrates this principle with a scene from the Laurel and Hardy film Liberty (1929). Laurel and Hardy struggle on the scaffolding of a building under construction, inadvertently raining down a hail of dangerous objects upon a policeman at the foot of the building. The cop seeks shelter in an elevator shaft, and Laurel and Hardy then get on the elevator and ride down the shaft, landing directly on the cop and seemingly squashing him to death. Laurel and Hardy then exit the elevator. When it ascends, where the policeman was squashed, now stands a midget in a policeman’s uniform. The first of two possible syllogisms holds that the event is totally implausible, because a) the result of being squashed by an elevator is death (major premise); yet b) the cop is squashed, but he survives (minor premise); so c) the event is not plausible. But the second, contradictory syllogism, which allows for the scene’s comic effect, goes as follows: a) The result of squashing is a reduction in size. b) The cop comes out smaller. c) Therefore, the event has a measure of plausibility.15 Palmer’s explanation for the comic effect of visual gags such as this one holds that a tension arises between these two competing syllogisms, in which the

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mode of reasoning that perceives the event to be plausible is inferior, based upon a lesser logic. But it is the structural possibility of this lesser logic within the gag itself that serves as the basis of the comic effect.16 Arthur Koestler offers a related structural explanation of comedy as involving the joining of “two or more independent and self-contained logical chains.” Comprehending the intersection of these chains in a joke or gag produces in the viewer/ listener a moment of what Koestler terms “biosociation,” a sudden emotional release of tension produced by the revelation of how the two independent logical chains in the joke operate together.17 Another way of putting this is to simply say that biosociation is the moment of “getting the joke”—when we comprehend how the joke makes sense and feel included in its logic. In the documentary tradition, however, there is an overarching premise that suggests the plausibility of anything we witness on the screen: the claim for the ontological status of the filmic referent as real rather than fabricated for the film.18 This fundamental premise of the documentary mode—the notion that the event we are seeing is real and spontaneous—produces Palmer’s comic tension in the context of documentary comedy. The viewer’s sense of the incredibility or even implausibility of the comic moment is counteracted by his or her belief in the truth-value of the film itself; the claim to indexicality compels viewers to accept the premise presented in the film as more plausible than implausible. Therefore, in documentary comedy, there is usually a reversal in priority between Palmer’s syllogisms, as compared to how they operate in a narrative film: Because of the film’s purported ontological status, the explanation that holds an event to be plausible outweighs the viewer’s sense that the bizarre nature of the spectacle renders it implausible. However, as with the gag in Liberty, a tension between the two possibilities remains, which produces a similar comic effect—it is simply based upon the viewer’s feeling that this “real” scene might be too bizarre to be believed, rather than feeling that an outlandish scene (the midget policeman) contains a measure of plausibility. This comic structure can be traced back to the earliest films in the documentary tradition, such as Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), generally considered the first documentary feature. In one well-known scene from the film, Flaherty stages an encounter between Nanook and a white fur trader, in which the trader purports to demonstrate and explain the workings of a phonograph. First breaking into a large grin upon hearing the recorded voice on the record, Nanook then takes the record from the trader, examines it, and bites it. As William Rothman points out, a viewer in Flaherty’s American or European audience might find it unbelievable that a person, even one who had never seen a phonograph record before, would try to learn its secrets by placing it in his mouth.19 But the film’s status as documentary authoritatively asserts the plausibility of this action. This impression of the action’s plausibility is further supported by the representational and narrative strategies through which Flaherty labors to construct an image of the Inuit as untouched by modernity and Western

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culture. As Fatimah Rony argues, the approach to ethnographic representation that seeks to render its subjects as “picturesque” is a gesture of self-protection, “synonymous with a desire to transfix a dynamic cultural confrontation into a still life . . . [t]he disturbing gaze of the Native . . . is tamed by visualizing the picturesque.”20 By freezing the subject in history, the viewer is distanced from the sense of a direct encounter in the present. Nanook’s exoticism is in turn mediated by his representation as noble, brave, and industrious. He is rendered as a sort of “primitive Protestant . . . a mirror for the white audience.”21 Additionally, humor is used to tame these subjects. As Rony writes, “many critics have identified an early precursor of Flaherty in Gaston Méliès . . . [whose] humor is indicative of this genre . . . ‘savages’ are made to seem silly and not really dangerous.”22 A Western viewer’s potential discomfort at witnessing Nanook killing a walrus and eating raw meat, for example—a scene in which his Otherness might seem potentially threatening—is released and relieved through the invitation to laugh at Nanook in moments such as when he bites the record. Despite such elements of “attractions” in the history of documentary, viewers conventionally associate narrative fiction film in the Hollywood tradition with escapism and pleasure, and documentary, by contrast, as investing the viewer with a sense of responsibility toward the larger, historical world. If, following Palmer and Koestler, getting the joke in fiction film marks a pleasurable release of tension for the viewer, then what are the stakes of getting the joke in the context of the traditional mission of documentary? In Nanook, the viewer’s laughter functions to effectively release him or her from a confrontation with potentially discomfiting knowledge (of the actual complexities of the encounter between white Western explorers, traders, and filmmakers and the Inuit peoples) and Otherness. This moment establishes a significant precedent: Laughter may defuse challenging or troubling images and ideas, and release viewers from a sense of responsibility toward documentary representations—thus having the opposite effect from the “invitation to investigation and knowledge” proposed by Jane Gaines. Christopher Guest exploits the comic potential in the tension between the plausible and implausible through a mock-documentary format in which (though the films do satirize real-world social formations) the political stakes of the representations remain relatively low. Moore, however, attempts to use comedy toward precisely the ends specified by Gaines—engaging viewers and enhancing his films’ rhetorical impact and effectivity. The last section of this chapter examines what I view as the mixed and often contradictory results of Moore’s efforts; the following section argues that Guest’s mockumentaries actually create a generic and syntactical basis for the style of awkward humor central to Moore’s documentaries, which has in turn proved deeply influential upon the wider cultural field of reality-based media.

Awkward Aesthetics II.

29

THE MOCKUMENTARY SYNTAX OF DOCUMENTARY’S AWKWARD HUMOR

Mock documentary defamiliarizes conventions that contribute to traditional claims of objectivity and transparency. In doing so, it unlocks comic potentials in documentary form and develops a comic syntax that has influenced a range of films and other reality-based media. Until recently, mock documentary has predominantly reproduced and parodied the form of feature-length documentary film. In his analysis of documentary and comedy, Paul Ward briefly discusses the television series The Office as an interesting variation on mock documentary conventions. Drawing from Dan Harries’ work on parody, Ward points out that what differentiates the show from many other mock documentaries is its lack of the “‘logical absurdity’ that is often identified as a marker of parody—a sudden incursion of something that ruptures the verisimilitude and creates incongruity.” Ward suggests that “the humour derives from the programme’s sustained plausibility, rather than the alternation between plausibility and implausibility that is characteristic of parody more generally.”23 Ward’s description of the “alternation between plausibility and implausibility” in parody clearly parallels Palmer’s analysis of the coexistence of plausibility and implausibility in the logic of sight gags discussed in the preceding section. I have argued that the humor of documentary comedy can in part be attributed to a similar tension between a viewer’s sense that a scene is either plausible or implausible, but with plausibility usually taking primacy due to the viewer’s perception of the film’s ontological status. The humor in mock documentary films like This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) inverts this relationship, functioning structurally more like the fiction film sight gags analyzed by Palmer, but creating a distinctive form of awkward humor rooted in the film’s documentary style. In Spinal Tap, as in Laurel and Hardy, the viewer’s primary perception of a scene’s implausibility is tempered by a minor implication of plausibility. To appreciate this form of humor, a viewer must be aware that the film is a fictional construct in documentary form. As director Rob Reiner explained in an interview about a preview screening in Dallas, “A small section of the audience laughed. The rest asked why we would make a serious documentary about a terrible band they had never heard of.”24 But when a viewer—either because of metatextual awareness or through perception of textual clues—is aware that the diegesis of the film is fictional, then the tension between implausible absurdities onscreen and the aura of plausibility lent by Reiner’s straight-faced appropriation of documentary film conventions creates the film’s distinctive comic effects. This mode of comic incongruity defamiliarizes documentary conventions generally meant to go unnoticed by the viewer, disarticulating them from their standard “sober informational function” and foregrounding their very conventionality. I use the term “defamiliarization” in the Russian Formalist sense of how violations of an existing literary system constitute a form

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of artistic and generic transformation.25 Rick Altman’s seminal analysis of generic evolution provides a related model for how mock documentary may defamiliarize and transform dominant documentary conventions.26 Altman notes that theorists such as Fredric Jameson (following Todorov) distinguish between “semantic and syntactic approaches to genre.” Semantic elements include “common traits” of a given genre—“characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like.” The syntax is how these building blocks are organized, through features like “plot structure, character relationships, or image and sound montage.”27 Theorizing generic evolution and formation, Altman goes on to suggest that “genres arise in one of two fundamental ways: either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements.”28 Documentary, as a mode of film rather than a genre, has, of course, adopted a huge range of semantic elements. The unifying principle of the range of subject matter represented in documentary film has simply been the tacit agreement that, as Renov puts it, the subjects are “a piece of the world plucked from its everyday context rather than fabricated for the screen.”29 But what happens when a documentary syntax adopts a set of semantic elements that are expressly fabricated for the screen? My argument on this point is twofold. First, I suggest that the syntax—the set of documentary conventions that includes elements like voiceover narration, subject interviews (often featuring reaction shots of the filmmaker/ interviewer), and rhetorical editing techniques—may be defamiliarized and subject to implicit critique through its incongruous juxtaposition to the films’ absurd subject matter. As Geoff King summarizes the concept of defamiliarization in Russian Formalist criticism, “self-conscious attention is drawn to conventions that are usually naturalized and rendered relatively invisible by the text.”30 As Carl Plantinga rightly points out, earlier films like Mondo Cane (1963) and Letter From Siberia (1957) can be seen as precedents for this mode of satirical juxtaposition between serious form and “silly, incongruous, or shocking subjects.”31 These two films, however, represent examples of exploitation and avant-garde aesthetics, respectively—both quite marginal to mainstream documentary practice and to public consciousness. Where Plantinga contends that This Is Spinal Tap does not perform a similar critical function toward documentary form itself, my analysis of defamiliarization suggests quite the opposite—mock documentaries like Spinal Tap draw “self-conscious attention” to conventions that are “usually naturalized and rendered relatively invisible.” Second, this laying bare of documentary conventions is productive in the sense that it reconstructs them by foregrounding their comic potentials. These potentials are then frequently incorporated into mainstream documentary film itself, in a form of generic evolution that Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky terms “canonization of the junior branch.”32 This process occurs at both syntactic and semantic levels. At the syntactic level,

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for example, mockumentary editing may parody “evidentiary” or “rhetorical” edits in documentary by juxtaposing them with absurd incongruities in their characters’ dialogue. The resulting comic style has been increasingly adopted in real documentary films. At the semantic level, many recent documentaries concern people whose claim to viewers’ attention is premised mainly upon their bizarre or comic natures, including a fair number of films focused—as in the Christopher Guest oeuvre—on the creative projects of individuals whose actual talents and abilities are highly questionable. This semantic shift is especially apparent in the offbeat portrait documentaries I examine in Chapter Two, but is significant to the work of Moore, to reality TV, and to many other examples of reality-based media. Directed by Rob Reiner, but starring Christopher Guest (who would go on to direct a series of mockumentaries in a similar vein), This Is Spinal Tap is, as Ethan de Seife writes, “for many people, the definitive mock documentary; it is still the one to which nearly all subsequent mock documentaries most often refer.”33 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight concur: “This Is Spinal Tap is something of a landmark within the mock-documentary form. It is often cited by filmmakers working in the form as a key reference point and influence on their own efforts.”34 While hardly the first example of a pseudo-documentary that bends factuality with explicitly satirical intent35, This Is Spinal Tap was the film that introduced mock documentary as a form to a broad audience.36 This much-celebrated film is constructed as a documentary following the North American tour of an aging British heavy metal band called Spinal Tap. Employing filmmaking styles associated with different documentary modes and movements, the film features observational sequences (including several concert performances), interviews with the band members, and constructed archival footage depicting the band’s history (which also functions as a parodic history of rock and roll music itself, as the band moves from its early “mod” days through a hippie “psychedelic rock” period, and finally into its present-day heavy metal incarnation). Palmer’s model of plausibility and implausibility is key to the structural basis of much of the humor in This Is Spinal Tap. In one of the film’s most famous and oft-quoted scenes, filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner) talks to the band’s lead guitarist, Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) about Tufnel’s custom-designed Marshall amplifiers that “go up to eleven.” This moment represents the culmination of a scene in which Tufnel shows off his collection of guitars to DiBergi, displaying his characteristic blend of arrogance and cluelessness. For example, he repeatedly demands that DiBergi listen to the amazing “sustain” on a guitar he holds up to the camera, and, only when DiBergi protests that he can’t hear anything, concedes, “Well, you would, though, if it were playing.” When he brings DiBergi over to see the specially designed Marshall amp heads, he does not seem to even know what the object is technically called, identifying it as “this is a top to, you know . . . what we use on stage.” Tufnel’s ignorance and incompetence as revealed in statements such as these is

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representative of the film’s satire of the cherished ideals of technical virtuosity and “hypermasculinity” in heavy metal culture—points made by Carl Plantinga in his analysis of the film.37 As the camera moves in for a close-up on the knobs, Tufnel excitedly explains that they “go up to eleven.” When DiBergi asks whether this feature makes it louder than other amps, Tufnel replies, as if the concept were painfully self-evident, “Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it?” In this scene, Tufnel’s explanation is premised upon an inversion of the relationship between the amp’s actual capacity to produce loudness and the control knob that calibrates that loudness on a one-to-ten scale. Hence, DiBergi’s subsequent question, which suggests that they could simply design the amps themselves to be louder but keep the same one-to-ten scale, is incomprehensible to Tufnel. He can only understand an increase in the power of the amp as proceeding from an increase in the numbers on the knob. As with the cop squashed in the elevator shaft in the Laurel and Hardy skit, the humor of the scene derives from the incongruity between these two possible explanations, one plausible—DiBergi’s suggestion that the amp could be louder even if the scale still read one to ten, and one implausible—Tufnel’s belief that the power of the amp can only be increased by expanding the scale. However, as with the reduced-size cop walking out of the shaft after having been crushed by the elevator, Tufnel’s perspective does contain a measure of plausibility that we can understand. Some guitarists really have no idea how their amps actually work, and so, on a certain level, they too may think of the increments on the volume knob as actual units of sound, rather than simply a scale for measuring sound output. In an obvious sense, This Is Spinal Tap and the subsequent series of similar mock documentaries in which Guest took over directing responsibilities from Reiner all take as their subject matter awkward people: aging and increasingly irrelevant rock musicians, talentless small-town community theater performers in Waiting for Guffman (1996), hypercompetitive contestants in televised dog shows in Best in Show (2000), and so on. These characters all exhibit qualities that conform to the criteria described by Bergson and other philosophers and theorists outlined earlier in this chapter: obstinacy, lack of adaptability to society, cluelessness about how others see them. The films construct a differential in perception, consonant with Carroll’s analysis of the sight gag, between how we view them and how they view themselves. In an interview with Christopher Guest in the humor magazine The Onion, the interviewer notes that the films are consistently about “the incompetence of the main characters. They’re always making fun of someone making bad art.”38 Guest explains, “It’s obviously inherently funnier to have in a comedy someone who isn’t doing something very well. That is the basis of most comedy. If you’re showing people where it’s smooth sailing, where is the joke?”39 But This Is Spinal Tap is not simply a satire of awkward characters. Just as significantly, the film parodies documentary form itself: its conventional stance of seriousness and authority, and conventions of camerawork and editing intended to convey and reinforce the gravity of a film’s message.

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Reiner’s performance as director Marty DiBergi contributes to this parody of documentary form. In his interactions with Tufnel and other members of the band, his demeanor conveys a self-important gravity and earnest interest in his subject matter, but (as in the scene with the Marshall amps) the film perpetually demonstrates the incongruity between DiBergi’s stance and the absurdity of his subjects. Throughout the film, subtle but significant choices in the cinematography and editing reinforce the actors’ performances to create a trenchant parody of the awkwardness often produced by the pretenses of documentary filmmaking—an awkwardness apparent in both the profilmic event and the formal devices used to shape it for the viewer. In the opening scene of Spinal Tap, Reiner introduces himself as Marty DiBergi—an allusion to Martin Scorsese, director of the famous rock documentary, The Last Waltz (1978). As he starts to tell the story of the first time he saw the band Spinal Tap in 1966, the film cuts to a medium shot, revealing DiBergi to be in a large room filled with film equipment. DiBergi begins to walk screen right as he tells the story, and the camera tracks with him, revealing more and more equipment behind him in the course of the shot: first a 35mm camera on which he is resting his arm, then various lighting instruments (several of which are turned on), cucaloruses, reflectors, c-stands, etc. This almost hyperbolic multiplication of signifiers of a “behind-the-scenes view” of the filmmaking process has a comic effect, because we are ostensibly about to see a low-budget cinéma vérité documentary shot on 16mm film with a frequently handheld camera (definitely not the larger-format camera associated with Hollywood filmmaking that DiBergi is pictured with in the opening shot).40 DiBergi stops walking, and we cut to back to a medium close-up as he reminisces, “I remember being knocked out by their exuberance, their raw power . . . and their punctuality.” In addition to the incongruous effect of praising a rock band for their adherence to a schedule alongside his more conventional accolades, this moment derives its humor specifically from the cut to a tighter shot on DiBergi’s face. This cut accompanies a shift in his monologue from a more objective recounting of events to a subjective and reverent statement of his personal feelings about the band. The obviousness of the intention defamiliarizes this convention of shooting and editing interviews in documentary filmmaking. It foregrounds the overly literal nature of the notion that when interview subjects share more intimate thoughts, the viewer should feel spatially closer to these subjects.41 This convention is supposed to be essentially indiscernible to the viewer. Here, however, it becomes a source of the scene’s humor, as its very awkwardness is rendered palpable.42 Other documentary conventions the film frames as awkward in their form and intent include the cut to a reaction shot of the filmmaker/interviewer in response to particularly salient points in a subject’s dialogue. This convention is prevalent in television newsmagazine interviews and is used in many documentary films (including The Last Waltz). It is meant to remind the viewer of the filmmaker’s presence as well as to provide a proxy to

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help guide the viewer’s reactions to the subject’s discourse: When we see the interviewer nodding in response with serious intensity, we are cued to be aware that something important has been said. This convention is repeatedly parodied in Spinal Tap; for example, when DiBergi interviews the band about their history together. He asks questions as the film employs a shot/ reverse shot structure between the director and band members. In response to DiBergi’s question about what became of the band’s first drummer, Tufnel and St. Hubbins sadly acknowledge that “He died (pause) . . . he died in a bizarre gardening accident some years back.” The absurdity of this explanation contrasts with our expectations concerning the dramatic deaths of rock stars: from drug overdoses, in plane crashes, etc. Just after we hear the phrase “bizarre gardening accident,” the film cuts to a reverse shot of DiBergi nodding his head with an expression of seriousness and empathy (see Figure 1.1). By employing this editing convention to emphasize the best punch lines in the characters’ dialogue, the film parodies the way in which it is normally used to convey the importance of the discourse.43 More generally, the film establishes a comic editing style by consistently cutting away from an interview or scene just as a character has made his (or her) funniest statement, rendering the last line a punch line to the scene. The rhetorical or (as Nichols describes it, “evidentiary”) editing style of documentary film trains viewers to expect significance from the final line spoken in a scene. Often, it will be clear that an interviewee has not finished speaking or resolved his or her train of thought at this point, but the placement of the cut indicates that the preceding statement was most useful for the filmmaker’s rhetorical or dramatic purposes. In Spinal Tap, this convention is instead used to emphasize moments of comic incongruity or reversals in the viewer’s expectations. Tufnel’s final insistence that “these go up to eleven” is one famous example of this technique.

Figure 1.1 Reaction shots of filmmaker Marty DiBergi parody documentary film conventions (This Is Spinal Tap).

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One of many others comes in a discussion between DiBergi and Tufnel as the guitarist sits at the piano playing a soft piece in a minor key. Cutting back and forth between a two-shot of Tufnel and DiBergi and close-up shots of Tufnel’s hands as he plays, the subdued camerawork seems to fit the introspective mood of the scene. DiBergi compliments Tufnel on how pretty the piece is, while Tufnel explains how he considers d minor to be the “saddest” of all keys. A bit of humor is introduced when Tufnel explains that he is simultaneously influenced by Mozart and Bach, making this something of a “moch” (pronounced “mock”) piece, but for the most part, the mood of the scene remains uncharacteristically serious. Then, however, DiBergi asks Tufnel the name of the piece, and Tufnel matter-of-factly replies, “Oh, this piece is called ‘Lick my Love Pump.’” We quickly cut away to a new scene. This moment displays an obvious comic incongruity between the genuinely pretty piano piece Tufnel plays and the crass vulgarity of the title he gives it. This incongruity is revealed—and its comic quality emphasized—through a reversal of expectations, or “peripeteia.”44 In sum, when distinctive conventions of documentary form and style are employed in This Is Spinal Tap, incongruity arises between the traditional serious intent of the documentary form and the absurd quality of the dialogue and action. This incongruity defamiliarizes the formal mechanisms through which documentary conventionally adds gravity to its subject matter, foregrounding their often awkward and overly literal intent.45 This formal parody reinforces Reiner’s satirical performance of a documentary filmmaker’s self-seriousness and elevation of his subject matter. The style of subsequent documentary films examined in this book, including much of Moore’s work, demonstrates how the parodic approach of Spinal Tap and other mock documentaries has actually contributed to a new documentary aesthetics. This trend is an example of Shklovsky’s “canonization of the junior branch,”46 or, as Hans Jauss describes it, a genre can be “reanimated through a restructuring (be it through the playing up of previously suppressed themes or methods, or through the taking up of materials or the taking over of functions from other genres).”47 This generic transformation has significant political, ideological, and ethical consequences for documentary film. Moore’s films in many respects reproduce the comic style of Guest’s work. But while Moore adopts elements of mockumentary syntax, he attempts to dissolve the parodic intent of this comic style and reinstate the magnitude and political stakes of the filmic referent—reconstructing this style in the service of committed political satire. Awkwardness in Moore’s films is not therefore situated in the limitations of documentary form; these limitations are no longer the object of critique. Moore’s version of awkwardness is a deliberate construction in the service of his political rhetoric, rooted in his on-screen persona, the situations he places himself in, and how he interacts with his subjects. But Moore’s attempts to harness and direct awkward humor in this manner sometimes elude his complete control. By framing many of his political antagonists as if they

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were characters in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, Moore aims to provoke disbelief in the viewer, incredulity at the viewpoints they shamelessly espouse on camera. As I argue in the next section of this chapter, Moore’s efforts to use humor toward a public shaming of such figures can, however, become complicated or problematized, and may produce results unintended by the filmmaker.

III.

MICHAEL MOORE’S RHETORICS OF AWKWARDNESS

Michael Moore is by far the most prominent and financially successful director in the recent history of American documentary film. The top–ten grossing documentaries since 1982 include four of his films: Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, number one on the list), Sicko (2007, number four), Bowling for Columbine (2002, number six), and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, number nine), and Moore’s debut feature, Roger and Me (1989), is not far behind, at number eighteen.48 Accompanying his documentaries’ unprecedented financial success and capacity to generate critical controversy, Moore’s films have had a significant impact on the form and style of contemporary American documentary film and reality-based media more broadly. Moore’s first-person approach combines expository elements such as voiceover narration and archival footage combined with ambush interviews and his signature form of awkward humor deployed for rhetorical purposes. I will analyze three modes of awkward humor in Moore’s films. Each of these modes produces its own distinct form of shame, situates this shame differently among the positions of subject, filmmaker, and viewer, and carries its own implications for the films’ broader political arguments and ethical stances. In the first, Moore stages awkward encounters with people in his films who, from his perspective, espouse or embody the social and political ills the films purport to address and combat. In this case, shame is directed toward the subject and what he or she represents. In the second form, Moore constructs a more reflexive form of awkwardness, in which the viewer is prodded to feel shame at his or her own cultural and class-based prejudices and inattention to social and political issues. In the third, I argue that Moore’s representational strategies are disrupted: The awkward moment he stages inadvertently produces a tension between the spectator’s embodied and affective response to the scene and the political or ethical perspective the film intends for us to accept and share.

1.

Shame on Them

Bowling for Columbine cemented Moore’s global prominence and his position as lightning rod for controversy and debate. It became the highest-grossing documentary of all time after its release and won multiple honors, including a special award at Cannes and the Academy Award for best documentary.

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At the same time, criticisms that had dogged Moore since the release of Roger and Me were only amplified by the success of this film: Moore was taken to task for what critics perceived as “manipulative” editing, factual inaccuracies, and exploitation of his subjects. The film was made in the wake of the Columbine high school shootings of 1999, in which two students murdered twelve students and one teacher, injured many others, and finally killed themselves. Moore investigates a wide range of possible causes and effects of gun violence in the United States, ultimately formulating a broad thesis suggesting that a generalized culture of fear and violence, propagated by the mass media and shaped at its core by the nation’s military and foreign policy, may account for the vast differences in gun violence between the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Like his other films, Bowling for Columbine addresses serious and controversial matters of policy, economics, and culture, but it retains the central role of awkward humor in Moore’s rhetorical strategies. In one sequence early in the film, Moore visits the farm of James Nichols, brother of Terry Nichols, who was convicted along with Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. This sequence exemplifies how Moore simultaneously employs a comic style similar in many respects to what we see in Christopher Guest mockumentaries and tries to sustain a viewer’s awareness of the tragedy to which, the film implies, James Nichols is likely linked. Moore frames him as a ridiculous figure, deserving of our derisive laughter, but also a symbol of the paranoia and madness that Moore suggests underlies much of the gun culture in the U.S. Moore presents an extended interview with Nichols at his farmhouse in Michigan, where Timothy McVeigh sometimes stayed, and where James and Terry were proven to have built bombs prior to the Oklahoma City bombing. Splicing together key moments from his conversation with Nichols through seamless editing that creates a sense of continuity, Moore presents a portrait of an unstable and not very intelligent man whose paranoia about the government and revolutionary fantasies embody a key component of what the film frames as the culture of fear feeding gun violence. But rather than simply presenting Nichols as a threatening bogeyman, Moore’s interactions with Nichols and the editing of the interview foster laughter at Nichols’ expense. At one point in the interview, Moore sits with Nichols at his kitchen table while Nichols heatedly explains how the federal agents who came to investigate his farm were “shaking in their shoes, scared to death” because they expected another Waco. When Moore presses him to explain this claim, Nichols’ righteous tone becomes infused with petulance. He begins to explain, “Because certain people . . .” and then pauses as if unsure whether to specify who. But with renewed vehemence, Nichols carries on: “. . . namely, my ex-wife, and other people” described him as a deranged radical with an arsenal of guns that he would be willing to use at the drop of a hat. Following this tirade that demonstrates the imbrication of

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personal resentment in Nichols’ paranoid political rhetoric, he laughs a bit maniacally, while the film cuts to a deadpan reaction shot of Moore, taking it all in. When I teach Bowling for Columbine, Nichols’ line about his ex-wife and Moore’s subsequent reaction shot never fail to elicit back-to-back waves of laughter from the class. One contributing factor, of course, is the contrast between Nichols’ manic energy and Moore’s expressionless response. More specifically, the interviewer reaction shot creates a moment of comic incongruity similar to what we see in This Is Spinal Tap. Where reaction shots are conventionally used to signify engagement with an interviewee’s discourse, the reverse shot of Moore registers nothing so much as barely contained incredulity. Moore appears, awkwardly, at an utter loss for words. But this implied signification of Moore’s expression in the reaction shot is quite deliberate and is intended to convey to the viewer Moore’s sense that this man is beyond dialogue, beyond reason. When Moore does attempt to reason with Nichols, their exchanges only serve as means of using comic editing techniques to further reinforce the film’s representation of him as deranged and dangerous. First, as Nichols unspools a fantasy about the overthrow of a tyrannical government that would involve “blood running in the streets,” Moore interjects the question, “Well, why not use Gandhi’s way? He didn’t have any guns and he beat the British Empire.” Nichols briefly considers the question, and then admits matter-of-factly, “I’m not familiar with that.” Following a beat in which Moore lets Nichols’ shocking ignorance of world history sink in, the film cuts to an interview with a teenager named Brent, who, in a line that reinforces the comic moment by seeming to describe Nichols, asserts, “Otsego [MI] has a bad habit of raising psychos.” In an interlude, Nichols brings Moore into his bedroom to show him the .44 Magnum he keeps under his pillow and proceeds to cock the trigger and hold the gun to his head. Then, at the very end of the interview, Moore challenges him on the intent of the Second Amendment, provoking Nichols to admit that perhaps things like “weapons-grade plutonium” should be restricted. To defend this point, Nichols looks knowingly at Moore and reminds him, “Well, there’s wackos out there.” Following this line, the film cuts to a montage of gun use and violence that serves as Moore’s literal representation of Nichols’ statement. These segment-ending statements from Nichols—“I’m not familiar with that” and “Well, there’s wackos out there”—function in a structurally similar manner to the comic punch lines in Spinal Tap (“These go up to eleven”; “Oh, this piece is called ‘Lick my Love Pump’”). Nichols is framed in part as a Bergsonian comic figure—clueless, obstinate, and in need of social correction. The viewer is given an easy sense of superiority in relation to Nichols’ overheated rhetoric and blatant ignorance of history. But the awkwardness of Moore’s encounter with Nichols—Nichols’ total inability to adequately comprehend and respond to Moore’s questions combined with his oscillation between a friendly and a threatening demeanor—serves a specific

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rhetorical function for Moore. The awkward encounter signifies how little hope we have of reasoning with the stalwart advocates of “Second Amendment rights,” and the film positions “fringe” elements like Nichols and the Michigan Militia as synecdoche for the irrational paranoia and violent potential that the film suggests underlie gun rights rhetoric. By intercutting archival footage from the Oklahoma City bombing (including a shot of a mutilated child) with the interview, Moore reinforces this point: Our laughter at Nichols should demonstrate to us how absurd the underlying logics of gun rights arguments can be, but this absurdity can shade easily into dangerous irrationality, death, and destruction.

2.

Shame on Us

Along with its striking financial success, Moore’s debut feature, Roger and Me, prompted divisive responses upon its release. Some critics, including Hal Hinson of the Washington Post and Roger Ebert celebrated Moore’s infusion of biting satire into what was often regarded as a staid mode of filmmaking. Others disagreed; Pauline Kael excoriated the film in The New Yorker as a piece of “gonzo demagoguery” and took Moore to task for inciting audiences to laugh at ordinary, working-class people of Flint while still feeling “politically correct.” She argued that Moore “does something that is humanly very offensive,” using “leftism as a superior attitude.”49 Along with prompting such divisive reactions, the film challenged categorical assumptions, as demonstrated by the title of an article in the New York Times: “Roger & Me: Documentary? Satire? Or Both?”50 Scholars including Dirk Eitzen, Jon Dovey, Paul Arthur, and Matthew Bernstein have all argued that Moore’s persona in the film is something of a lure designed to entertain viewers and put them at ease, making them feel that they are not simply being lectured to. Dovey and Arthur both suggest that Moore’s first-person style represents a new form of authority for a media audience less invested in older models of objective discourse. Bernstein sees the persona as more of a ruse, designed to distract viewers from the conventional expository documentary techniques through which Moore actually asserts his arguments.51 It is true that Moore sometimes relies upon expository methods, but the authority of Moore’s voice derives most centrally from the comic style that establishes him as particularly attuned to the ironies and absurdities in Flint’s economic collapse and in peoples’ responses to this tragic situation. Moore articulates this perspective through a number of approaches, including sarcastic commentary in his voiceover narration, and, even more importantly, through rhetorical editing techniques that humorously make his points without him having to state them directly. Moore stages deliberately awkward interviews and public confrontations with representatives of General Motors and the economic elites of Flint, but carefully manages these encounters for strategic purposes. As Dovey and Arthur rightly argue, his

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seemingly awkward and incompetent persona often functions to reconstruct an authoritative documentary voice in the context of a media environment increasingly characterized by irony and reflexivity. When Moore creates awkward moments designed to shame the wealthy and powerful, he attempts to construct an insulated position of judgment, free from shame, for himself and for the spectator he intends to align with his viewpoint. When Moore depicts the working class and disenfranchised of Flint, however, the film’s representational strategies and politics grow more complicated, leaving him open to criticisms like those of Kael: that he condescends to his working-class subjects and exploits them for easy laughs. But while Moore does sometimes create humor at the expense of ordinary people in Flint, his goals with such scenes are more nuanced and aligned with the film’s political goals than such criticism allows for. Perhaps the most (in)famous working-class comic figure in the film is the “Pets or Meat” woman who raises rabbits in her backyard that can be bought either for friendship or for the kitchen stove (her name is Rhonda Britton, but she is not identified by name in the film, and the DVD menu refers to her only as the “bunny lady”). The scene depicting Moore’s encounter with her is shot in an observational style, beginning with Moore’s awkward inquiry at her back door about her sign that advertises bunnies as “Pets or Meat”: for Moore, a discomfiting concept, for Britton, a self-evident proposition. Britton proceeds to show Moore the cramped rabbit cages behind her run-down house and explains her trade with lines like, “I butcher the babies when the babies reach four or five months old, ‘cause see if you butcher the older ones like these guys then they’re stewers, not fryers, and a lot of people likes [sic] fryers better than they do the stewers.” Moore performs a bemused discomfort for the camera—serving as proxy for the viewer—by chuckling awkwardly and interjecting brief, ironic comments like “yeah, that makes sense.” He registers further discomfort as she proceeds to explain how, when the males get old enough, they begin urinating on the other males, fighting, and castrating each other: “They chew their balls right off, then you have a bloody mess.” During these shots, Moore remains mostly in profile on the side of the frame. Britton and her bunnies are the focal point of the camera’s attention, but Moore’s performative reactions and ironic comments foreground what he sees as the comic incongruity in the situation. American culture tries to draw a strict line between our conception of a given animal as either a pet or as meat—dogs fall on one side of this dividing line, cows on the other, and so on. The hand-written sign posted outside her house that reads “Rabbits or Bunnies/Pets or Meat” transgresses this categorical boundary. The scene foregrounds her own lack of recognition of this transgression, while Moore’s performance emphasizes that it is as apparent to him as it should be to the audience. Britton might therefore seem to be positioned as the butt of the joke, displaying a Tufnelesque cluelessness about social norms.52 (See Figure 1.2.)

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At the end of the scene, however, Moore changes tone. He switches to a shot in which he is out of frame and Britton addresses the camera position. This change in framing shifts the encounter from a casual, conversational style to a somewhat more formal interview, reinforcing the shift from a humorous to a more serious tone. In this last shot, she explains how the rabbits and dogs she raises are her only source of income beyond Social Security, and how she barely earns enough money to survive. As she speaks, the film cuts to a reverse shot of Moore, showing him reacting to her explanation with seriousness and empathy (see Figure 1.3A and 1.3B). The device that is subject to parody in This Is Spinal Tap and that Moore employs for humorous effect in the James Nichols interview from Bowling for Columbine is used here for its most conventional function—the filmmaker is meant to serve as proxy for the intended viewer reaction, now one of pathos rather than laughter. During the previous section of the scene in which Britton displays her overcrowded cages filled with bunnies that “chew each other’s balls right off,” Moore embodies Tomkins’ shamed subject who wants to look away. But Moore makes sure to end the scene by performing a direct gaze at Britton and the economic problems she embodies—a refusal to look away from the problem. Following Moore’s own defense of his use of comedy, the humorous portions of the scene can be seen as a hook to engage the viewer with the subject matter.53 More importantly, however, the shift in tone engenders a productive tension: By feeling empathy for the woman at the end of the scene, the viewer may feel a bit guilty and question the basis of his or her prior feeling of amused superiority. By evincing an awkward distaste for Britton’s work and the very conceptual premise of “Pets or Meat,” Moore invites the viewer to identify with this reaction and the insensitivity to severe economic hardship that it implies. By letting Britton’s more extensive explanation of her life circumstances “correct” the attitude Moore displays at the start of the scene, the viewer in turn is shamed by his or her own initial response. This ending places the scene’s comic qualities into Moore’s rhetorical framework in this segment of the film. In scene after scene, he depicts people whose behavior may bewilder or amuse the middle-class viewer, but frames their actions as desperate means by which the unemployed of Flint attempt to scrape by. For example, he follows the “bunny lady” scene with another interview with a Flint resident struggling to earn a living—a young man who regularly donates his plasma. Speaking to Moore outside the front door of the Flint Plasma Company, the frequent donor explains that the plasma center is only open on “Mondays and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. [Pause] Saturdays and Sundays they’re closed.” Obviously, the viewer is invited to laugh at the young man’s discursive limitations, which lead him to explain the hours in this manner rather than simply saying that they are “open on weekdays and closed on weekends.” Moore apparently finds this line so amusing that he includes it as a quotation, among other funny odds and ends, in the film’s closing credits. But Moore

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Figure 1.2 Juxtaposed with Moore’s deadpan reactions, “the bunny lady” is a comic figure (Roger and Me).

goes on to show the scars on the man’s arm from his habitual donation and then moves into a sequence depicting the rise of violent crime in the city—implying a kind of downward spiral in which people in Flint resort to ever-more desperate measures to survive. The scenes with the “bunny lady” and the plasma donor thus attempt to situate the social actors’ means of making money not as purely individual choices but as symptoms of the larger social and economic crisis created by General Motors’ corporate decisions.54 The ultimate object of Moore’s satire in Roger and Me is the absurdity of the economic and political processes that bring a once-proud city to a state of collapse and despair. Moore deploys humor as a form of social corrective directed, for different reasons, toward both the working class and the economic elites of Flint. Wealthy citizens of Flint and various spokespersons and apologists for the General Motors corporation are humorously ridiculed, diminishing the authority of their arguments made in defense of General Motors’ policies and the system of late capitalism in general.55 Although Moore’s humorous representations of the “bunny lady” and the plasma donor are linked to an analysis of the larger economic causes of poverty and foster a self-critical shaming for the viewer, these scenes still leave the impression that the working class cannot adequately speak for itself. Thus, Moore positions the voice of the documentary filmmaker as the most credible on the issues and as the most viable means of advocating on behalf of the disenfranchised.

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Figure 1.3a

Figure 1.3b A shot/reverse shot sequence reinforces a sense of pathos (Roger and Me).

3.

Unruly Shame

In scenes like the James Nichols and Rhonda Britton conversations, the spectator is positioned to identify with Moore’s onscreen persona. We are meant to share his incredulity at Nichols’ uninformed radical rhetoric, his discomfort with Britton’s matter-of-fact explanation of her trade, and his

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empathy toward her explanation of the poverty she contends with. In other scenes in Moore films, however, Moore’s strategic awkwardness may work against the filmmaker’s goals, disrupting the viewer’s intended identification with his screen presence and rhetorical stance. The question of the spectator’s “identification” with figures in a film that has so deeply concerned narrative fiction film theory remains severely undertheorized in the context of documentary film studies. Many of the models for theorizing spectatorship developed in film theory are based on semiotics and on psychoanalytic paradigms: the castration complex, voyeurism and fetishism, the mirror stage and the imaginary and symbolic registers in the formation of the ego, primary and secondary identifications. These paradigms have been largely avoided in documentary studies, in favor of analysis focused on documentary films’ stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies, ethical and political implications, and the ontology of the documentary referent. More recent work in documentary studies has expanded this framework, reconsidering the possibilities for semiotics and psychoanalytic theory and drawing from phenomenology, queer theory, and other critical paradigms. In the two scenes discussed thus far, awkwardness is deployed in the service of Moore’s rhetoric via the spectator’s identification with his own onscreen persona and voice. To conclude this discussion, I turn to an analysis of how the spectator’s intended positioning may be disrupted: a climactic scene from Bowling for Columbine in which Moore finally interviews the film’s primary villain, National Rifle Association (NRA) chairman and former Hollywood movie star, Charlton Heston. A phenomenological perspective on this scene helps us to understand the spectator’s embodied discomfort at Heston’s comeuppance, a response that would seem to contradict the film’s general ideological positioning of the viewer. Throughout the film, Heston has functioned as a kind of spectral presence, akin to the role played by General Motors chairman Roger Smith in Roger and Me: a human locus for the social ills the film addresses, a powerful but elusive figure who serves as Moore’s political adversary. Unlike in Roger and Me, however, here Moore successfully obtains an interview—in part by mentioning his credentials as a lifetime member of the NRA. He emphasizes this point again at the start of the interview, handing Heston his membership card in an ostensible gesture of affinity. The interview is framed with Moore and Heston seated together in Heston’s “pool and tennis house,” with glamorous posters from Heston’s years as screen icon in the background. As in the interview with Rhonda Britton, Moore is visible in frame but positioned far to the right, turned in Heston’s direction. Heston is positioned much more centrally in the frame, facing the camera, such that the shot reads almost as an over-the-shoulder shot for Moore (though we can generally see his face, in profile) (see Figure 1.4). At times, the film cuts to a tighter medium shot of Heston, excluding Moore from the frame altogether. This framing aligns the viewer with Moore’s spatial position,

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Figure 1.4 Moore’s “ambush interview” with Hollywood star and NRA president Charlton Heston (Bowling for Columbine).

creating a visual correlate to our intended alignment with his ideological position: We are poised to see the wealthy and powerful NRA leader put in his place. Less than halfway through the interview, Heston begins to grow tongue tied over Moore’s challenging questions about the causes of gun violence in the United States and what differentiates us from other industrialized nations. At this point in the interview, it becomes apparent that Heston is becoming aware of the ambush: The interview will not be a friendly conversation with an NRA member and supporter, but rather, a confrontation about his views on gun violence and his activities as NRA chairman—particularly his decisions to attend rallies near Littleton and Flint not long after the Columbine killings and a school shooting in which one six-year-old child was shot by another. He tries resorting to stock answers, but Moore quickly points out contradictions in his statements, challenging him to truly consider and respond to the questions. Heston starts trying to gracefully wriggle out from the interview, but Moore insistently keeps him pinned to his chair with tough questions. Heston’s posture at the start of the interview is straight, his demeanor relaxed and confident. By this point, however, his body tenses, he plays nervously with his hands and looks down or away before trying to answer some of Moore’s questions. As his discomfort grows more palpable, his physical age and frailty also come to the foreground of our perception of him. Here, I think, the viewer’s embodied response to Heston’s own embodied awkwardness and discomfort creates tension with our intended ideological alignment with Moore and corresponding desire to see Heston attacked. From a

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phenomenological perspective, Vivian Sobchack describes the “reversibility of cinematic perception and expression” as the “‘enabling structure’ of cinematic communication,” which makes other narrative and semiotic codes possible.56 As Steven Shaviro puts it, one doesn’t exactly “identify” with the onscreen protagonist as psychoanalytic theory understands it; rather, one is “brought into intimate contact with the images on the screen by a process of mimesis and contagion . . . [which] tend to efface fixed identities and blur the boundaries between inside and outside.” For Shaviro, film spectatorship implies “continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my own body . . . and the bodies and images on the screen” that is not reducible to ideological or semiotic analysis.57 The spectator’s embodied response to the Heston interview changes over the duration of the interview. We begin in a comfortable position of alignment with Moore’s perspective, not feeling ourselves implicated in the scene. As Moore tightens the vise, with the camera now focused exclusively on Heston’s aged and increasingly tensed body, we experience the “reversibility” or “continuity” between our body and the body onscreen, although we have little, if any, reason to identify with Heston in a conventional sense. He has to this point existed in the film only in damning archival clips from his NRA speeches, and the film’s critical perspective on the NRA and other gun rights advocates has been strongly developed through multiple forms of persuasion. This simultaneous experience of bodily continuity or mimicry between Heston and the viewer and (moral, ideological) disidentification with him disrupts the operation of public shaming that Moore intends to stage in this interview. No longer strictly contained by the film’s ideological framework, the shame generated by this interview may be experienced directly by the spectator, or projected onto Moore himself. The competing spectatorial impulses engendered by this scenario are reflected in Silvan Tomkins’ description of shame in terms of a desire to look away when someone or something that was familiar suddenly appears unfamiliar.58 The familiar coordinates of Moore’s representational politics are ruptured, and the spectator becomes unmoored from a stable position of ideological and affective alignment with the film’s perspective. Many reviews of the film articulated this feeling about this climactic scene, including a generally favorable piece in Boston Review by Harvard Law professor Alan Stone, who writes: Many viewers of this scene might think the stupid white guy finally got what he deserved, but to me Moore was the bully and Heston was the victim who could not defend himself. Michael Moore’s politics are close to my own and his documentary does raise important questions about American racism, militarism, and domestic and foreign policy. Still, his tactics in Bowling for Columbine are no better than those of talk radio’s right-wing demagogues. Is it wrong to think that we should be better than they are?59

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Stone’s analysis of this scene demonstrates a felt contradiction between his ideological alignment and his affective response to an awkward moment. Moore intends for the scene to cement his argument and rally the viewer behind him by shaming Heston, but shame exceeds and disrupts Moore’s attempt to contain and direct it toward a specific rhetorical effect. Jon Dovey, Paul Arthur, and others have long since demonstrated that Moore’s seemingly awkward persona reinscribes an authoritative voice for the documentary filmmaker. My intention in this chapter has been to move beyond this basic argument in two primary ways. First, I have examined the basis for Moore’s influential mode of awkward humor in mock documentary films like This Is Spinal Tap and explored the political, ideological, and ethical implications of this stylistic and generic transmutation for documentary films that claim significant stakes in the representation of their real-world referents. This transmutation and the infusion of awkward humor into documentary filmmaking has further implications for the spectator’s perception of the ontological status of the documentary referent, an issue that I will continue to explore throughout this book. Second, I have analyzed the link between awkwardness and the affect of shame in Moore’s work, examining its implications for the positions of subject, filmmaker, and viewer. Shame is sometimes harnessed and deployed to serve Moore’s rhetorical goals; at others, it exceeds and ruptures his films’ frameworks and produces unintended and contradictory forms of viewer response. I ended this discussion of Moore with a consideration of how viewer “identification” with social actors might function in the context of Moore’s awkward moments. Chapter Two takes up this question in detail, exploring the complex structures of desire, fantasy, and identification in film portraits of social outsiders, or “anticelebrities.” NOTES 1. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1999. 2. Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 44–54. 3. Jerry Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 94. 4. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960, 96–97, 102–110. 5. Ibid., 224. 6. John Portmann, When Bad Things Happen to Other People (New York: Routledge, 2011), 11. 7. Hobbes does not look favorably upon this practice, suggesting that only men “conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves” indulge in it and that it is a sign of “Pusillanimity.” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, eds. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997], 35).

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

R. E. Ewin provides an extensive analysis of Hobbes’ brief remarks in “Hobbes on Laughter,” The Philosophical Quarterly 51, no. 202 (January 2001): 29–40. Jerry Palmer, Taking Humour Seriously (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 94. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 9–10. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 136. Palmer dismisses Bergson’s analysis at the very start of The Logic of the Absurd, questioning how useful concepts of “social flexibility” can possibly be in a wide range of social contexts, and arguing that it makes no sense to imagine that all laughter “has the function of promoting socio-political change” (Palmer, 1987, 19). This, I think, misses the value of Bergson’s essay. It should not be taken as a comprehensive theory of laughter, but it provides an excellent basis for understanding the role of “superiority” in the comic. Bergson’s language in the passage quoted above, in which he points to an “unavowed” (emphasis mine) intention to correct our neighbor gives the lie to Palmer’s critique: There is not necessarily an explicit social/political goal in this type of laughter, but the response is rooted in the laugher’s sense that the object of laughter has in one way or another ignored social expectations while remaining clueless about having done so. Noël Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Ibid., 30. Jerry Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd: On Film and Television Comedy (London: BFI: 1987), 42. Ibid., 43. He points out as well the crucial element of surprise in gags like this, which he explains in Classical aesthetic terms as the peripeteia, the moment of reversal in which the viewer’s expectations are suddenly turned on their head (Palmer, 39). Arthur Koestler, Insight and Outlook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), 30, cited in Andrew Horton, “Introduction,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 5–7. As Michael Renov puts it, the documentary referent is “plucked from the real social world rather than fabricated for the screen.” Michael Renov, “The Truth About Non-Fiction,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7. William Rothman, “The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North,” in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 32. Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 80, 101–104. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 85. Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 70–71. Cited in Carl Plantinga, “Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap” in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 320. See, for example, Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Routledge, 1989), 45.

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26. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” in The Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). Writing critically about the limitations of existing models of genre and generic evolution, the overarching purpose of Altman’s essay is to articulate the need for a genre theory that “would explain the circumstances underlying their [existing disparate theories of genre] existence, thus paving the way for a critical methodology that encompasses and indeed thrives on their inherent contradictions” (Altman, 31). 27. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999), 89. 28. Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 35. 29. Renov, “The Truth About Non-Fiction,” in Theorizing Documentary, 7. Nichols defines the “referent of documentary” as “history”—describing history as an, “excess” that “always stands outside the text” (Nichols, Representing Reality, 142). One could, of course, make the argument that certain semantic elements have been prevalent in the documentary tradition. 30. Geoff King, Film Comedy (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002), 121. King draws in particular here upon the work of Victor Shklovsky. 31. Plantinga, 330. 32. Cited in Steve Neale, “Questions of Genre,” in Grant, Film Genre Reader III, 174. 33. Ethan de Seife, This Is Spinal Tap (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 10. 34. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 121. The authors go on to argue that the film represents “a specific template or popular model which has inspired other filmmakers to pursue the form,” citing films like Hard Core Logo (1997) and Fear of a Black Hat (1993) as examples of its “direct descendants” (124–5). 35. Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread (1933) would better fit that description— though any attempt to posit an originary text would necessarily be debatable. Films like Land Without Bread and other predecessors cited by de Seife, such as Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980), were limited to art-house or festival exhibition, and, equally far from the mainstream, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and its imitators existed in the marginal domain of exploitation film (de Seife, 10). Juhasz and Lerner’s F is for Phony contains two pieces on Land Without Bread, and Vivian Sobchack analyzes the film in her essay, “Synthetic Vision: The Dialectical Imperative of Luis Bunuel’s Las Hurdes,” in Grant and Sloniowski. See also Julian Petley’s essay “Cannibal Holocaust and the Pornography of Death,” in King, The Spectacle of the Real. Roscoe and Hight provide a valuable genealogy of the mock documentary form and analyses of significant predecessors to This Is Spinal Tap, including The Rutles (1978), F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1974), and examples from radio and television such as Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (Roscoe and Hight, Chapter Five, “A Suggested Genealogy”) 36. As de Seife points out, the rise of VCRs and the distribution of films on VHS in the 1980s contributed significantly to the film’s longevity and beloved status among fans and critics (de Seife, 28–32). 37. Carl Plantinga, “Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap,” in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 38. Scott Dikkers, “Special Guest.,” http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3107/ avclub3107.html.

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39. Ibid. As Stephen Mamber points out, failed artists are frequently the subject of postmodern texts that are constructed according to principles of parody and pastiche. (Stephen Mamber, “In Search of a Radical Metacinema,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], 82). 40. The way in which this excess of equipment is revealed piece-by-piece through the tracking shot adds to its hyperbolic quality, reminiscent of similar comic uses of this device—perhaps most famously in Godard’s Weekend (1967). Given that we never return to this set, and it is unclear when, if ever, all of this equipment is used for the film, it is as if DiBergi and his crew had snuck onto the set of a feature film and surreptitiously shot this introduction, using the equipment to bolster their shaky credibility. 41. We often see this technique used in The Last Waltz, one of the documentaries This Is Spinal Tap is clearly parodying. For example, early in the film, Scorsese is having a conversation-style interview with guitarist Robbie Robertson. We see both Scorsese and Robertson in a full two-shot. Robertson is speaking casually about the concert being documented, but then begins a rather dramatic statement—“We wanted it to be more than just a concert, we wanted it to be a celebration”—which is accompanied by a cut from medium long shot to medium close-up. 42. This parodic technique is repeated a second time in the scene, following a further tracking shot in which DiBergi gives more expository information on the background to the documentary. We then cut back in to a medium close-up, as he looks upward—as if deep in thought—and dramatically adds, “I wanted to capture the sights, the sounds . . . the smells, of a hardworking rock band on the road. And I got that. But I got more. A lot more.” 43. The influence of Spinal Tap’s parodic use of interviewer reaction shots is evident in Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, where we see this technique used repeatedly for comic effect. 44. Jerry Palmer defines the peripeteia as the first moment of a gag, consisting of a surprise—as when the midget cop walks out of the elevator shaft in the Laurel and Hardy skit. The second part of a more complex gag like this one, then, is the “syllogism,” discussed above, in which the competing interpretations of plausibility and implausibility make humorous “sense” out of the peripeteia (Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd, 40). 45. As Mikhail Bakhtin has demonstrated, the function of parody is often to subvert official and authoritative languages, of which older modes of documentary represent a modern example. Cited in Ruth Perlmutter, “Woody Allen’s Zelig: An American Jewish Parody,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 206. 46. Neale, “Questions of Genre,” 174. 47. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 105–106. 48. http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=documentary.htm. In the introduction to his recent edited collection on Moore, Mathew H. Bernstein provides a valuable overview of Moore’s financial success, popularity, and impact on documentary film and popular culture more broadly. See Bernstein in Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon, ed. Matthew Bernstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 49. Pauline Kael, “Melodrama/Cartoon/Mess.” The New Yorker, January 8, 1990, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/01/08/1990_01_08_090_TNY_ CARDS_000141956.

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50. Richard Bernstein, “Roger and Me: Documentary? Satire? Or Both?” The New York Times, February 1, 1990, http://www.newyorker.com/arch ive/1990/01/08/1990_01_08_090_TNY_CARDS_000141956. 51. See Dirk Eitzen, “Tipsy Discourses of Sobriety: Documentary and Humor,” paper presented at Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference, La Jolla, California, April 5, 1998. Cited with permission of the author; Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Matthew Bernstein, “Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore’s Roger & Me,” in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 52. As Susan Purdie defines the position, the butt of a joke is constituted as “excluded from the Teller-Audience relationship,” which in turn confirms the other two positions as “masterful jokers.” The butt, on the other hand, is characterized as someone who is denied “discursive potency.” (Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993], 58–59). 53. In his essay on Moore’s television work, Jeffrey P. Jones describes Moore’s “belief in the power of humor to attract and enlighten.” Jones quotes Moore’s contention that he uses humor to “bring people into these issues, [and] make it funny so it won’t be like PBS” (Jones, in Bernstein, 237). 54. A similar approach of gentle irony applies to Moore’s representations of many of the working class social actors in the film. Another is a young man who, following a lunch event with Ronald Reagan, first affirms that Reagan was a good listener and provided valuable ideas for the poor of Flint to help themselves out of their hardship. But he is then unable to articulate even a single example of what those ideas were. See my discussion of Roger & Me in my article “Documentary Comedy,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 104 (August 2002). 55. Jeffrey P. Jones quotes Moore’s contention that in order to debate representatives of the government or large corporations, his strategy is to “disarm them with their weakness—their inability to laugh or have a sense of humor.” (Jeffrey P. Jones, “Moore Muckracking: The Reinvention of TV Newsmagazines in the Age of Spin and Entertainment,” in Bernstein, 232). 56. Vivian Sobchack, “Phenomenology and the Film Experience,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 45. 57. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 52–3, 254–55. 58. Silvan Tomkins, “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 134–35. 59. Alan A. Stone, “Cheap Shots,” http://bostonreview.net/BR28.3/stone.html.

2

Awkwardly Reflected Mirroring Anticelebrity in the Portrait Film

This chapter analyzes documentary films constructed as offbeat portraits of eccentric individuals, or “anticelebrities,”1 with a particular focus on the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975) and Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s American Movie (1999). The fascination these films engender is rooted in a set of mismatched gazes and desires among filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. Earlier celebrity portrait films in the Direct Cinema tradition were premised upon the inherent interest to the public of their subjects—the lives of the famous conveyed with the pretense of neutral observation that characterized the movement. In anticelebrity portraits like these, the interest is constructed by the awkward interactions between subjects and filmmakers. These relations are expressed through a set of gazes that instantiate misrecognition: faulty identifications, mutually incompatible forms of need, and discomfiting oscillations between intimacy and distance. Both films discussed in this chapter are about social class. Grey Gardens depicts wealth and social privilege lost, lingering in spectral traces throughout the decaying East Hampton mansion inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie.” American Movie, on the other hand, concerns class aspiration—low-budget filmmaker Mark Borchardt’s relentless pursuit of the artistic and financial success he repeatedly characterizes as the “American dream.” In both cases, the films suggest that their subjects misrecognize their own class positions: The Beales cannot see how much they have lost, and Mark cannot see how little he will ever gain. These thematically central forms of misrecognition are linked to further differentials in perception among filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. Little Edie, for example, looks to the Maysles Brothers’ cameras to find an idealized selfreflection, a site of narcissistic identification. The filmmakers mirror to Edie an image that simultaneously fulfills her desire and refracts to the viewer the very incongruity between this image and their own perceptions of her. I argue that differentials in perception and need between filmmakers and subjects are structured by necessary disavowals that enable the documentary to exist. Elizabeth Cowie claims that disavowal is central to distinct modes of viewer identification in documentary spectatorship. She suggests that identifying with the narration of a documentary film entails “a matter

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of imagining and of fantasy in the sense understood by psychoanalysis of the world available to be mastered, to become what we want it to be, and of the contingent real made over into knowable reality and thus available to change, to desire.”2 This structure of fantasy represents for Cowie the “magical thinking” described by Freudian disavowal, linked to documentary spectatorship as “a matter of believing—because the other does—that the world can be mastered.”3 In other words, spectators of documentary may identify with a film’s narration as an ideal ego figure, “‘[t]he other who knows/does it for me.’”4 Disavowal has a related but somewhat different function in anticelebrity portrait documentaries. The fantasy that sustains the filmmaker-subject relation is one of a mutual recognition that will translate legibly into representation: a subject with something of value for the spectator and a filmmaker who can recognize and convey this value. In the profilmic event, the documentary being shot becomes a fantasy screen onto which the subjects can project their own desires and can narcissistically identify with their own idealized image. The filmmakers, in turn, may sustain the consistency of this screen for the subjects while constructing a somewhat or even drastically different image intended for the film’s audience. This is not necessarily a simple matter of manipulation or deceit, but rather one of asymmetrical desires— the filmmakers’ desire for a compelling subject and the subject’s desire for a film that props up his or her fantasy of self—disavowed in a fantasy of mutual recognition in which these two desires are fully complementary. Moreover, the filmmaker is not always in the position to fully control this fantasy; a subject’s performance may overtake or rupture a filmmaker’s intended form of representation. Slavoj Žižek describes how “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires: the fascinating presence of its positive contents does nothing but fill out a certain emptiness.”5 Through an analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s story, “Black House,” Žižek demonstrates how annulling the distance between reality and fantasy space may be a source of trauma (and in the story, violence). Closing this gap deprives us of a place in which to articulate our desires.6 The awkward moments of anticelebrity portrait films often erupt precisely when this distance is lessened or eliminated, when the fantasy of mutual recognition between filmmaker and subject is contested or dissolved. Critics frequently charge films like these with “exploiting” their subjects and question whether the films’ frequent uses of humor compel spectators to laugh with the subjects or to laugh at them. An analysis of the distinct configurations of fantasy, disavowal, and identification in these films, however, allows us to move past the analytical impasse to which such criticisms invariably lead. In other words, trying to assess a portrait film’s ethics through debating whether it exploits or respects its subjects (“laughing at” or “laughing with”) is a dead end. Moments of humor or identification must be understood through an analysis of the often-incongruous structures of fantasy among filmmakers, subjects, and viewers.

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RECORDING INTIMACY, PERFORMING AUTHENTICITY With the advent of mobile synchronous-sound film equipment in the 1960s, celebrity portrait films emerged as a subgenre in the Direct Cinema and cinéma vérité movements. Films like Jane (D.A Pennebaker, 1962), Meet Marlon Brando (David Maysles, 1965), Mingus (Thomas Reichman, 1967), and Pennebaker’s famous portrait of Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back (1966), promised a glimpse into the private lives of public figures. Drew Associates’ Primary (1960), a portrait of the campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and the original celebrity-politician of the media age, John F. Kennedy, established a precedent for films like these. Whether focused on politicians or entertainers, all of these films, as Paul Arthur puts it, “purport to offer intimate views of personal identity that exceed in truth value those of competing agencies of reportage such as still photos and newspaper and magazine profiles.”7 A related but thematically different trend in film portraiture that grew more prevalent in the 1970s focused on social outsiders, as in Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967), Panola (Ed Pincus and David Neuman, 1971), and Best Boy (Ira Wohl, 1979), as well as eccentric figures with only an indirect connection to celebrity, such as the Beales of Grey Gardens.8 Films like these mark a shift from the focus on celebrities to portraiture of individuals or groups whose identities and pursuits set them outside the norms of mainstream, middle-class culture, and whose often outsized personalities conform to expectations derived from narrative fiction film conventions. Particularly since the 1990s, with the influence of HBO, the POV series on PBS (Public Broadcasting in the U.S.), and other funders of broadcast and commercially oriented documentary work, conventions such as psychological character development and narrative arcs constructed around character goals and obstacles have become increasingly prevalent. As B. Ruby Rich points out, the rise of “character-driven” documentaries since the 1980s runs parallel to the ever-increasing prevalence of celebrity-focused media since the founding of People Magazine in 1974.9 Rick Prelinger notes critically that “PBS gatekeepers” have little interest in documentaries that do not conform to narrowly defined standards of narration: “[T]he mainstream documentary focuses on what’s now called ‘storytelling,’ a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved.”10 Furthermore, the subjects of offbeat character-driven documentaries since the 1990s tend to exhibit pronounced comic qualities: Films focus on real people who make audiences laugh, and it is often the subjects’ delusions and failures that make them compelling to filmmakers. Even when the resulting documentaries represent a serious engagement with social and political systems that contribute to their protagonists’ struggles, the films still couch the stories in humor. The lineage of offbeat portrait documentaries of the 1990s and 2000s includes not only 1970s portrait films, but also Errol Morris’ gently comic

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portrayals of the owners and patrons of a pet cemetery in Gates of Heaven (1978) and the eccentric small-town residents of Vernon, Florida (1981), as well as some of Nick Broomfield’s documentaries, like Lily Tomlin (1986), and Michael Moore’s humorous depiction of his subjects in Roger and Me (as discussed in Chapter One). Like Moore’s work, offbeat portrait films demonstrate the influence of the mock-documentary aesthetics of Christopher Guest and others, sometimes leading viewers to mistake them for fictional constructions. This confusion speaks to the type of subject to which these films gravitate, and to how viewers’ interpretive frameworks are shaped by formal and stylistic conventions that traverse the boundaries between documentary and mock documentary. Offbeat portrait films can be loosely divided into two categories. A first category focuses upon nonfamous individuals, whose often obsessive dedication to a particular goal or lifestyle choice lends itself to a compelling narrative arc, usually produces comic effects, and often marginalizes them from middle-class social norms. Such films include American Movie, The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998), Driver 23 (Rolf Belgum, 1998), Speedo (Jesse Moss, 2003), The King of Kong (Seth Gordon, 2007), Trekkies (Roger Nygard, 1997), Mule Skinner Blues (Stephen Earnhart, 2001), and many others. Falling more loosely within this first category, many recent documentaries have focused on groups of people engaged in a competition of some sort. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body (S. R. Bindler, 1998) and Karaoke Fever (Arthur Borman and Steve Danielson, 2001) take a largely comic approach, whereas films like Word Wars (Eric Chaiken and Julian Petrillo, 2004) mix humor with more nuanced portrayals of the social actors. Some eschew comedy almost entirely, as in Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz, 2002). A second category of offbeat portrait films sustains the premise of the original celebrity portraits of the 1960s by focusing on established artists and entertainers. But these films often employ a comic approach like the documentaries in my first category, leading to similar charges of condescension. Films in this second category include Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994) and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger, 2004). Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi, 2008) and My Heart Is an Idiot (David Meiklejohn, 2010) fall between categories one and two. Moreover, cartoonist Robert Crumb is an “underground celebrity,” in some respects resembling the social outsiders in category one. The first wave of celebrity portrait films in the 1960s and 1970s purported to move past a constructed public personality and reveal a more authentic, private self behind it. Don’t Look Back, for example, offers us backstage footage of Dylan in what the film presents as an unguarded mode (as compared to the defensive posture he erects around reporters). Marjoe (Sarah Kernochan and Howard Smith, 1972) enacts this claim to authenticity quite directly through its exposé structure: By means of this film, Marjoe Gortner will reveal his vocation as a Pentecostal preacher to be a giant scam. Offbeat portrait films in the 1990s like American Movie invert the structure

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of these early film portraits. They begin with the private life of someone who is not a celebrity or public figure. By fashioning a narrative around this person’s experiences, the films create a “character”—a social actor intended to be compelling and entertaining for the viewer—with a newly acquired public life. The popularity of such films in the 1990s coincides, of course, with the rise of reality television to the status of dominant televisual format. Turning “ordinary people” into compelling “characters” and even celebrities is a central tenet of reality TV. John Corner argues that reality TV shows like Big Brother dispense with older documentary ideals of field observation and the spontaneous capture of authentic moments in favor of operating their “claims to the real within a fully managed artificiality, in which almost everything that might be deemed to be true about what people do and say is necessarily and obviously predicated on the larger contrivance of their being in front of the camera in the first place.”11 In doing so, reality TV shows avoid “the difficulties in extracting the personal from the social”; rather, the whole construction is designed to reveal the personal “under circumstances that are not so much those of observation as those of display; living space is also performance space.”12 Corner problematizes any attempt to infer a distinction between the self displayed through performance in this context and a “true” or authentic self beneath the surface. He uses the term “selving” to describe a process whereby the viewer’s sense of a subject’s “true self” emerges and develops through the performed self in the context of the “applied pressures of objective circumstance and group dynamics.”13 Portrait documentaries like Grey Gardens and American Movie are certainly well removed from the staging of identity in artificial environments that we see in reality TV; they both operate within the conventions of what Bill Nichols terms the observational and participatory modes of documentary filmmaking.14 But the process of “selving” that Corner identifies in reality TV of the 1990s is a logical extension of the forms of subject representation in many character portrait documentaries since the 1970s. The celebrity portrait films of the 1960s asked viewers to invest in the premise of gaining access to a more authentic, private version of a public figure; the films’ generally observational style reinforces this sense of authenticity. Grey Gardens, with its constant and intimate modes of address from subject to camera, dispenses with Direct Cinema’s ideal of neutral observation and allows for the viewer’s perception of the subjects to emerge through performative and relational engagement with the filmmakers. The Beales embody the paradoxes inherent to Bill Nichols’ concept of “virtual performance”: “Priority goes to those individuals who can convey a strong sense of personal expressivity that does not seem to be produced by or conjured for the camera—even if, in fact, it is.” Virtual performance describes the “paradoxical sense of a performance, an expressive capacity, where the concepts of acting and performance are simultaneously disclaimed and desired.”15 The structure of disavowal upon which this idea is based speaks to a movement away from the investment in authenticity in the public/private dichotomy of

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the older celebrity portrait. Rather, what emerges in anticelebrity portraits like the ones examined in this chapter is a sense of emotional authenticity that emerges through a performative bridging of public and private in front of the camera. Mark Borchardt’s performative expressivity was already so compelling that many viewers took American Movie to be a mock documentary, finding it hard to believe that this colorful “character” was a real person. But it was this “character” (as Mark himself later described his on-screen persona) that brought him the kind of film-world fame he had always strived for as a director, but had never come close to achieving. As a direct result of American Movie’s success, Mark made extensive appearances at film festivals and was a repeat guest on Late Night with David Letterman and other talk shows. This extratextual circulation of American Movie’s central figure poses the question of what happens when a “virtual performance” exceeds the boundaries of a film and takes on a life of its own in the “real world.” Do we understand the “Mark” who achieved this fleeting fame as preceding, coeval with, or the product of the “virtual performance” he gives in the film? I argue that Mark’s persona that emerges in and through the film can be understood through Žižek’s analysis of the “movement ‘from outside inward’” as a “key component of intersubjective relations . . . we effectively become something by pretending that we already are that.”16 For Žižek, the “outside,” the performance, is “never simply a mask,” but is the symbolic order itself, the intersubjective social network in which our “external place defines our true position.”17 In the section of this chapter on American Movie, I argue that Mark’s “role” both within and beyond the scope of the film demonstrates how this movement from the outside inward, from performance to self, inverts the premise of the original celebrity portrait films that sought to reveal the true self behind the performance. But, a necessary condition for the performance to even take shape in films like Grey Gardens and American Movie is the disavowal that posits a form of mutual recognition and shared understanding between filmmaker and subject. The filmmaker projects the notion that he or she is capturing an image of the subject as the subject wishes to be seen, and the subject sees in the filmmaker a reflection of this ideal self-image. These films’ awkward moments foreground this disavowal and the ways in which mutually incompatible needs and desires are subsumed by the fantasy of mutual recognition. This subsumption, however, is never total and is frequently ruptured in awkward and discomfiting ways.

“YOU’RE VERY GOOD WHAT YOU DO SEE ME AS”: DESIRE AND DISAVOWAL IN GREY GARDENS The Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975)18 is one of the most well-known portrait films of the 1970s. It depicts the daily lives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ aunt, Edith Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her daughter, Jackie’s

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cousin (“Little Edie”). The women live together in a dilapidated, twentyeight room mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, a shadow of its former luxury. The house is filled with cats, the vegetation around it is hugely overgrown, and it was once declared a health hazard by the city. The women’s larger-than-life personalities, the simultaneous affection and bitter conflict between them, and the striking contrast between their high society past and impoverished present lifestyle have inspired longstanding interest. It was adapted as a TV movie for HBO in 2006 starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, and as a Broadway musical in the same year. Upon its release, the film was praised for its artistic accomplishment and vehemently criticized for invading the privacy of the women.19 With its focus on eccentric subjects that many viewers have found alternately funny and disconcerting, and the challenging ethical questions raised by its filmmaker-subject relationship, Grey Gardens is an influential precedent for the more recent wave of offbeat portrait documentaries. As Kenneth J. Robson points out, the Maysles’ own presence in the film is felt more strongly than in their previous work—which largely follows Direct Cinema’s noninterventional premise.20 Jay Ruby suggests that the filmmaker-subject interactions the Maysles include in the film are less the product of a deliberately reflexive aesthetic strategy than simply an “‘accidental’ reflexivity” resulting from the subjects’ inability or refusal to ignore the camera crew and behave like the “proper” subjects of a documentary.21 Ruby argues that the Maysles proceeded with the film “in spite of this situation (or possibly because of it),” implying that the on-camera interactions between the filmmakers and their subjects may have been aesthetically and thematically valuable to them. Critics and audiences wondered how “aware” the Beales were of the possible implications of appearing on camera, a question that has remained central to considerations of documentary ethics and recurred in responses to more recent character portraits. The New York Times review of the film asserted that one cannot doubt the Maysles’ claim that they genuinely “love and admire” the Beales, but “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter. To watch ‘Grey Gardens’ is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?”22 The last line of this quotation (also the last line of the review) raises a central question about this type of documentary: What need do the cameras seem to fulfill for the subjects, and what happens when the asymmetry of the filmmakers’ and subjects’ needs comes to the foreground, either during or after the profilmic event? Grey Gardens depicts the Beales as embodiments of “faded glory.” Throughout the film, cinematography and editing emphasize incongruity between the women’s past and present lives, and between their own perception of this insular world and its appearance to the outside observer. The film repeatedly contrasts lingering close-up shots of photographs and

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portraits of the women in their younger years with images of their often unclothed, aging bodies. These shots provide a visual correlate to the frequent conversations in which Little Edie, in particular, ruminates wistfully on the glamorous society lifestyle of her youth. More pointedly, however, the film implies that Little Edie is deeply stuck in the past. As she describes and demonstrates her talents as a singer and dancer, and narrates a history filled with gentleman suitors and parties, the camera focuses upon details that emphasize the squalor in which they live: old plates of half-eaten food, holes in the walls, odd and long-ignored decorations, throngs of cats (and even a raccoon) roaming freely and taking advantage of available food. This motif of contrasts points to the filmmakers’ desire to foreground the incongruity between Edie’s fantasy life rooted in memories and the reality of her present circumstances. Little Edie frames her own image to the filmmakers through conversation, self-description and narration, and elements of performance including costuming, singing, and dancing. The filmmakers, who mostly remain off camera and are heard infrequently, capture but subtly reframe Edie’s projected self-image through distinct choices in the cinematography. One of the first scenes featuring Little Edie, for example, contains a minor “reveal” constructed by the camerawork. The film initially frames Edie from the waist up, and she appears relatively conventional in a turtleneck sweater (accompanied, however, by one of her ubiquitous self-fashioned head scarves). As Edie explains that her outfit is “the best thing to wear for the day, you understand,” the camera tilts down to display a very odd configuration of garments whose function and value she proceeds to explain in great detail (“. . . then you have the pants under the skirt, then you can pull the stockings up over the pants underneath the skirt, and you can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape . . .”). The Maysles’ choice to conceal and then reveal the most unusual components of Edie’s outfit suggests their awareness of the disconcerting or slightly comic effect the sight could have for the viewer. Edie continues to display a variety of unusual outfits throughout the film, leading critics to focus on her dress as a sign that she is a bit off-balance. The New York Times review notes, “Edie . . . seems the more deeply disturbed. She dresses in a strange costume that exposes most of her legs in black openwork stockings, keeps her head constantly covered with a tight hood and dances and sings disjointedly.”23 Roger Ebert describes how “Edie dresses up in bizarre costumes. She likes to wear skirts upside down . . . She dresses in lace curtains, in bedspreads, in bathing suits that were last seen on the cover of Life, circa 1948.”24 Characterizing mother and daughter as “classic eccentrics,” Ebert describes the documentary of their existence as “comic and bright, as well as sobering.”25 This statement echoes the sentiments of many critics, for whom the film is, as Arthur Knight puts it, simultaneously funny, sad, and disturbing.26 As these comments indicate, the Maysles allow Edie’s oddly comic appearance and behavior to serve as part of the film’s

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“attractions,” while at the same time framing them in a narrative of loss and loneliness. The nature of Little Edie’s own apparent investment in the Maysles’ attentions points to a significant disjunction between the filmmakers’ and subject’s respective perceptions of their relationship. Edie treats the Maysles as interlocutors and confidantes. She confesses secrets and hopes to them, vents about her difficult relationship with her mother, performs song and dance routines for them, and expresses pleasure in their attentions (particularly David’s). In one scene late in the film, Little Edie makes a revealing statement about her perception of how the filmmakers view her. Big and Little Edie talk in an upstairs room where Big Edie frequently rests in her bed, eating and reading. As the camera lingers on a painted portrait of Big Edie as a young woman, she instructs the Maysles to “take a picture” of Little Edie. The film cuts to a shot of Little Edie, who acts surprised upon realizing she is on camera. She leans toward a mirror to check the condition of her headscarf, and then, directly addressing the filmmakers, explains, “You don’t see me as I see myself, but you’re very good what you do see me as.” She goes on to explain that she sees herself as a “little girl,” while her mother interjects the opinion that she sees her daughter as a “very immature child.” Little Edie responds by stating that “she sees me as a baby, I see myself as some kind of a little girl. They [the filmmakers] see me as a woman.” Little Edie’s dialogue in this scene reveals the needs that the filmmakers seem to fulfill for her. They mirror for her a desired image of herself as a grown woman. But her perception is incongruous with the film’s representational strategies toward her. The film consistently depicts Little Edie comporting herself as an adult woman, discussing past romances and at times flirting with the filmmakers. But it also implies that Edie represents a case of arrested development, a woman who behaves “inappropriately” for her middle age—often acting like a teenager or even a child. For example, just prior to this scene, the Maysles focus on a sign propped up on a chair in the downstairs foyer. The handwritten sign announces “The Great Dancer Little Edie Bouvier Beale.” It is the kind of prop a child would construct before putting on a performance for her parents. After explaining how she can only see herself as a child when around her mother, Little Edie finds a recording of the Virginia Military Institute marching band. She excitedly refutes her mother’s claim that she can’t dance, and the film cuts back to the downstairs foyer. The sound of the record cues Little Edie’s effort to prove her mother wrong. The camerawork in the scene that follows might initially seem to reinforce Little Edie’s self-presentation as a talented and charming entertainer. But this apparent reinforcement actually inscribes irony into the representation, and the scene constructs and emphasizes a differential between Edie’s self-perception and the viewer’s likely response (The Times review describes the performance as “a painful drum majorette routine”).27 The first shot

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Figure 2.1

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Little Edie’s exuberant musical performance (Grey Gardens).

brings to mind techniques one might find in a film musical, designed to enhance the spectacle of the performer and the dynamism of the performance. The camera remains static at first, framing the bottom set of steps as we see Edie’s feet and legs enter the frame, clad in white heels and black stockings. The camera tilts down and zooms in slightly to maintain only her feet and legs in the frame. Then, with a flourish, the camera zooms out and tilts up to reveal Edie marching straight toward us, smiling and brandishing a small American flag (see Figure 2.1). Often maintaining direct eye contact with the camera, Edie exuberantly performs her routine while the Maysles fluidly follow her movements, even tilting down at one point to focus on her footwork as she whirls around. The choreography between camerawork and performance, particularly in the scene’s opening shot, creates a visual correlate to how Edie herself perceives her performance—as a skillful and entertaining musical number. In earlier scenes in the film, she has described pageants she participated in as a young woman, and, in one scene, explodes with anger at her mother for pressuring her to return from New York City at a time when she was auditioning for shows. The sight of Little Edie in her mid-fifties, performing this dance routine in one of her many odd, homemade costumes, foregrounds one of the film’s major points of characterization: the notion that she clings to the lost possibilities of her youth. By shooting the scene using a style that viewers would associate with a glamorous Hollywood musical number, the film frames Edie as she would like to see herself. But in doing so, it constructs a visual incongruity between subject and style meant to gesture toward the

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theme of lost youth. The camerawork creates a sense of ironic distance, emphasizing the perceptual differential between subject and spectator. In other words, the formal quality of the scene would seem to suggest mutual recognition between filmmaker and subject. But, like the film’s consistent visual strategy of contrasting the Beales’ current physical appearance to glamorous photos and paintings of their youth, this scene creates visual incongruity that adds a layer of commentary not seemingly apparent to Edie herself. It is the viewer, then, who experiences the awkwardness of this scene. Our understanding of the differential in perception between filmmaker and subject, more than anything inherent to Edie’s appearance and performance, is what lends the scene a “painful” quality (as the Times review puts it). This contrast and its larger implications for the filmmaker-subject relationship are emphasized further when we see Edie’s reaction to being filmed. In an almost childlike fashion consonant with her grandiose handmade sign, when the record ends she flees from the room and through a curtain that hangs in the doorway to the adjacent room, as if it were blocking off access to the backstage of a theater. Exuberantly, Edie exclaims, “Darling David [referring to David Maysles], where have you been all my life?” Retracing the steps from her dance routine with an excited and restless energy, she breathlessly repeats the question, “where’ve you been, where’ve you been, where’ve you been?” Upon hearing her mother’s voice from upstairs, she calls out, “all I needed was this man, David!” Shifting her attention to a dialogue with her mother, she continues by exclaiming, “I wish I had David and Al with me before this.” We hear her mother reply, “Well, you had your mother,” to which Little Edie responds, as she runs up the stairs and out of frame to end the scene, “but they’re more interested!” This moment represents perhaps the most naked display of a dynamic between Little Edie and the filmmakers that is evident throughout the film. Little Edie makes an excellent documentary subject because she opens herself up to the camera with abandon. In a one-sided fashion, guided only by minimal and occasional responses from the Maysles, she banters, flirts, and confides her frustrations and aspirations. As Nichols points out, documentary filmmakers are drawn to subjects “who can present themselves before a camera with minimal self-consciousness and, more importantly, who can inflect actions or recountings with a subjective depth of feeling.”28 Little Edie’s exuberant response to David and Al’s attention in the VMI Marching Band scene indicates the disavowed exchange of needs upon which the film is based. The Maysles need Edie to reveal herself on camera, and Edie needs an interlocutor, someone other than her mother to listen to her. Moreover, Edie’s pleasure in David’s attentions (“all I needed was this man, David” she says, with excited emphasis) points to a further structure of disavowal at work in the profilmic event. Matthew Tinkcom argues that Little Edie’s flirtation with David functions as a kind of seduction that is not simply about an attraction to David but “about her need to have the camera to herself; Little Edie is seducing . . . the direction that the film will take” and

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seducing the viewer into believing her accounts of the past over and against those of her mother.29 In Tinkcom’s account, the Direct Cinema standard of noninvolvement between filmmaker and subject is undermined from the start by Little Edie’s gaze and address toward the filmmakers (inflected by, but not subsumed under, her flirtation with David).30 He argues that this dynamic demonstrates that the film is “frequently organized by Little Edie’s visual field,” which distances it from “the masculinist and heteronormative dimensions of more typical Direct Cinema projects.” Further, it places the filmmakers “in a remarkable bind about Little Edie’s gaze and one that gives the film its energies.” That is, Little Edie recognizes them “as both filmmakers and objects of flirtation,” and these “moments of recognition by her form the basis of the film’s revelations about the thwarted romantic and erotic possibilities” that both women keep recounting.31 Tinkcom’s analysis offers a valuable counterbalance to accounts that see Little Edie as simply an unaware victim of exploitation by the filmmakers. Following his argument, I would suggest that the Maysles must disavow Edie’s recognition of them (David, specifically) as points of romantic interest—not simply disinterested recorders of reality. This intersubjective dynamic must remain an unspoken subtext of the profilmic event. I agree with Tinkcom that the exchange of power is not unidirectional, and the fantasy of mutual recognition I have described does depend upon the agency of both parties. But Tinkcom overstates the degree to which Little Edie’s gaze actually “organizes” the visual field of the film. As I have argued, the filmmakers simultaneously reflect and refract Little Edie’s projection of her own self-image as a desirable and desiring subject in relation to David. The film produces an incongruity between Edie’s efforts to engage with the filmmakers as a vital and flirtatious subject and its frequent representation of her as eccentric, somewhat immature, isolated, and trapped in the past. This incongruity mirrors other visual incongruities the film constructs, such as those between the Beales’ decaying house and the well-maintained estates that surround it, and between their physical appearance in the film and in their old photographs. If Little Edie perceives the potential for these forms of representation, she, too, must disavow their possibility in order to proceed with the process of filming. One of the film’s most emotionally charged scenes takes place toward the end (though the event actually happened relatively early in the filming process), in the mansion’s “pink room.”32 In this scene, Little Edie recounts with sorrow and anger the story of a man named Eugene Tyszkievicz, whose intended marriage proposal was (in her view) blocked by her mother. As Tinkcom rightly points out, the film frequently alternates between intimate conversations featuring Little Edie alone with the filmmakers and scenes that also include Big Edie and/or their young friend Jerry. This strategy does foreground Little Edie’s perspective, and it is true that she tries to use the filmmakers as a sounding board for her own version of past events in opposition to her mother’s. But rather than simply reinforcing Little Edie’s perspective, as Tinkcom argues, the film often calls it into question.

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I have suggested that scenes like Little Edie’s marching band routine construct a differential in perception between subject and film spectator, seeming on one level to reinforce her self-image while simultaneously undermining it. In the pink room scene, Little Edie dominates the frame when she is in the room, standing close to the camera and passionately recounting her story of missed opportunity for marriage. Big Edie remains in the background of the frame, dwarfed visually by her daughter but verbally contesting Little Edie’s account throughout the scene. Directly before and after this emotional argument, the filmmakers shoot intimate conversations alone with Big Edie in which she discusses her daughter. In the first, she praises her daughter’s singing voice. In the second, just after Little Edie has stormed out of the room, her mother explains that Eugene was actually alienated from her daughter and said something to Big Edie that she now repeats for the camera: “How could such a warm, lovely woman [referring to Little Edie] over the telephone turn into something so cold?” Discomfort and shame the viewer might feel at Little Edie’s raw emotional outburst is exacerbated by her mother’s explanation, which undermines the credibility of her daughter’s narrative. Thus, in addition to the forms of visual and perceptual incongruity the film constructs around the figure of Little Edie, it presents incongruity between mother’s and daughter’s respective accounts of this pivotal moment in the daughter’s life. This incongruity ultimately privileges the mother’s perspective and undermines Little Edie’s control over her representation in the film. In an interview with Alan Rosenthal conducted soon after the film’s release, Grey Gardens editor Ellen Hovde responds to critics’ charges that the film “exploited” the Beales. Rosenthal asks Hovde if she believes that the Beales understood the implications of their own representation and whether or not she thinks the film was ethical. One of Hovde’s central arguments in the film’s defense is to claim that the Beales themselves loved the film. In making this point, however, she admits to the fact that audiences might laugh at the film, and to her own concern that the Beales’ initial pleasure in the film might change upon seeing it in public with an audience. Hovde uses very qualified terms in admitting to the film’s comic qualities, attributing responsibility for the laughter to the disposition of the film’s audience rather than to qualities inherent to the film itself: “[T]he audience begins to pick up on certain things, and to laugh at certain things.”33 She claims that her concerns were dispelled, however, after sitting with Little Edie for a screening at the Lincoln Center. Despite hearing other members of the audience laugh, and hearing the criticism leveled at the film, Hovde argues that the Beales recognized themselves in it, and “defended [it] more than anyone.” Hovde’s language implies a disavowal at the heart of this moment of apparent self-recognition in spectatorship, however: “She [Little Edie] laughed, she cried, she enjoyed it. She treated it almost as if it were someone else, and yet she realized very well that it was herself and her mother.”34

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Little Edie’s sense of her own agency in the profilmic event would therefore be subject to a feeling of dispossession in the act of spectatorship. The profilmic event’s fantasy screen of mutual recognition displaced by the real screen of the movie theater, she finds herself in an audience laughing at the image materialized in front of her. In order to “enjoy” the film, then, Little Edie must manufacture a distance between herself as spectator and her own projected image. This secondary disavowal extends the logic of the disavowal I have argued inheres in the profilmic event, in which Edie must imagine only a flattering image (“you’re very good what you do see me as”) projected onto the fantasy screen constituted by the filmmaker-subject relation. The necessary splitting of belief that Hovde describes, in which Little Edie knew “very well” who she was looking at but had to enjoy the film “as if” it were someone other than herself, guards against the traumatic annulment of the distance between reality and fantasy space in this moment of highly awkward spectatorship.

“I WILL BE GODDAMNED IF I DON’T GET THE AMERICAN DREAM”: ASPIRATION AND FAILURE IN AMERICAN MOVIE In an influential essay on the ethics of documentary filmmaking, Calvin Pryluck argues that there is quite often a fundamental tension between the rights and well-being of documentary subjects and the artistic goals of filmmakers. He cites Stephen Mamber’s contention that Direct Cinema filmmakers like the Maysles brothers tend to seek out moments in which subjects contend with failure, because such moments strip people of their defenses and compel them to behave in a more revealing manner. Unguarded moments characterized by failure, weakness, or vulnerability are thus linked to truth and authenticity.35 The directors of American Movie rely upon both the comic and dramatic potentials of failure and struggle. The film, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (1999), documents a two-year period in the life of aspiring horror filmmaker Mark Borchardt as he attempts to complete a short film titled Coven. Mark hopes to use profits from Coven to eventually shoot a feature titled Northwestern—his lifelong dream project. The film blends broad comedy of errors in its depiction of the filmmaking process with poignant and sometimes troubling scenes of Mark’s strained relationships with his parents and his ex-girlfriend and children. It focuses, as well, on Mark’s and his best friend Mike Schank’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and gambling. Throughout most of the film, Mark displays a friendly attitude toward the film crew, treating the camera as an intimate sounding board for the expression of his aspirations and his frustrations. Unguarded moments shade into awkward moments, however, when the viewer perceives tensions or disjunctions in this ostensibly intimate relation, or when the subject challenges the filmmaker’s perspective and the stakes of the film itself.

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Film critics repeatedly pointed out that the film represents a difficult attempt to balance satire and empathy. Eleanor Gillespie writes, “Whether ‘American Movie’ is celebrating Borchardt as an all-American dreamer or satirizing him as an all-American loser is never clear.”36 Roger Ebert describes the film as a “very funny, sometimes very sad documentary,” and adds, “some of the scenes could work in a screwball comedy.”37 Lisa Schwartzbaum characterizes it as an “uneasily amusing documentary.” She points toward the tension viewers may feel between Mark’s “touching” determination and “unironic intensity,” on the one hand, and the film’s transformation of Mark and his friends (and their “vulnerably antic lifestyle”) into “colorful movie characters,” on the other.38 Although both can be described broadly as offbeat character portraits, a number of factors differentiate Grey Gardens and American Movie. Two significant ones include American Movie’s very conventional goal-driven narrative arc, and the way in which its subject’s vocation as a filmmaker further complicates the fantasy of mutual recognition between filmmaker and subject. Where Grey Gardens is constructed as a kind of mosaic depicting the women’s existence and contains few markers of narrative temporality, American Movie moves chronologically through a delimited period in the protagonist’s life as he tries to overcome obstacles and achieve his goals. In his interactions with the filmmakers Mark’s address to the camera often assumes or solicits a shared understanding of technical, aesthetic, and procedural issues in filmmaking. While the film at times signals the filmmakers’ appreciation of Mark’s enthusiasm for his craft, it suggests that Mark is unlikely to achieve anything near to his aspirations. In a limited fashion, the film also implies a broader critique of the ideology of the “American dream” itself, which inspires Mark’s efforts but also may offer a lure that prevents him from facing up to realities of underemployment and debt, addictive behaviors, and familial conflicts and responsibilities. In this sense, the film does engage with broader issues of the barriers created by social class. But the overall structure of the film is thoroughly governed by the standard narrative arc built around an individual protagonist that Rick Prelinger criticizes as a “storytelling” impulse since the 1990s that imposes severe limitations upon both form and content in documentary practice. The film follows conventions of narrative and viewer identification rooted in Hollywood filmmaking, encouraging the viewer to root for Mark as he struggles to achieve his artistic goals—even incorporating the classic device of a deadline in the film’s third act. Within this structure, Mark’s problems and obstacles are cast more as the product of his own choices than as symptoms of broader class-based social inequities. The limited fame Mark achieved following the success of American Movie is doubly ironic. While he gained public visibility through his beloved medium of film, it was because of his “virtual performance” in a documentary rather than his work as a director. Secondly, while American Movie did help him to meet a few short-term financial goals, it did little to transform

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his actual economic status and certainly did not bring him the material qualities of the “American dream” he describes in the film. For American Movie to exist at all, Mark must inhabit a successful “virtual performance.” By effectively performing this role, Mark then becomes this “character” in the world beyond the scope of the film. This process, as I mention earlier, can be understood through Žižek’s concept of subject formation “from outside inward,” in which what might initially seem like a mask comes to define our very existence in the symbolic order.39 Through the documentary, Mark achieves a virtual version of his own dream. The subtitle of American Movie is “The Making of Northwestern,” referring to the title of Mark’s featurefilm dream project. But the actual making of Northwestern is sidelined fairly early in the time period covered by American Movie (in favor of the more manageable short film, Coven). Mark is supplanted by “Mark” (his work as a director displaced by his virtual performance), and Northwestern is supplanted by American Movie: a successful feature film whose existence is premised in part upon Northwestern’s failure.40 A scene in which Mark scouts locations exemplifies the type of strategies through which the film simultaneously demonstrates appreciation of Mark while also positioning him within its conventional narrative of a lone individual facing seemingly impossible odds. Nonsynchronous sound editing is key to the scene’s effects. At the start, Mark’s dialogue is synchronous as he walks around the location and explains enthusiastically to the filmmakers how the house he is visiting will provide some “killer interiors,” and then elaborates upon the importance of mise-en-scène: “You know what I’m sayin’? You ever see Manhattan? You ever see The Seventh Seal, where they have these great dialogues with these great backgrounds?” From off-camera, we hear Chris Smith affirm that he does know what Mark is getting at, reinforcing the sense of affinity and mutual recognition between filmmaker and subject. At other points in the scene Mark’s voice accompanies images of him at work, taking still photographs of his location and framing various shots. Just prior to the cut that ends the scene, he excitedly describes what it will be like on the day of the shoot: “[A]nd of course there’ll be a whole crowd of people here so we gotta make like a line where people can’t go, have a hell of a lot of assistant directors saying ‘Hey! Hey! Hey, could you step back like five feet?” As Mark delineates this self-important fantasy of a shooting day, the film cuts from a medium close-up of Mark addressing the camera to a long shot of him, with his back turned to the camera, facing his location in a seemingly contemplative moment (see Figure 2.2). This shot positions him small and alone within a large and somewhat desolate space and provides a visual contrast to his verbal braggadocio, emphasizing the distance between his aspirations and his actual life situation. With little financial resources or other skilled assistance, this lone individual stands in the face of the monumental task of producing a feature film. Although Mark’s bragging makes him seem a bit ridiculous, the image with which the scene ends invokes the

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Figure 2.2 Shot composition in American Movie suggests the magnitude of Mark’s challenges (American Movie).

poignancy of the conventional “longshot,” the protagonist determined to succeed against the odds. Other scenes in the film use nonsynchronous sound to foster viewer identification with Mark by suggesting access to his thoughts. The film’s opening, for example, depicts him driving an old American sedan in the evening through bleak streets on the Northwest outskirts of Milwaukee. Over gentle guitar music on the soundtrack,41 we hear Mark describing his sense of the present as a critical juncture in his life: He has failed, and sabotaged or betrayed himself, many times in the past. But now, he states with conviction, “This time I cannot fail, I won’t fail. It’s not in me. You don’t get second chances and mess ’em up. You’d be a fool to.” The intended effect is to create the feeling of direct access to Mark’s thoughts during a contemplative solitary drive at nightfall. The interior monologue has always been an important way that narrative fiction films strive to create viewer identification with a character, and here the filmmakers adapt this convention to a documentary framework through the use of nonsynchronous sound.42 But immediately following this opening, the film moves quickly into Christopher Guest territory, constructing a sequence depicting Mark’s frenzied preparation for (and mediocre execution of) a radio show titled “The Creeps.” As in This Is Spinal Tap, the film frequently turns bits of amusing

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dialogue into punch lines for a given scene by cutting away just as they are delivered. It creates moments of comic incongruity by juxtaposing Mark’s comic energy to the near-comatose delivery of deadpan observations and non sequiturs offered by his best friend Mike, a former heavy drug user. Indeed, with Mark tall and thin and Mike short and stout, the two even embody the visual incongruity of the classic comic duo. Throughout the film, numerous comic moments emphasized by the film’s editing are derived from the struggles and mishaps involved in Mark’s artistic endeavors. The opening credits sequence, for example, finds Mark sitting at a desk opening mail, with ever-growing despair. Surveying a mounting stack of bills that he has no ability to pay, Mark is nearly pushed over the edge of frustration by a notice from the IRS claiming a “lien on any real personal property.” Just at this moment of apparent hopelessness, Mark opens a final letter that creates a surprising reversal in the situation. “Who wants to be faced with this crap?” he moans as he unfolds the notice. Then, he suddenly brightens and he reads aloud, “Your ATT Universal Card has arrived!” Grinning and holding the card out toward the camera, he continues: “Oh, God . . . kick fuckin’ ass, I got a Mastercard! I don’t believe it, man. Life is kind of cool sometimes.” By isolating through the editing Mark’s aggrieved reactions to troublesome bills, the filmmakers create an expectation that Mark realizes he is in deep financial trouble. His un-selfconscious joy at receiving a Mastercard, then, serves as what Jerry Palmer terms the “peripeteia”—the first component of a gag that brings about a reversal of expectations, as we saw with Nigel Tufnel’s piano piece, “Lick My Love Pump,” in Chapter One. On the one hand, the comic reversal would seem to promote a Bergsonian form of laughter that contains the wish to correct Mark’s ill-advised reaction to the credit card. At the same time, insert shots of the many scripts and film books that line Mark’s shelves imply his single-minded dedication and willingness to put everything on the line for the sake of his dream, thus creating the prospect for viewer empathy and even admiration mixed in with the laughter. Many critics focused on the film’s frequent use of comedy, some to defend the idea that Mark could be an object of both laughter and identification, others to condemn what they saw as the film’s condescension toward and exploitation of its subjects—charges leveled in terms remarkably similar to the ones against Grey Gardens. Critics like The New York Times’ Janet Maslin described it as “affectionate humor,”43 and Edward Guthman in the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that it contained no “cheap shots,” and was “warm, funny, and brave all at once.”44 On the other hand, Amy Taubin in The Village Voice suggested that Chris Smith “used the camera to exacerbate a relationship of unequal power.” She noted that although Mark enjoyed momentary success as he toured the festival circuit with Smith and Price, “what he doesn’t seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.”45 Chris Gore of Film Threat magazine bluntly described the film’s dominant effect as schadenfreude, opening his review by sarcastically

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stating, “Nothing makes me feel better about myself more than watching the pathetic lives of other people. It warms my heart.”46 A number of comment threads on the Internet Movie Database address similar questions, with titles like “A story of the American Dream or condescending mockery?”47 Charges of exploitation like Taubin’s shadowed both the filmmakers and Mark himself following the film’s release. In an interview with Smith and Price for Indiewire, for example, the first few questions challenge the filmmakers to explain why many people find the film condescending. In a response quite similar to Ellen Hovde’s defense of Grey Gardens, they claim that people who think the film is condescending toward Mark and Mike are really projecting their own cultural biases onto the film. Smith argues: There are a handful of people who just have that attitude that Mark comes from a lower middle class background and he somehow isn’t quite as intelligent as they are. I don’t know what it is, because I think that Mark is one of the most creative, original, intelligent people I’ve met in my life.48 Price adds that she is disappointed when she hears that people found the film to be condescending and thinks that they “just didn’t get it”: “For whatever reason—judging a book by its cover or the idea that if there’s humor in a documentary, it must be condescending, it must be making fun of somebody. As opposed to laughing because these guys are funny.”49 Smith and Price’s comments suggest that class differentials and biases between subject and spectator account for why some viewers find the film condescending. There is nothing condescending, they imply, in the film’s representation of Mark.50 One of the film’s most awkward moments, however, suggests that Mark might share some of the critics’ uncertainty or suspicion about the filmmakers’ perspective. The scene comes during a sequence roughly midway through the film that depicts a rather depressing Thanksgiving Day for Mark and his friends. In the course of the evening, Mark dutifully (but with mounting frustration) fulfills his care-giving responsibilities toward his Uncle Bill (on whom he depends for financing) and washes Bill’s dirty laundry in the basement. As he jams piles of clothes into the machine, Mark mutters, with characteristic hyperbole, about how this onerous task represents “man’s inhumanity to man.” A series of further scenes depict an uncomfortable dinner gathering and its aftermath, displaying the film’s consistent mix of bleakness (an exhausted, pained-looking Bill in an open bathrobe, nodding off at the kitchen table over a piece of overcooked Turkey) and comedy (a drunken conversation in which Bill repeatedly misunderstands Mark’s claims to see “great cinema” in their situation as great “cinnamon”). Finally, we find Mark in the basement again, ranting with frustration about his life and the people around him. At first looking up and past the camera position, Mark expresses anger toward people who talk endlessly about their plans while actually

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Figure 2.3 An awkward moment in which Mark challenges the filmmakers (American Movie).

accomplishing nothing. Then, pausing and directing a focused gaze right at the camera, he asks, “What do you think? What do you really fucking think, huh?” There is a beat, and then, without averting his gaze, Mark repeats his question: “What do you really think?” Finally, we hear Chris Smith ask, “About what?” Mark doesn’t answer, but continues to stare in an expectant and challenging manner at the camera, then sighs as if frustrated, and proceeds to take a large bite from a turkey leg that to this point has been concealed out of frame. Mark chews his bite silently, while continuing to gaze into the camera until the scene fades out, with Mark’s question unanswered (see Figure 2.3). Two short scenes follow this moment in the basement, which, taken together, reinforce the film’s frequent depiction of Mark as a self-defeating dreamer. First we see Mark sitting in front of a Green Bay Packers football game on his family’s old television set. He describes his ongoing attempts to “face up to who I am and shit like that”—how he knows where he wants to be but doesn’t know how to get out of his present situation. The film underscores Mark’s point by cutting while he speaks from an over-the-shoulder shot to a close-up on the television screen. This shot juxtaposes Mark’s description of his restless impulse to heroic images of an “American dream” successfully achieved, as we see iconic quarterback Brett Favre congratulated by his teammates following a victory. The hidden break in temporal continuity between these two shots further indicates the symbolic weight that the filmmakers intend for the latter image. Sealing the intended meaning, the film uses a sound bridge over the image of a smiling Favre: We hear Mark’s girlfriend’s voice explain, “He wants to be somewhere where he’s not.” The film then cuts to a brief scene in which she addresses the camera

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and completes her thought in a manner that gently undermines Mark’s sense of the singularity of his struggles: “But then, don’t most people want to be somewhere where they’re not?” By bookending Mark’s rant in the basement with his drunken bad behavior at Thanksgiving and these subsequent scenes, the film situates the awkward moment as part of its broader depiction of Mark’s perpetually selfundermining investment in an ideal of the “American dream.” The framing scenes suture the meaning of Mark’s question (“What do you really think?”) to this thematic framework. In other words, the question is aligned with Mark’s self-questioning in the scene that follows, implying that he was asking the filmmakers what they really think about his prospects for achieving his goals, for getting to a better place. But the scene in the basement exceeds this thematic containment. Mark’s question is awkward—and in its awkwardness, revealing—because it cuts to a deeper set of issues and tensions in the profilmic event. I have argued that offbeat character portraits like Grey Gardens and American Movie are premised upon a fantasy of mutual recognition between filmmaker and subject. The making of American Movie proceeds according to the premise that because Mark and the directors share a knowledge of the joys and frustrations of filmmaking, the film is, in a sense, a collaboration. Seen in this light, Mark is not only the subject of the film but also possesses agency as a narrator, commenting upon and helping to shape the film’s depiction of the filmmaking process. The fact that these things may be (at least in part) true does not make them any less a fantasy; dynamics between filmmaker and subject and forms of representation that do not fit this framework must be disavowed to keep this overarching premise intact. In other words, Mark’s question, “what do you really think?” threatens, in Žižek’s sense, to annul the distance between reality and fantasy space. The question makes an untenable set of demands upon the filmmaker: What do you really think about me, my friends, my home and family, my self-destructive tendencies, why I am funny, why I am tragic? The question potentially implies everything that serves as the basis of the film but which must remain unstated in order for its creation to continue. No real answer to this question can be offered without rupturing this mutual fantasy of recognition, and so the director can do no more than deny the comprehensibility of the question: “About what?” Smith answers, and Mark just directs a hard stare back at him until the scene ends. Director Sarah Price may be right that viewers who perceive “condescension” toward the film’s subjects could be projecting their own class biases onto its representation of Mark and his world. But social class does serve as the implicit basis for much of the film’s comedy, its pathos, and the broader themes that emerge from the narrative arc of a man trying to complete a low-budget independent film. As Indiewire describes it, the film is a portrait of “lower middle class young men living in the midwest,” and the San Francisco Examiner notes “Smith’s determination to show us all of Mark and his

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lower-middle class environs.” In Variety, Glenn Lovell uses a class-based slur to casually describe Mark as a “redneck auteur.”52 These descriptions, and critics’ charges of condescension and exploitation are rooted in part in the way the film sometimes bases its humor upon Mark’s limited education or his regional colloquialisms. One of many examples includes Mark’s insistent mispronunciation of the title of his own film, Coven.53 Mark always pronounces it with a long “o,” such that the first syllable rhymes with “rove.” When informed by his lead actor of the word’s correct pronunciation, Mark sticks to his guns, insisting that his version is better (because otherwise the word “sounds like oven”). The actor somewhat condescendingly explains that Mark could perhaps add an umlaut if he wanted to pronounce the word that way. Mark shoots back, “what the hell is an umlaut?” and then, after a moment’s reflection, adds, “oh, you mean those two little dots?” The film does emphasize the disparity between Mark’s life situation and his dreams of material success. The filmmakers drive this point home in a scene in which Mark drives his beat-up old car around wealthy suburbs of Milwaukee and talks about how the expensive properties motivate him and remind him of his goals. With a mansion in the background of the shot, Mark explains how “the American dream stays with me each and every day.” But Mark is in his early thirties, a father of three children from an exgirlfriend, and lives in a modest house with his mother in Menomenee Falls. He and his friends struggle with drug, alcohol, and gambling problems, and one goes to jail during the period of filming. Mark delivers newspapers and works a low-wage custodial job at a cemetery in order to scrape by and continue his filmmaking. Mark’s own brother suggests that he is probably best suited for a factory job. While the scene in the basement represents an awkward moment between Mark and the filmmakers, there is no shortage of awkward situations among the social actors themselves. In one of the most uncomfortable of these scenes, Mark drunkenly denigrates the prospect of settling for a factory job while watching the Superbowl. The scene already reflects tensions among Mark’s family members (and possibly differing feelings about appearing in the documentary), as Mark’s father, brother, and daughter watch the game in the living room while Mark, Mike, and his mother watch the game on a small television set in the kitchen. Close-up insert shots of the television screen condense the time of the evening as we witness Mark getting progressively more intoxicated. These shots also develop the film’s earlier use of televised Green Bay Packers games as a motif foregrounding the apparent hopelessness of Mark’s aspirations for success and fame. At one point, the Packers’ on-field heroics inspire him to boast about his own filmmaking process and to berate those who choose to work in a factory. Tension mounts as he tries to bully Mike into accompanying him to a bar and buying him pitchers of beer with Mike’s scratch-card winnings. Mike, a recovering alcoholic, has little interest in this plan but tries to avoid saying no to Mark directly. Intercut with shots of the Packers’ eventual

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victory celebration, Mark compares the losing team to factory workers and angrily boasts of how he “will never be like you, you fucking job-working, forty-hour motherfucker!” Mark extends his tirade to insulting his mother’s domestic labors, and she and Mike look away uncomfortably as he denounces the daily routines of housewife and factory worker. The viewer may be tempted to look away in shame as well, as the camera unflinchingly captures an expression on his mother’s face that registers years of difficulty and disappointment while she explains that “tomorrow he’s going to be OK again.” The scene represents the frustration and despair into which the aspirational structure of the “American dream” may so easily slide. It constructs a dark flipside to the hope and determination expressed in other moments like Mark’s opening monologue and his visit to the upscale suburb. In this regard, it is important to note that the film is frontloaded with lighthearted depictions of comic high jinks in the filmmaking process. The filmmakers withhold the information that Mark has three children until over half an hour has passed, and from this point gradually reveal more and more about Mark’s and his friends’ problems with gambling, drugs, and alcohol. The comic structure of the film’s first section casts Mark as a figure in the Christopher Guest mold; indeed, some threads on the Internet Movie Database question the film’s ontological status: “Is this a real documentary?”; “Is this a serious documentary or a ‘mockumentary’?”; and simply, “What is this?”54 The filmmakers may intend for the initially lighthearted tone to involve viewers with the story and to enhance the impact of later scenes in which we see the anger that bubbles under the surface of Mark’s manic energy. But by constructing Mark as an eccentric and funny “character” that invokes Guest’s comic fictions, the film’s comic style threatens to defuse its potential for social critique, as well. As Guest himself affirms, his films are primarily about people making “bad art”; we laugh at their delusions but also affectionately root for them to achieve their goals. By enabling this mode of spectatorship for a real documentary, American Movie positions Mark’s struggles within the ideology of individual agency that underpins the concept of the “American dream” itself. That is, the film presents Mark’s frustrations and failures as symptoms of his own choices and actions, delimiting its potential for a broader commentary on social class and the barriers it creates. Instead, many viewers and critics are reduced to posing reductive binary questions about the film: Is it admiring or condescending, is Mark himself “a talentless loser or inspiring man”?55 In the “Pets or Meat” scene from Roger and Me analyzed in Chapter One, the viewer’s shame stems from an initial acceptance of the film’s presentation of the “bunny lady” as simply a comic figure. When the later portion of the scene provokes us to recognize the extreme poverty that drives her actions, we reconsider our initial reaction. By implicating the viewer in a moment of critical self-reflection, Moore attempts to disallow a feeling of spectatorial insulation from the socioeconomic problems the film addresses. If the viewer

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of American Movie feels shame at watching Mark’s profanity-laced tirade against factory workers and his own mother on Superbowl Sunday, it arises mainly because earlier sections of the film invite us to enjoy his comic foibles and to empathize with his intense aspirational feelings. In other words, the film may provoke oscillation between identifying and disidentifying with Mark at the reductive level of questioning whether he is “inspiring” or a “loser.” Prelinger’s critique of the “storytelling” model in documentary filmmaking, in which an individual protagonist overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds in order to succeed, is germane to an analysis of American Movie. The film even culminates with Mark’s heroic, eleventh-hour completion of Coven in time for a well-attended local premiere. The film does modify this triumphal climax with a more bittersweet denouement that depicts Mark hitting up his uncle for more money, as the old man describes how he doesn’t “have any dreams anymore.” But ultimately the film’s individuation of Mark through its comic qualities and conventional narrative structure limits its potential for a more incisive examination or critique of social class and the “American dream.”

RETELLING THE STORY In a review of American indie film enfant terrible Todd Solondz’s Storytelling (2001), Charles Taylor includes American Movie’s Chris Smith among a group of directors that, in his view, make their subjects into a “freak show.” Taylor groups Solondz and Smith with Neil Labute, Larry Clark, Errol Morris, and Michael Moore, claiming that, like these directors, Solondz can never resist getting laughs at the expense of those blue-collar people he’s supposed to be so concerned about. The common sensibility of these filmmakers is that they invite the audience to share their feelings of superiority to the people they put on screen. And too often, the largely white, urban, liberal, educated audience these filmmakers attract have been happy to join in, looking down their collective noses at the hicks and rubes and bourgeoisie trapped on the screen like specimens under glass.56 Given that Storytelling is in part intended as a critical satire of American Movie—a point to which I will return momentarily—there is irony in Taylor’s placement of Solondz and Smith in this same category. But Taylor’s comments efficiently summarize prevalent criticisms of filmmakers like Moore and Smith: Well-educated artists trade upon class biases to position audiences like themselves to enjoy a sense of superiority over less culturally sophisticated subjects. Solondz, whose previous films presented extremely dark satires of subject matter including teenage cruelty and bullying, sexual harassment, and

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pedophilia, describes feeling “unsettled” by the screening of American Movie he attended: “People were laughing, uproariously, and you have to question what that laughter is about.”57 Solondz’s answer to this question, as depicted by the plot of Storytelling, is quite straightforward: The laughter reflects the cultural condescension described by Charles Taylor and many other critics. Storytelling is divided into two sections that feature separate characters and plots. One section is titled “Fiction,” the other “Nonfiction,” and Solondz aims (with a rather heavy hand) to unsettle what he views as cultural assumptions about art that sustain these terms as discreet or even coherent categories. In the “Nonfiction” section, Solondz casts American Movie’s Mike Schank to play the cameraman for a hapless, untalented documentary filmmaker named Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti). Having failed in other endeavors, Oxman sets out to shoot a documentary about a wealthy suburban New Jersey family, with a particular focus on the teenage son, Scooby (Mark Webber); he pitches the project to Scooby’s family as “An American Family for the new millennium.” Solondz paints in broad strokes, establishing the connection to American Movie not only by casting Schank, but also by titling Oxman’s film “American Scooby.” Footage we see from “American Scooby” is deliberately, painfully trite and poorly conceived. Solondz emphasizes not only that Oxman cannot figure out a worthwhile “story” to “tell,” but also that his subject is spoiled and uninteresting. In the section’s climactic scene, Scooby journeys (uninvited by Oxman) from the suburbs to downtown New York City and locates a test screening of “American Scooby.” Initially excited, the narcissistic young man’s reaction turns to shame and tears as he realizes that the audience—pointedly depicted as sophisticated, well-dressed urban denizens—is laughing with gusto at the film’s representation of him and his family. The scene depicts Scooby’s recognition through the audience’s mocking laughter of the way that Oxman has seen him all along. Following Žižek’s analysis of Highsmith’s “Black House,” Oxman’s film functions proleptically for Scooby as an empty space for the projection of his desires. The film reinforces this point by demonstrating through fantasy sequences how televisual stardom is a focal point of desire for the callow and aimless young man, a desire that feeds directly into his interest in participating in Oxman’s documentary.58 Until he comes face-to-face with the finished product at the screening, the documentary functions for Scooby as the “sublime object,” or object-cause of desire. The sublime object “presents the paradox of an object that is able to subsist only in shadow, in an intermediary, halfborn state, as something latent, implicit, evoked: as soon as we cast away the shadow to try to reveal the substance, the object itself dissolves; all that remains is the dross of the common object.”59 The fantasy of mutual recognition that I have described in this chapter must subsist in this kind of half-born state; the awareness of significant differentials in perception among filmmaker, subject, and audience would rupture the fantasy that

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sustains the creation of the film. Scooby experiences a sense of loss and shame when he recognizes his own prior misrecognition, when the fantasy space dissolves and he must confront Oxman’s and the audience’s perception of him and his family. Solondz’ fiction about “nonfiction” is meant to criticize the ethics of documentary filmmaking by suggesting that a subject who confronts an audience’s reaction to his image on-screen could be traumatized by the experience. But how have the real-life analogues to Scooby responded to this scenario? I have argued that Little Edie’s reaction to viewing Grey Gardens is structured by disavowal: She laughs and cries along with the rest of the audience, enjoying the film “as if it were someone else” on-screen, although she knows “very well that it was herself and her mother.”60 Interviews with Mark Borchardt about his experience of watching American Movie with festival audiences also suggest a complex and contradictory form of displacement, in which Mark repeatedly refers to his onscreen image as a “character.” In an interview with Indiewire, for example, Mark affirms that he sees the film as his story, but also explains, “When I look at the screen I don’t see me as I’m talking to you right now. I see this other character in making a film.”61 Speaking with A. V. Club, Mark is asked directly what he thought about Storytelling. He claims that he liked it very much and argues that the film should not be taken as a “sinister allegory to American Movie.” But defending American Movie against the widespread perception that it exploited him, Mark again refers to his representation as a “character,” explaining how he “will call it a character, because once the camera’s on, everything changes.”62 But in this latter interview, Mark is not comfortable with simply distancing himself from this “character.” He continues with a verbose and rather convoluted defense of the film, in which he also asserts, “I was who I am, amped up a little bit because the camera was rolling.”63 Mark’s defense of the film displays an awkward tension between the competing claims that he was essentially playing a role and that it was an honest and realistic representation of his life. I have argued that both the Beales’ and Mark’s onscreen personae exemplify the qualities Nichols describes as “virtual performance”: a “strong sense of personal expressivity that does not seem to be produced by or conjured for the camera—even if, in fact, it is.”64 Mark’s own description of his onscreen self as both a “character” and as “who I am” may reflect an internalization of the disavowal Nichols ascribes to the documentarian that seeks out the virtual performance: “the concepts of acting and performance are simultaneously disclaimed and desired.”65 Mark’s media appearances following American Movie’s success—particularly a series of appearances on Late Night with David Letterman—reify the virtual performance, in effect collapsing the distinction between the “character” and “who I am.” I have suggested that the film already takes a compromised approach to issues of social class, but on Letterman, Mark is reduced to being simply a comic figure in the Christopher Guest vein. The film’s more

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troubling depictions of his struggles with alcoholism, child support, and so on, are sidelined entirely. Like Mark, the main characters from This Is Spinal Tap also appeared on Letterman and other talk shows, both following the release of the film and in subsequent years to promote the film’s theatrical rerelease, an album of new material recorded by the band, etc. The actors did interviews in character as the band members, and often performed Spinal Tap songs for an appreciative studio audience. They have continued to play live concerts at major venues such as London’s Wembley Arena. Through buying records or cheering at concerts for a “band” that was originally intended as a satire of heavy metal music, fans perform an ironic mode of appreciation. They position themselves as knowing insiders to the expansion of the satire beyond the film’s diegesis into other media and performance contexts: They know very well that Spinal Tap is not a real band and that their music is a joke, but behave as if the band is real and the music is enjoyable. Mark’s appearances on Letterman parallel those of the actors who play Spinal Tap in significant ways. Normally actors appear on talk shows as “themselves,” under the pretense that viewers get to meet the real person behind the film performance. The Spinal Tap actors’ choice to appear in character, by contrast, creates a continuity of performance across different media outlets that dissolves the film’s diegetic boundaries and extends the conceit that the film was a documentary in the first place. When interviewing Mark, Letterman is determined to sustain a similar kind of continuity of performance between American Movie and his show. He attempts to isolate and emphasize the qualities that made Mark an entertaining comic “character” in the film, while avoiding forms of engagement with him that would in any way undermine the ironic and satirical tone of his show. In one early appearance, Letterman even supplements his interview with Mark with a comedic video produced by the show, in which Mark leads the viewer on a tour of his hometown of Menomenee Falls. The video, then, serves the same role as the musical performance on the show by Spinal Tap: It provides a context for an interview that might otherwise be less entertaining for a viewer unfamiliar with the original film. In doing so, it converts Mark’s “virtual performance” in American Movie into simply a “performance,” in which he is expected to reproduce only the funny parts of his original role in the documentary. Mark’s Letterman appearances, then, erase any distinction between his role in American Movie as a “character” and as “who I am.” In order to achieve some small version of the film-world fame of which he has dreamt all his life, Mark, in Žižek’s sense, becomes his own mask—his “external place” in the “intersubjective symbolic network” defines his “true position.”66 This “external place,” however, is premised upon a voiding of the class-based forms of hardship that underpin his virtual performance in the documentary. While American Movie limits its potential for social critique through its use of comedy in the Christopher Guest mode and a narrative arc that follows

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Hollywood formula, the film still presents an ambivalent view of Mark’s pursuit of the “American dream,” conveys the real hardships of his environment, and allows for awkward moments that create a productive tension in the film’s own representational strategies. Mark’s celebrity status in the context of media outlets like Letterman depends upon an erasure of the elements of the film that mediate its comic qualities and moor Mark’s performance to its socioeconomic context. Mark is, in a sense, correct that Storytelling’s Scooby cannot be understood as a fictional version of himself. Unlike Scooby, Mark is able to inhabit and perhaps take control of his own “character,” a character that is ultimately barely distinguishable from the lovably eccentric but socially irrelevant artists that populate Christopher Guest films. Although she is made over into a dramatic character in subsequent feature-film and Broadway adaptations of Grey Gardens, Little Edie never really enters Christopher Guest territory. Her comic qualities remain tethered to a thematics of loss and nostalgia at the core of what has now effectively become the Grey Gardens “property.” Sitting among a laughing audience at the Lincoln center, Edie manufactures a distance between herself and her image, appreciating it “as if it were someone else.” The fantasy space remains intact, at least sufficiently for Edie to laugh along with them. As offbeat portrait documentaries continue to be produced, this kind of audience laughter is both desired and shunned by their directors. Consider the case of two documentaries about heavy metal bands, Joe Berlinger’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) and Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008). Anvil, about a band that never quite succeeded, was widely described as “a real-life Spinal Tap.”67 The film’s poster displays pull quotes featuring adjectives like “hilarious” and “outrageous,” as well as “touching” and “inspirational.” By contrast, at a 2004 festival screening of Metallica that I attended, Berlinger opened his q&a by taking the audience to task for laughing throughout the film. He claimed to be surprised by the reaction, implying that the audience was being condescending. Some audience members agreed, including a group of Metallica fans that spoke up to say they felt that the laughter “made the band seem like they were Spinal Tap.” Berlinger’s response to the laughter was not unlike Little Edie’s reaction to the screening of Grey Gardens: Both are rooted in a desire to preserve the fantasy space. If the Metallica audience laughed because they “didn’t get” the film (misrecognized Berlinger’s intentions), then the mutual recognition between himself and the band would remain intact. Otherwise, the laughter could cast the film in the light of Spinal Tap or even Solondz’ satirical “American Scooby.” Accordingly, this kind of laughter must be explained away: as misrecognition, as projection of the audience’s inherent discomfort with the subjects (Grey Gardens editor Ellen Hovde’s take), or simply as tautology—in American Movie codirector Sarah Price’s opinion, it is a mistake to believe that viewers laugh because the film is condescending. Their laughter, rather, is due simply to the quality that the filmmakers have recognized in Mark and Mike: “because these guys are funny.”

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NOTES 1. Paul Arthur, “No Longer Absolute: Portraiture in American Avant-Garde and Documentary Films of the Sixties,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 102. 2. Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 90. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 8. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. Arthur, 102. 8. Ibid., 105. 9. B. Ruby Rich, October 23, 2011, comment on Visible Evidence listserv. 10. Rick Prelinger, “Taking history back from the ‘storytellers.’” Blackoystercatcher: Rick Prelinger’s Blog, June 22, 2009, http://blackoystercatcher. blogspot.com/2009/06/taking-history-back-from-storytellers.html. 11. John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 45. 12. Ibid., 45–6. 13. Ibid., 51. 14. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 38–56. 15. Ibid., 120, 122. 16. Žižek, 73. For example, two characters pretend, for strategic purposes, to be a couple in love, only to eventually realize that they are, in fact, a couple in love. 17. Žižek, 73–4. 18. Editors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyers also receive director credits for the film. 19. Alan Rosenthal, “Grey Gardens: Ellen Hovde,” in The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 373. 20. Kenneth J. Robson, “The Crystal Formation: Narrative Structure in ‘Grey Gardens.’” Cinema Journal 22, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 42–53, 46. 21. Jay Ruby, “The Image Mirrored,” in Rosenthal, 73. 22. Richard Eder, “‘Grey Gardens’ Visits Recluses on L. I.,” The New York Times, September 27, 1975, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res= F20A17F73A5B107B93C5AB1782D85F418785F9. 23. Ibid. 24. Roger Ebert, “Grey Gardens,” The Chicago Sun-Times, November 10, 1976, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/grey-gardens-1976. 25. Ibid. 26. http://www.mayslesfilms.com/films/films/greygardens.html. 27. Eder, “‘Grey Gardens’ Visits Recluses on L. I.” 28. Nichols, 120. 29. Matthew Tinkcom, Grey Gardens (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 64. 30. Ibid., 64. 31. Ibid., 67. 32. Alan Rosenthal, “Grey Gardens: Ellen Hovde.”

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33. Ibid., 382. 34. Ibid. 35. Calvin Pryluck, “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking,” in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 259. 36. Eleanor Gillespie, “American Movie,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://www.accessatlanta.com/movies/content/shared/movies/reviews/A/ americanmovie.html. 37. Roger Ebert, “American Movie,” http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ american-movie-2000. 38. Lisa Schwartzbaum, “American Movie,” Entertainment Weekly, November 19, 1999, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,271709,00.html. Variety describes the film in these terms: “Think ‘Northern Exposure’ crossed with ‘Ed Wood’ and you’ll have a pretty fair approximation of pic’s quirky, deadpan appeal.” (Glenn Lovell, “Review: ‘American Movie,’” Variety, January 28, 1999, http:// www.variety.com/review/VE1117490618?refcatid=31). 39. Žižek, 73. 40. I am indebted for this last point to my student Joel Neville Anderson in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. 41. Mike Schank plays all of the guitar music that scores the film. 42. This convention of editing sound and image so as to construct interior monologues in a documentary context is prevalent in both offbeat character portraits and reality TV. Indeed, an early example of the approach can be found in PBS’ seminal reality TV series An American Family, which occasionally bends its otherwise strict observational style. Another example can be found in the work of ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall. Bill Nichols discusses MacDougall’s gravitation toward social actors whose everyday behavior expresses depth and density of character. When working on a film about Aboriginal peoples who were more reserved, MacDougall experimented with “strategies of ‘interior commentary’ that might compensate for expressive performance (Nichols, 121). 43. Janet Maslin, “‘American Movie’: Seat-of-the-Pants Director: Lights! Camera! Gumption!” The New York Times, November 5, 1999, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C07E3DA1E3BF936A35752C1A 96F958260. 44. Edward Guthmann, “A Quintessentially ‘American’ Dream,” The San Francisco Chronicle, November 19, 1999, http://www.sfgate.com/movies/ article/A-Quintessentially-American-Dream-2896381.php. 45. Amy Taubin, “Death Be Not Proud,” The Village Voice, November 2, 1999, http://www.villagevoice.com/1999–11–02/film/death-be-not-proud/2/. 46. Chris Gore, “American Movie,” Film Threat, July 4, 2001, http://www .filmthreat.com/reviews/402/#ixzz1NDVzRLle. 47. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/board 48. Amy Goodman, “Interview: Made in America, Chris Smith and Sarah Price on Their ‘American Movie,’” Indiewire, November 4, 1999, http://www .indiewire.com/article/interview_made_in_america_chris_smith_and_sarah_ price_on_their_american_mov. 49. Goodman, “Made in America.” 50. It is remarkable how closely this defense echoes Hovde’s response to similar criticisms of Grey Gardens. She suggests that viewers’ concerns about the representation of the Beales are perhaps projections of their own discomfort: “But when people say that those women were exploited, I think what they

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51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

are really thinking about is themselves” (Rosenthal, “Ellen Hovde,” 381). Hovde’s claim is predicated on her assertion that she and the other filmmakers created a fair and accurate portrayal of the women. Thus, she suggests, if viewers feel uncomfortable and think that the women are exploited, then their discomfort actually lies in their view of the women as they are—not in how they are represented. In other words, it is viewers’ own prejudices against the women’s unusual lifestyle that accounts for the sense that exploitation is taking place. Also like Hovde, Smith and Price assert that Mark himself was comfortable with the film. Smith makes sure to point out in the interview that he and Price invited Mark to view the final cut of the film and told him that they would change anything with which he was uncomfortable. Amy Goodman, “Made in America”; Wesley Morris, “Looking for America with a Movie Camera,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 19, 1999, http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Looking-for-America-with-a-moviecamera-3057464.php. Lovell, “Review: American Movie.” Roger Ebert also describes the Mark’s life and environment in class-based terms: “Borchardt’s life is a daily cliffhanger involving poverty, desperation, discouragement and diehard ambition. He’s behind on his child support payments, he drinks too much, he can’t even convince his ancient Uncle Bill that he has a future as a moviemaker. Bill lives in a trailer surrounded by piles of magazines that he possibly subscribed to under the impression he would win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes” (Ebert, “American Movie.”) This mispronunciation is a point relished by many critics and fans, and David Letterman insistently points it out while promoting the Coven video during Mark’s appearances on his show. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/board http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/board/?p=2 Charles Taylor, “‘Storytelling,’” Slate, January 25, 2002, http://dir.salon.com/ story/ent/movies/review/2002/01/25/storytelling/index.html. Charles Taylor, “‘Storytelling’”. The film depicts this desire through Scooby’s visualized daydreams of appearing on and hosting the Conan O’ Brian show. Žižek, 83–84. Rosenthal, “Ellen Hovde: Grey Gardens,” 382. Amy Goodman, “Interview: ‘American Movie’s Mark Borchardt, An Inspiration for Filmmakers Everywhere,” Indiewire, November 3, 1999, http:// www.indiewire.com/article/interview_american_movies_mark_borchardt_ an_inspiration_for_filmmakers_ever. Josh Modell, “Interview: Mark Borchardt,” A. V. Club, July 17, 2002, http:// www.avclub.com/articles/mark-borchardt,13774/. Ibid. Nichols, 120. Ibid., 120–122 Žižek, 74. See, among many examples, John Horn, “Of ‘Anvil!’ and steely resolve,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/09/ entertainment/et-word9; Andrew Perry, “Anvil—the real Spinal Tap,” The Telegraph, February 18, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/andrewperry/4688005/Anvil-the-real-Spinal-Tap.html.

3

Awkward Satire Comedies of Deception

This chapter examines reality-based films and videos that use pranks, hoaxes, and other forms of deceit for social and political satire. In their most straightforward form, what I term “comedies of deception” enable an easy alignment for the viewer between knowledge and pleasure: Aware of the ruse, the viewer is positioned to laugh at the dupes who serve as the films’ political targets. This type of intervention is embodied by the work of activist filmmaker-performers The Yes Men, whose stunts are documented in The Yes Men (Chris Smith, Sarah Price, Dan Ollman, 2003) and its sequel, The Yes Men Fix the World (Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr, 2009). Other comedies of deception involve less straightforward configurations of knowledge and affect among the positions of filmmaker-performer,1 social actor, and viewer. These more complicated examples include the film and television work of performer Sacha Baron Cohen (Da Ali G Show [2000, 2003–2004] and the films Borat [Larry Charles, 2006] and Brüno [Larry Charles, 2009]), as well as Casey Affleck’s elaborate hoax film I’m Still Here (2010), which satirizes celebrity culture by purporting to document the dramatic implosion of Hollywood star Joaquin Phoenix’s acting career. His ambush interview style and construction of an onscreen persona that represents a strategically modulated version of himself make Michael Moore an important progenitor of the comedies of deception I analyze in this chapter. In Chapter One, I argued that Moore’s efforts to construct awkward situations for rhetorical effect can be grouped into three categories, each with its own vector of shame: shame on the social actors who espouse the viewpoints Moore opposes, shame on the viewer for his or her own insensitivity or ignorance, and an unruly form of shame that may disrupt the filmmaker’s apparent rhetorical goals for a scene. This chapter presents an expanded model to examine films that engage in far more thorough going forms of deception than Moore’s, in which many of the social actors (and sometimes even the viewer) may be wholly unable to distinguish what is staged and fabricated from what unfolds spontaneously onscreen. In the various comedies of deception I discuss, the positions of the filmmakerperformer, social actor, and viewer shift among the three points of the

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triangle in Freud’s joke structure: joke teller, audience, and object of the joke.2 These variations significantly affect the political and ethical implications of the satire. Two major academic studies have examined hoax films as a part of their broader analyses of mock or fake documentary. The overarching purpose of the first of these books, Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight’s Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, is to analyze different degrees to which mock documentary may subvert the conventionally authoritative discourse of documentary film. The films they examine range in this respect from affectionate parody to critical deconstruction. Their analysis of mockumentaries such as Forgotten Silver (Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, 1995) argues that a hoax structure offers possibilities for a reflexive critique of documentary’s formal and institutional claims to authority. Many viewers in New Zealand felt frustration and a sense of betrayal upon learning that its story of the life and work of a New Zealand filmmaker named Colin Mackenzie—who made every major technical breakthrough in cinema before its real historical invention—was fabricated.3 But Roscoe and Hight suggest that this response opens up the possibility for viewers to question their uncritical acceptance of the truth claims of traditional documentaries. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner’s more recent book, F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, focuses on “more serious uses of the fake documentary format” and is specifically oriented toward less mainstream media “produced within the independent or avant-garde sectors.” Juhasz uses the term “productive fake documentaries” to describe the films examined in the book. She explains this concept as the work of filmmakers and artists who “engage a subversive or progressive project: to underscore that documentary can be readily linked and unlinked to other cultural and political projects that have contributed to injustice.”4 In sum, these studies generally argue that hoaxes can contribute in a distinctive way to the larger documentary project of educating and informing viewers, precisely by deconstructing some of the methods through which conventional documentaries purport to do so. Films like Forgotten Silver and Ruins—Jesse Lerner’s documentary about the forgery and exhibition of pre-Columbian objects that is the subject of two essays in F Is for Phony—are invested in interrogating how documentaries employ signifiers of authenticity (distressed archival footage, expert testimony, voice-of-God narration, etc.) to construct an authoritative and singular view of “history.” The comedies of deception I analyze in this chapter are somewhat less concerned with a critical examination of documentary form than these other films. They function largely as documented performance pieces, in which the satire is created primarily through the profilmic event. The camera does not always play a strictly observational role, however. It may serve as a further provocation, and the performer and duped social actors may address the camera directly. The comedies of deception I examine have multiple

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lineages: the confrontational style of documentary filmmakers like Moore and Nick Broomfield; the hidden camera gags of shows in the tradition of Candid Camera5; and political prank-interventions like those of The Yippies and Dick Tuck (a Democratic consultant known for pranks targeting Richard Nixon in the 1960s). Leshu Torchin argues that in hoax documentaries “the stars perform alternative identities . . . to elicit truths about the institutions in which they appear.”6 She situates Baron Cohen’s Borat in relation to other “documentaries that chronicle hoaxes,” including The Yes Men and The Couple in the Cage (Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, 1997), a documentation of Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s performance piece depicting two “recently discovered” Amerindians placed on display at sites such as the American Museum of Natural History.7 She goes on to suggest, however, that unlike The Couple in the Cage or The Yes Men, Borat “does not provide a clear backstage,” but rather “postures as transparent documentary.”8 The film’s ultimate refusal, in Torchin’s view, to posit a clear “truth” differentiates it from hoax documentaries and results in a “recursive” framework in which the “entire project is thrown into uncertainty as each sequence provides a step backward from verisimilitude, offering a performative documentary about performance and a mockumentary of a documentary of a mockumentary.”9 I agree with Torchin that the viewer’s degree of access to the ruse plays a major structuring role in the form of critical intervention the hoax creates. This chapter examines a variety of scenes from comedies of deception that construct differentials in understanding among the positions of filmmakerperformer, social actors (who are most often the dupes), and viewer. They do not always offer a “clear backstage” or clearly avoid doing so; sometimes the backstage reality is ambiguous and difficult to discern. The scenes analyzed in this chapter all provoke forms of discomfort and unease, for the social actors onscreen and often for the viewer as well. Their awkward moments are intended to pierce through layers of social and political complacency or hypocrisy, bringing forth discomfiting truths from which we might prefer to look away. These films/videos link their satire to moments of affective intensity both onscreen and off, producing forms of shame and contempt that vector in multiple directions. I discussed in the Introduction how Silvan Tomkins analyzes shame as a breakdown of intersubjective relations. He describes it as an “inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment,”10 and, in a passage that bears repeating, “an act which reduces facial communication,” linked to “any barrier to further exploration . . . [which] might be because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger.”11 For Tomkins, being shamed by another “generates the torment of self-consciousness,”

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to which one has been “forced unwillingly” by the barrier to communication.12 Rooted in the experience in infancy in which the “circuit of mirroring expressions between the child’s face and the caregiver’s face” may break down, shame is experienced as a “disruptive moment . . . in a circuit of identity-constituting identificatory communication.”13 Inversely, the feeling of contempt reduces self-consciousness and is linked to “an intense consciousness of the object, which is experienced as disgusting.” Contempt involves a desire to insulate oneself: “It is a literal pulling away from the object.”14 As Sedgwick explains it, both shame and contempt (as well as disgust) differ from other affects in that they are “activated by the drawing of a boundary line or barrier” rather than (like interest or enjoyment) activating a new engagement.15 But, as she points out, “[w]ithout positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush. Similarly, only something you thought might delight or satisfy can disgust.”16 This conjunction of positive and negative affect is a key component of the rhetorical strategy in some scenes I analyze in this chapter. In other words, these scenes are premised upon the filmmaker-performers deliberately offering forms of interest or enjoyment to the duped social actors, only to turn the situation on its head in order to shame them on camera. This rhetorical strategy implicates the viewer in some cases, as well. I divide my analysis into three sections, each addressing scenes that represent a distinct configuration of knowledge and affect among the filmmaker-performers, duped social actors, and viewers. The primary affects that circulate among these positions are shame, contempt, and enjoyment in the form of superiority or schadenfreude. In section one, “The Joke’s on Them,” the scene is intended to shame the duped social actors who serve as targets of the filmmaker-performers’ opprobrium. When there is a clear alignment in perspective between filmmaker-performer and viewer (us), then the dupes (them) are positioned as objects of shared contempt. Scenes of this type resonate with some of Michael Moore’s rhetorical strategies analyzed in Chapter One, but with the added dimension that the dupe is in the dark not only about the performer’s intentions but about his or her true identity, as well. Witnessing how the duped social actors buy into a ruse that is legible to the viewer reinforces the viewer’s intended alignment with the filmmaker-performer’s perspective. As I mention in the Introduction, Susan Purdie describes the bond between joke teller and audience as a “mastery of discourse.” The butt of the joke is excluded from this bond and denied “discursive [emphasis mine] potency—the power to be an agent who has intentional effect in the world.”17 When “The Joke’s on Them,” the dupe is doubly rendered an object of contempt—both because his or her viewpoint is framed as problematic or offensive, and because his or her lack of awareness excludes him or her from the bond established between filmmaker-performer and viewer. Most scenes in the

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Yes Men films, and some scenes in Sacha Baron Cohen’s work, belong in this category. The Yes Men films consistently use this strategy because their targets are corporate executives and government leaders who generally possess a great deal of “discursive potency” and political agency. The Yes Men’s guerilla comedy interventions attempt to puncture the logics that underlie these positions of power, by appropriating and hyperbolizing the discourses of corporate globalization with the intention to correct what they present as a kind of shame deficit.18 Their political theater is an effort to produce forms of shame that they believe should be more fully associated with the discourse of multinational companies like DOW Chemical and global organizations like The International Monetary Fund and The World Trade Organization. In scenes in the second section of the chapter, “Unstable Jokes,” the alignment of positions in the joke triangle is much less fixed, and the satirical meaning or intended effects are more ambiguous. In some cases, for example, the dupe’s viewpoint is more or less aligned with the ostensible politics of the film itself. The dupe’s position as object of the joke thereby challenges the coherence of these politics. This type of scene crops up throughout Sacha Baron Cohen’s film and television work. The views espoused by Baron Cohen’s onscreen personae should seem to position them as butts of the joke. But often, formal elements of these scenes (camerawork and editing) contribute to a comic structure that encourages the viewer to identify with Baron Cohen’s character and laugh at the dupes (even in spite of oneself). Such scenes may provoke what critics often characterize as the “wrong” kind of affect: laughter at the expense of people whose beliefs and values should align with those of the film itself (including a feminist group in Borat, in a scene I discuss in this chapter). Moreover, one key function of Baron Cohen’s characters (especially Borat and Brüno) is to shamelessly display offensive ideas that are calibrated to put the targets of the film’s satire at ease, so that they will more readily reveal their own offensive views on camera. But the characters themselves represent offensive and even grotesque caricatures based on stereotypes of ethnicity, class, and sexuality. In scenes in section one, “The Joke’s on Them,” the irony in the performer’s use of offensive discourse unambiguously implicates the duped antagonist as object of the viewer’s contempt. Scenes I discussed in the “Unstable Jokes” section may also encourage laughter that undermines the films’ purported goals to expose social prejudice. Such responses would include laughter with Baron Cohen’s characters’ often-reprehensible perspectives, and/or laughter at the ethnic and gay stereotypes embodied by the characters themselves. Many public responses to Baron Cohen’s films demonstrate anxieties about both of these types of “misplaced” laughter. In the case of Borat, for example, the Anti-Defamation League issued a statement on the film soon after its release. Qualifying its criticism by noting that “there is absolutely no intent on the part of the filmmakers to offend, and no malevolence on

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the part of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is himself proudly Jewish,” the film nonetheless raises cause for concern because “one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.”19 Reporting on Brüno for The New York Times, Brooke Barnes cites the ADL’s comments on Borat and makes the same point about the follow-up film: “Ultimately the tension surrounding Brüno boils down to the worry that certain viewers won’t understand that the joke is on them and will leave the multiplex with their homophobia validated.”20 Rashad Robinson of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), like the ADL, frames Baron Cohen’s efforts as “well meaning,” but describes them as “problematic in many places and outright offensive in others.” Taking a contrary position, Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine, defends the films in precisely the terms used by Moore to defend Roger and Me twenty years earlier: “‘The multiplex crowd wouldn’t normally sit down for a two-hour lecture on homophobia, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I’m excited about that.’”21 While Barnes’ piece does not attempt to reconcile these opposing viewpoints, a subsequent letter to the Times in response to her article puts it bluntly: “If ‘Brüno’ sells the tens of millions of tickets that ‘Borat’ did, most of those ticket buyers would not be spending $12 to contemplate prejudice; clearly they would fill the theaters to laugh at the gay guy.”22 These critics attribute responsibility for the “correct” interpretation to the viewer (more sophisticated viewers will “get it,” others will not). But we must attend more closely to textual cues in the films. Formal elements of certain scenes undermine or ambiguate the films’ purported satirical intentions and produce troubling forms of polysemy and modalities of identification. In scenes discussed in the third section, which I term “The Joke’s on Us,” the viewer is positioned as a possible dupe. Here, it is much more difficult for us to tell what is staged and what is spontaneous, and who in the scene may or may not be in on the joke. These scenes provoke a distinct form of the epistephilia that Bill Nichols argues constitutes a major component of documentary film spectatorship. In Representing Reality, Nichols contends that documentary replaces narrative fiction film’s scopophilic position for the viewer with an epistephilic one. He claims that the difference “between fiction and documentary is akin to the difference between an erotics and an ethics” and suggests that, for documentary, key concepts in psychoanalytic film theory (voyeurism, fetishism, narcissism) “seldom occupy the central position they have in classic narrative.”23 By describing the experience of documentary spectatorship in terms of an epistephilia, however, Nichols’ language connotes a form of spectatorship still governed by modes of desire and pleasure (or displeasure). Indeed, although he does not allude to it directly, Nichols’ explanation of epistephilia in documentary film spectatorship echoes descriptions of “the system of the suture” in semiotic-psychoanalytic film theory.24 He writes, “[documentary] posits an organizing agency that possesses information and

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knowledge, a text that conveys it, and a subject who will gain it. He who knows (the agency is usually masculine) will share that knowledge with those who wish to know; they too can take the place of the ‘subject-who-knows.’” To this, Nichols adds, “Knowledge, as much or more than the imaginary identification between viewer and fictional character, promises the viewer a sense of plenitude and self-sufficiency.”25 Further, he compares the knowledge offered by documentary film to the “ideal-ego figures or objects of desire suggested by the characters of narrative fiction.”26 This “sense of plenitude and self-sufficiency,” then, is enabled through identification with an “organizing agency” that constructs knowledge within a particular ideological framework. As in suture theory, there is a play between dispossession and possession: When we lack knowledge or understanding, we experience an epistephilic need to have this lack filled through an imaginary identification with an authoritative perspective. This organizing agency of the documentary performs a stabilizing function like that of the “ideal-ego figures” in narrative fiction film. The scenes I analyze under the rubric of “The Joke’s on Them” fulfill the desire Nichols describes in a very straightforward manner. In on the joke, the viewer is invited to share the filmmaker-performer’s ideological perspective (knowledge through pleasure) and enjoy a privileged position in relation to the shamed and ignorant dupe (pleasure in knowledge). Scenes in which “The Joke’s on Us,” however, dispossess the viewer of this mutually supportive relationship between pleasure and knowledge by challenging our understanding of their degrees of veracity or fabrication. I focus in this section on a key scene in Baron Cohen’s Borat, and in the conclusion to the chapter I briefly discuss I’m Still Here—which is intended to keep the viewer entirely in the dark about its fictionality. This strategy of dispossessing the viewer of knowledge may contribute productively to a film’s broader satirical project and provoke the viewer to think critically about documentary modes of authority and knowledge construction. As Nichols argues, however, “[t]he aesthetic of epistephilia, like that of scopophilia, nourishes itself.”27 In other words, viewers’ curiosity about the film’s veracity may lead to an overinvestment in distinguishing fact from fiction as a means of regaining that elusive sense of “plenitude and self-sufficiency” in spectatorship. Moreover, the effort to draw this distinction between the real and the staged often has little value for understanding the politics of these films’ satirical projects within contemporary media culture.

I.

THE JOKE’S ON THEM

The comedy of deception is a tactic employed by activist filmmakers and performers across the political spectrum. On the conservative right, we find the prankster James O’Keefe, who gained notoriety by making a sting video at an office of The Association of Community Organizations for Reform

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Now (ACORN), a network for community groups that advocate for lowincome families on social and political issues. On the left, The Yes Men are a duo of activists who satirize the ideology of neoliberal economists by posing as spokespersons for the World Trade Organization and companies like DOW Chemical in order to infiltrate professional conferences and media appearances. O’Keefe’s ACORN video, created using an approach that appropriates elements of Baron Cohen’s and The Yes Men’s styles, set in motion a wave of legislative responses that ultimately led to a federal defunding of the organization.28 In a scene early in The Yes Men Fix the World, the duo hijack an international finance conference in the guise of corporate spokesmen for DOW Chemical. Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum (itself a pseudonym) in character as “Erastus Hamm” gives a lecture and slide presentation titled “Risk, Reality, Reason: End-to-End Standards and Acceptable Risk.” He explains that DOW has developed software called Acceptable Risk, a “market-smart risk calculator” that allows the entrepreneur with a product that is potentially dangerous to human life to “find out what risks are or are not acceptable from a bottom-line business perspective.” Bichlbaum proceeds with a presentation that establishes the precedent for their risk calculator in cases such as IBM’s sale of punch card technology that greatly assisted the Nazi genocide (replete with a slide featuring an offensive caricature of an elderly Jewish man). He argues that although this business transaction had an immense cost in terms of human life, its huge profits make it a “golden skeleton” in the company’s closet—the sort of enterprise the acceptable risk calculator will help contemporary entrepreneurs assess in terms of their market value. The Yes Men’s stated intention in scenes like this is to shame the audience attending the presentation; “would this,” they ask in a voiceover that precedes the scene, “make the bankers think twice?” Toward this goal, they employ rhetorical strategies that follow Sedgwick’s principle: “Without positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush.”29 When Bichlbaum discusses IBM, the film cuts to reaction shots of attendees who appear bewildered and somewhat incredulous. To put the largely European group at ease, however, he offers for their enjoyment a joke at Americans’ expense: “Now, you may have heard the joke—how many Americans does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Twelve—one to climb the ladder and eleven to file the lawsuit.” The film cuts to a shot of several attendees laughing heartily, evincing the type of relief that Freud suggests humor may enable. Freud writes that humor finds “a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of transforming it, by discharge, into pleasure.”30 The Yes Men thus offer the audience a positive affect in order to more fully shame them with Bichlbaum’s follow-up joke: “What about Indians?”, he asks, and then deadpans the punch-line: “Oh, just one.” The film cuts back

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to another reaction shot of the audience, and we see the smiles falling away from their faces, replaced by expressions of embarrassment at the point of the joke: The impoverished victims of the Bhopal gas disaster received only a fraction of the amount the Indian government asked for in a lawsuit against the Union Carbide Corporation (which was later acquired by DOW Chemical). The Yes Men’s point is that Bichlbaum’s discussion of IBM and the very premise of their acceptable risk calculator should make anyone in the audience interrupt the presentation or leave the room. But the audience is willing to stay seated, hear him out, and even laugh at one of his jokes. The film implies that this is already a shameful response, and the follow-up joke is intended to trigger the shame that The Yes Men want these financiers to feel. To reinforce the critical meaning of this production of affect, Bichlbaum proceeds to spell out the logic behind the two contrasting jokes: Although DOW would “never claim that one life is worth more than another,” “the market has its own logic, and if we’re willing to live with it, we must make the most of the choices it makes.” This performative displacement of individual and corporate responsibility and ethics to the “invisible hand of the market” represents the essence of The Yes Men’s satirical point in this scene. The satirical effect is sealed, however, by the behavior of some of the duped social actors captured on camera following Bichlbaum’s presentation. Many members of the audience approach The Yes Men to shake their hands and collect souvenir keychains featuring the DOW Chemical logo attached to a small gold-painted skull intended to represent the talk’s central concept. Two members of the audience are captured on camera praising the talk and making specific inquiries about its applicability to their own business models. One man recaps the logic of the presentation—not to contest it, but to affirm it. Describing a product he wants to introduce onto the market, he suggests, “Whichever way you do this, you’re doing to cost some lives, but if you make some money in the process, then it’s acceptable,” and then laughs with satisfaction and compliments the Yes Men for their “refreshing” presentation (see Figure 3.1). These conversations resolve the scene by suggesting that behind the general audience’s passive shamelessness throughout the presentation lies a much more mercenary shamelessness that undergirds the system of international finance itself. Where the Yes Men perform slight variations on essentially the same character—a buttoned-down, free-market ideologue—Sacha Baron Cohen creates three quite different characters in his film and television work: Ali G, a deeply ignorant young white man from the London suburbs who worships hip hop culture and speaks in a fake “rude boy” patois; Borat, a sexist and anti-Semitic journalist from rural Kazakhstan; and Brüno, a gay Austrian fashion reporter whose infatuation with the superficial excesses of celebrity culture is matched only by his historical and political ignorance

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Figure 3.1 The Yes Men’s political adversaries shame themselves on camera (The Yes Men Fix the World).

(he frequently makes approving references to Hitler and fascism). Each character was developed on television and subsequently appeared in a feature-film adaptation. Borat had the biggest cultural and financial impact of the three films. It earned roughly 129 million dollars in the U.S., and a total of 262 million worldwide—on a budget of 18 million dollars.31 The film generated a great deal of controversy, as well as several lawsuits. The total box office for the less successful Brüno was only about half of Borat’s, but the film did rival its predecessor in sparking commentary and debate. Calvin Pryluck, Bill Nichols, Jay Ruby, and many others have examined the ethical quandaries around consent and deception in more conventional documentary filmmaking.32 Discussions of deceptive practice have centered on questions such as whether or not it is ethical for a filmmaker to feign interest in a corporation’s accomplishments in order to covertly document safety violations, exploitative labor practices, etc.33 In such examples, a filmmaker deceives a subject about his or her goals and intentions, premising this deception upon the notion that it serves the greater good and “society’s right to know.”34 The counter-principle to this justification of “deceptive practice” is the idea of “informed consent.” Following the guidelines of research experiments in medicine and psychology, some critics have argued that subjects of documentary film need to be made aware in advance of the full range of possible effects and implications of their appearance on film.35 The Yes Men’s ethics fall squarely within the “greater good” tradition, despite the extreme degree of theatrical deception they practice as compared to more traditional documentarians. Baron Cohen’s work purports

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to “expose prejudice” in a general sense, but his strategies and their ethical implications are less clearly delineated. Scenes in Borat that align the perspectives of viewer and filmmakerperformer at the expense of the duped social actor(s) include the following: Borat’s ride in an RV (recreational vehicle) with a group of fraternity brothers from the University of South Carolina who bemoan the “upper hand” held by “minorities” in the U.S.; gun shop owners who do not express concern when Borat asks what weapon would best help him to “defend from a Jew”; Borat’s slapstick destruction of an antiques store featuring Confederate memorabilia; and a scene in which Borat sings a fictionalized “Kazakh national anthem” to the crowd at a rodeo, after exhorting them to cheer for his statement of support for the American “war of terror.” Before this performance, he interviews the rodeo’s manager, who tells Borat that he should shave his mustache in order to avoid looking like a “Muslim terrorist” and assents enthusiastically to Borat’s claim that in Kazakhstan they execute homosexuals. Early appearances by Brüno on Da Ali G show also fit this model. Baron Cohen initially uses the character to target the ignorant and classist attitudes of some fashion-world professionals. In one notorious scene, Brüno interviews a designer who describes a clothing line’s “trailer trash” aesthetic and makes denigrating comments based on working-class stereotypes. She laughs right along with Brüno when he points out gleefully that these “primitive, rubbish people” cannot afford her clothing. The film Brüno uses the character primarily as a vehicle to confront peoples’ homophobia, and also to satirize the character’s own obsession with wealth and celebrity. A major segment of the film’s narrative satirizes fundamentalist Christian “conversion therapy” intended to “cure” people of homosexuality. In the story, Brüno decides that he must become heterosexual and undergoes a number of ordeals recommended as “treatment,” including joining the National Guard, participating in a hunting party, and learning karate. Finally, he emerges in his new persona as “Straight Dave”—itself a caricature of the homophobia and masculine posturing that the film often satirizes. Straight Dave hosts a cage-fighting (mixed martial arts) event in Arkansas that is billed as “Straight Dave’s Man-Slammin’ Maxout,” offering free admission to an unsuspecting public. Straight Dave, of course, embodies the idea of internalized homophobia. Baron Cohen uses the character as a vehicle to expose the affective intensity of his targets’ homophobia, and how easily it is triggered in a context they expect to reinforce their prejudices. Where The Yes Men’s presentations are frequently geared toward shaming their duped audiences, in scenes like this, Baron Cohen as Brüno solicits responses of contempt and disgust. He sets up an elaborate ruse that promises his onlookers a familiar pleasure, in order to perform an affective bait-and-switch: “only something you thought might delight or satisfy can disgust.”36

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Dressed in camouflage gear and a cowboy hat and sporting a mullet haircut and beard, Baron Cohen as Straight Dave enters the ring and rallies an enthusiastic crowd with contemptuous jokes about homosexuality and group chants of “straight pride!” Multiple reaction shots of audience members emphasize their laughter at his jokes and wild, fist-pumping enthusiasm for his homophobic commentary. A voice from the crowd interrupts Straight Dave to call him a “faggot,” and he challenges the speaker to come up and fight him in the cage. The voice belongs, of course, to a participant in the ruse: When the man emerges, the viewer recognizes him as Lutz, Brüno’s estranged personal assistant and lover. The two fight violently at first as the crowd cheers approvingly. Just as Straight Dave seems to have his opponent on the ropes, he pauses. They gaze into one another’s eyes and proceed to kiss passionately and undress each other while a love song is piped through the arena. Reaction shots of the crowd depict a range of negative affects: shock and disbelief, disgust, and anger that builds to a near-riot as audience members scream homophobic epithets and pelt the performers (only partially protected by the walls of the cage) with cups, bottles, and finally a metal folding chair that narrowly misses Baron Cohen’s head (see Figures 3.2A, 3.2B, and 3.2C). As Sedgwick explains it, contempt is a pulling away from the object, “the drawing of a boundary line or barrier” between self and object.37 The scene emphasizes the intensity of the crowd’s homophobic attempt to defend the boundary between themselves and the image of two men kissing. More specifically, the scene suggests that this intensity is rooted in their felt awareness of the contiguity between the spectacle that offers “delight” and the one that provokes “disgust.” In other words, the crowd’s dismay and rage are provoked by the frictionless transmutation of the spectacle: As Baron Cohen plays it, the passionate quality of the fight feeds naturally and easily into the love scene. Even as Straight Dave represents Baron Cohen’s satire of heterosexual bluster as internalized homophobia, the scene’s choreography implies to the audience that by cheering for the fight they were taking pleasure in a spectacle that was already homoerotic. “The joke’s on them” not just because they see something they “don’t want to see,” but because the scene calls into question the desires that underpin what they think they do want to see. As in The Yes Men’s interventions, the scene attempts to confront the dupes with their own contradictions.

II.

UNSTABLE JOKES

Baron Cohen sometimes pranks social actors whose beliefs or ideas would not seem to run counter to those of his own satirical project. In some cases—particularly in many scenes featuring Ali G—this has the effect of positioning Baron Cohen’s character as the primary butt of the joke. The satirical perspective of the filmmaker-performer is thus expressed through

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Figure 3.2a

Figure 3.2b

Figure 3.2c

Horrified reactions to the sight of two men kissing in Brüno (Brüno)

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his own character’s shortcomings. Ali G interviews experts on broad topics of which he is, himself, comically ignorant—including politics, art, science, etc. The interviewees serve as straight men for his buffoonish discourse. The dupes don’t tend to come off so badly; rather, their perplexed reactions ground his comic performance, and some (including former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali) actually handle the situation with good humor and grace. Because Ali G describes himself as the “voice of the youth” (delivered, as always, in his faux-patois), but is incapable of asking an intelligible question, the character satirizes the frivolousness of contemporary popular media. Some scenes in Borat, however, render ambiguous who in the scene is truly the object of the joke. In one such scene early in the film, Borat interviews Linda Stein, Grace Welch, and Carole De Saram, three members of Veteran Feminists of America—a network for women who were involved with the second wave feminist movement. This scene immediately follows an evening in his hotel room in which Borat discovers American television. He becomes fixated upon CJ, the character played by popular sex symbol Pamela Anderson on the syndicated USA Network television series, Baywatch. Borat’s infatuation with the character is meant to suggest his susceptibility to the crudest of mass-marketed male fantasies. The scene establishes a structure for the film’s plot—Borat’s cross-country quest to find and marry Pam Anderson— and foreshadows the attitudes that he will display in his interview with the feminist group. As with much of his behavior in the film, Borat’s views on women are contextualized by the film’s grotesque fictionalization of Kazakhstan as a backward and severely underdeveloped bastion of sexism, anti-Semitism, violence, and perversion. Just prior to the interview, Borat explains to the camera that in Kazakhstan, it is illegal for more than five women to gather together “except in brothel or in grave.” In the scenes in which “the joke’s on them,” Baron Cohen’s characters express offensive viewpoints meant to align with those of the dupes in order to goad them into revealing their own prejudices on camera. By contrast, Borat articulates views antagonistic toward the duped women in the feminist group. He begins the interview by asking what “this feminism” means. When one woman proceeds to give a very straightforward explanation of how feminism is the idea that women are equal to men, Borat visibly suppresses laughter. He asks them if they think women should be educated, and then questions how this could be possible when “government scientists” have demonstrated that women have smaller brains—“the size of squirrel.” Baron Cohen’s satirical tactics at this point might seem to be consonant with those in scenes like his interview with the rodeo manager. By persuading Americans to accept as credible Borat’s wholly outlandish claims about the backwardness and pathology of life in former Soviet republics,38 Baron Cohen tries to foreground the dupes’ cultural arrogance and myopia. But Borat’s discourse in this interview taps into real issues with which feminism

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has struggled—in this case, the deployment of quasi-scientific “facts” intended to “prove” various forms of male superiority. His claims are made quite strategically in order to push his interviewees’ buttons. This intention is reinforced when he counters their mildly irritated reactions with another sexist cliché: “Give me a smile, baby,” he says, “why the angry face?” Using a condescending and infantilizing mode of address, he invokes the reactionary construct of the “humorless feminist” whose attempts to engage in serious, rational discourse undermine her femininity. Scenes in The Yes Men films and Baron Cohen’s work that I analyze in the first section of this chapter construct the power dynamic that Susan Purdie argues is fundamental to the structure of jokes: The butt of the joke is excluded from the teller-audience bond and denied “discursive [emphasis mine] potency—the power to be an agent who has intentional effect in the world.”39 It is clear from my analysis why The Yes Men would be invested in undermining their opponents’ “discursive potency” and thereby, perhaps, their greater agency in the world. The same could be said for some of Baron Cohen’s targets, such as the rodeo manager and the South Carolina fraternity brothers. The scene with the Veteran Feminists, however, bases its intended humor in part upon undermining the discursive potency of social actors whose viewpoints should not position them among the film’s satirical targets. Formal elements of the scene support this problematic form of humor at the women’s expense. As Linda Stein attempts to explain to Borat why his ideas and attitude are “demeaning,” the film adds Borat’s voiceover narration to drown her out: “I could not concentrate on what this old man was saying,” Borat explains, as the camera zooms in on his face. Stein is thus excluded both aurally and visually; the voiceover silences her speech, and the zoom-in gradually cuts her out of the frame while she gestures emphatically and tries to reason with him. Seeing her speak without being able to hear her words quite literally robs her of discursive potency, and the zoom-in suggests that she is a nuisance that Borat needs to tune out. Calling her an old man in his internal monologue invokes the sexist cliché that feminists are “mannish,” of a piece with the idea that they are humorless. Form and content are isomorphic in this scene: The film implies that they don’t get the joke being played on them precisely because they possess characteristics that the film is lampooning (humorlessness). The simultaneous offensiveness and sheer banality (sexism as cliché) of Borat’s attitude could suggest a satirical deconstruction of the discursive potency of sexism itself. At the same time, the internal monologue and zoom-in construct a comic effect at the interviewee’s expense. If the viewer laughs at this moment, he or she is aligned not with the critical position of the filmmaker-performer expressed ironically through the character (as in the scenes discussed in section one), but rather, with the character himself. The scene’s satirical politics are ambiguous and contradictory, and the ethics of its deceptions cannot be justified in terms of the “greater social

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good.” Leshu Torchin describes these types of ambiguities in Borat in terms of a “recursive play with epistemological framing.” She analyzes a scene in which Borat visits “humor coach” Pat Haggerty and gleefully tells him an anecdote involving rape and incest in an effort to understand the American sense of humor. As Torchin points out, Haggerty’s claim that Americans would not find the joke funny “is true and not true at the same time . . . performed at one register removed [that is, by a character we know to be a satirical construction], the joke is once again quite funny,” and “had American audiences laughing from the safety of their seats.”40 Borat’s interview with the Veteran Feminists of America is similar in content and approach to two interviews Ali G conducts with prominent feminist intellectuals Sue Lees and Naomi Wolf. Many YouTube comments on these videos suggest that fans of Baron Cohen are quite happy to overlook or ignore the irony, identify with the character, and leave with their sexist viewpoints validated.41 If, however, the interview with the feminists in Borat opens up the possibility for viewers to identify with the character and take pleasure in the sexist humor, later scenes in the film challenge this prospect. The South Carolina fraternity brothers in the RV embody the real-life version of the sexism Baron Cohen performs satirically as Borat. They refer to women as “bitches” and “hos,” ask Borat enthusiastically if women are slaves in Russia, and suggest that the way to treat women is to “fuck the shit out of them and then never call them again.” In and of itself, the RV scene would seem to represent a clear-cut example of an alignment between filmmaker-performer and viewer in which “the joke’s on them.” But it should be interpreted in relation to the many other scenes in the film in which the “recursive play” that Torchin describes allows for a range of seemingly contradictory responses. In the “Veteran Feminists” scene, viewers may take either Borat himself or the interviewees to be the butt of the joke, or find that their laughter is multivalent: making fun of sexism while simultaneously partaking in it. But the film allows for no pleasure in the fraternity brothers and their aggressively hostile attitudes toward women and racial and ethnic minorities. Scenes like this represent a kind of indexical grounding of the recursive play at work in the scenes that enable sexist comments and rape jokes to be funny “at one register removed.” Again, as Sedgwick writes, “[w]ithout positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush.”42 While the forms of “positive affect” offered by scenes like the “Veteran Feminist” and humor coach interviews are far from uncomplicated, the forms of temporary pleasure they may offer are rebuked by troubling encounters with figures like the fraternity brothers. Indeed, the larger narrative arc of the film reflects a similar structure: Viewers are encouraged to laugh with pleasure at an absurd caricature of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism in the film’s fictionalized Kazakhstan, only to find all of these qualities embodied by real people Borat meets in his journey through the United States.43

Awkward Satire III.

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THE JOKE’S ON US

In this final section, I analyze scenes that position the viewer as dupe. The viewer is unclear as to who is in on the joke, and to what extent the onscreen events are authentic or staged. Scenes like these position the viewer to experience a “vacillation between belief and incredulity”44 and may either contribute productively to the film’s satire or simply engender greater epistephilia. In a scene toward the end of Borat that represents the culmination of the protagonist’s cross-country quest to find and marry Pamela Anderson, the viewer is given no obvious clues as to whether or not Anderson (or anyone else present) is aware of the ruse. The scene takes place at an autograph signing with the star held at a Virgin Megastore in Orange, CA, near Los Angeles. As the scene begins, Borat stands outside the store and announces to the camera his intentions to propose marriage, “Kazakhi-style.” If Anderson is to be the dupe, it is unclear to the viewer how the scene will contribute to the film’s satirical project. The scene does not establish an alignment between the positions of filmmaker-performer and viewer as in the scenes I examine in section one of this chapter. Rather, the nature of the profilmic event and the observational style in which it is shot distance us from the performer. The scene is set in a crowded space open to the public for a highly regulated event, complete with store security and personal bodyguards for the star. In order to remain unobtrusive and allow Borat to blend in45 with the throng of fans present to meet Anderson, the cameraperson hangs back and relies upon frequent zooms and adjustments with the handheld camera to keep Borat prominent in the frame. In most scenes in the film, the camera has a privileged view of the action, but here the cameraperson’s position implies a less accessible situation. Borat’s imminent interaction with a major Hollywood star (especially given his expressed intentions), the crowded space, and the presence of security guards lend the scene a distinct tension that is enhanced by the sense of authenticity and immediacy created by the camerawork. Even before Borat’s interaction with Anderson, then, the scene produces an awkward sense of uncertainty for the viewer on multiple levels: We are unclear as to what exactly the character plans to do, and, in turn, what the performer seeks to demonstrate or accomplish. Moreover, given the strictly controlled nature of public celebrity appearances, the situation seems set on a collision course with Borat’s characteristically disruptive behavior. When his turn comes, Borat approaches the autograph table nervously, and Baron Cohen fully plays out the scene’s awkward possibilities by performing a halting and protracted introduction of himself and his family history before finally making his proposal. While Anderson initially handles his attentions with a polite smile, she appears to grow increasingly uncomfortable as he encroaches upon her space to show her the “traditional wedding sack” that he has embroidered with their names. When Anderson curtly

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refuses his proposal, Borat quite suddenly and forcefully pulls the sack over Anderson’s head and body and tries to pick her up as if to abduct her. Chaos ensues, as other customers try to assist by fighting him off. He chases her through the store and out into the parking lot, where he is finally tackled and handcuffed by two security guards. Adding to the sense of spontaneity in the scene, the handheld camera appears barely in control during the chase, losing focus and falling behind the action. At one point, the film cuts to surveillance-camera footage from the store, another conventional signifier of realism and authenticity (see Figure 3.3). Many discussions of Borat among critics and fans questioned whether or not Anderson was a knowing participant in the stunt. As Marchese and Paskin write in a piece in Salon that attempts to definitively catalog what is real, coy comments Anderson made about the film, as well as the existence of news items linking the two performers in other contexts, make it seem “more than likely that Anderson was in on the joke.”46 Watching the scene, however, we must rely on textual cues to gauge its plausibility. Moreover, the extremity of many of Baron Cohen’s stunts makes it seem plausible that he would be willing to perform an assault on a celebrity for the sake of his film. Scenes like the abduction of Pam Anderson compel the viewer to question the extent to which he or she can discern the difference between the spontaneous and the staged throughout the film as a whole. The viewer is accustomed to being aligned with the perspective of the filmmaker-performer and privy to the scenes’ satirical intent. Dispossession of this knowledge may, first, undermine the sense of superiority over the duped social actors. Second, it can produce epistephilia that takes the form of a drive to distinguish truth

Figure 3.3 Surveillance-camera footage enhances the authenticity of Borat’s assault on Pamela Anderson (Borat).

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from fiction. Dissecting every part of the film to determine its veracity (as Marchese and Paskin’s Salon essay attempts to do) represents an effort to restore the sense of “plenitude and self-sufficiency” that Nichols suggests is produced by identification with a documentary film’s “organizing agency” (or the “subject-who-knows).”47 In other words, Baron Cohen’s work may produce a distinct version of the desire that Nichols associates with more conventional documentary spectatorship. But this desire is mediated by the strategies of a filmmaker-performer (Baron Cohen) who thumbs his nose at the very idea of an authoritative or consistent organizing agency. When the joke is on figures like the rodeo manager and the fraternity brothers, the viewer’s identification with the film’s organizing agency (in however absurd a form it may present itself) does enable a version of Nichols’ “plenitude and self-sufficiency.” It is engendered by a sense of superiority over the duped social actors, and, often, a feeling of contempt for their unfiltered attitudes. The Pam Anderson scene prods the viewer to question the assumption of shared knowledge and his or her identification with the filmmaker-performer. Indeed, Borat’s own relationship to media images represents a satire of overidentification and a lack of critical distance in spectatorship. In a scene early in the film (just prior to his meeting with the Veteran Feminists), Borat first learns of Anderson while channel surfing at his hotel. The scene suggests that his distinct combination of credulity and vulgarity make him an ideal consumer for American television: He is excited by the violent action on COPS and laughs with hearty affirmation at juvenile sex jokes on the sitcom Married . . .With Children (apparently pleased with himself for “getting it”). Finally, he becomes completely enraptured by the image of Anderson on Baywatch. The point of the scene is to show that Borat has no distance at all from the televisual image. When Pam Anderson’s character first appears on screen, the film cuts to a reverse shot of Borat reclined in bed, with a slow zoom-in on his love-struck expression. As he proceeds to watch the show, Borat literally closes the distance between himself and the image by moving to a chair placed directly in front of the screen (see Figure 3.4). He is thoroughly caught up in the onscreen action, seemingly losing his sense of the distinction between reality and diegetic fantasy (as well as actress and character) as he cries out to the TV, “Be careful! Be careful CJ!” while she dives into the ocean to rescue a swimmer. Falling in love with CJ, Borat muddles the distinction between reality and media fiction. When he visits the Veteran Feminists, he explains that he has seen a woman on TV by the name of CJ who lives in a town called Baywatch, and asks them if they know her. The women patiently draw the distinction for him between reality and fiction, explaining to him that she is “just on television” and “her name is Pamela.” Borat persists, of course, asking if she lives in New York City and taking out a pen and paper to note her location when one woman informs him that she (Pamela Anderson) lives in California. Borat encounters additional media images of Anderson in his

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Figure 3.4 Literalizing Borat’s lack of critical distance from media imagery (Borat).

cross-country quest to meet CJ; the object of his desire becomes a hybrid of performer and character based on his inability to properly interpret these images and draw a distinction between reality and fiction. In the scene in the hotel room and throughout the film, the viewer is positioned to laugh at Borat’s inability to tell the “real” Pam Anderson from the character she portrays. But in the scene in which Borat assaults her, the viewer is, in a sense, placed in the same position as Borat himself: We do not know if we are watching the “real” Pam Anderson reacting spontaneously, or a staged performance by the actress “playing herself.” The assault scene reminds us, in effect, to not be like Borat himself—to not be seduced by images and believe that their meaning is easily legible to us. This point is made by Anderson’s role in particular but is relevant to the film as a whole (and Baron Cohen’s work more broadly). Baron Cohen is a much more slippery figure than The Yes Men. His three different characters (and their differing manifestations in film and television) each generate different forms of humor. The politics of his pranks shift with the ever-changing configurations among the positions of joke teller, audience, and object of the joke, and much of his work is ambiguous and contradictory enough to make the meaning(s) of its satire challenging to pin down. This would seem to be the performer’s intention: Unlike The Yes Men, whose political position and goals are quite explicit, Baron Cohen offers little more than a broad claim that his work exposes prejudice to encompass a diverse and multivalent array of performative and textual strategies. No one would ever suggest that The Yes Men’s work might inadvertently reinforce neoliberal ideology. But it comes as no surprise that many critics argue that Baron Cohen’s work reinforces prejudice, or at least claim that a less-sophisticated viewer might believe that it does.

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As much as (or more than) the coarse content and awkward encounters, the elusive quality of meaning in Baron Cohen’s work may produce feelings of dispossession and frustration for the viewer. In this respect, it is unsurprising that the work’s interpretive difficulties sometimes produce epistephilic efforts to “definitively” catalog the distinctions between truth and fiction. Such efforts displace interpretation of the work’s (social, political) meanings—even its ethical implications—in favor of an investment in its ontological status. The Salon article “What’s Real in Borat” represents a prominent synthesis of this kind of research, but a Google search for the phrase “What’s Real in Borat” produces innumerable articles and blog posts with titles like “How Much of Borat Is Real?”, “Bruno and Borat—Real Documentaries?”, “‘Borat’: What’s Real, What’s Not,” etc. This kind of research and discussion promises to restore the viewer’s disrupted feeling of “plenitude and self-sufficiency” by reasserting textual mastery—in effect, a form of documentary suturing through knowledge. This reductive approach to textual mastery, however, neglects the ways in which the work’s most challenging or productive meanings and effects are often generated precisely in and through modes of ambiguity, uncertainty, and awkward tensions among the filmmaker-performer, social actors, and viewer.

CONCLUSION: HARD TO WATCH A pair of films released in back-to-back years based their satirical projects upon sustained interpretive conundrums; neither film offered what Torchin calls a “clear backstage” within the film itself. Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here was eventually revealed as a hoax—an elaborate, documented performance piece that spanned nearly two years during which Oscar-nominated actor Joaquin Phoenix (Affleck’s brother-in-law and close friend) enacted a very public, drug-infused personal and professional meltdown and left acting to pursue a career in rap music. The film itself sustains the viewer’s uncertainty indefinitely, creating a perpetual feeling of dispossession that contributes to its satire of a contemporary celebrity media culture that promises to gratify the public through the total exposure of the “real” private lives of the rich and famous. Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) has never been clearly established as either an authentic depiction of the transformation of street-art fan and aspiring documentarian Thierry Guetta into successful artist Mr. Brainwash, or an elaborate hoax by Banksy satirizing art-world commercialism and conformity. Some critics have argued that it may be both: Possibly a documentation of a fabricated phenomenon and its real impact on the art world. Banksy himself maintains that the film is not a hoax, though, as Melena Ryzik puts it in a Times piece on the film, “both Banksy and Mr. Guetta are pretty unreliable narrators.”48 The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary category, despite continued controversy as to how it should be categorized and interpreted.

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This sustained ambiguity surrounding Exit Through the Gift Shop is appropriate to the film’s thematic concerns. Challenging viewers to question the veracity of Mr. Brainwash, his art, and the film itself contributes to the film’s exploration of authenticity and value in the contemporary art world. Older hoax films like Forgotten Silver premise their critique of documentary authority precisely upon the structure of deceit and revelation: Once viewers realize they have been fooled, they are in a position to reflect on the documentary conventions that produced their credulity. By contrast, the revelation that I’m Still Here was a hoax—prompted by the necessity of restoring Phoenix’s acting career—adds nothing to the satirical project of the film itself. Affleck himself used the phrase “hard to watch” to describe the film, a point echoed in many reviews.49 This description connotes, I think, not only the ugliness of Joaquin Phoenix’s persona, but also how the film consistently refuses to acknowledge its own fabrication. The film’s style and content offer little evidence that it is a hoax. We are positioned to cringe at Phoenix’s behavior—which runs the rather narrow gamut between awkward (his abysmal “rap” performances) and outright abusive toward those around him. Indeed, part of the film’s critique of celebrity culture is produced through the awkwardness of his social interactions: His interlocutors’ expectations of him are radically upended by his absurd and often sadistic behavior, but they consistently shy away from challenging or confronting him. These social actors often exhibit the shame that Tomkins describes as a simultaneous desire to look and to look away. As a kind of sustained vérité “train wreck,” the film encourages a similar response for the viewer—a point echoed by reviews including the Washington Post’s.50 Like the members of Spinal Tap, like Borat, and like, as I have argued, Mark Borchardt of American Movie, Joaquin Phoenix made an appearance on David Letterman “in character.” In this notorious video (which went viral immediately), Phoenix appears in sunglasses with shaggy hair and a full, unkempt beard. He ignores Letterman’s questions altogether or gives terse responses that suggest a complete disinterest in participating in the ritual of celebrity interview (he is ostensibly on the show to promote his role in James Gray’s Two Lovers [2008]). When he does offer a more extensive answer to a question—about why he plans to leave his acting career—Phoenix bluntly explains that given the highly personal nature of the decision, it would be uncomfortable and pointless for him discuss it in front of Letterman’s studio audience. His performance is highly awkward for precisely the reasons I have outlined in this book. It destabilizes the conventional roles of host, celebrity guest, and audience, dramatically altering the expectations of both host and audience. It creates a level of tension that renders Letterman barely able to remain composed and good-humored. Phoenix is not openly belligerent or combative, but by simply refusing to play his expected part in the celebrity talk show structure, he demonstrates how easily the machinery breaks down (while the audience laughs with nervous uncertainty throughout the proceedings). Perhaps even more effectively than I’m Still Here itself, Phoenix’s

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appearance on Letterman satirizes how easily celebrity media culture is subverted, glamor converted to awkwardness, and pleasure to shame, when someone refuses to fulfill expectations. After the revelation that the film itself and the original Letterman appearance were part of a hoax, Phoenix made a follow-up appearance on the show. He appears well dressed and clean-cut and attempts to explain his and Affleck’s motivations behind the deception. But, if anything, his half-hearted effort to justify their actions merely detracts from the impact of his previous appearance. Letterman exploits the interview as an occasion to insist that he was not fooled and to (rather petulantly) turn the tables on Phoenix as payback. Moreover, despite the very public revelation and explanation of the hoax, conspiracy theories abound: A great deal of Internet commentary about the Letterman appearances argues that the film—and Phoenix’s implosion—was in fact real. The hoax explanation, they argue, is a retroactive attempt to rescue Phoenix’s acting career and to drum up interest in a very unsuccessful film. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly articulates his own lingering sense of uncertainty in a piece that explains why he bought into the film’s veracity in the first place: But just as millions of people re-ran the Phoenix/Letterman clip on YouTube and thought that they smelled a rat, the hoax rumor, to me, had the distinct ring of a story planted by a publicist for the purposes of damage control. And, in a funny way, it still does—even as Casey Affleck comes clean. In fact, the hoax confirmation now takes on the aspect of an entertainmentindustrial-complex conspiracy theory, all built around the fact that I’m Still Here was a shocking bomb at the box office last weekend, grossing a per-screen average of barely over $5,000 on just 20 screens. Could damage control + intriguing redefinition of the movie = megahype?51 It is precisely through its ability to generate these perpetual questions and suspicions that the film succeeds in its satirical project. Films like Forgotten Silver and the Yes Men documentaries ask the viewer to think critically about persuasion and belief in documentary media. In the complex and sometimes contradictory ways I have discussed, Sacha Baron Cohen’s work presents a related challenge to the spectator. But, as Gleiberman’s commentary suggests, sustained reflection on the celebrity publicity machine that is the object of the Affleck-Phoenix hoax engenders a perhaps endlessly recursive epistephilia—which may in turn imply that, in the long run, the film achieves its satirical goals after all.

NOTES 1. Because of the strong collaboration in these films between filmmaker and central onscreen performer, I use the term “filmmaker-performer” to describe one of the three points in this triangle.

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2. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1960), 99–100. 3. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 144–150. 4. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary,” in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, eds. Juhasz and Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 4–5. 5. For discussions of the ideological implications of Candid Camera in its Cold War context in the United States, see Bradley D. Clissold, “Candid Camera and the origins of Reality TV: contextualizing a historical precedent,” in Understanding Reality Television, eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (London: Routledge, 2004), and Anna McCarthy, “‘Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt, and Me’: Postwar Social Science and the ‘First Wave’ of Reality TV” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004). I discuss Candid Camera more extensively in Chapter Four. 6. Leshu Torchin, “Cultural Learnings of Borat Make for Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary,” Film and History 38, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 53–63, 59. 7. Ibid., 59–60. 8. Ibid., 60. 9. Ibid. 10. Silvan Tomkins, “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 134. 11. Sedgwick and Frank, 134–35. 12. Ibid., 136, 138. 13. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 36 14. Sedgwick and Frank, 135. 15. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 116. 16. Ibid. 17. Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 58–59. 18. Citing Christine Harold’s Ourspace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, Amber Day suggests that pranks like those of The Yes Men operate through a strategy of “amplification and appropriation,” rather than outright negation, of existing modes of discourse and representation. (Amber Day, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate [Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2011], 173). 19. “Statement on the Comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen, A.K.A. ‘Borat,’” September 28, 2006, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Mise_00/4898_00.htm 20. Brooke Barnes, “A Plea for Tolerance in Tight Shorts. Or Not,” The New York Times, June 11, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/movies/14barn. html?pagewanted=all. 21. Ibid. 22. Howard Schranz, Letter to the Editor: “Bruno: Joke’s Not on the Bigots,” The New York Times, Jun 19, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/ arts/21alsmail-BRNO_LETTERS.html. 23. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 76. 24. Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kaja Silverman, “On Suture,” in Braudy and Cohen. Nichols, 31. Ibid. Ibid., 180. Dick Tuck, a 60s-era liberal prankster, compares O’Keefe’s work quite unfavorably to his own. (Mark Leibovich, “In Politics, Scamps, Saboteurs, and the Occasional Criminal,” The New York Times, January 29, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/weekinreview/31leibovich.html.) Another Times piece describes O’Keefe’s work as “a kind of gonzo journalism or a conservative version of ‘Candid Camera.’” (Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Robinson, “High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur,” The New York Times, January 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/us/ politics/31landrieu.html?pagewanted=all.In a New Yorker profile of prominent conservative entrepreneur and blogger Andrew Breitbart, Rebecca Mead describes his connections to O’Keefe and writes that O’Keefe’s “approach did not adhere to traditional standards of journalism, bearing a closer resemblance to the methods pioneered by Sacha Baron Cohen.” (Rebecca Mead, “The Rage Machine,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_mead.) Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 116. Freud, 233. http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=borat.htm Two important sources on documentary ethics include New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Image Ethics, eds. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). One chapter from Bill Nichols’ seminal Representing Reality outlines a theory on documentary ethics through a model of different types of documentary “gaze.” This is the example Bill Nichols uses in his teaching-oriented text, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001). Calvin Pryluck, “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming,” in Rosenthal, 260. This is Calvin Pryluck’s argument, in particular. He includes three main conditions that amount to informed consent in scientific literature, suggesting that these principles should be instructive for documentary filmmakers: “consent is not valid unless it was made (1) under conditions that were free of coercion and deception, (2) with full knowledge of the procedure and anticipated effects, (3) by someone competent to consent” (Pryluck, 261–2). He goes further, suggesting that in addition to a “right to privacy,” documentary subjects should also be accorded a “right of personality,” which would include “the right to be free of harassment, humiliation, shame, and indignity” (Pryluck, 261). Sedgwick, 116. Ibid.; Sedgwick and Frank, 135. Baron Cohen’s crew convinced the Veteran Feminists group that they were a television crew from Belarus. Purdie, 58–59. Torchin, 60. Linda Stein herself reflected upon the ambiguity of the scene’s satire in a subsequent interview, stating, “He didn’t make the point with sexism that perhaps he did with anti-Semitism and homophobia.” David Marchese and Willa Paskin, “What’s Real in ‘Borat’?” Salon, November 10, 2006, http://www.salon.com/entertainment/feature/2006/11/10/guide_to_borat/.

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41. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oftOCN1jkNo. 42. Sedgwick, 116. 43. As Torchin points out, however, the film softens the challenge to the American viewer through a more targeted framing of the “Southerner” as object of its satire: “[T]he American South will be the America of this trip, as storied with bigotry and violence as is the atavistic Kazakhstan the film imagines” (Torchin, 57). 44. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Braudy and Cohen, 823. 45. That is, “blend in” to the extent that this is possible for him. Baron Cohen plays the initial stages of the scene in a low-key manner, however. 46. Marchese and Paskin, “What’s Real in Borat?” See also, Larry Carroll, “Was Pamela Anderson In On the Joke? A ‘Borat’ Investigation,” http://www.mtv. com/news/articles/1544909/scenes-borat-real-investigation.jhtml. 47. Nichols, 31. 48. Melena Ryzik, “Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?” The New York Times, April 13, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy .html. See also, Melena Ryzik, “New Doubts for a Film That Has Truth Issues,” The New York Times, January 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/ movies/awardsseason/06bagger.html?_r=0. 49. Michael Cieply, “Documentary? Better Call It Performance Art,” The New York Times, September 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/ movies/17affleck.html/partner/rssnyt?_r=0 See also, R. L. Shaffer, “I’m Still Here Review: Performance art gone very, very wrong,” http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/11/24/im-still-here-blu-ray-review. 50. Michael Sullivan, “I’m Still Here,” The Washington Post, September 10, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/im-still-here-2010-i,1168087/ critic-review.html. 51. Owen Gleiberman, “Joaquin Phoenix and the ‘I’m Still Here’ hoax: So maybe he really is as great an actor as Brando,” Entertainment Weekly, September 16, 2010, http://insidemovies.ew.com/2010/09/16/the-im-still-here-hoax/.

4

Awkward Extremes Reaction Videos and the “Reactive Gaze”

A young boy screams in terror, slaps the computer screen violently, and runs, sobbing, out of the room. A college student laughs, covers his face in horror, looks back at the computer screen, and then runs to the bathroom and vomits. A group of teenage girls screams with pleasure, hyperventilates, and giggles uncontrollably. These scenes of intense affective and bodily display are among the prized moments in a popular form of Internet video termed “reaction videos.” Disseminated primarily on sites like YouTube, this phenomenon has been addressed in sources like The New York Times and Slate.com. A search on YouTube will turn up innumerable examples of different types of reaction videos, as well as parodies of the form. In reaction videos, friends, acquaintances, and family members set up a camera or Webcam to record one another’s reactions to various media—including scary prank videogames, extreme pornographic videos, and trailers for popular movie franchises—all of which are selected for the intensity of the various responses they can provoke. Reaction videos emphasize the details of the subjects’ expressive reaction to the content they see on the computer or TV screen. This content, however, often remains concealed from view for the spectator watching the reaction video itself. Reaction videos mobilize an affective response from the spectator based not upon the satirical exposure of political and social prejudices, as in the prank videos of performers like Sacha Baron Cohen and The Yes Men examined in Chapter Three, nor upon the elaborate staging and negotiation of pranks as social dilemma or puzzle (as in the classic Candid Camera gags). Rather, the videos solicit a response based solely upon their capacity to represent moments of affective intensity in their subjects. The subjectspectator relation, however, is not in most cases characterized by mimicry. Because a majority of these videos are explicitly framed as comedy, subjects and spectators react differently. Whether the on-screen subjects scream, recoil, cry, laugh, or even vomit, we are meant to laugh. A number of textual and extratextual elements indicate this intended response: the gag structure, their relation to comedic formats such as America’s Funniest Home Videos, and the framing comments and descriptions by users who post them on the Internet. Not all spectators find them funny, however,

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and I examine the reasons for divergent responses to reaction videos in this chapter. I focus in particular on two prominent subgenres of reaction video, the first based upon a Web prank referred to as “The Scary Maze Game,” the second upon a notorious viral pornographic video clip called “2 Girls 1 Cup.” My analysis centers on the reaction videos themselves, not the content of the original source material (i.e., the “2 Girls” clip). Although I felt compelled to watch this troubling video for the sake of my discussion, readers may wish to avoid doing so (the path taken by Michael Aggers, despite his having written on the phenomenon for Slate). Other forms of reaction video solicit different types of affective response. Teenage female fans of the Twilight movies watch trailers for upcoming films and make videos of themselves that showcase ebullient displays of pleasure and erotic cathexis. A related form, dubbed “reunion videos” in media coverage, depicts highly emotional surprise homecomings of American soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These events are staged and recorded to provoke grateful tears among their children and to foster a sense of national pride and affective community in the viewer. As miniature “tearjerkers,” reunion videos—unlike reaction videos—do intend a relation of mimicry between subject and spectator. What links all of these types of video is their emphasis on soliciting an extreme reaction from their subjects: Without significant displays of shock, disgust, pleasure, or filial love, the videos would not be successful examples of the form. I have argued in Chapters One through Three that awkward moments are linked to responses of shame (and, in some cases, the related affect of contempt) that are vectored, in different contexts, toward the positions of subject, spectator, or filmmaker. These forms of shame may have a pedagogical function in the service of documentary rhetoric, or they may rupture these very rhetorical systems. They may be bound up in relations among these three positions characterized by desire, (dis)identification, or bodily mimicry. The extreme content and the minimal, functionalist form of Internet reaction videos throw into stark relief how the structures of shame this book has examined connect to issues of ethics and ontology in the culture of contemporary reality-based media. More specifically, radically opposed viewer responses to reaction videos demonstrate the imbrication of ontology and ethics: Viewers who find them funny and lack an ethical response to their often troubling scenarios seem to experience a derealization of the videos’ content (and the real people featured in them). In these cases, viewers’ experience of reaction videos may involve contempt toward the videos’ subjects, and an attendant reduction in self-consciousness (as opposed to the implication of the self in the shame response).1 This chapter links a phenomenological analysis of reaction videos and spectatorship to broader ethical issues in contemporary media culture, in particular the phenomenon of Internet “trolling.”

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Simple and direct, visceral and sometimes shocking, endlessly repeatable and reproducible, these reaction videos demonstrate how YouTube is a primary location for contemporary examples of Gunning’s “cinema of attractions.” But where Elizabeth Cowie and Jane Gaines regard “spectacles of actuality” as potentially inviting spectators’ greater knowledge and understanding of the larger context for their sensational representations, reaction videos have the opposite effect.2 Rather than opening up a viewer’s sense of the historical world beyond the image, reaction videos for “The Scary Maze Game” and “2 Girls 1 Cup” promote a different version of what Nichols terms “epistephilia” (a desire for knowledge).3 They provoke curiosity about the videos’ authenticity at the level of a simple “real/fake” binary, as well as curiosity about the capacities of spectators. Reaction videos purport to satisfy curiosity about such capacities by testing contemporary viewers’ ability to handle sadistically assaultive images. They stake their claim to effectiveness upon displays of authentic affective intensities, but produce what Geoffrey Hartman terms an “unreality effect” in relation to their often-troubling content.4 Both reaction and reunion videos substitute visceral response and bodily mimicry for an ethical form of spectatorship that would provoke a viewer’s sense of implication in the representation. I derive my conception of an ethics of spectatorship in particular from scholars such as Michael Renov and Michele Aaron, who turn to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to theorize the importance in spectatorship of “recognition of the other, and a taking of responsibility for this recognition and of one’s own desires.”5 Where reaction and reunion videos aim to provoke pleasurable laughter and tears, respectively, an ethical form of spectatorship would recognize the problematic uses made of the videos’ human subjects toward these goals. Reaction videos put viewers in the odd position of directing a sadistic gaze toward someone else’s masochistic gaze. Carol Clover has pointed out the centrality of a masochistic gaze in spectatorship of horror films. Both on screen and in the audience, an introjective gaze is just as significant as the active, scopophilic gaze long-since theorized by Laura Mulvey and others. Even as spectator identification veers between killer and victims, the spectator’s gaze oscillates between sadism and masochism, assaultive and reactive positions—positions that are conventionally gendered masculine and feminine, respectively.6 But while in horror film this oscillation allows for a form of transgender identification among male spectators, reaction videos create a disjunction between the masochistic gazes on screen and the position of the spectator: They frame other peoples’ fear or shock as a source of comedy. Indeed, by sometimes positioning traditionally masculinized subjects like soldiers or policemen as “ideal victims” for reaction video pranks, the videos reify the conventional gaze of male spectatorship: In reaction videos, male reactive gazing—the reversal of the active gaze—is framed as farcical. Not surprisingly, then, it is a young man who becomes a reaction video “star” of sorts

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by watching the disgusting “2 Girls 1 Cup” clip and evincing no reaction whatsoever. Admiring comments on YouTube praise him for having “beat” the video—for, in effect, having resisted the passive position of reactive gazing.7 One factor uniting the seemingly variegated modes of reaction video is their investment in the display of affective or emotional authenticity. A primary suspicion articulated in YouTube comments about many of these videos is that they “look” or “seem” fake. Spectators’ investment in authenticity in this context, then, invokes a highly reductive form of epistephilia. Reduced to its most bare-bones quality, the epistephilia expressed on comment-board debates seeks only to differentiate the spontaneous from the performed, the authentic from the constructed. It may not be surprising that a generation of viewers raised on reality TV programming, for whom the blurring of these categories seems natural and expected, might crave a jolt of something perceived as completely spontaneous and authentic—and feel continually wary that it is not. As Jay David Bolter describes contemporary media spectatorship in his preface to the collection, The Spectacle of the Real: Although the desire to contain the ambiguities of “real events” by fashioning them into a story is not peculiar to our contemporary media culture, our current cultural moment does seem to be obsessed with this practice. The popularity of reality TV . . . clearly reflects the desire of its viewing audience to see the “real” in dramatic terms.8 In this media-cultural context, however, moments that come across as nondramatized, nonnarrativized reality will carry a distinctive and possibly pleasurable charge precisely because of the widespread expectation that manipulation is the norm. Reaction videos seek to construct and convey this charge through a simple and almost clinical process: Provide someone with an intense visual stimulus, and record his or her reaction. In his introduction to the same volume, Geoff King argues that in post9/11 media culture “the impression of ‘reality’ . . . is often presented and experienced as a form of spectacle” and that, in a parallel fashion, “the fascination with the spectacular” often frames it “in terms of its apparent ‘realism.’”9 He describes, for example, reality TV’s “spectacle of, supposedly, the ‘real’ itself, a ‘reality that ranges from the banality of the quotidian to intense interpersonal engagements.’”10 King points to contributor Misha Kavka’s argument that in addition to conventional formal features in reality TV signifying authenticity (handheld and surveillance camera, location sound, etc.), “a key dimension in which ‘reality’ is asserted is at the level of affect.” 11 Analyzing “real-love” TV programs such as The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire, Kavka suggests that the “simulated” conditions for love on such programs can nonetheless “stimulate” real feeling for viewers, which in turn

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creates a sense of the programs’ “reality.” Giving the example of peoples’ intensely emotional responses to the death of Princess Diana, Kavka argues that The reality effects of the mediated real, what I am calling “constructed unmediation”, often have a greater urgency and a paradoxically greater immediacy than the world around us . . . [t]his immediacy serves as the grounds for what we take to be real, and is itself known or measured through our affective response . . . [which] “proves” that this reality matters (i.e., it must be real if we care so much).12 Jane Roscoe posits a related theory of the link between affect and authenticity, writing at the peak (2001) of the major wave of reality-television programming in Western media exemplified by hugely successful shows like Big Brother and Survivor. She argues that “flickers of authenticity” are visible in these programs at moments when the participants’ performative masks are momentarily ruptured or fall away. She situates these flickers at points of intense affective or emotional experience and display.13 In a subsequent article on documentary musicals, Roscoe and Derek Paget compare the concept of flickers of authenticity to “Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’ and Brecht’s ‘alienation effect.’”14 In other words, the punctum—or moment of rupture and cathexis—for an audience accustomed, as Bolter describes it, to seeing “reality” as carefully crafted and dramatized, is seeing reality as spontaneous and “real.” Roscoe’s notion of flickers of authenticity may be important primarily for what it tells us about our own desires as spectators of reality-based media. It is problematic to posit a link between display of affective/emotional intensity and the authenticity of the representation, given that such spectacles are prized by reality TV producers and help participants garner public and media attention. But, following Kavka’s thesis, such flickers may be seen to stimulate affective responses for viewers that create a greater sense of the reality of the representation. Reaction videos provide a seemingly paradoxical variation upon Kavka and Roscoe’s linkage of a viewer’s affective response to his or her sense of authenticity in a media representation. There is an additional layer of mediation for viewers of reaction videos: In most cases, we are spectators of spectators, responding to other peoples’ responses to yet another piece of mediated reality. Reaction videos are valued, garnering large number of views and enthusiastic comments on YouTube, primarily if the subject in the video displays an intense or extreme affective response. At the same time, reaction videos do not solicit an emotional or ethical investment from the spectator in relation to the subjects of the videos. In contrast to Kavka’s description of viewers’ responses to the emotionalism of reality TV (“it must be real if we care so much”), reaction videos’ framing as

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comedic is often premised upon a disjunction in feeling between spectator and subject.15 In the case of the first type of reaction video I examine, “The Scary Maze Game,” this disjunction allows many viewers to respond with laughter to a prank that borders on child abuse. This strong disconnect between spectator and subject cannot be explained in terms of Kavka’s and Roscoe’s arguments linking affective display to reality effects. I argue instead that responses to the Scary Maze reaction videos that lack what Vivian Sobchack terms “ethical care” indicate a type of “derealization” of the videos’ content.16

REPLAYING FEAR: “THE SCARY MAZE GAME” Reaction videos in general frame their subjects’ reactive, masochistic gazes as sources of humor, and the Scary Maze videos that feature children represent a particularly ethically fraught form. The game itself can be accessed through websites such as scaryforkids.com, a portal that provides access to images, videos, comics, stories, etc., oriented toward younger users.17 The game is essentially a prank designed to give the player a shock. The user navigates through a series of simple mazes, and each time he or she reaches the end point of a maze, a new one pops up on the screen. The game is designed to elicit close, focused attention on the computer screen, because if you touch the walls of a maze then you will have to start over. On the third maze, the very last section of the maze narrows considerably, making the user to have to focus intently on the screen and lean in even closer. Suddenly, a full-screen image of the possessed Regan’s (Linda Blair’s) face from The Exorcist pops up, accompanied by extremely loud screaming and scary sound effects. Carol Clover develops her analysis of the reactive gaze in relation to the plot of Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom (1960). The film suggests that a child subjected to deliberately fearful events by a trusted adult, for the sake of visually recording and analyzing his horrified reactions, could very well grow up to be a traumatized and sadistic serial killer. What Clover terms the “reactive gaze” of the protagonist’s childhood is transformed into the most literal of “assaultive gazes.” The film presents the father’s experiments as a sadistic warping of the principles of scientific inquiry, an extreme and unlikely scenario providing the motivating backstory for the film’s monstrous but pitiable protagonist.18 The “Scary Maze Game” reaction videos demonstrate a bizarre transmogrification of this scenario, shifting it from the domain of fiction to (mediated) reality, and from the intent to horrify the viewer to the intent to amuse. A great many reaction videos to the “Scary Maze Game” have been posted online at this point, all following a formula established by a video identified on YouTube and on websites such as scaryforkids.com as the “original” Scary Maze reaction clip. In this video (titled “Scary Maze prank—The

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Original”), a boy, who appears roughly eight years old, sits at a computer playing the maze game. A handheld camera with a consumer-grade DV image—including the date and time on screen—all mark what we see as conventional home video.19 Fixated on the screen, the child talks about getting to the next level, and wonders aloud why he can’t touch the walls. We hear from off screen the adult male voice of the camera operator say, in a gentle and reassuring tone “because it’s fun.” The man who performed the prank did not upload this video to YouTube, so the viewer cannot be sure of his exact relation to the boy, but the domestic setting and familiarity between the two suggests that he is at least a family member, if not the boy’s father. When The Exorcist face suddenly pops up on the screen, the boy screams in sheer terror, slaps the screen several times (as if defending himself from the assault of this image), and then runs to another corner of the room, sobbing abjectly. The man keeps the camera trained on the boy throughout, even moving in for a tight close-up on the boy’s face as he weeps. In the background, we can faintly hear the man chuckling. More commonly, the pranksters themselves upload videos to YouTube— in the case of the Scary Maze reaction videos, these are often parents or older siblings. One such video is titled “Little girl scared by the scary maze game,” posted by “mrdennis.” “mrdennis” can be identified as the girl’s father, based upon his description of the video on his YouTube channel.20 “mrdennis” describes the video by writing, “we put a hidden camera under a box by the computer. the look on her face is priceless.” This video also includes the audible presence of an adult female figure, who may be the girl’s mother—or another relative or family friend. The woman, like the man in the “original” scary maze video, provides reassuring, encouraging words to the girl as she works through the maze. “You can do this,” she says, “be careful.” Once the scary face pops up on the screen, the girl reacts in a similar fashion to the boy in the original video. She screams in terror, reels back in the chair, and starts to cry as the video ends. The most significant part for my analysis comes after this end-point, however. “mrdennis” proceeds to show the girl’s horrified reaction to the scary face, twice over, in slow motion the first time and even slower motion the second time. These repetitions isolate and allow the viewer to witness in great detail the contortions of the girl’s terrified face as she screams and begins to cry (see Figure 4.1). The choice by “mrdennis” to edit the video in this manner follows the logic of the “instant replay” or “highlight” that is integral to sports broadcasts and has found its way into other reality-based formats. We can see this technique employed in reality TV shows that feature action sequences, like Police Videos and COPS. Sometimes it is used in other reality shows, such as Big Brother, to emphasize the social actors’ reactions to emotionally intense moments. Significantly, this technique is also used in some contemporary pornography. What Linda Williams terms the “money shot”—or the image of external male ejaculation (which serves as visual guarantor of “authenticity” in the sexual act depicted)21—is sometimes repeated several times, even

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Figure 4.1

Reaction videos feature children terrified by computer-game pranks.

in slow motion. Following these conventions in the editing of this video indicates that the creator intends for the minute details of the girl’s terrified facial expression to be a source of great visual pleasure for the viewer, akin to a spectacular reception in football, car crash in Police Videos, or money shot in pornography. Williams argues that what she terms the “body genres” of horror, melodrama, and pornography provoke a relation of affective mimicry between body on screen and body of the spectator.22 Comedy, she points out, differs from these genres: Although it provokes a spectator’s response at an affective and bodily level, it often depends upon a differential in perception and affect between viewer and on-screen character.23 This dynamic is at play in the Scary Maze Game reaction videos, given the viewer’s understanding of the game and anticipation of the moment of shock. This differential is heightened by the subjective difference between child subjects and teen or adult makers/spectators. A number of textual and extratextual elements of the Scary Maze reaction videos indicate their intended comic effect: The basic gag structure, their relation to scare pranks featured on comedic television programs like America’s Funniest Home Videos, the adult man’s audible laughter in “Scary Maze prank—The Original,” and “mrdennis’” own description of “Little girl scared by the scary maze game”: “the reaction on her face is priceless.” While these videos are intended as comedy, it is instructive to examine the responses of actual viewers, represented by the vast number of comments posted on YouTube. Comments sections for YouTube videos taken from America’s Funniest Home Videos, for example, almost never question the ethics of the pranks, but only the quality of the videos—how successful they

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are as comedy. On the other hand, the comments left by viewers of the Scary Maze Game reaction videos, particularly those involving children, demonstrate a polarization of viewer response. In one of the two primary modes of response, viewers describe the videos as hilarious, sometimes even going so far as to chastise the children for their signs of cowardice.24 It can be reasonably assumed from the content of some of these comments, the language used (e.g., calling the frightened little boy a “pussy”) and the Internet-specific abbreviations and other lingo (OWNED, PWNED, etc.), that the users who actually insult the children are in many cases also children or teenagers. Whether or not insulting language is used, however, a large number of the comments indicate that the viewer’s main response is to find the video extremely humorous. Moreover, the number of “likes” far exceeds the number of “dislikes” for each of the two videos discussed thus far. The other primary category of response indicated by the comments is one of moral outrage. Representative of this type of response are comments made to “mrdennis” such as the chastising “u must b a terrible parent. . . . who does that to a child??”, “Im guessing these parents got sick of pranking their friends so they prank? a 5 year old. Or they are screwed up. Either way thats emontional abuse,” or the more elaborate revenge fantasy: “I hope when the girl grows up she gets a bat and comes to your nursing home when your 80 and beats the shit out of you.” The dichotomous quality of the responses on the whole foregrounds a simple yet significant point: The users who find the videos funny have no ethical response to them,25 and the viewers who have an ethical response find them to be decidedly un-funny. In Vivian Sobchack’s essay, “The Charge of the Real,” she examines the “charge” carried by an indexical image when it erupts within a fictional diegesis. Sobchack uses the example of the real killing of a rabbit in the hunting scene in Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939). The charge that this image carries, as Sobchack writes, to “momentarily rupture the autonomous coherence and unity of Renoir’s fictional world,” is not based upon any stylistic or narrative shift in the film. Rather, this rupture is linked to the viewer’s response to the finality of this death at the level of “embodied knowledge” and a sense of “ethical care.”26 As in Kavka’s analysis of “real-love” television programs, Sobchack links an affective response expressed as a form of “caring” to a viewer’s sense of the representation’s ontological status. The Scary Maze reaction videos can be understood according to Sobchack’s thesis, in that some viewers’ responses of ethical care rupture the intended address and reception of the videos as comedy. More significantly, however, the viewers who lack an ethical response perhaps reinforce Sobchack’s thesis by enacting its inverse. In other words, for Sobchack we experience something as “real” to the extent that we feel an ethical response to it. For viewers of the Scary Maze reaction videos who lack this ethical response, and for whom the only reaction is laughter, we might infer that they perceive the subjects of the videos as not quite “real.” I am not

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suggesting that they perceive it as “fake,” but rather that it moves us out of a conventional fiction/nonfiction binary, to a position in which the more salient distinction is between an ethical implication of the spectator or a lack thereof.27 In his essay, “Memory.com,” Geoffrey Hartman argues that a “simple axiom of psychoanalysis” is that “hyperarousal”—which he suggests is a common condition for consumers of contemporary Western media—leads to “trauma or inappropriate psychic defenses.”28 Television’s (and we might here add the Internet’s) “hyperbolic form of visuality,” blurring the distinctions between “news” and “entertainment,” “reality” and “fiction,” leads to a mode of spectatorship in which “the reality-effect of its imagery, therefore, is heightened and diminished at the same time,” verging on an “unrealityeffect,” or what he describes elsewhere as a certain “ghosting of reality.”29 The implications of this mode of perception—what Hartman terms a “new and insidious psychic defense”—may especially affect young people: “what can keep addicted viewers, especially younger ones, from . . . looking at everything live as if it were a reality that could be manipulated?”30 While his identification of this epistemology is not new in the context of postmodern theory, Hartman’s important contribution is his contention that it may lead to concretely identifiable psychic defense mechanisms associated with trauma. These defense mechanisms could have significant implications for peoples’ capacities for empathy toward and understanding of others.31 Many viewers’ unsympathetic responses to the Scary Maze reaction videos depicting children suggest this kind of desensitization, and, following Hartman, a kind of derealization or ghosting of reality. For those who find the videos funny, the children paradoxically provide a jolt of extreme affective response, while at the same time lacking any kind of inner life the viewer can—or seemingly wants to—access. The lack of a sense of “implication” many spectators feel toward the children indicates what Michele Aaron terms an “insulation from responsibility” in her analysis of the ethics of spectatorship.32 Self-reflexive strategies in narrative cinema function for Aaron in a manner similar to the rabbit in Sobchack’s analysis: Creating a “radical charge” by foregrounding the spectator’s own experience of and responsibility toward the representation, they provoke a “fundamental avowal of the real.”33 Aaron deems an ethics of spectatorship particularly important for a cultural context in which the divide between “the real and the fake ‘devastating spectacle’ is blurrier, more banal or potentially powerful, than ever,” and where “personal and social response and responsibility” toward real or fabricated images of suffering must be understood not as categorically different but on “some kind of continuum of spectatorship.”34 Viewer response to reaction videos like “The Scary Maze Game” might seem an extreme example of shamelessness in contemporary media spectatorship, but the feeling of “insulation” it instantiates speaks to larger issues surrounding the “devastating spectacles” that are increasingly banalized or derealized.

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“AN ETHIC OF IRRESPONSIBILITY” The reactions of users who find popular Internet videos—or “memes”—like The Scary Maze Game funny affirm an ironic and distanced relation toward images of suffering. Rather than allowing for a sense of personal “implication” linked to an “avowal of the real,” regarding such videos as hilarious suggests a disavowal perhaps linked to Hartman’s ghosting of reality as a form of psychic defense. Many other phenomena in Internet culture consist of peoples’ pain and suffering transformed into humor and entertainment. In 2010, for example, a video of a violent fight on a bus between an older white man and a younger black man went viral. As described by Rob Walker in The New York Times Magazine, the “fairly depressing” video spawned four million views and over seventy-five thousand (often racist) comments on YouTube. Users of the controversial forum called /b/ on the website 4Chan.com named the older white man “Epic Beard Man,” and response videos and comments all over the Internet led the Huffington Post to run a story titled “Why ‘Epic Beard Man’ Is the Fastest Growing Internet Meme Ever.”35 The popularity of videos like these, and their conversion into widespread phenomena by users who find them funny, points in the direction of the culture of “trolling” on the Internet. Trolls are Internet users whose aim is to disrupt online communities or cause emotional distress to other users, often through hacking peoples’ accounts or posing falsely innocent questions designed to lure others into embarrassing themselves. In its most extreme forms, trolling can be extremely cruel. Mattathias Schwartz describes a case in which users of the /b/ message board turned the suicide of a teenage boy named Mitchell Henderson into a source of collective Internet humor. Trolls hacked a MySpace memorial page created by the boy’s classmates and performed pranks like replacing his face with that of a zombie, pasting Henderson’s own face onto hardcore porn scenes, placing a video with a dramatic reenactment of his death on YouTube, and, demonstrating that the pranking possibilities of pre-Internet technologies have not gone entirely out of style, making prank phone calls to the boys’ parents with greetings like, “Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.”36 As Walker suggests, a mantra for trolls “is that they do it all ‘for the lulz,’” meaning for the LOLs, just because they can . . . a rationale for the idea that everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds [a reference to the ‘Epic Beard Man’ video].”37 A common target of blame for this kind of behavior is the potential for anonymity on the Internet; as Schwartz notes, cases like that of Mitchell Henderson “presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person.”38 But Schwartz acknowledges that, although technology may “reduce the social barriers” on this kind of behavior, it fails to account for the trolling impulse itself— for which he vaguely posits “a destructive human urge that many feel but

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few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics, and, most of all, jokes.”39 Schwartz’s explanation of this impulse might seem to return us to a Freudian framework in which hostile joking is an indirect expression of repressed aggressive feelings. But if seen in this light, the technological mediation truly does make a difference: Hostile impulses in cases like that of Mitchell Henderson are not so much displaced into joking form as they are simply expressed in mediated form. Freudian jokes, after all, are made in the company of the joke-object, whereas, as Schwartz rightly points out, “jokes” like these exist only under the conditions of distance and anonymity. Moreover, the hostility of Internet trolls arises from what they perceive as the absurdities in peoples’ discourse and self-representation on the Internet itself; the target of the humor is already mediated, not something that even exists in the “real world.” It is possible to draw more specific conclusions about phenomena like “The Scary Maze Game,” “Epic Beard Man,” and trolling in general, than Schwartz’s thesis that the Internet provides an easy mode of expression for an “ambient misanthropy.” Walker suggestively concludes his article by wondering if “the trick that converts a bus fight into hilarious entertainment for millions” and other “pointless-seeming jokes” reveal certain truths about the Web and contemporary culture: “This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means.” In other words, “informational tricksters” like hackers and trolls call the bluff of those who idealize the democratic and creative possibilities of the Internet, revealing the less appealing content “burbling in the hive mind’s id.”40 Considerations of ethics in documentary theory can productively expand Walker’s analysis. In his discussion of the ethics of documentary filmmaking, Bill Nichols links an “interventional” approach, in which a filmmaker may directly involve himself or herself with a situation in which a subject is threatened, to an “ethic of responsibility.” He allows that “[a]n ethic of irresponsibility is also conceivable,” but cites only extreme examples such as filming the results of Nazi “medical” experiments in concentration camps or the hanged body of an American hostage in Lebanon. Nichols positions such examples as striking deviations from the norms of documentary recording, which would normally situate images of atrocity in a condemnatory framework: “Rather than witnessing against the taking of life this ethic conveys a complicity with murder and with the rationale supporting it.”41 Published in 1991—the same year as the Rodney King beating video that signaled a new era in the role of consumer media production in public culture—Nichols’ ethical framework hardly accounts for a media environment in which Scary Maze game reaction videos and “Epic Beard Man” attain widespread popularity. These videos demonstrate Nichols’ “ethic of irresponsibility” applied to the more quotidian contexts of the home video prank and public altercation, not the Nazi death camp. But the term may

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be an apt way of describing the ethos of such videos not only at the level of production but of reception, as well. Nichols conceives of an ethic of irresponsibility as a complicity of the filmmaker with the agency of suffering—a complicity that implicates the viewer as well. Walker’s description of the conversion of an amateur video capturing a violent altercation on a bus into the Internet meme known as “Epic Beard Man” suggests a production and reception context in which no one is implicated, in which the real suffering depicted is only fodder for sensational humor. Such phenomena point away from an ethical form of spectatorship marked by a sense of responsibility or implication, and toward Hartmann’s concerns about media hyperarousal provoking an “unreality effect.”

CANDID CAMERAS TO WEBCAMS: THE YOUTUBE CONTEXT Reaction videos exist in the generic tradition of television programs such as America’s Funniest Home Videos (hereafter AFHV), its predecessor Candid Camera—often considered the progenitor of the reality TV format42—and more recent iterations like Punk’d and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment in the U.S., Trigger Happy TV and Fonejacker in the U.K., French variations like Camera Cachée, and so on. The pranks in Candid Camera centered largely on the temporary confusion of the person positioned as butt of the joke, with orchestrated scenarios designed to test peoples’ responses to bizarre predicaments. AFVH—a compendium of videotaped domestic high jinks—often features staged pranks, but of a much simpler and less protracted variety than those of Candid Camera or Punk’d. One montage of such moments from the show featured in a video on YouTube depicts a typical series of gags based upon homologous situations: Someone hides in an unexpected place (dumpster, ice machine outside a convenience store, office supply cabinet, etc.) and then pops out and gives a big scare to an unsuspecting victim. In all of these cases, the structure of the comedy is very simplistic and depends upon a basic principle identified by Noël Carroll in “Notes on the Sight Gag”: a differential in perception between viewer and character, in which the viewer can perceive the situation as the character perceives it but also has a broader understanding of the situation that is not available to the character.43 These “scare” videos reduce the sight gag structure to its most bare-bones quality: We know the scare is coming and that that the butt of the joke does not, and we then get a laugh out of their various frightened reactions.44 Candid Camera’s pranks are often more elaborate and socially revealing than the gags on AFHV. In Bradley Clissold’s essay on Candid Camera, he explains how creator Allen Funt felt the need to set up many pranks such that the unsuspecting victim would have to respond with “American ideals such as sportsmanship, perseverance, ingenuity, grace and pluck—the very qualities needed to see Americans through the Cold War.” Candid Camera

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functioned to mediate Cold War–era anxieties about surveillance, converting invasions of privacy into shared moments of entertainment in which the dupes sometimes came across in a good light.45 The less-complex pranks often featured on AFHV involve no such individuation of the dupes; the victims exist only for the purpose of their extreme reaction to the scare— after this, the video has run its course. In this sense, these videos provide a template for the simple formula of reaction videos. The Internet—YouTube in particular—is even better suited to the display of such content than is television. Reaction videos are meant to be watched in succession—the user compares multiple iterations of essentially the same gag. YouTube’s format, in which the suggestions bar provides numerous videos similar to the one being watched, promotes this mode of viewing. Alexandra Juhasz offers a critical perspective on the popular and scholarly perceptions of YouTube as a site of participatory, democratic, and even revolutionary potential.46 Juhasz describes YouTube as a “postmodern television set” that facilitates an isolated form of distracted viewing and time wasting, “expertly delivering eyeballs to advertisers” while its “corporate ownership limits the form and content of its videos.”47 She argues that promises of YouTube’s democratic capacities mask what is, in practice, merely an updating of well-established modes of corporate media.48 The form of most successful YouTube videos, she suggests, reproduces older media conventions, as well: “The best YouTube entertainment integrates and condenses three methods developed in earlier media—humor, spectacle, and self-referentiality—to create a new video form organized by plenitude, convenience, and speed. (But maybe this is not so new: TV ad, anyone?)”49 Reaction videos like “Scary Maze Prank—the Original” and its numerous imitators based upon the scary maze game exemplify the formal constraints of the popular YouTube video as described by Juhasz. “Scary Maze Prank— the Original” is indeed an extremely popular video on the site; uploaded in May of 2006, as of the time of writing, it has been viewed 26,251,807 times and features 46,081 “likes” and 52,173 comments. On his YouTube channel, the original poster, whose handle is, inexplicably, “CantWeAllJusGetAlong,” boasts of his video’s success by listing its ranking in different categories of popularity on the site (in the “People and Blogs” category): #12—Top Favorited (All Time); #33—Most Viewed (All Time); #46—Most Discussed (All Time). The video conforms to Juhasz’s overarching criterion for popular videos on YouTube: They are “easy to get, in both senses of the word: simple to understand—an idea reduced to an icon or gag—while also effortless to get to: one click! A visual or aural sensation . . . serves as the best videos’ iconic center.”50 The videos featured on America’s Funniest Home Videos fit the criterion of being easy to understand; as I’ve suggested, they reduce the structure of the sight gag to its most simplistic form possible. But reaction videos on YouTube conform to both aspects of “easy to get”—with the reaction itself representing the “visual or aural sensation” for which the rest

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of the video is merely anticipation. Editing choices like “mrdennis’s” slow motion repetition of the daughter’s screams indicate the central importance of the moment of reaction. Some reaction videos even employ quick cuts or fades that move us more quickly toward the payoff. In a sense, reaction videos—which are, after all, a form of home video— represent a distillation and further reduction of the formal properties of America’s Funniest Home Videos. The TV show is premised upon repetition and a very limited palette of formal variations on a basic gag structure (unexpected and silly behavior by a family pet, slapstick-y pratfall by a family member like the ever-popular thrown-ball-to-the-groin). Condensing and updating this televisual format, YouTube’s interface encourages viewing multiple iterations of essentially the exact same reaction video, substituting only the individual victim.51 The trajectory from Candid Camera to America’s Funniest Home Videos to prank-based reaction videos on YouTube represents a gradual narrowing and privatizing of the sphere of activity. We begin with pranks staged in public, which reveal the complications of citizens’ negotiations of authority and social space. We move toward gags often based in group family interactions—in backyards, swimming pools, living rooms, and so on. Finally, we wind up with one family member interacting with a computer screen while an unseen relative wields the camera. Reaction videos void the formal and social complexities of Candid Camera gags and the more recent public pranks of Sacha Baron Cohen and The Yes Men. They do not promote even the rudimentary form of identification with common family foibles encouraged for the audience of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Reaction videos distill these preceding forms into a mechanistic formula for producing extreme affective responses. They represent a form of humor ideal for a culture that wants its money shots in quick succession, with no greater context required.

CURIOSITY AND DISGUST: “2 GIRLS 1 CUP” Unlike the Scary Maze reaction videos, another type, featuring teenage girls recording their own ebullient reactions to trailers for the popular Twilight teen vampire movie franchise, does not necessarily create a disjunction between spectator and subject for comic effect. These self-produced reaction videos are designed primarily as a means of constructing affective communities. They are shared online, not only on YouTube, but sometimes on the makers’ own websites—such as the fan site produced by a group of girls who call themselves “Twilighters Anonymous.” While some comments on YouTube make fun of the girls’ reactions to new clips of their screen idols, many profess identification and a shared sensibility, with responses like “that reaction was sooooooo me and my bffs,” and “yeah that was me when I saw the trailer for the first time lol.”52

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The Twilight reaction videos are examples of the sort of fan community practices examined by Henry Jenkins and many other scholars, though they are certainly less creative and critical than other types of fan productions.53 More troubling than the self-produced Twilight reaction videos by teenage girls are videos made by parents, featuring the reactions of very young girls—even toddlers—to the same movie trailers. Such videos tend to elicit comments about how “cute” and “adorable” the little girls in the videos are, with the cuteness clearly premised upon a comic incongruity between the toddler’s age and the awestruck reactions that mimic those of older girls.54 While YouTube users value children and teenage girls in the Scary Maze and Twilight reaction videos for the spectacularity of their reactions, perhaps the most culturally visible mode of reaction video seems designed challenge any viewer to control and contain his or her reaction. In 2009–2010, videos featuring peoples’ reactions to two notorious pornographic clips referred to as “2 Girls 1 Cup” and “2 Girls 1 Finger” became a minor media sensation. Michael Aggers reported in Slate.com on the “2 Girls 1 Cup” videos, through which the very phenomenon of reaction videos became more widely known. The cultural impact of this clip included innumerable reaction videos, parodies featuring well-known characters like Kermit the Frog, an ironic tribute song by singer-songwriter John Mayer, and an episode of the popular animated television comedy The Family Guy showing the characters watching (and viscerally reacting to) the clip. The original video features the “two girls” of the title involved in the expelling and consumption of human excrement and vomit. The extremity of the content allows the videos to provoke curiosity or even Nichols’ epistephilia for spectators. But these “spectacles of actuality” do not provoke curiosity about any of the problematic social issues such clips could be seen to raise—or even about the profilmic event of the videos themselves, which remains, in Hartman’s terms, paradoxically derealized despite its indexical brutality. Instead, as cultural phenomenon, the videos seem to engender only curiosity about spectatorship itself: Could I handle watching a video like this, and how would other people react to watching it? Thankfully, none of the reaction videos on YouTube depict children being pranked by adults.55 The videos’ victims range from teenagers to grandparents. Often, the instigator of the prank appears on screen or is audible off screen. Having already seen the video, he laughs at his friend’s or family member’s horrified reaction, thus providing the viewer with an on-screen proxy—we laugh with the prankster as both of us laugh at the victim. But these three positions are fungible; the reaction video viewer is likely to have viewed the original “2 Girls 1 Cup/Finger” video, and the on-screen prankster or video-maker almost certainly has. As in the Jackass film and television franchise—which presents the performance of dangerous and stupid stunts as simultaneously ridiculous and admirable—the viewer and social actors laugh with and at each other and themselves.

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Figure 4.2

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“2 Girls 1 Cup” provokes reactions of disgust and amusement.

For example, the video “2 Girls 1 Cup Reaction #1,” which claims to be “the very first reaction video ever posted on YouTube” and has been viewed over thirteen million times, depicts three students (two male and one female) watching the video on a laptop in a dorm room (see Figure 4.2). We see the three of them in a frontal view, with the camera positioned behind the open laptop. At the first disgusting moment in the video, one of the male students and the female student visibly gag, turn away, and cover their mouths, while the other male student only laughs and continues to stare at the screen. The other two look back at the screen, and then, in perfectly synchronized reactions, gag even more strongly. The young woman turns away to face the wall, and the man flees into the adjacent room. He returns briefly for a last effort to look at the screen, but then runs away again, gagging and retching. The woman keeps her eyes averted from the screen, doubled over as if thoroughly overwhelmed by what she has seen, while the other man laughs even more loudly and points his finger mockingly at his friend who flees the room. Many comments on the video express amusement and amazement at the one man’s ability to laugh throughout the ordeal, and point out—rightly, I think—that he may be in on the joke. Such comments include: “the guy in right is clearly? the one who shows the video to the other two, if not it looks to me like he is enjoying that,” and “I love the guy on the right who just? watches and laughs, unaffected.” The basic motivation for willingly watching the videos is the conventional “dare”: People watch them for similar reasons that, as children, they ride roller coasters, knock on the door of a “haunted house,” or eat a worm. The

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combination of screams, gags, and laughter among the subjects in many of the videos correlates to experiences like these. The implicit challenge posed by the maker of the reaction video is “can you handle this (without looking away)”? In many, it should be pointed out, the position of joke-teller and joke-object are collapsed into one body, as in Jackass: many people shoot reaction videos of themselves watching the “2 Girls” videos for the first time. But what is at stake socially and culturally in the ability or choice to look or to not look at videos like these? And what do viewers desire of the subjects in the videos? On the one hand, viewers take pleasure in other peoples’ distress and disgust. Comment boards consistently single out points when subjects display the most extreme facial expressions and bodily responses as moments of great hilarity and pleasure for the viewer. One comment on a popular video simply titled “Two Girls one Cup Reaction” reads, “i love how at :24 his face turns from ‘alright good video theres hot chicks!’ to “HOLY CRAP? WHAT THE HELL AM I WATCHING?!?!?!?” People describe the intensity of their own bodily reactions to watching the subjects’ reactions, as in comments like “My ribs hurt and i cant? breath. . . . Im laughing to hard . . . LMAO!!!!” But there is also a certain anxiety of authenticity that accompanies watching these videos: Are the responses real and spontaneous or staged, faked, acted? This anxiety is rooted in viewers’ expectations that displays of affective intensity indicate a more authentic reality in the representation. Given the simplicity of reaction videos as texts, any sense of nuance or ambiguity in these investments in authenticity is reduced to a simple binary: Is the reaction real, or not? Many comments on reaction videos pose such questions, and decry certain videos as “fakes.”56 In turn, many reaction video makers and subjects (and maker-subjects) go out of their way to claim that their reactions are entirely spontaneous and authentic. For example, as “JuliaGotico” writes about a self-made reaction video to “2 Girls 1 Finger” featuring herself and a friend, “ew. ew. ew. and yes i know i sound retarded but this is alll (sic) real and none of this was over acted.” The audience’s need to believe that the subjects’ reactions are authentic suggests an investment in the idea that it is still possible for people to be “moved”—in the most literal sense of the word—by media representations. There is a desire for the spectacle of what Williams in her analysis of “body genres” describes as “a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm—of the body ‘beside itself.’”57 In this sense, a subject dry heaving or vomiting in a reaction video becomes the pinnacle of authenticity—an involuntary, incontrovertible bodily reaction that serves the function of the money shot in pornography. Spectatorship of “body genres” differs in significant ways from spectatorship of reaction videos, however, notably in the fact that watching reaction videos is a form of spectatorship once removed. We watch other people watching material that moves them at a bodily level in various ways, but the primary intended response for us is only laughter.58

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The on-screen viewers, however, often experience what Williams describes as “an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on screen.”59 This mimicry is particularly direct when viewers gag or vomit in response to the women in the video doing the same; viewers self-abject along with the women on screen. This is not an “identification” in the psychological sense film theory describes, but it does involve a kind of brief, visceral subjective alignment between viewer and on-screen body. From a phenomenological perspective, we could describe a relation of continuity or reversibility between spectator’s body and on-screen body. Reaction video subjects turn away, gag, and vomit because on some level they can almost feel themselves doing the things the women in the video are doing. It is an extremely reductive version of what Nichols describes as a “practical testing of subjective responses” that accompanies the observational documentary viewer’s sense of imagining himself or herself as a possible participant in the world viewed.60 Following Williams’ analysis, it is not surprising that the original pornographic clips feature the bodily reactions of women. As she points out, in all three of the body genres—melodrama, horror, and pornography—“the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain.” 61 However, the subjects of the reaction videos for these clips are decidedly mixed gender. Indeed, because women conventionally serve this role of providing the visual signs of embodied response, reaction videos that depict a horrified or disgusted reaction from conventionally masculine figures like soldiers constitute a popular subgenre on YouTube. Some subjects of reaction videos seem genuinely unaware of what they are about to see—notably, parents and other older relatives of teenagers who instigate the prank and make the video. Many people, however, make themselves the subjects of their own reaction videos, explaining that they know something about what is in store for them, but want to watch the video and find out for themselves. What would lead people to subject themselves to this experience of extremely masochistic spectatorship? Noël Carroll poses a similar question about spectators of horror films, suggesting that it is “paradoxical” that horror audiences would be drawn to sights that in everyday life would repel them.62 Carroll’s hypothesis is that the disgust provoked by the horror monster engenders a strong curiosity in the viewer that drives, and is rewarded by, engagement with the horror narrative. Because monsters are beings that defy or transgress conceptual categories, they are particularly suited to provoking curiosity and supporting a drama rooted in the characters’ and viewer’s desire to prove the monster’s existence and understand its nature.63 The disgust that monsters engender, then, can be seen as both the precondition and the “price to be paid” for the cognitive pleasures of the monsters’ disclosure.64 Neither the subject matter of the original “2 Girls” pornographic clips, nor reaction videos themselves, are narratives that provide the kind of

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cognitive pleasures described by Carroll. Carroll’s link between disgust and curiosity is important for understanding the impulse to watch material like the “2 Girls” clips, however. Disgust is not the price to be paid for a curiosity rewarded by narrative engagement, but rather the price for an indexically brutal experience of what Elizabeth Cowie terms “the spectacle of actuality.”65 Like Carroll’s horror monsters, the acts depicted in the videos are characterized by abjection and the transgression of deep-seated cultural boundaries and taboos—but they engage spectators in a quite different manner. They represent a sort of limit case of indexicality, invoking Robert Ripley’s slogan, “There it is—believe it or not.” But, where Cowie and Jane Gaines suggest that Ripley’s films and other documentary “attractions” may provoke a desire for further knowledge and understanding of the larger context for the surprising and entertaining spectacle, videos like these provoke an epistephilia66 primarily about spectatorship itself: How will I feel watching a video like this; can I ‘handle’ it? In his article in Slate, Aggers describes a variety of reactions that represent different answers to these questions. In addition to the expected responses of disgust and dumbfounded laughter, he points to one teenage girl who “appears genuinely disturbed by her Google adventure.” But, he argues, her final comment after surviving the experience, “Yeah, OK. 2 Girls 1 Cup. I get it now,” carries “something hopeful” in it: “While the Internet can feed our worst tendencies, occasionally it showcases our collective resilience and sense of humor. I watched a disgusting video and it wasn’t so bad . . . Here, laugh at me.”67 Aggers has a point, and the “collective resilience and sense of humor” he refers to resonate with Freud’s arguments in his essay, “Humor.” For Freud, humor can mark a “repudiation of the possibility of suffering,” in which the ego asserts “that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure.”68 Another, more troubling reaction, comes from a young man who evinces bored indifference throughout the video—and even manages to eat a sandwich while watching it. When the video ends, he berates other viewers who find the video shocking. Almost sputtering with frustration, he asks, “I mean, are you new to the Internet?” and “I have seen things SO MUCH WORSE than that. . .”. The utter lack of affect in his reaction while watching the video points us away from Freud’s notion of humor as a form of “collective resilience,” and toward the prospect of derealization as an effect of contemporary media spectatorship. Nichols’ argument that documentary spectatorship can involve a “practical testing of subjective responses” is premised upon a spectator who “imagine[s] the screen pulled away and a direct encounter possible.”69 But for Nichols, this “practical testing” means that the viewer will gain a deeper understanding of, and engagement with, the profilmic reality that was documented. Like Cowie and Gaines, Nichols implies that subjective responses should serve as a spur to greater knowledge. Reaction videos, however, represent a near-complete lack of engagement with or consideration of the

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profilmic event—the conditions that allowed for the making of the pornographic clips themselves. Given the extremity of what is depicted on-screen, it might follow that viewers would feel some concern over the situation in which the two women could be led (or coerced) into performing such acts.70 Questions posed about “2 Girls 1 Cup” by the subjects of reaction videos and on comment boards demonstrate curiosity only about its authenticity (which, as I have pointed out, is a common response to reaction videos themselves). A number of people wonder whether or not “2 Girls 1 Cup” is real (in the sense of whether or not some other substance is sneakily substituted for human feces), but questions of its implications for the two girls themselves are almost totally absent.71 Moreover, questions about its authenticity are directed primarily toward how the video’s ontological status would affect the experience of spectators, not the experience of the women in the video. In other words, if viewers knew that it was “faked,” then they would not experience such authentically extreme reactions—a perhaps disappointing effect. Even as epistephilia concerning “2 Girls 1 Cup” is limited primarily to its potential effects upon the spectator, ethical concerns in comments are limited to the question of whether certain people should have been shown the video (in particular, parents, grandparents, or wives of the reaction videomaker—people who seem truly disturbed by what they see on the screen). But the lack of an ethical response in relation to the women in the video parallels the responses of viewers who find the Scary Maze reaction videos hilarious rather than troubling. The “2 Girls 1 Cup” clip is prized for its ability to provoke uncontrolled, authentic responses in spectators based upon a “brute fascination” with what Linda Williams would call its “frenzy of the visible.” Paradoxically, however, viewers’ lack of ethical concern points toward what Hartman describes as a ghosting of reality. Hartman sees such responses as a form of psychic defense against hyperarousal; here, the derealization and the hyperarousal are coterminous, each enabling the other. Among the many reaction videos I watched in researching this chapter, the lone response I found that expressed any interest in the profilmic event of “2 Girls 1 Cup,” was, interestingly, from comedian Joe Rogan, host of the now-defunct reality TV show “Fear Factor.” On “Fear Factor,” contestants win money for performing fearsome tasks (either dangerous stunts like skydiving, or disgusting acts like eating spiders, bulls’ testicles, and so on). A reaction video featuring Rogan, then, is clearly intended to demonstrate that “2 Girls 1 Cup” can be shocking even to someone who has “seen it all.” Rogan, does, in fact, react strongly to the video, and not only averts his gaze repeatedly, but even walks away from the computer desk entirely. After the video ends, Rogan and the friend taping him immediately begin speculating about the video’s conditions of production. Rogan asks, “What is that for? Crack? Heroin? Meth? What do you think they do that for?” Rogan and his friend discuss this point for a while, concluding that the girls in question are clearly cocaine addicted, and estimating what kind of daily

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allowance of the drug compels them participate in such a horrible set of acts. Although Rogan and his friend do not explicitly present a critique of these issues, their reaction is actually unique in even considering the video’s material conditions of production—and the performance of the featured women as a form of exploited labor. The video’s Wikipedia entry explains that it was made in Brazil, thus adding for any viewer curious enough to look it up an added aura of exoticism and Otherness. Rogan’s response to the video represents a kind of vulgar articulation of what Melissa W. Wright terms “the myth of the disposable third world woman”—who is herself un-valued and ultimately replaceable, while at the same time her labor produces things of value.72 As Rogan (semiironically) puts it after viewing the video: “Who are those girls? We have to find them. We have to offer them a job at JoeRogan.net.” Pointing, however cynically, to the acts depicted in the video as a form of labor, Rogan’s comments foreground the almost universal disavowals of the material conditions of production for “2 Girls 1 Cup” in other reaction videos. The video’s impact depends precisely upon its brutally explicit exploitation of indexicality. It is regarded as almost unwatchable precisely because viewers perceive the depicted acts as fundamentally undoable; these are things so far outside of the viewer’s domain of experience that to even imagine them produces violent physical reactions. So, the image is perceived as if it is merely a simulation (“derealized”), when in fact we are witnessing not disguised labor but the index of labor in the most direct sense. As Rogan’s response correctly points out, these representations might not exist if participating in the production of the video-commodity did not serve a distinct material need: drug addiction, economic hardship, etc. The reality that is here ghosted is the exploited labor that is itself valued precisely because it ostensibly conceals nothing.

SPECTACULAR INTIMACIES: “REUNION VIDEOS” The “Scary Maze Game” and “2 Girls 1 Cup” reaction videos are constructed and presented as comedic gags, but finding them funny depends upon a viewer who avoids an ethical response. Despite the bodily mimicry apparent in some reaction video subjects’ responses to “2 Girls 1 Cup,” I have argued that spectatorship of—and within—reaction videos is often premised upon a disjunction between viewer and representation, and derealizes ethically troubling subject matter. This derealization disallows a sense of personal implication and “recognition of the other” that might undermine the intended responses of laughter or pleasurable shock. On the other hand, videos expressly designed to promote an alignment of response between reaction video subject and spectator might seem to allow for “recognition of the other,” and enable a more ethical viewing position. The final subgenre of reaction videos I will examine, dubbed “reunion

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Figure 4.3

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Reunion videos as emotional spectacle.

videos” in media coverage, depict American soldiers’ surprise homecomings from Iraq and Afghanistan. The videos feature extreme outpourings of emotion on the faces of their unsuspecting children captured by the cameras (see Figure 4.3). As in many of the Scary Maze videos, children again serve as focal points and ideal subjects. But here, children’s unguarded, intense reactions are mobilized to serve the purpose not of ethically problematic scenarios intended as comedy, but rather, of deeply affective patriotism and paternalism. The figure of the child serves its conventional function as an emblem of all that needs protection, uniquely able, as Lee Edelman argues, to mobilize ideological force in relation to the idea of a “future” we must attain.73 Rather than promoting an ethical form of spectatorship, however, such videos negate “recognition of the other” just as much as the reaction videos discussed above. The spectator’s tears function to resolve him or her of responsibility for larger social and political issues that such videos might raise.74 A notable feature of the reunion videos, and one of the qualities that sets them apart from the other reaction videos examined thus far, is their enactment in public spaces with on-screen audiences for the spectacle. Unlike the other genres of reaction video, we are not watching someone react to another video playing on a computer or TV screen, but rather to a live event. We move away from the territory of home video and toward more professionally staged and constructed media spectacles. But the basic principle remains the same: The videos are successful to the extent to which the scenario can solicit—and the camera can capture—an externalized reaction from the subject that viewers will perceive as spontaneous, authentic, and intense. As reported by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times, military

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spokesman Jon Myatt is quite explicit about asserting that “younger children work best. ‘They’re not as self-conscious when it comes to crying and hugging their father. Teenagers are worried about their peers.”75 Reunion videos feature a few common settings. Classrooms or schoolrelated events such as assemblies or dances are by far the most frequent. Far larger live audiences witness these events, however, when they are staged at professional sporting events. These have included halftime during a “Military Appreciation” day game for the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars, or between innings at a home game for the Dayton Dragons.76 Whether the setting is as small as a classroom or as large as an NFL stadium, however, the events are constructed as spectacles. Local news crews frequently help to stage the events and then air them for the public. Indeed, many of the reunion videos featured on YouTube are taken from local news or national cable TV news outlets. One heavily watched clip on YouTube, “Soldiers Surprising their Kids,” is taken from a cable news broadcast and is constructed as an emotional version of the “highlight reels” common to televised sports news.77 Cutting out most of the setup and any attendant dead air, and adding dramatic voiceover narration and gentle nondiegetic piano music, the video features a tightly condensed series of tearful reunions between parents and children. It also uses the “instant replay” device common to sports broadcasting (and, as I have pointed out, to other forms of reaction video) to allow viewers to linger on the expressions of shock and joy on the children’s faces at the moment of recognizing their fathers. Staging the reunions at sporting events, however, introduces an even greater spectacularization of these intimate moments. As Hoffman reports, families stand proudly in the middle of the field while messages from the deployed fathers are broadcast on the stadiums’ Jumbotron screens. But the pretense that these messages are satellite transmissions from overseas is only a ruse. The fathers then come running out onto the field, and, as Eric Deutsch, executive vice president of the Dayton Dragons, describes it, “’The crowds get it before they [the children] do, and the standing ‘O’ [ovation] continues, and the wives were crying, and, oh my gosh!” All along, the reunion is displayed in tearful close-up to the crowd on the giant screen.78 Deutsch’s breathless description resonates with language used by family members themselves in describing these events. As Major Kevin Becar puts it in recounting his reunion with his son at the Jaguars game, “’He was just bawling, and we melted into each others’ arms.” Descriptions like this place us in the territory of confessional daytime television, but contextualized to legitimate male affective response and display. These videos function for viewers like distilled versions of melodramas: As “tearjerkers,” they provoke a perfect mimicry between body on screen and body of spectator. As Hoffman puts it, “Read this and weep . . . But view ’em—as millions have through TV news broadcasts, YouTube, and countless other Web sites—and just blubber.”79

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Nearly thirty-five hundred comments on the YouTube page for the “Soldiers Surprising their Kids” montage express the same sentiment over and over: How these heartwarming scenes make the viewers cry, even to an extent that surprises them. Viewers identifying themselves as men unaccustomed to such expressions of emotion describe being taken aback by the force of their own emotional responses. Comments of this nature include, “I cried like a woman”, “I’m a grown man and I shed a tear. Well more than one,” “Ahh man I’m a pussy,” and the reassuring response to this last comment: “ur not u just have feelings. I cried 2.” Beyond such comments on this and similar videos, we find sentimentalized expressions of intense patriotism, and some discussion of personal experiences by soldiers or their families.80 Given the way in which these events and videos aim to provide a male-inclusive experience of affective release through tears, it is perhaps not surprising that some are staged at sporting events and that the editing mimics the style of highlight reels and instant replays. Cable television stations like ESPN have increasingly constructed sports as a domain of male melodrama, with narratives of athletes overcoming poverty, drugs, or family problems on the road to success, public apologies for illegal or unethical behaviors, and tearful press conferences following big-game losses and player retirements. The New York Times coverage suggests that these videos may provide a way for the public to better understand and be aware of the experiences of soldiers and their families. The only significant criticism of the phenomenon featured in the Times story focuses on the possible negative effects this form of reunion—and appearing in these videos—may have on the children. That is, psychologists point out that the element of surprise itself may be disturbing to children, and may exacerbate anger they already harbor toward their absent parents. These are certainly valid points. But it is also important to critically consider the effects these videos have on their legions of viewers through television and YouTube. Do these videos, indeed, promote a sense of greater awareness, and ethical responsibility, toward soldiers and the wars in which they serve? I would argue quite the opposite—that they reduce our sense of responsibility and of the magnitude of these wars. If anything, these videos suggest that war must be a good thing if these moments are its synecdoche—if it enables these scenes of emotional outpouring so linked to an experienced sense of national belonging and patriotism. The videos contribute to what Lauren Berlant terms the “intimate public sphere,” in the sense that they redirect criticism from a political sphere to a sentimentalized opinion culture, “characterized by strong patriotic identification mixed with feelings of practical political powerlessness.”81 In Representing Reality, Bill Nichols terms “magnitude” that which “involves a tension between the representation and the represented as experienced by the viewer,” specifically our affective and bodily awareness of the magnitude of the historical event beyond the documentary image.82 Magnitude is where politics enters phenomenology, where Sobchack’s sense of

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“ethical care” may create a space for praxis. Reaction videos’ production of affect, on the other hand, seems to actually foreclose many viewers’ sense of the “magnitude” of the world beyond the screen. For Nichols, the experience of magnitude in documentary spectatorship is critical because “[v]isceral experience must be rendered meaningful,” moving us beyond the “indexical correspondence between a text and the visual world” and into “the ideological correspondence between a text and the historical world.”83 By contrast, in Juhasz’s analysis, the form of the YouTube video disallows the very possibility of magnitude. Media in this format, she argues, represent “an idea reduced to an icon or gag . . . [u]nderstandable in a heartbeat, knowable without thinking, this is media already encrusted with social meaning or feeling.” In contradistinction to an opening up of the historical world and a viewer’s sense of his or her engagement with this world, YouTube creates an insular referential domain, dominated by intertextual forms of humor: “YouTube videos are often about YouTube videos, which are most often about popular culture. They steal, parody, mash, and rework recognizable forms . . . humor enters through parody . . . or else slapstick, a category of spectacle.”84 “Scary Maze Game” and “2 Girls 1 Cup” reaction videos illustrate Juhasz’s point about the closed circuit of YouTube humor. Like viral YouTube videos such as “Epic Beard Man,” they convert disturbing content into a simple “icon or gag” that is then subject to endlessly multiplied repetitions with minor variations. Reaction videos privilege the affective experience of spectatorship at the expense of “recognition and responsibility” toward the subjects of the videos themselves. Despite their ostensible evocation of sympathy for soldiers and their families, homecoming reunion videos equally displace a viewer’s experience of historical magnitude. Reductive and mechanistic means of producing external displays of affect, reaction and reunion videos imply an investment in emotional authenticity, while paradoxically derealizing its representations and removing the productive “tension” of Nichols’ magnitude. NOTES 1. Silvan Tomkins, “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust,” in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 135–36. 2. See my discussion of Gaines and Cowie in the introduction to this book. 3. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 31. 4. Geoffrey Hartman, “Memory.Com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era,” Raritan 19, no. 3 (2000): 1–18, 4. 5. Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower, 2007), 114. As Renov puts it, “[t]his prioritizing of the ethical [over philosophical systems focused on questions of ontology and epistemology] could have important consequences for documentary theory, whose most

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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notable debates have focused on the ontological status of non-fiction discourse and on its claims to truth and knowledge—in short, on ‘being’ and ‘knowing.’” Renov suggests that an “ethical view” would refuse the “appropriative stance” viewers conventionally take toward documentary subjects, “choosing instead receptivity and responsibility.” (Michael Renov, “The Address to the Other: Ethical Discourse in Everything’s For You,” in Renov, The Subject of Documentary [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 159, 161). Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 192. Clover’s analysis of masochistic spectatorship draws in particular upon the work of Christian Metz and David Rodowick. See my discussion of this reaction video later in this chapter. Bolter goes on to question the broader implications of reality TV for media coverage of disasters and other world events: “Reality TV could almost be seen as a dry run, in which the audience learns to accept the controlled narrativization of televisual events. Viewers will then be prepared to accept the narrative structures offered in the less well-scripted, real-time coverage of wars and disasters.” (Jay David Bolter, “Preface,” in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King [Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005], 11). Geoff King, “Introduction,” in The Spectacle of the Real, ed. Geoff King, 13. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 16. Misha Kavka, “Love ‘n the Real; or, How I Learned to Love Reality TV,” in King, 95. Jane Roscoe, “Real Entertainment: New Factual Hybrid Television,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 100 (August 2001). Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe, “Giving Voice: Performance and Authenticity in the Documentary Musical,” Jump Cut 48 (2006). A number of other examples point to viewers’ desire to locate and believe in a moment of authenticity within a representational framework which they otherwise perceive to be mediated, constructed, or outright false. See, for example, Deborah Jermyn, “‘This is about Real People!’: video technologies, actuality and affect in the television crime appeal,” in Understanding Reality Television, eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). In a nonacademic context, David Foster Wallace describes in his essay “Big Red Son,” a police captain’s explanation of his attraction to pornography in terms of what he regards as moments when the performers stop “performing” and reveal authentic and spontaneous pleasure. (David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster [New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005]). In this respect, they follow the principle of the sight gag as formulated by Noël Carroll and discussed in Chapter One. Vivian Sobchack, “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,” in Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 273. The site seems to target an audience of older children and young teens who have made books like the “Goosebumps” series such a success. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 168–181. Videos like these could be seen as extreme examples of James Moran’s argument that home-video technology significantly expanded the scope of activities conventionally recorded in photographs and filmed home movies.

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

Documentary’s Awkward Turn Richard Chalfen described the “home mode” of recording as focusing on celebrations, holidays, and significant events marking “rites of passage from birth to old age.” Moran suggests that with the expanded recording capacity of video over film, “many will cherish moments of embarrassment, distress, or defeat for their candid humor or truth. Video, that is, realizes a broader range of intentions than Chalfen’s formal reading of home movies would indicate.” (James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 36, 42). A YouTube channel is essentially a profile page featuring all of a user’s videos as well as other information. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 100–103. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” in The Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 144. Williams, 144. For example, we laugh at the misfortune of the clown when he slips on the banana peel—the most basic form of sight gag structure analyzed by Noël Carroll. This response represents the link discussed in previous chapters between comedy and a sense of superiority identified by Henri Bergson, in which laughter functions as a “social corrective”—we affirm through our laughter another person’s inadequacies. (Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell [New York: Macmillan, 1928]). Some users even try to shout down the users who express outrage at the videos, making comments that emphasize how the videos are “just a joke” and that the users who are offended should not watch the video if it bothers them, and so on. Sobchack, 273. In her coauthored book with Lisa Downing, Libby Saxton offers a valuable synthesis of extant scholarship on the ethical dilemmas surrounding spectatorship of suffering. Saxton examines the thorny issues concerning “the propensity of contemporary modes of image-production and diffusion to obscure the distinctions between real and fabricated violence, between reportage and spectacle.” In an effort to examine the “ways in which films negotiate the surfeit of images of suffering that circulate in competing visual media and interrogate our responses to them,” Saxton turns to texts by Serge Daney and Geoffrey Hartman that examine modes of film and video—such as Holocaust survivor witness videos—that may “constitute sites of resistance to the altericidal practices and numbing ‘unreality-effect’ of mainstream media.” (Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters [London and New York: Routledge, 2010], 68, 69). Geoffrey Hartman, “Memory.Com: Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era,” Raritan 19, no. 3 (2000): 1–18, 5, 3. Ibid., 1, 3, 4. On this point, Hartman quotes Norman Manea’s Baudrillardian formulation: “televised reality becomes a self-devouring ‘proto-reality’ without which the real world is not confirmed and therefore does not exist” (Hartman, 4). As he puts it in his discussion of Holocaust survivor testimony videos, “the real issue is whether we can learn from the suffering of others without overidentifying. To overidentify with the victim may have consequences as grave as to identify with the oppressor,” because of a “movement toward a coldness or cruelty when it becomes too hard to take in something that wants to be

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

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forgotten or mastered” (Hartman, 13). Hartman’s comments here resonate with Michele Aaron’s argument, discussed later in this chapter, that moralistic films about atrocity that demand sentimentalized responses may function to absolve viewers of a sense of implication and responsibility. Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, 98, 116. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 89, 122. Rob Walker, “When Funny Goes Viral,” The New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2010, 38–43, 43. Mattathias Schwartz, “The Trolls Among Us,” The New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2008, pp. 1–2 of online archive version. Walker, 43. Schwartz, 12. Ibid., 9. Walker, 43. Nichols, Representing Reality, 85–86. See, for example, Anna McCarthy, “’Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt, and Me’: Postwar Social Science and the ‘First Wave’ of Reality TV,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004), and Bradley Clissold, “Candid Camera and the origins of Reality TV: contextualizing a historical precedent,” in Holmes and Jermyn. Noël Carroll, “Notes on the Sight Gag,” in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The more direct (albeit obnoxious) successors of Candid Camera than AFHV are programs like Punk’d and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, in which we see the extended reactions of people, often celebrities, to elaborately staged pranks that often challenge their assumptions about their own social power. For an extended discussion of these shows in relation to the work of Sacha Baron Cohen, see Chapter Four, “The Borat Effect: Comedies of Deception.” Bradley Clissold, “Candid Camera and the Origins of Reality TV: contextualizing a historical precedent,” in Holmes and Jermyn, 33, 40. Alexandra Juhasz, “Learning the Five Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 145–150. Ibid., 147. Juhasz’ critique of YouTube resonates with other scholars’ analyses of reality TV and its online interactive tie-ins. Mark Andrejevic, in particular, argues that reality TV offers a “more cynical version of democratization, one whereby producers can deploy the offer of participation as a means of enticing viewers to share in the production of a relatively inexpensive and profitable entertainment product.” He terms this process “the work of being watched, a form of production wherein consumers are invited to sell access to their personal lives in a way not dissimilar to that in which they sell their labor power.” (Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched [Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004], 6). Juhasz, 147. Ibid, 147. I should note that when Juhasz uses adjectives like “best” and most “successful” to describe these videos, she means within the corporate aesthetics and socially conservative standards according to which YouTube videos tend to attain prominence. Even the nondescript bedroom and home office locations remain essentially identical to the eye.

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52. Related comments express a longing for community, explaining that the poster’s friends don’t “get” or appreciate Twilight. 53. Following Julie Levin Russo’s analysis of fans of Showtime’s lesbian drama The L Word, Twilight reaction videos can be seen as a form of immaterial labor: Emotionally invested productivity that adds value to the corporate entertainment product (but which may at times intensify antagonisms between audiences and corporations). (Julie Levin Russo, “Labor of Love: Charting The L Word,” Wired TV: Laboring Over an Interactive Future [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014]). 54. Videos like these are similar to an extremely popular viral video from 2010 that featured a three-year-old girl crying uncontrollably on camera because of her love for teen idol Justin Bieber, while her sister (on camera) and mother (holding the camera) goad her on. Again, this video was considered extremely “cute” and “funny” by most viewers who commented upon it. 55. Of the many examples of this particular reaction video on YouTube, only a couple claim to feature children or preteens, and in these cases certain textual markers (a lack of the familiar soundtrack to the actual “2 Girls 1 Cup” video audible in most reaction videos, for example) suggests (as many users on the comment boards are all too happy to point out) that these videos are faked (that is, the children are not really watching the actual source material). 56. Comments of this nature on “2 Girls 1 Cup Reaction #1” include, “The guy is acting . . . what a dumbass,” and “Haa Haa? This Seems Fake . . . There isn’t any music . . . In the real video there is . . . Haa Haa Good Tryy thoo.” 57. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” in The Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 144. 58. In the case of the Twilight fan videos, of course, this can be a form of shared laughter and identification. 59. Williams, 144. 60. Nichols, Representing Reality, 43. 61. Williams, in Grant, 144. 62. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 159. 63. Ibid., 181–182. 64. Ibid., 185–6. 65. Elizabeth Cowie, “The Spectacle of Actuality,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19. 66. Bill Nichols’ term for a desire for knowledge in documentary spectatorship. (Nichols, Representing Reality, 31). 67. Michael Aggers, “2 girls 1 Cup 0 Shame,” Slate, January 31, 2008, http:// www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_browser/2008/01/2_girls_1_cup_0_ shame.html. 68. Sigmund Freud, “Humor,” in Character and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 265. 69. Nichols, Representing Reality, 43. 70. The video itself is actually a trailer for a 2007 Brazilian fetish-porn film titled Hungry Bitches. 71. I have not read through the hundreds of comments on each of the dozens of reaction videos on YouTube, but a fairly extensive browsing never turned up any such commentary. 72. Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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73. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 74. Aaron makes a similar point about movies like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), following Franco Moretti and Susan Sontag’s discussions of war photography (Aaron, 117, 114). 75. Jan Hoffman, “War’s Other Enduring Videos,” The New York Times, November 27, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/fashion/29video. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 76. Ibid. 77. Many compilation videos of these clips are featured on YouTube; another popular one is titled “Soldier’s (sic) surprised (sic) their loved ones,” and a blog devoted entirely to such videos has been created, as well: WelcomeHomeBlog.com. 78. Hoffman, “War’s Other Enduring Videos.” 79. Ibid. 80. Occasionally, someone will use the comment board as a platform to express criticisms of the American role in the war, but these users are quickly rebuked by others. 81. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 82. Nichols, Representing Reality, 232. 83. Nichols, 232. 84. Juhasz, 147.

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Awkward Moments, Endless Days Feeling Time in The Office

The British (2001–2004) and American (2005–2013) versions of the mockdocumentary sitcom The Office depict the workday routines of a paper company office located on the periphery of a major urban center, presided over by a boorish and delusional boss. The British Office, set at the Wernham Hogg company in the borough of Slough, featured cocreator and writer Ricky Gervais as boss David Brent; the American adaptation placed its Dunder Mifflin Company in the town of Scranton, PA, with Steve Carrell playing boss Michael Scott. Craig Hight suggests that the critical and popular success of both the British and American versions effectively defined for audiences “what television mockumentary should be . . . they have achieved the kind of status that This is Spinal Tap achieved for cinematic mockumentary.”1 A televisual mock documentary differs significantly from a feature film, and Hight, Brett Mills, and other scholars have analyzed the show’s intersection of conventions derived from mock documentary film, docusoap, and sitcom, suggesting for it terms such as “comedy verité” or “mockusoap.”2 In his analysis of documentary and comedy, Paul Ward briefly discusses the British Office as a variation on feature-film mock-documentary conventions. Drawing from Dan Harries’ work on parody, Ward points out that what differentiates the show from mock documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap is its lack of “the ‘logical absurdity’ that is often identified as a marker of parody—a sudden incursion of something that ruptures the verisimilitude and creates incongruity.” Ward suggests that “the humour derives from the programme’s sustained plausibility, rather than the alternation between plausibility and implausibility that is characteristic of parody more generally.”3 I argue that the British Office’s “plausibility” can be understood through Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological concept of “documentary consciousness.” The viewer of The Office experiences what Sobchack terms a “charge of the real” that is distinct from the experience of either conventional sitcoms or many feature-film mockumentaries. For Sobchack, documentary consciousness describes “a particular mode of embodied and ethical spectatorship that informs and transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real.”4 She argues that the viewer’s engagement or “mode of consciousness”

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with which he or she approaches the film—above and beyond textual cues in the film itself—“depend always on the viewer’s existential knowledge of and social investment in the context of a lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.”5 A significant example for Sobchack of moments when the irreal seems transformed into the real is witnessing the real death of an animal within a fictional diegesis (in this case, the death of a rabbit in Renoir’s Rules of the Game). But she enumerates several other modes of transforming a fictional diegesis in this manner, such as the inclusion of real-world archival footage, the appropriation of documentary stylistic conventions, and the casting of real celebrities playing “themselves.”6 To a much greater degree than with the mock documentary feature films that preceded it, viewers’ affective response to the British Office is rooted in our continual awareness of, and investment in, what Sobchack describes as a “lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.” The show does not trade upon ontological ambiguity, as in earlier mock documentaries like Forgotten Silver or even to some degree This Is Spinal Tap.7 Viewers are well aware that they are watching a fiction; as Hight points out, mockumentary discourse has become “naturalized within the televisual medium” and carries no capacity at this point to surprise or confuse us.8 Rather, the show solicits a documentary consciousness: We experience it on some level as real, not simply because of its documentary style, but because of the ways in which it sustains for us the idea or impression of this larger lifeworld. The British Office critically portrays the lifeworld of a white-collar workplace that embodies none of the standard ideals of post-Fordist flexible labor. As Tara Brabazon rightly argues, “Post-Fordist labor is casualized, temporary, autonomous, and ‘flexible.’ The Office reveals none of those characteristics. There are no initiatives from knowledge-economy theory to stimulate the creativity of workers.”9 In the context of an informationage economy, the office of The Office manages the production and sales of paper, an object that distinctly connotes an older industrial and workplace model we are supposed to be leaving behind (with the new “paperless” office). Kathi Weeks describes the post-Fordist ideal of workplace “professionalism,” in which the employee is expected to commit not just his or her labor time but also his or her creativity and very personality to the company, to “gain control over his or her thoughts, imagination, relationships, and affects” in the service of the corporation.10 The Office represents the broad persistence of all the un-creative, repetitive office work obscured by ideals of the information-age workplace. As Brabazon writes, “The Office demonstrates the mismatching of the new corporate capitalism with the language of team-building and flexible employment . . . ‘[f]lexible jobs are the most inflexible in terms of their content, career trajectory, function and rights.”11 The British Office has been described as a paradigm of “cringe comedy.” My contention is that the “cringe” represents precisely the sort of embodied spectatorship described by Sobchack; specifically, the show’s signature moments of protracted awkwardness and dead air compel the viewer to feel

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time. The phenomenological experience of time in such scenes conveys the embodied experience of time for the characters trapped in their repetitive jobs, as the hours pass into days and the days into weeks. The Office’s cringe comedy is premised upon continual reminders of “a lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text,” sustained by its mockumentary framework, its exploitation of television’s longstanding association with liveness, intimacy, and immediacy, and its realist depiction of the quotidian quality of its diegesis. In other words, we cringe not simply because of repugnant boss David Brent’s awkward and insensitive behavior, but because our embodied reaction to the show indexes our greater awareness of numbing work routines that serve as counterpoint to the ideal of flexible and creative labor in a “new” economy. The American adaptation of The Office, which I analyze in the last section of this chapter, enacts key changes to the show’s character development, narrative structure, and centrally, its mode of spectatorship. These changes reflect markedly different ideological implications of the American version’s representation of its corporate workplace. I want to highlight the verb in Sobchack’s definition of documentary consciousness: a mode of spectatorship that “transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real” (emphasis mine). In the British version, this transformation enacts and reinforces the show’s critical perspective on real-world offices characterized by mundane routines and an ideology of “professionalism” that “creates an artificial consensus that hides the volatility and antagonism of employment relations.”12 The moment of transformation from one register of spectatorship to another (for example with the death of the rabbit in Rules of the Game) is critical to an understanding of the films Sobchack analyzes; it is in this frame-shifting that their meanings and affective capacities are most salient. I argue that the American Office contains many of the satirical impulses developed in the British version, but mediates these impulses with an affectively charged representation of the workplace as a space of individual and interpersonal happiness and fulfillment. This affective charging and its attendant ideological containment of the British version’s critical effects occur through moments of narrative, spectatorial, and formal transformation—three distinct but interconnected forms of frame-shifting. At the plot level, Michael Scott succeeds in transforming frustration and anxiety among his employees into job satisfaction rooted in a sense of community, and even family. At the level of spectatorship, the viewer’s “cringe” is converted into a mode of pleasurable identification with the characters in their moments of achievement and happiness. Finally, at a formal level the show generates its affective force at moments characterized by shifts between differing registers of documentary realism. This shifting can move either in the direction of a more pronounced documentary style, or by stretching the show’s quotidian diegesis in a more implausible direction. Moments in which the viewer is positioned to identify with the characters’ greatest happiness tend to be signaled by one of these two modes of formal transformation

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that affect the viewer’s phenomenological experience of the show, or what Sobchack terms the viewer’s “intentionality.”13 In other words, my analysis of the American Office employs but expands Sobchack’s theoretical framework. I locate not just a “charge of the real” that implicates the spectator ethically, but an affective charge, connected to the show’s frame-shifting among differing degrees of realism, that may soften the show’s critical edge and undermine our sense of responsibility (as Sobchack puts it, “responseability”) to the lifeworld that it represents.14

THE BRITISH OFFICE: CRUEL OPTIMISM IN SLOUGH Lauren Berlant describes the emergence of “precarity” as a “dominant structure and experience of the present moment, cutting across classes and localities.”15 Berlant notes that Hardt and Negri and others have pointed out the “increasing corrosion of security as a condition of life for workers across different concentrations of economic and political privilege.”16 Berlant’s analysis of the films of Laurent Cantet suggests how precarity signals “the impact of neoliberalism on formerly protected classes,” and is not simply an economic condition but one that “permeates the affective environment too.”17 The title of The Office’s pilot episode is “Downsize,” indicating its central plot device: a warning handed down to boss David Brent from corporate management that either his or another branch office will soon be made “redundant.” The pilot thus establishes the position of economic precarity in its characters’ lives right from the outset. Along with the threat of downsizing, the pilot episode places precarity front and center by using the introduction of a temporary worker (Ricky) to the office as the viewer’s point of entry to the setting and characters. On the same day they receive the news of their potential firing, the office workers meet a young man whose impermanent employment may represent their own futures. The closing scene of the pilot episode represents the culmination of a series of awkward encounters with his employees that have characterized David’s office tour for Ricky. We have already winced, for example, at an encounter with a young Pakistani employee that demonstrates both David’s reflexive racism and his cluelessness. The final scene intends to realize the fullest potential of the cringe in cringe comedy and plays specifically upon David’s insensitivity to his workers’ very real anxieties about the precarity of their employment, especially following the news about corporate downsizing. In the scene, David attempts to impress and bond with Ricky by playing what he describes as a “practical joke” on receptionist and central character, Dawn. David believes he is creating a comic moment and enlists Ricky as an accomplice beforehand by leading him to believe that the joke will be harmless. But there is nothing funny about the situation for Dawn, Ricky, or the viewer; indeed, Ricky comes to serve as proxy for the viewer as he silently cringes throughout the encounter.

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When Dawn enters the meeting room where David sits with Ricky, David sets up the “joke” by reminding her that the imminent office merger will lead to “redundancies.” He proceeds to matter-of-factly explain that he will have to let Dawn go first, based upon her pattern of stealing office supplies (Post-it notes). When Dawn, utterly shocked and crestfallen, protests that she has never stolen anything, David claps Ricky jovially on the back and asserts that he won’t even have to give Dawn severance pay because her actions constitute gross misconduct. The scene plays out in a shot/reverse shot sequence alternating tightly framed shots of David and Ricky, seated closely together, and Dawn, facing them from a few feet away. The spatial proximity of the characters adds to the scene’s discomfort, and every time we cut to David as he builds up the cruel ruse, we also see Ricky growing increasingly uncomfortable and anxious (see Figure 5.1). He clearly feels terrible for Dawn but is unable to reveal the truth because of David’s authority over them both. After this final insult regarding severance pay, which compounds the economic threat the prank has created for Dawn, she breaks down and sobs quietly into her hand—leading David to realize that his “joke” has actually been terribly hurtful. “That was a joke, there,” he mutters, visibly registering a cringe in his own body for the first time during the scene, and glances up at the camera with some apprehension about how he might appear at this moment. David is utterly at a loss. He cannot apologize, because that would acknowledge the inherently flawed nature of his “joke.” The presence of the camera prevents him from simply fleeing the scene; he must instead attempt to somehow save face. Under the camera’s unwavering gaze,

Figure 5.1 [BBC]).

Firing an employee as practical joke for boss David Brent (The Office

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David proceeds for what feels like an excruciatingly long time (actually less than thirty seconds) to act as if everyone—workers and documentary crew alike—can understand that his intentions were good and no real harm was done. In brief, awkward sentence fragments with long pauses between them, he explains, “Good girl, it was a joke we were doing . . . Well done, settling in . . . Practical jokes for the good.” He then attempts to hide from the situation by looking at the faxes Dawn has brought him. Finally, Dawn looks up, angrily calls him a “wanker” and a “sad little man,” and leaves the room. In characteristic scenes like David’s fake firing of Dawn, the very lack of action—David’s inability to redress the consequences of his ridiculously inconsiderate attempt at a joke—creates for the viewer an embodied experience of time. The moment seems to last forever, and we wish—at a bodily level—for it to end. As Hight points out, televisual mock documentary capitalizes on long-established elements of television aesthetics—particularly the sense of intimacy fostered through heavy use of closeup shots and foreground action in the frame, and the feeling of immediacy conveyed by the medium’s capacity for “liveness.”18 When watching a typically excruciating interaction between David and his employees, the viewer often feels a need to look away, cringing at how the show’s mock documentary framework enhances television’s existing feel of intimacy and immediacy. Exploiting our associations with televisual liveness and presence, the show can produce the sense that this painful scene is really happening, in the present, right in front of us. The scene’s feeling of almost brutal realism can be understood through Malin Wahlberg’s analysis of Andre Bazin. Wahlberg suggests that along with its emphasis on the long take and depth of focus, Bazinian realism is in some cases achieved by “a mode of framing through which the time of the image transfers the existential meaning” of the action to the time of film viewing.19 Following Wahlberg, the phenomenological experience of time for the viewer in scenes like this points to the greater thematic significance of time in the show as a whole. The show takes place almost entirely inside the office and during the nine-to-five hours of the standard workday that organizes and regulates the experience of time for its characters. The Office’s characteristic moments of dead air not only contribute to the cringe comedy, but also convey the embodied experience of time for the characters, as the hours pass into days, the days into weeks, and so on. Indeed, Tim, the show’s “everyman” character and intended point of viewer identification, continually expresses anxiety about wasting his life in this job. Tim frequently asserts that his employment at Wernham Hogg is only temporary; he plans to return to university and study to become a psychologist. Turning thirty years old in an early episode of the series, Tim increasingly expresses the fear that time is slipping away from him while he performs what he perceives as meaningless tasks throughout his workday. In this respect, it is telling that the also ran for the show’s theme song was Cat Stevens’ “Sitting,” a song that describes a restless impulse and a fear of stasis.20

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Creating a form of spectatorship in which the viewer is compelled to feel time at a bodily level, where our cringe signals a profound desire for time to accelerate and the scene to end, is one way in which the show solicits what Sobchack terms a “documentary consciousness.” Additionally, the show employs imagery that opens up its diegesis to the historical real, particularly in the opening title sequence. In this sequence, we see shots of the real town of Slough and the Slough Trading Estate business park, thus situating the show within a recognizable real-world location and commercial property made notorious by poet John Betjeman as a symbol of poor working conditions, exploitation, and a coarsening national culture. The exterior shots of town, Trading Estate, and the building within which the fictional Wernham Hogg paper company is meant to be located all construct at the level of mise-en-scène a realist—even a gritty realist—aesthetic. A series of parallel tracking shots with leftward movement reveal scenes of the town and office park, eventually resolving on an image in which the full frame is filled by the grey and imposing exterior of the Wernham Hogg building. Accompanied by the almost elegiac strains of the instrumental version of the show’s theme song, the opening situates the show within a larger history of capitalism and the modern workplace by grounding its diegesis in the viewer’s awareness of the real town of Slough and its historical associations. The lyrics of the theme song, “Handbags and Gladrags” (as heard in the closing credits), criticize consumerism and a diminished sense of the value of labor, and, in a further connotation, resonate with the show’s theme of economic precarity: “So what becomes of you my love/When they’ve finally stripped you of/ The handbags and the gladrags/That your granddad had to sweat so you could buy.” Significantly, we see none of the show’s characters in this opening sequence, thus further grounding the shots in a sense of historical reality. This distinctive absence of its characters from the opening sets the show apart from the majority of British and American sitcoms that use opening title sequences (including, significantly, the American version of The Office). Even the urban working-class American sitcoms of the 1970s featured the main characters within the location shots in the opening title sequences— think, for example, of Laverne and Shirley’s Milwaukee—thus creating more of a continuum between the studio-shot interiors and these exterior location shots. By keeping the characters out of frame, on the other hand, the shots in the opening sequence of The Office reinforce the viewer’s sense of what Sobchack describes as a “lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.” The opening sequence is indicative of how the show creates a spatial dialectic between inside and outside that serves as a figure for its play between fiction and documentary, the irreal and the real. With the majority of scenes taking place within the confines of the office, except for the characters’ occasional forays to equally claustrophobic locations like the local nightclub, “Chasers,” the show’s opening aligns the spatial “outside” of the office building with the historical world “outside” the show’s diegesis. The

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viewer’s sense that the world outside the windows of the office aligns with our own world accounts just as fully for the cringe comedy effect as does the painfully awkward and crude behavior of David and his assistant Gareth. We cringe in part because of the feeling that there is nothing we can look away to. Reminding ourselves that, “it’s just a TV show,” is of little comfort when we may feel that its world is hardly distinguishable from our own lifeworld. As Adam Kotsko writes, the British Office challenges the notion that awkwardness is the product of inherently awkward individuals. Rather, it “lays bare the uncomfortable truth that the modern white-collar workplace is inherently and irreducibly awkward,” resulting from the forces of neoliberalism that have transformed both American and British workplaces into “vague and uncertain environment[s].”21 In other words, the condition of economic precarity the show depicts is itself linked to awkwardness; in my argument, this diegetic awkwardness produces significant discomfort for the viewer in part because of our embodied and affective experience of its world as an extension of our own. This permeation of inside with outside and fiction with reality is further reinforced by Tara Brabazon’s point that The Office conveys how the destruction of job security, combined with technological extensions of the workplace in the form of pagers, email, and so on, create a society in which “there is no ‘outside’ to work.”22 As an expression of the interrelated dialectics of inside/outside and fiction/reality, windows serve as an important visual motif in the opening sequence and in several other scenes from the series as well. I have pointed out how the final image in the opening sequence fills the frame entirely with an exterior shot of the Wernham Hogg office building, delimiting the viewer’s field of vision. Large windows line the side of the building, but neither viewer nor characters can see much beyond or through them: From the interior shots in the office, little of the outside is visible. Moreover, the characters and the viewer know that there is nothing much out there, anyway—just the business park, which might as well be the office interior. Thus, as a motif, windows actually signify an obstruction of view; they reinforce how the characters cannot see their way out of these limiting and menial jobs (see Figure 5.2). Despite his repeated expressions of ambition to leave the office and return to school, Tim begins to shift his priorities in season two after being promoted by David. Throughout season one, he remains of all the characters the one least identified with his job (his nemesis Gareth would be the one most identified). But the show suggests not only that it’s difficult for him to see beyond the routine and security afforded by his job, but, more pointedly, that perhaps there really is nothing beyond this office, no horizon of possibility, nothing that he could strive for anyway. Tim’s oft-stated but never-acted-upon fantasy of returning to university can be understood in relation to Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” Berlant describes cruel optimism as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” People who have these

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Figure 5.2 The Wernham Hogg building windows as obstruction of view (The Office [BBC]).

attachments would suffer the loss of the desired object, even if “its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.”23 Tim remains at an impasse throughout the series. On the one hand, leaving the economic security of his job and returning at the age of thirty to university would carry significant financial and social risks. He could fail in his studies and drop out for a second time; he could complete his studies but fail to find a job as a psychologist. At the same time, he finds himself unable to commit his personality (in the terms of Weeks’ concept of “professionalism”) to his job at Wernham Hogg. He cannot find stimulation in his repetitive and uncreative daily tasks, nor can he identify with the asinine forms of workplace “collegiality” that David aims to foster.24 It is not just that Tim’s attachment to his fantasy of a return to university harms his well-being; the problem is that either extricating himself from his job or fully committing to his job both threaten his sense of self. In the overarching logic of the show’s bleak satire of lower-rung office work in post-Fordism, no character will simply be allowed an escape route to a more “fulfilling” career. The psychology career functions only, as Berlant writes, as “sheer fantasy”: an “outside” that, according to the show’s spatial and thematic dialectics, cannot really exist. At the same time, the show accedes to certain of the conventional strictures of sitcom narrative and viewer identification with characters. The Office cannot allow Tim

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to escape, but it won’t punish viewers by letting Tim turn into a version of David—a possibility it teases us with briefly toward the end of season one and the start of season two, as I will discuss. To resolve this central contradiction the show ultimately turns to the conventional happy ending offered by a romantic heterosexual coupling, when Tim and Dawn finally share a kiss and their long-suppressed feelings at the office Christmas party. Tim negotiates his boredom and disidentification with his job through a detached and ironic attitude. He invests more effort in his efforts to play elaborate practical jokes on the pretentious and delusional Gareth than he does in his actual work, although the show implies that his job is simply too easy for him and he actually accomplishes his assignments more than adequately. With Dawn as his willing and frequent accomplice, Tim divests from his work the elements of his personality that, in the ideal of “professionalism,” are meant to inform his labor—in Weeks’ terms, his “thoughts, imagination, relationships, and affects.” Tim instead invests these energies in disruptive pranks intended primarily to undermine Gareth’s devout identification—however ineffectual and misguided—with a sense of his own professionalism. Tim disavows agency even in relation to the jokes he pulls on Gareth: When confronted with examples of his handiwork, he acts as if the pranks are simply the rational and inevitable response to Gareth’s obnoxiousness. As Tim puts it, following a chain of events in which he casts Gareth’s stapler in a gelatin mold and finally tosses it out the window, “This is what you drive me to, mate.” Tim’s detachment from his surroundings is perhaps most pointedly illustrated by one of his signature habits, shared only by David, that functions to foreground the show’s documentary framework. Frequently during scenes shot in the observational style (that is, scenes not framed as interviews with the characters), someone like David or Gareth will make a patently absurd or offensive statement that Tim feels it is pointless or ill advised to respond to directly. Instead, he will glance at the camera with an expression that mixes knowingness, bemusement, and a degree of helplessness. Tim’s consistent expression at these moments seems to communicate to the film crew as well as to a projected viewer of the documentary, “You get it, right? And you see what I have to deal with here?” David’s direct looks at the camera are quite different from Tim’s. David casts furtive, sidelong glances at the camera when he seeks to either ensure that his “best” moments are being captured for posterity, or at nervous moments when he worries that his ideal self-image may be unraveling. David looks into the camera to gauge how he is being perceived, an extension of perhaps his most central character trait and personal obsession: wanting everyone in the office to like him, to view him as a fun-loving and benevolent boss, a “chilled-out entertainer” (in his own words). In other words, for David, the camera looks in on him and his domain. Tim looks at the camera for reasons that are almost the inverse of David’s. He does so to

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register his own detachment from the world around him, from Gareth and David and the whole office environment in which he feels he is wasting his years.25 I mentioned earlier how the visual motif of windows in The Office signifies not an expanded view but rather an obstruction of view. Little can be seen through them, indicating thematically how severely limited is the characters’ sense of possibility beyond the daily routines of their office jobs. The camera, in a sense, becomes for Tim what the windows in the office cannot be. The documentary camera is conventionally understood to provide a “window into the world,” offering viewers access to an environment that is often unfamiliar to them. For David, the camera functions as a window to his world in a way that he alternately finds gratifying and anxiety provoking. For Tim, the camera does not function primarily as a window into the world, but rather as a window out of the world of this office, signifying an expansion of his view and sense of possibility. These moments of looking outward also confirm Tim’s position as primary point of viewer identification. As the smart and affable, funny “everyman” character, Tim is positioned within the narrative as the likable alternative to David, who is the show’s central figure but who thwarts viewer identification. These moments, in which Tim’s gaze at the camera reminds the viewer of the documentary framework and the absence of the “fourth wall,” invoke a spectator’s documentary consciousness. Viewer identification with Tim at these moments does not function to suture the viewer into the text. Rather, they represent another way that the show opens up its diegesis to Sobchack’s “lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text”: Tim’s direct and knowing glance at us implies that we both occupy a shared lifeworld. Tim’s gaze outward thus contributes to how the show’s documentary premise, the real footage of Slough used in the opening credits, its representation of the quotidian experience of white-collar office work, and its construction for the viewer of a lived sense of temporality all function to connect the world of the show to our own world. Tim copes with his work life through a strategy of detachment, which is precisely what is difficult for the spectator to maintain: Our bodily reaction to the cringe comedy is rooted in our documentary consciousness. Recognizing this world as our own makes it impossible for us to sustain the comfortable position from which we can remind ourselves that it is “only a fiction.” This effect provides an answer to the question posed by some critics and viewers: Why on earth would anyone want to make a documentary about this office in the first place? The answer is that no one would, because the vast majority of documentaries create their own forms of escapism as windows into worlds and lives intended to provoke and sustain for the middle-class viewer the “epistephilia” attributed by Bill Nichols to documentary spectatorship.26 The Office offers a very different phenomenology: This is what your life feels like; here are scenes that you wish to end, from which you wish to turn away.

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FROM CRUEL OPTIMISM TO A HAPPY ENDING At the end of the “Training” episode in season one, Tim simultaneously announces in frustration that he will quit his job and asks Dawn out for a date, mistakenly believing that she has broken off her engagement to her fiancé, Lee. But Tim is gently refused in front of everyone in the office. Two episodes later, in “Judgment” (the season one finale), a failed medical exam prevents David from accepting a promotion to an upper-level corporate position. David’s failed promotion prevents the Slough branch from being closed down and absorbed into another office. David offers Tim a promotion in order to convince him to stay as well—which Tim accepts, leading to a marked change in his personality. Tim’s commitment to Wernham Hogg following his rejection by Dawn might be seen as a gesture of resignation: If he cannot be with Dawn, and share with her the experience of ironic detachment toward the workplace, then why not shift his affective register? Why not make an engaged commitment to his career that will at least profit him in terms of salary and the (modest) status of “senior sales clerk”? For the viewer, however, Tim’s affective shift toward a “professional” relation with his work is framed as distinctly undesirable. Tim’s newfound commitment represents his movement away from the “cruel optimism” instantiated by his dream of returning to university. The ensuing change in his character foregrounds Berlant’s point that, however fantasmatic the object, a person “might not endure well the loss of their object/scene of desire.”27 Tim’s transformation ruptures the incipient romance between Tim and Dawn—a plot that taps into viewing pleasures rooted in conventional genre and narrative expectations. The show suggests that the relationship that we desire to see realized is only possible when Tim remains at an impasse—neither leaving Wernham Hogg for university, nor committing himself at an “affective and relational” level to his job. At the end of the “Judgment” episode, Tim sits alone at the club where David has raised everyone’s spirits by announcing that he turned down the corporate promotion, thus saving everyone’s jobs.28 Watching Dawn dance with Lee, he appears dejected. Dawn comes over to join him and asks when he will be leaving for university. Explaining to Dawn that he has changed his plans after accepting the promotion, Tim resorts uncharacteristically to the sort of semicoherent corporate jargon that David frequently employs—the type of jargon that would normally provoke one of Tim’s deadpan glances at the camera. After explaining to Dawn how he’ll be making more money and that “with a bit of networking” he might be promoted to a management position like David’s, Tim goes on to describe how “moving up can mean within an internal ladder framework, or sideways to external, and then up. You know, you got to look at the whole pie, vis-à-vis my current life situation, you know?” Dawn smirks a bit and laughs while repeating some of Tim’s buzzwords, expecting that he may be using them ironically. But Tim resolutely refuses

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irony, substituting for it a conventionally professional attitude: He offers Dawn a tight-lipped smile and suggests that she should apply for his old job. Tim’s affect in this scene is described well by Berlant as a “recession grimace”: “somewhere between a frown, a smile, and a tightened lip.” As more and more people watch their “dreams become foreclosed on in material and fantasmatic ways, the grimace produces another layer of face to create a space of delay while the subject and world adjust to how profoundly fantasmatic the good-life dreams were, after all.”29 The scene ends with Tim dragged willingly, and symbolically, onto the dance floor by David and other celebrating employees. The camera lingers for a long take on Dawn’s face, registering first a kind of bemused surprise, which deepens into disappointment and loneliness. In the first few episodes of season two, Dawn makes an effort to sustain the distinctive qualities of their relationship by attempting to inject ironic humor and shared in-jokes to their workday routines. What David calls Tim’s “new leaf,” however, means a brusque detachment from these older forms of relation with Dawn. He patronizingly brushes off her humor, and even pulls rank on her, lightly reprimanding her for being away from the reception desk when new employees from the Swindon branch are arriving. When Tim develops a relationship with Rachel, one of these new employees, Dawn’s jealousy is particularly piqued when she sees Tim and Rachel sharing practical jokes on David or Gareth.30 A turning point for Dawn and Tim in season two comes when Tim approaches Dawn’s desk, seeming to display his newfound reserve. But he proceeds to pull out his appointment book and explain with a straight face that he has a little time open in his schedule that day for “winding up Gareth with Dawn.” Thus, he frames an invitation to their old games within a businesslike discourse. Tim’s relationship to professionalism following his promotion is a kind of dialectical process. At first he embraces it thoroughly, negating his earlier position of ironic detachment within which his flirtation with Dawn thrived. But, as season two progresses, he synthesizes a continued commitment to working harder and taking on more responsibility with sustaining the ironic detachment that prevents him from making an affective commitment of his personality to his career—thus reopening the prospect for his relationship with Dawn. But Tim’s relation to Dawn bears the structure of cruel optimism as well. Unhappy with his actual relationship with Rachel, Tim breaks it off in order to return to a state of perpetual promise and deferral in his flirtation with Dawn—who remains engaged to Lee. A realized relationship with Dawn is homologous to the return to university. Both are ideals that sustain his “sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.”31 But neither really feels possible to act upon immediately, and, moreover, the two prospects also seem mutually exclusive. Tim can only attempt to make real a relationship with Dawn when his hand is forced: In the final episode of season two, he learns unexpectedly that Dawn is leaving the office for a six-month stay in Florida with Lee.

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Tim makes an effort to prevent this from happening by confessing his true feelings. The scene features a stylistic device that goes on to become central for moments of affective intensity in the American adaptation of the show. Realizing that he is truly facing a now-or-never situation, Tim interrupts an interview in which he characteristically describes his own lack of agency with regard to Dawn’s plans. “You can’t change circumstances,” he says, then pauses thoughtfully, and abruptly excuses himself, gets up, and walks rapidly toward Dawn’s desk. The remainder of the scene dramatically highlights the show’s documentary framework by foregrounding its potential limitations in capturing a significant event. Signifying the camera operator’s ostensible surprise at Tim’s sudden action, the frame becomes shaky and the camera rushes forward, employing a quick zoom and refocusing in an attempt to keep Tim in the frame. Tim gets to Dawn’s desk and quickly ushers her into a meeting room, where he closes the door and turns off his mic. We watch a scene that we understand to be his heartfelt attempt to change her mind with no sound, our view obscured by the glass and partly closed blinds. Although formal elements of the show generally remind us of its documentary framework, this scene foregrounds that framework in a more extreme and jarring way, disrupting the show’s established rhythms of representation. For Sobchack, documentary consciousness emerges through formal incongruities and ruptures that provoke the viewer’s sense of “the space of the irreal [transformed] into the space of the real.”32 This scene creates a formal rupture in which the representational system momentarily breaks down, and the viewer is barred from access to dialogue that is deeply significant to the narrative. In doing so, it indicates the prospect of an affective shift for the characters. The camera’s inability to fully capture the action becomes a signifier for the prospect of an emotional connection between the characters based upon immediacy, spontaneity, and being in the present—all qualities that would run counter to the temporalities of monotony, deferral, and cruel optimism. But the episode will not end on this note. Instead, Tim leaves the conference room, walks quietly back to his desk, turns on his mic and, with a quick glance at the camera, tersely explains, “She said no, by the way.” This season-ending moment of failure is juxtaposed to another failure, in which David himself is made “redundant.” After a series of warnings by his immediate supervisors Neil and Jennifer based on his inappropriate behavior, incompetent management style, and inability to complete assigned tasks, the threat of downsizing with which the show begins finally has a direct impact on David himself. In an appropriately awkward scene, David, with tears in his eyes, drops his sarcastic façade and resorts to begging Neil and Jennifer, “Don’t make me redundant.” David fails to keep his job, and the worst thing about it for him is the realization that life in the office will continue with little change. Even before his formal firing, David has reason to anticipate that the ax could fall. He makes the rounds of the office, offers

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unsolicited consolation to his employees over his potential departure, and (insincerely) discourages them from leaving their own jobs in protest. But he is met only with polite indifference and the business of their daily routines, the same routines that Tim quietly resumes after his rejection by Dawn. As Berlant argues in a brief mention of The Office in a footnote in Cruel Optimism, the show can be described as a “situation tragedy,” a genre that “describes episodes of personality caught up in a form of despair not existential or heroic but shaped within the stresses of ordinary life under capitalism.”33 Ejected from his “fantasmatic place as the funniest good boss imaginable,” David can only be an embarrassment when he continually returns to hang around the office, “a figure for everyone’s potential ejection into the social death of no work and no love.”34 Berlant refers here to the events depicted in a two-part “Christmas Special” that aired following the completion of the show’s two full seasons. In this episode, the show opens up its diegesis to a broader representation of the world outside of the office, but, as Berlant suggests, this world is shown to contain little hope or possibility for David. He gets by in two different but equally humiliating ways: He is a sales representative for a company that sells cleaning products to businesses, and so, operates in the same world of drab office parks but on a much lower rung in the hierarchy. At the same time, he attempts to capitalize on the ambiguous form of celebrity he has attained through the broadcast of the documentary about him and the office. To the extent that people recognize him from the “telly” at all, however, they regard him as a buffoon—and he is perpetually drawn back to the safe space of Wernham Hogg. When David visits the office, and when Dawn returns midway through the episode from her stay in the U.S., mise-en-scène and dialogue emphasize one point in particular, nothing changes. As Dawn says, making small talk and getting reacquainted with everyone, “Well, this is. . . all the same.” What does change in the Christmas special, however, is that the show’s emotional tone shifts significantly from the bleak social critique of the original two seasons. In the second part of the Christmas episode, the show allows for the satisfaction of viewer expectations much more conventional to serial and episodic television. Identification with characters becomes easier, and, by contrast to the final episode of season two, we are allowed a modestly happy ending. The mean streak that we always suspected lay beneath Neil’s nice-guy persona is made explicit; he attempts to humiliate David by building everyone’s expectations that David will bring a date to the party when he actually expects him to show up alone.35 But David has in fact met a kind, attractive, and intelligent woman who likes him and attends the party with him. Upon their entrance, a quite deliberate zoom-in on Neil’s surprised and disappointed reaction offers viewers a conventional moment of satisfaction at his comeuppance. David, in turn, redeems himself through his incipient relationship with this very appealing new character, Carol. As Tara Brabazon points out, David breaks from his normal participation in sexist and racist

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discourse by defending Carol when his perpetually offensive friend Finchy calls her a “dog,” and “walk[s] away from the masculine circle of innuendo and sleaze.”36 These two moments offer relief from awkwardness and allow us to identify with David with a degree of comfort never previously possible. Where season two ends with back-to-back scenes depicting Dawn’s rejection of Tim and David’s firing, the Christmas episode ends in a parallel but affectively inverted manner. Following the scene of David’s redemption, Dawn makes an eleventh-hour decision to finally break up with Lee. She returns to the office party, where she wordlessly embraces Tim, and the two leave, hand-in-hand. In a brief coda, we are offered shots of the office staff, smiling, talking, and dancing happily with one another. The final image of the show depicts David and the staff posing for a group photo; David tells a joke that gets a genuine laugh. If The Office can be described as a “situation tragedy,” its final scenes’ character redemption, heterosexual coupling, and group sentiment offer a more conventionally comic ending that softens the forms of social critique I have discussed. In this way, the ending foreshadows the direction in which the American adaptation takes the show’s concept.

THE AMERICAN OFFICE: FROM AWKWARD MOMENTS TO INTIMATE BELONGING As compared to the British version, The American Office contains more conventionally comic logical absurdities and plot elements that strain the plausibility of the diegesis.37 Moreover, boss Michael Scott might himself seem a rather implausible character—both in terms of his promotion to boss in the first place, and his surprising moments of success as a manager despite his seemingly imbecilic qualities. But the show’s apparent forms of implausibility point to differences from the British version in its mode of spectatorship and its commentary on corporate culture. When Michael finally leaves Scranton (the small city in Pennsylvania that serves as the U.S. version of Slough) and the show itself at the end of season seven, he does so as an almost beloved figure—but not because he has ever really become a consistently good manager. Rather, it is because his unwavering optimism and identification with a fantasy of himself as a great boss allow him to sometimes draw others into his fantasy in a way that David Brent can never manage to do. Michael is initially presented as a character largely in the mold of David, an unbearably awkward and obnoxious figure whose insensitivities on issues such as workplace diversity even earn him a well-deserved slap in the face from a female Indian-American employee in an early episode. But, as the show develops over the seven seasons featuring Michael, it suggests his unexpected ability to succeed in ways that David Brent never can. He dispels for a majority of his employees the ideal of a different (better) future by making them ultimately like him and one another (often in spite

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of themselves). He converts his own role as lighting rod for awkward and difficult interpersonal encounters into a communal, even familial workplace environment. Michael becomes a center of gravity around which friendships, relationships, and forms of personal happiness and satisfaction develop and coalesce as the show progresses. Despite a number of temporary departures or threats of departure, all of the major characters remain in or return to the office. The British version depicts Tim’s time in Slough as rooted in the perpetual deferrals of cruel optimism. By contrast, in the American version, characters like Jim and Pam (this version’s Tim and Dawn) who let go of their prospects for outside opportunities and remain in Scranton are rewarded with greater happiness. Only in the eighth and ninth seasons, following Michael’s departure, does the office community begin to fragment. This fragmentation is most visible in marriage problems between Jim and Pam. Michael Scott creates both the problems and their solutions: workplace conflict and alienation on the one hand, but also the authentically felt group affection that is shown to supersede these other problems. The show suggests that the problem isn’t Michael demanding of his staff a commitment of, as Weeks puts it, its “thoughts, imagination, relationships, and affects.”38 Rather, the problem is that Michael frequently just gets it wrong; he misunderstands the management principles he is meant to apply and creates problems rather than solving them. As the show progresses, however, Michael is shown to mature and his instincts to prove increasingly correct. His emphasis on shared creative projects, parties, and the general infusion of work with play foster not only workplace success but important personal relationships as well. This thematic contrast between the British and American versions is connected to differences in the two shows’ intended modes of spectatorship. If the cringe embodies the experience of watching the British Office’s satire of workplace alienation, the American version mediates this response with much more conventional forms of viewer identification. We are positioned to understand and share the feelings, hopes, and goals of psychologically developed characters—even Michael Scott himself. The season four episode titled “Local Ad” exemplifies how the show invokes the British version’s characteristic awkwardness but then provides resolutions for it rooted in forms of feeling, in the affective possibilities of a workplace “family.” As one viewer put it in a YouTube comment on the episode, “It seems like I watch the show for the characters now, not the humor. I genuinely feel happy whenever Michael feels happy.”39 The start of the episode evokes a familiar cringe rooted in one of Michael’s comic character flaws: his misunderstanding of workplace diversity issues. The show frequently uses Michael to satirize the “political correctness” (or lack of substance) in corporate “sensitivity” training. Michael will attempt to employ the discourse associated with multicultural awareness, but his awkward butchering of this discourse leads him to be even more insulting.

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In an early scene, Michael meets a pair of video producers hired by Dunder Mifflin corporate headquarters to create a television ad for the office. The producers are young and from New York City; one is white and one Asian-American. In short, they embody Michael’s own ideal of hipness and diversity, and he attempts to impress them accordingly—with predictably painful results. After first explaining to the bemused but polite producers that he wants the video to be “cutting edge,” “youthful,” and “like MTV on crack,” Michael proceeds to introduce members of his staff in ways that cause increasing consternation for the newcomers. Standing behind a middle-aged, reclusive African-American employee named Stanley, Michael places his hands on Stanley’s shoulders and claims that he is “the key to [their] urban vibe.” When Stanley protests with irritation that he grew up in a small town and challenges Michael to explain what seems “urban” about him, Michael can only dismiss Stanley’s question by patting him on the shoulder and asserting that, “Stanley is hilarious.” In other words, Michael completely misses Stanley’s deconstruction of the euphemism.40 He assumes that Stanley is simply making a faux-naïve joke premised upon a literalization of the term (rather than refusing Michael’s racial interpellation). As Michael proceeds to create a series of awkward moments like this one, the show repeatedly cuts to reaction shots of the two producers, looking more and more uncomfortable and put off by Michael’s offensive remarks. These reaction shots create a comic effect similar to Michael Moore’s deadpan reaction to (Terry’s brother) James Nichols that I discuss in Chapter One. The producers serve as diegetic proxies for the viewer’s own discomfort with Michael, and would thereby seem to be positioned as points of identification for us. But narrative elements of the episode (characteristic of the show as a whole) undermine this seemingly more appropriate locus of viewer identification, positioning us to root for Michael once he dissociates himself from the professional producers and vows to create his own competing Dunder Mifflin commercial. The episode demonstrates Michael’s unexpected success in making everyone in the office happy with the resulting video, as well as with their own participation in its creation. This success contributes to the show’s effort to make the viewer feel happy for Michael as well, in spite of our discomfort with his awkward and offensive qualities. Numerous effusive user comments about the episode on YouTube indicate the success of this effort. The show’s narrative and affective qualities, then, run counter to the British version’s depiction of tedious and uncreative labor that lags hopelessly behind the idealized qualities of the information-age workplace. In the American Office, Michael succeeds in fashioning an affective “family” among his employees. By affirming their relationships with one another and identifying with their roles in projects like Michael’s video, they adhere, however awkwardly and imperfectly, to the ideal of professionalism. They commit their personalities and imaginations to their work, despite the

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threat of downsizing introduced in the first episode and sustained by plot reminders that they work within an increasingly obsolete business model to distribute a product that is itself threatened with obsolescence. It might seem surprising to suggest that the show’s assorted comic characters adhere to a model of professionalism, but it is worth noting that the show periodically inserts reminders that the “numbers,” or sales figures, from this branch office remain consistently high—contrary to the expectations of both the viewer and the corporate higher-ups. The commercial made by the professional video producers is quite realistic as the sort of modestly budgeted ad one would see for a regional business on the local television market. It is technically and aesthetically competent but derivative and unremarkable in its gag structure. The episode depicts Michael’s efforts to create his competing video to submit to the corporate office, with a typical series of pratfalls and frustrations leading us to expect that the results will be disastrous. The video itself is withheld from the viewer until the very end of the episode, after we have already learned that corporate chose the professional video over Michael’s. The episode would seem to suggest that the viewer should share the producers’ perspective on Michael and his endeavors: We feel the same awkwardness they feel in the face of Michael’s offensive comments toward his employees, and we are led to believe that their video, while unremarkable, must be considerably better than whatever Michael has come up with. But the show invokes the possibility of viewer identification with the producers only to subsequently dispel it. This repositioning of the spectator is accomplished through a final scene depicting the office staff watching Michael’s ad; the scene exemplifies the show’s overarching representation of the workplace as a personally fulfilling environment for its employees. The depiction of the video and the staff’s reaction to it represents a formal condensation of the ideological operation performed by the show more broadly: its reconciliation of seemingly contradictory positions of social satire, on the one hand, and affective investment in the social status quo on the other. The staff has gathered at a bar to catch the broadcast of the professional commercial. Much to Michael’s dismay, everyone quite enjoys it, and a couple of quick reaction shots of the group depict them showing particular pleasure at seeing themselves onscreen in the ad’s final shots. Fulfilling his role as the “nice guy” of the cast, Jim asks the bartender to put on a DVD featuring Michael’s version, announcing it as “the premiere of the real Dunder Mifflin commercial, Michael Scott director’s cut.” The aesthetics of the commercial represent Michael’s amateurish effort to reproduce the style of television ads for corporations like Microsoft, ads that depict the seamless and personally fulfilling integration of the product into the daily lives of a diverse contemporary populace. But the video’s potential to critically parody contemporary corporate PR is muted by its narrative and affective functions: The scene demonstrates the characters’ deep satisfaction in their own roles in the video, a satisfaction that serves as synecdoche for their overall job satisfaction. While the characters enjoy

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the professional video, they are shown to identify with Michael’s video as their own; it represents for them a product of the workplace as personally and creatively fulfilling environment. By making available to the viewer an emotional investment in the characters’ reactions, the scene reinforces this ideology affectively—a point demonstrated by countless user comments on YouTube clips featuring the scene. The scene constructs a homology between the staff as represented in the video and the staff as spectators of the video. In both positions, they are individualized but also shown to be parts of a greater whole, a team. Using inspirational voiceover narration and the theme music from Chariots of Fire, the video makes a case for the value of Dunder Mifflin’s “limitless paper in a paperless world”; the tagline is an effort to articulate an inspiring defense against the threat of obsolescence. It is also a perfect illustration of the wordplay and chiasmus typical of corporate sloganeering, and of the vacuousness of such messages. In the video, the staff portrays a diverse group of characters in a series of brief vignettes in which paper plays a life-enhancing role. Paper products symbolically connect these various individuals across distances of time and space; a match on action cut follows the trajectory of a paper airplane thrown from an office window in Scranton and caught by a woman in India (which is to say, an Indian-American employee of the office, green-screened [poorly] against a backdrop of the Taj Mahal.) Following each vignette, we cut to reaction shots of the featured staff member, displaying pleasure and pride in his or her performance in the video. Finally, as the video ends, the camera zooms out to reveal the whole staff as it bursts into happy applause (see Figure 5.3). The music from the video comes to underscore the emotional tenor of the group’s collective response. The characters in Michael’s video are symbolically linked by paper; the characters in The Office are, in turn, an assortment of distinctive individuals that form a community linked by paper as their vocation.

Figure 5.3

Collective good feeling among Michael Scott’s staff (The Office [NBC]).

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The scene has the potential to simultaneously mock corporate aesthetics, a character whose aspiration to artistry means a clumsy emulation of these aesthetics, and a staff naïve enough to be inspired by the video’s patent mediocrity. Indeed, the British version might lean more in these directions. My argument, however, is that the American Office is premised upon three interrelated forms of transmutation that significantly alter the effects of the British version. As I explain at the start of this chapter, these three transmutations occur at the levels of plot, spectatorship, and in formal elements of the show’s construction. In the plot, Michael transforms workplace unhappiness into job satisfaction and a sense of intimate community. The spectator’s cringe frequently turns into a pleasurable identification with the characters and their moments of happiness. At a formal level, the show’s affective force is premised upon shifting registers between an aesthetic of documentary realism and elements that strain the plausibility of its quotidian diegesis. This shifting can move in either direction: That is, moments when the characters are most happy can be signaled by a stretching of diegetic plausibility or by a deliberate foregrounding of the show’s documentary framework. The generation of greater affect for the viewer is, in turn, rooted in how these moments shift his or her phenomenological experience of spectatorship. Sobchack’s analysis of documentary consciousness describes “diverse and variable experiences in which we engage with the cinema as both fiction and documentary—very often in relation to the same film.”41 As I have discussed, her essay focuses in particular on moments when the space of the “irreal” is transformed for the spectator into the space of the real. But her description of the permeability of these categories points toward my argument that the American Office premises some of its most significant narrative and thematic effects upon shifting the viewer’s consciousness back and forth. As Sobchack writes, “what the terms ‘fiction’ and ‘documentary’ designate are an experienced difference in our mode of consciousness, our attention toward and our valuation of the cinematic objects we engage.”42 Paul Ward gets it right when he describes the British Office’s “sustained plausibility,” but this phrase is suggestive of more than simply how the show’s comedy works. The fact that it does not tend to shift formal and affective registers in the same manner as the American version43 helps to sustain the distinctive mode of spectatorship linked to its critical perspective on contemporary white-collar office work. In the American Office, on the other hand, the shifts defuse the awkwardness and mediate the show’s critical potential with conventional forms of narrative pleasure and viewer identification with characters. Generic factors contribute to this difference, as well. The British Office consists of two seasons (or series) of six episodes each, followed by the Christmas special finale. The American version, on the other hand, ran for a total of nine seasons, each averaging twenty-six to twenty-eight episodes. Operating within the episodic form of the traditional sitcom, its extended run

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and popularity has contributed to its foregrounding of sitcom conventions less apparent in the British version. The British Office could thus function more as a televisual experiment in mockumentary form. In the American version, for example, the romantic tension between Jim and Pam is stretched out over the first three seasons, until Jim finally makes his feelings clear in the season three finale. Their dating continues for two more seasons, until they are finally married and have a baby in season six. The “will-they-orwon’t-they” structure of the couple’s romantic arc was frequently compared to the iconic romance between Sam and Diane of the beloved 1980s sitcom Cheers, demonstrating how the development of conventional plot structures and viewer identification with characters has often superseded the social satire characteristic of the British original. The American Office’s shifts among different degrees of realism are manifested in narrative elements as well as stylistic effects. In the “Local Ad” episode, the two outside characters (the video producers) in a sense anchor the episode in greater diegetic realism. Their pained responses to Michael’s offensive comments toward his employees provoke the viewer who finds Michael funny to remember how difficult actually working for him would be. Their video, while pedestrian, is much more convincing than Michael’s as a viable product for television broadcast: From its use of immediately recognizable copyrighted music to its staging of absurd scenarios in a highly sentimentalized manner, Michael’s video clearly would not “work” in the real world. In this sense, the decision by the corporate office to air the other video increases the episode’s realism. But the way in which the video is intercut with happy reaction shots of all the major characters charges our response to it with affective investments that have been developed through multiple story arcs over the course of several seasons. Many of the comments on various clips of this scene on YouTube demonstrate how viewers experience it at a deeply emotional level, in which, crucially, a strong identification with the characters translates to an ability to appreciate Michael’s video. Wanting the characters to be happy, viewers are able to, in effect, see the video through their eyes. As I mention earlier, one viewer describes watching the show for the “characters, not the humor,” and feeling genuinely happy when Michael is happy. Others describe emotional, even tearful, reactions to the scene: “i seriously teared up when i saw this, its perfection, and i really wish i lived in that world, my favorite show ever”; “that made me cry for some reason.” A large number of comments argue for the quality of Michael’s video and describe how much they prefer it to the professional video: “If only real advertisers put that much work into it and made a commercial as great as that!”; “One of the most Inspiring and creative ad ever created, wish this would really be on TV”; “This commercial was undoubtedly better than the ones the pros did.” 44 With his video, Michael constructs a fantasy of himself and his office staff as an innovative and creative “team” in the post-Fordist mode. The product

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in question undoubtedly signifies the industrial past, but the video bundles this product in a simulacrum of information-age, globalized aesthetics and ideology. The video’s tagline, “Limitless paper in a paperless world,” is, of course, contradictory, even incoherent. But the very overcoming of contradiction promised by the form of the statement mimics the logic of much contemporary corporate PR that offers us product-based resolutions to the problems of past and present and a technologized path to the future. At this moment in the episode, Michael’s staff loses its frustrations with him and the process of making the video. They identify deeply with the video’s form and message, and the evidence of their own creative labor. If the viewer invested in the narrative and character development in the show’s larger arc follows the episode’s cues to identify with the characters’ happy reactions, then he or she effectively enters into Michael’s fantasy. Not only do we like the way that the characters like the video, but we may simply experience liking the video ourselves—like the fans on YouTube. The episode constructs two mutually imbricated forms of transmutation. The viewer’s discomfort with Michael and potential identification with the professional video producers dissolves into identification with Michael and the collegial warmth and sense of accomplishment occasioned by the video. In turn, the show’s potential for satire of corporate culture is transformed into an almost celebratory vision of aspiration based on a contemporary model of professionalism. These structures of identification depend upon straining plausibility and diegetic realism. Based on our knowledge of the show’s characters, we might expect at least some of them to display a more bemused appreciation of Michael’s video, with its derivative aesthetic sensibility and logical absurdities. But the scene’s intense investment of affect in the characters’ reactions in turn conditions disavowal in the viewer’s response: We know perfectly well that the video isn’t good, but we like it and feel an emotional response to it anyway. Other episodes provide further examples of how emotional experience for characters and viewer is often linked to implausible plot elements that strain diegetic realism. For example, in the season six episode, “Secret Santa,” the members of the staff have all been assigned to one another for anonymous Christmas gifting. A gag early in the episode depicts receptionist Erin, with visible wounds and bandages on her face, announcing to the office that whoever is attempting to literally enact for her “the Twelve Days of Christmas” must stop: The numerous calling birds, french hens, turtle doves, and other animals are ruining her house, attacking her cats, etc. Quick cuts to an interview with Andy (who harbors a crush on Erin) and shots of him attempting to corral a bevy of swans into Erin’s compact car reveal not only that he is responsible for the “gift” but that he remains enthusiastic about it and impervious to Erin’s distress. The implausibility of anyone actually attempting and succeeding in pulling off a stunt like this seems to make the moment a throwaway gag that would have no place in the more realistic British version of the show. The episode’s plot follows a trajectory similar to that of “Local Ad” and many

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other episodes: Michael displays characteristically bad behavior (in this case being openly resentful because someone else has been chosen to play Santa in the Christmas party), but then redeems himself and creates a space of communal good feeling by the episode’s end. Another threat of downsizing and job loss dispelled for the time being, the staff celebrates with general good will, and the episode concludes by reintroducing the “Twelve Days of Christmas” gag. But the affective structure of the gag is transformed in this final scene into an almost magical moment that unites the staff in surprise and wonder: As they leave the party, smiling and chatting, they are greeted in the snowy parking lot by Andy and his “twelve drummers drumming.” Panning across the smiling faces and bobbing heads of the group, the episode’s final shot positions this implausible stunt as a moment of emotional investment for characters and viewer, a perfect end to the evening and a gift to the whole office. Tara Brabazon makes the important point that the workers in the British Office have, in effect, no private life: “We never see their homes, families, or children . . . [t]he domestic sphere is irrelevant, with the ruthlessness of career jealousies and capitalism slicing away private lives.” The constant threat of downsizing, combined with the technological innovations that make it impossible to ever truly leave work behind, transform the “workaholic” from pathology to normative standard.45 While the British Office presents a critical view of this erosion of boundaries between public and private, work and life, the American Office frequently presents this very erosion as the enabling condition for communitarian goodwill and affective possibility. Scenes I have described, such as the outing at the bar to watch Michael’s video and the office Christmas party, do not include spouses, children, or friends. For the most part in the Office, the staff members fulfill these roles for one another. The American Office offers an imaginary resolution to the problem Brabazon describes—the colonization of private life by work. In the show, private life can find its most emotionally invested and fulfilling expression literally inside the workplace itself. The successful, emotionally rendered relationship between Jim and Pam suggests that an office might be an ideal location for the inception of a new family. This point is made even more succinctly in a single sequence from the season seven episode, “Garage Sale,” in which Michael proposes marriage to Holly, his girlfriend and coworker. In this sequence, Michael maps the narrative of his and Holly’s relationship across otherwise quotidian spatial coordinates in the office. He walks Holly through the office, pausing at a doorway, a spot in the stairwell, the water cooler, and so on, and reminds her of pivotal moments in their intimacy: the place where he first saw her, where they first kissed, where they first made love. These spatial coordinates are normally marked only by the regimented and cyclical temporalities of the workday, spaces where not much happens other than repetitive tasks and watching the clock. But Michael reinvests these spaces with the significance of an intimate narrative

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Figure 5.4 The office as site of heterosexual romance and collective sentiment (The Office [NBC]).

constructed from a series of singular moments in time. The second phase of Michael’s proposal further situates a conventionally private moment within the public constituted by the office and its staff. Michael leads Holly through a doorway behind which the entire staff stands, holding candles and forming a kind of gauntlet. Following Michael’s plan, each member of the staff proposes marriage to Holly, allowing her to turn all of them down until she and Michael pass into a candlelit room where he finally makes his proposal. Although separated from Michael and Holly by a door, the staff remains present to this moment, visible through the glass in a reverse shot as they look on excitedly. Once Holly accepts the proposal, everyone bursts through the door and shares hugs and congratulations with the couple (see Figure 5.4). The scene offers the same communal ideal of the staff as family that we see when they watch Michael’s video together or enjoy a happy resolution to a difficult Christmas party. The breakdown between public and private is figured in this sequence as a condition of possibility for heterosexual intimacy infused with the sentiment of group belonging. While this scene is infused with romantic fantasy, it does not strain plausibility to quite the extent of Michael’s video or the Twelve Days of Christmas. All of these scenes, however, generate an emotional charge for the viewer by shifting registers from awkward humor rooted in more realistic workplace conflict and tedium to idealized forms of intimacy and community. The show’s affirmation of the workplace as privileged site for the production of these forms of feeling is signaled at a formal level by shifts among different registers of documentary realism. Thus far, I’ve focused on scenes that shift away from realism, but an equal number of significant scenes emphasize their

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emotional significance by foregrounding the show’s documentary aesthetic. One of the most notable scenes of this nature is another, earlier marriage proposal: Jim to Pam, fulfilling the long will-they-or-won’t-they story arc. Pam has moved to New York City to study art, and it puts a strain on their relationship. They regularly meet at halfway points to see one another. Toward the end of the two-part, season five premiere episode, “Weight Loss,” the show cuts from a comic scene set in the office to a long shot of a freeway gas station in the rain, shot from the other side of the road. The camera reframes and zooms in to bring Jim and Pam into frame as he gets out of his car to meet her, then stuns her by going down on one knee to make his proposal—which, of course, she accepts with joy (see Figure 5.5). The way the scene is shot foregrounds the limitations of the camera view. Although it is a moment of huge emotional and narrative payoff for the viewer, it is brief, and the documentary-style framing distances us spatially from the characters. We are reminded of the embodied perspective of the diegetic camera, even as we share in Jim and Pam’s intimate moment. The spatial distance that provokes an experience of documentary consciousness for the viewer, however, actually increases our sense of the moment’s intimacy. Because of the awkward, voyeuristic perspective, the moment does not feel staged for us; it links a feeling of authenticity to emotional impact. Formally, the scene evokes the obstructed view of Tim’s confession of his feelings to Dawn in the British version. The two scenes’ formal parallelism, however, reveals a diametrical opposition at the thematic and emotional levels that characterizes greater differences between the two shows: One scene represents romantic failure, the other, success and happiness.

Figure 5.5 Jim’s proposal to Pam foregrounds the documentary framework (The Office [NBC]).

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The season seven episode, “Goodbye, Michael” pulls out all the stops in investing Michael’s departure with an emotional impact. Specifically, it draws from both strategies I have outlined: The sentimentalized representation of collective intimacy in the workplace, and a foregrounding of the documentary framework that enhances our sense of a scene’s emotional significance (through a strategy of spatial/aural distancing). The latter approach is used when Pam, the character who over the years has grown closest to Michael, barely catches him at the airport for a final goodbye. Michael has already removed his wireless mic and returned it to the diegetic crew. As he walks away from the camera toward his gate, Pam runs into the frame and we witness their brief farewell, silently, in a long shot. With the total lack of audio distancing us much more fully from the scene than is the case with Jim’s proposal to Pam, the show reinscribes a private intimacy to the relationship between Michael and Pam—begun as an awkward and unpleasant boss-secretary relation and developed over the show’s many seasons into a true friendship. In other words, the scene represents a fitting capstone to the show’s imaginary resolution to the colonization of private life by work. The absence of a private life for the characters in the British Office contributes to the show’s bleak satire, but in the American version, the workplace staff is reconfigured as an intimate and even familial group. The erosion of boundaries between public and private, then, is not a problematic symptom of contemporary corporate ideology and workplace practices, but rather a site of affective possibility. In a final turn of the screw, the boss-secretary relationship has gained such intimate significance that it must be made private through its exclusion from the documentary representation. Michael and Pam’s parting words are privileged by this representational strategy, and when Pam, on camera again, explains what Michael said as they embraced, we sense that she withholds something intimate and important from us. The representational strategy in this final farewell scene enacts the sentiment Michael expresses in a voiceover that accompanies shots of him leaving the office and checking in at the airport. Reflecting upon how Holly and the children they will have are his family now, Michael thoughtfully concludes, “The people you work with are just, when you get down to it . . . your very best friends.” The initial form of the sentence implies that Michael will realize that his incipient family is his true family, and that the people you work with are “just people you work with.” The joke in Michael’s reversal of the expected conclusion to the statement reveals, of course, the truth of the show’s representation of the intimate rewards of the workplace. These intimate rewards are manifest in a scene toward the end of Michael’s penultimate episode, “Michael’s Last Dundies.” Like Michael’s proposal to Holly, this scene emphasizes how Michael has become a source of communal good feeling among the staff. Following the awkward humor of Michael’s annual office awards ceremony (the “Dundies”), Michael and his managerial trainee Deangelo Vickers return to the office where they find

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the staff assembled in the meeting room. As a gesture of thanks and farewell to Michael, the staff sings for him an adaptation of “Seasons of Love,” the closing number from the musical Rent, whose original lyrics ask, “How do you measure a year in the life?” To Michael’s initial excitement, which gives way to visibly emotional gratitude, the staff adapts the lyrics of the song to describe the nineteen years that Michael has worked at Dunder Mifflin. The staff’s song describes “nine million, nine hundred eighty-six thousand minutes” that contained Michael’s office high jinks as well as his moments of helping or inspiring members of his staff. It references specific moments from the show that will reward the memory of the dedicated viewer. It is a scene of emotional intensity, with the staff’s heartfelt rendition of the song gradually bringing tears to Michael’s eyes. In the British Office, Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” characterizes the temporality of the present. Tim is unsatisfied with his present job and life, and invests his emotional energy in the fantasy of a different future represented by a return to university. But the show demonstrates how this fantasy will never be realized, and how it both sustains and undoes him in the present. The British Office creates a bleak representation of the awkwardness and boredom that structures the minutes and years in the lives of low-level white-collar workers. Michael Scott’s achievement in the American Office is to relieve the other characters of the burden of cruel optimism. He enables them to invest their emotions in the present moment. The characters in the American Office have no better future prospects than the characters in the British version. They always face the very real threat of downsizing, and few of them would have many options should they lose their present jobs. But Michael manages to make a dead-end job into a space of group belonging and sentiment. In this world, you no longer need to aspire to something different professionally, because the forms of emotional connection that are meant to give greatest meaning to our lives are in fact to be found in the workplace. What the staff’s song for Michael effectively describes is how all of the awkward moments he has created over the years are subsumed under memorable moments like this one. In the end, they are not moments you want to escape, but moments you want to hold onto. Michael makes it okay for his staff to not feel awkward about their own mediocrity and their lack of prospects—to lose their sense of shame. There is no shame in enjoying a patently amateurish company commercial because it embodies the collective effort of a group of best friends. And there is no shame in failing to pursue graduate study in graphic design at the Pratt Institute and returning to work as a secretary in Scranton, as Pam does in season five, because you will marry the coworker with whom you have fallen in love. At the level of spectatorship, then, the show ultimately transmutes social satire into sentimental attachment that enables our own experience of pleasurable shamelessness. Michael’s departure from the show occasioned the expression of a deep sense of loss among fans and critics. A Tumblr site titled

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“Goodbye Michael Scott” features testimony of fans’ tearful responses to Michael’s final two episodes, coupled with images and animated GIFs from the episodes. Representative comments include: “just cried my eyes out saying goodbye to Michael Scott”; “Finally watched Michael’s last episode and I can’t stop crying. . .I bawled like a baby almost the entire time”; “If someone had told me that I would cry THAT hard while watching The Office, I would not have believed them.”46 Innumerable comments on YouTube clips of the last two Michael Scott episodes express similar sentiments. Critics joined in as well, expressing sentiments like this one: “[S]eeing Dwight and Jim (and, to some extent, the actors themselves) get all misty and sentimental pushed me over the edge. By the end I was a wreck. I’m still sniffling a bit as I write this.”47 Describing Pam’s farewell to Michael at the airport, Peter Sheffield writes: “I got so choked up, it took me an hour to wonder how she got through airport security without a boarding pass.”48 I have argued that the cringe that characterizes watching the British Office compels the viewer to feel time in a way that connects the show’s phenomenology of spectatorship to its social critique. While the American Office fosters its own share of cringes, the experience of spectatorship in the show’s most pivotal episodes replaces cringing with crying, awkward moments with happy memories. The British Office often makes the viewer want to look away from the scene; we experience an embodied sense of shame and embarrassment that takes on a deeper resonance because of “our existential knowledge of and social investment in the context of a lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.”49 But the American Office eases the burden of a diegetic world and greater lifeworld marked by precarity and diminished horizons by enabling the viewer to share in the characters’ experience of group belonging and sentiment. As another comment from the Tumblr site describes it: Yep. I cried. Absolute tears. I was fine until Dwight read Michael’s recommendation letter. After that it was all downhill for me. TEARS EVERYWHERE. And I was completely dead when Jim and Michael were talking . . . I might watch it again tonight . . . lol.50 Rather than wanting to look away in shame, we may find ourselves wanting to watch these moving and cathartic scenes again, and again. They deliver us from awkwardness.

NOTES 1. Craig Hight, Television Mockumentary: Reflexivity, Satire, and a Call to Play (Manchester, UK and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 278. 2. Brett Mills, “Comedy Verité: Contemporary Sitcom Form,” Screen 45, no. 1 (2004): 63–78.

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3. Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 70–71. 4. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 261. Sobchack’s concept of the “irreal” itself complicates truth/fiction binaries and must be understood in her phenomenology of spectatorship as moments when “the real is bracketed and put to the side, as a noncriterion of the work’s coherence, meaning or plausibility” (258). 5. Ibid., 268. 6. Ibid., 261–265. 7. Director Rob Reiner points to this potential ambiguity through an anecdote (cited in Chapter One) describing confused audiences at a preview screening of the film in Dallas. 8. Hight, 73. 9. Tara Brabazon, “‘What have you ever done on the telly?’: The Office, (post) reality television and (post) work,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 101–117, 108. 10. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 73. 11. Brabazon, 109. 12. Ibid., 108. 13. Vivian Sobchack, “Phenomenology and the Film Experience,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 48. 14. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 284. 15. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 192. 16. Ibid., 193. 17. Ibid., 192. 18. Hight, 77–80. See Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America/AFI: 1983). 19. Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 33. 20. As Stevens sings, “I keep on wondering if I sleep too long, will I even wake up the same/And keep on wondering if I sleep too long, will I even wake up again.” 21. Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness: An Essay (Winchester, UK: O-Books, 2010), 32. 22. Brabazon, 107–108. 23. Berlant, 24. 24. As Tim explains to the filmmakers in an interview in the final episode of season two, he feels like his life can be described as a “three.” He could cast the die, and might roll a six, but he could also roll a one. So, he thinks, sometimes it’s better to just leave the dice alone. 25. Kotsko also locates a strategy of “detachment” as key to this character, though he focuses more on Tim’s American counterpart, Jim. Kotsko argues that Jim’s ironic detachment is a strategy for coping with awkwardness in a throwback to the attitudes and worldviews of the characters on Seinfeld (Kotsko, 37). 26. Nichols, 76. 27. Berlant, 24. 28. Here David tells a self-promoting lie, of course: The real reason he is not promoted is his failed medical exam. 29. Berlant, 196.

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30. Indeed, ironic humor mediates the shifting positions in the two love triangles—Tim, Dawn, and Rachel, as well as Tim, Dawn, and Lee (Dawn’s fiancé). When Tim’s relationship with Rachel sours a bit, for example, she notices the renewal of his joking around with Dawn, and tries to interject herself into the mix. 31. Berlant, 24. 32. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 261. 33. Berlant, 290. 34. Ibid., 291. 35. Kotsko points out that Neil is, after all, nothing more than a much more successful version of David: “the boss who insists he’s your friend, who’s affable and charming . . . all the while maintaining the underlying hierarchy all the more effectively” (Kotsko, 42). 36. Brabazon, 116. Moreover, in this scene, Neil displays a comfortable camaraderie with the vile Finchy. 37. Implausible plot elements in the show often center on Michael Scott’s assistant, Dwight Schrute (the counterpart to Gareth in the British version). 38. Weeks, 73. 39. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wge4UsX5d5o 40. A euphemism rooted in a term the Billboard music charts coined to replace the older, “colored” music chart. 41. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 261. 42. Ibid. 43. With the exception of moments I have discussed at the very end of season two and in the Christmas Special. 44. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wge4UsX5d5o 45. Brabazon, 107–108. 46. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/goodbye-michael-scott 47. Cindy White, “The Office: ‘Goodbye, Michael’ Review,” http://www.ign .com/articles/2011/04/29/the-office-goodbye-michael-review. 48. Rob Sheffield, “Goodbye, Michael Scott: Steve Carrell Has Left the Building,” Rolling Stone Culture Blog, April 29, 2011, http://www.rollingstone .com/culture/blogs/pop-life/goodbye-michael-scott-steve-carell-has-left-thebuilding-20110429. 49. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 268. 50. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/goodbye-michael-scott

Conclusion Post-Awkward?

In Chapter Four, I examined scholarship on reality television that analyzes how viewers’ sense of a representation’s authenticity is often linked to its emotional or affective intensity. In the context of the widespread expectation that reality television (and much documentary film) is heavily staged and manipulated, moments that viewers perceive as spontaneous and undramatized may carry a distinctive and pleasurable charge. Jane Roscoe situates authenticity at the level of the onscreen performance, suggesting that moments of intense emotional display signal “flickers of authenticity,” or ruptures in the social actors’ constructed personae.1 I argued that Roscoe’s analysis ran the risk of essentializing these forms of emotional exhibition. Misha Kavka more insightfully analyzes how spectators experience authenticity based upon the strength of their own affective responses. In other words, as she puts it, “simulated” conditions for emotional display may “stimulate” real feeling: “[I]t must be real if we care so much.”2 This current investment in emotional openness as a sign of authenticity has precedent in the “unguarded moments” prized by Direct Cinema filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s that I discussed in Chapter Two. Filmmakers valued situations in which a subject’s vulnerability seemed to lead him or her to reveal something intimate and authentic on camera. As I suggested in that chapter, however, unguarded moments may become awkward moments “when the viewer perceives tensions or disjunctions in this ostensibly intimate relation, or when the subject challenges the filmmaker’s perspective and the stakes of the film itself.” Awkwardness is produced by the incommensurability between the self-image apparently desired by Little Edie of Grey Gardens and the filmmakers’ representational strategies toward her. Awkwardness is inescapable when Mark Borchardt from American Movie drunkenly demands that the filmmakers tell him what they “really think”— but any answer they might give could destroy the tacit expectation of a shared perspective between filmmaker and subject. Michael Moore offers the viewer a feeling of righteous satisfaction at his on-camera takedown of Charlton Heston, but may instead provoke an awkward tension between political investments and affective response. Moments like these present us with an uncomfortable, even unpleasant sense of authenticity that

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differs significantly from reality TV’s production of emotional catharsis for character and viewer alike. In this context, the popularity of the webbased “reunion videos” discussed in Chapter Four is unsurprising: They offer a quick shot of emotional intensity distilled from the larger, messy, awkward political and ethical issues with which documentary has always grappled. For the British Office, a show that until the very end refused to the viewer the forms of narrative and emotional satisfaction conventional to television sitcoms, mock documentary provided an ideal aesthetic for its depiction of the perpetual failure of personal fulfillment and interpersonal connection in the postindustrial white collar workplace. The distinctive form of temporality constructed by the “dead air” of documentary long takes conveyed the characters’ own experience of their emotionally deadening work routines and lack of professional and personal horizons. The American adaptation of the show began in a similar vein, but, as I argue in Chapter Five, eventually transformed the British version’s bleak satire into an affirmation of the workplace as surrogate family and staging area for personal growth and meaningful relationships. The show’s final season redeemed not only the workplace, but, in a corresponding fashion, documentary film itself: Both helped to resolve key narrative conflicts and offered emotional resolution for the characters and the show’s viewers. Particularly given the nine-season duration of the American version and the widespread naturalization of mockumentary as a structuring device for television sitcoms, it can be easy to forget while watching The Office the premise that all of the footage will be edited into a documentary for television broadcast within the diegesis. The shows offer occasional reminders, like boss Michael Scott asking the cameraperson, “don’t you guys have enough footage at this point?”—but reflexive moments like this represent a wry foregrounding of how the show’s long duration (due to its success) strains the plausibility of its mockumentary premise. The viewer never sees the actual finished documentary, although both American and British versions make a point of demonstrating that it does air on television. All of the footage we see thus occupies an ambiguous status wherein the viewer cannot tell whether or not it will be included in the final diegetic documentary.3 In the British Office, the diegetic documentary airs during the story time that passes between the end of the show’s second season and the two-part “Christmas Special” that ultimately ends the program. It is used primarily as a commentary upon the compromised form of celebrity made available through contemporary reality television. David Brent subsists upon club appearances that capitalize on his visibility from the documentary, while simultaneously berating the documentary for how it used deceptive editing to misrepresent him as a “plonker” (rather than the effective and lovable boss he imagines himself to be). The joke, of course, is that the viewer can infer that the diegetic documentary is quite consistent with the show itself; both reveal David to be this very plonker.

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The final season of the American version links a pronounced foregrounding of its documentary framework to the introduction of a significant narrative conflict. In this season, the marriage between central characters Jim and Pam is on the rocks. Pam shares her fears in an emotionally intimate friendship with a character that is new to the viewer but as old as the show itself: the boom mic operator, who has been recording sound for the diegetic documentary throughout the shooting process. The soundman’s emergence in the frame after nine years of invisibility constitutes a distinctive form of breaking the fourth wall. Where the characters’ direct address to the camera is standard for the show’s mockumentary framework, an element of surprise is created by the intrusion of the documentary crew into the world of their subjects. The scenes depicting the friendship (and potential romance) between Pam and the boom operator are situated unambiguously outside of the diegetic documentary. In other words, the viewer can infer that any given scene from the show might or might not appear in the diegetic documentary (titled “The Office: An American Workplace”), but these scenes with Pam and the soundman are definitively excluded from this documentary. Foregrounding the paratextual quality of this footage signals the show’s greatest narrative crisis—the potential divorce of Jim and Pam, primary points of viewer identification. But it is documentary itself that solves this crisis. Jim restores Pam’s faith in their marriage at the end of the season by showing her a DVD the producers have made for him featuring highlights of their relationship, which doubles as a nostalgic recap for the viewer of the show’s major romantic plotline. Although we see clips of Jim’s video for Pam, we never see “The Office: An American Workplace.” The show’s penultimate episode teases us with the buildup of anticipation among the characters for its premiere, only to fade to black just as they have gathered at a local bar to watch it. In the final episode, which begins six months later, the characters discuss the impact of seeing their lives captured in the film. In a highly sentimental final sequence, the major characters share intimate thoughts about the friends they have made and the experiences they have shared with their coworkers in the office. They speak in glowing terms about the documentary film and how it helped them to see the extraordinary in what might otherwise appear to be the ordinariness of daily life and work. Jim describes the profundity of being able to watch his own life milestones and personal growth on film, describing the documentary as an “amazing gift.” Receptionist Erin asks with wonder, “How did you do it? How did you capture what it was really like? How we felt, how we made each other laugh, and how we got through the day?” The show’s resolution, then, suggests a perfect consonance between the characters as spectators of the diegetic documentary and the extradiegetic spectators of The Office: Earlier, we cringed along with them, but ultimately we experience the same warmth and collective good feeling that they do.

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Where formal reflexivity is linked to narrative and emotional crisis, the resolution offers the viewer identification with Jim and Pam’s restored relationship and with the shared sentiment expressed by all of the characters. Importantly, the source of this resolution is the affirmation of documentary film as a transparent vehicle for capturing and preserving the authenticity and emotional resonance of daily life. This marks a significant shift from the satirical and deconstructive impulses of many older mockumentaries, including the British Office itself. Misha Kavka’s analysis of affect in reality television suggests that the format’s “constructed unmediation” may have “a paradoxically greater immediacy than the world around us.”4 The resolution of The Office, by contrast, is premised upon a nostalgic image of documentary as unconstructed unmediation, as a source of historical and emotional truth. It is a conservative resolution to a show that stood for many viewers as the very paradigm of awkward humor, and which made the most of a format—the mockumentary—whose effectivity is based upon creating a sense of unconstructedness in a text that we know full well to be a fictional construction. I have argued throughout this book that complexities and contradictions of documentary aesthetics, ethics, and politics since the 1970s have contributed significantly to the cultural logic of awkwardness. Many of the film and media texts I have discussed attempt to inhabit this awkwardness and deploy it for cultural intervention and social satire. The British Office represents an exemplary form of the latter. It is all the more ironic, then, that the American version resolves with a nostalgia for documentary film as source and site of an emotional authenticity whose value is premised specifically upon its transcendence of awkwardness.

NOTES 1. Jane Roscoe, “Real Entertainment: New Factual Hybrid Television,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 100 (August 2001). 2. Misha Kavka, “Love ‘n the Real; or, How I Learned to Love Reality TV,” in The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005), 95. 3. This structural feature points to an important distinction in earlier, featurefilm mockumentaries: Some present the completed faux-documentary itself, like This Is Spinal Tap and Forgotten Silver. Others present the footage that was intended for use in a never-completed documentary, like The Blair Witch Project and Man Bites Dog. In these latter films, of course, the filmmakers never complete the planned documentary because they are killed, and the formal distinction I am drawing would seem to parallel a genre distinction in older mockumentary films between comedy and horror. 4. Kavka, 95.

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Index

“2 Girls 1 Cup” 110, 124–30 Aaron, Michele 15, 111, 118 Affleck, Casey see I’m Still Here Aggers, Michael 128 Ali G 96 Altman, Rick 30, 49n26 America’s Funniest Home Videos 121–3 American Movie 14–16, 66, 69–70, 72–5 Anderson, Pamela 96, 99–102 Anvil! The Story of Anvil 79 Arthur, Paul 4–5, 39–40, 47, 54 Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) 90 authenticity 4–7, 55–7, 65, 84, 104, 171, 174; and Borat 99–100; and reaction videos 111–13, 126, 129, 134, 135n14; and The Office (American) 156; and The Office (British) 165 Awkward Family Photos 3 awkwardness: and culture 2–4, 6–7, 15; and documentary 1, 7–9, 14; and economic precarity 147; and humor 2, 16–17, 23, 26, 28, 37; and Michael Moore 35–6; and people 32; and politics 17 Banksy see Exit Through the Gift Shop Barnes, Brooke 88 Baron Cohen, Sacha 85, 87–8, 91–103 Bazin, Andre 145 Beale, Edith Bouvier (Big Edie) 60, 64 Beale, Edith Bouvier (Little Edie) 16–17, 52, 59–65, 77, 79 Bergson, Henri 25–6; 48n12, 136n24

Berlant, Lauren 133, 143, 154; and cruel optimism 147–8, 151–2, 167 Berlinger, Joe see Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Bernstein, Matthew 39 Bolter, Jay David 112–13, 135n8 Borat 91, 96–8, 99, 101–2 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan 85, 87–8, 92–3, 96–103 Borchardt, Mark 15, 57, 65–75, 77–9 Bowling for Columbine 36–8, 44–6 Brabazon, Tara 141, 147, 154, 163 Britton, Rhonda 40–1 Brüno 91–3 Brüno 88, 92–5 bunny lady see Britton, Rhonda Candid Camera 121–2 Cantet, Laurent 143 Carroll, Noël 5–6, 121, 127–8 cinema of attractions see Gunning, Tom Clissold, Bradley 121 Clover, Carol 111, 114 comedies of deception 17, 83–5, 90 Corner, John 56 Couple in the Cage, The 85 Coven 65, 73, 75 Cowie, Elizabeth 14, 52–3, 128 cringe comedy 2, 18, 141–7, 150 Day, Amber 5–6 de Seife, Ethan 31 DiBergi, Marty 31–4, 50n41 Direct Cinema 7, 16, 52, 54, 56, 58, 63, 65

184

Index

documentary: and comedy 10–13, 17, 27–9, 69–70; and disavowal 52–3, 56–7, 62, 64–5, 77, 119; and ethics 15, 65, 92, 120–1; and exploitation 37, 53, 63–4, 69–70, 77, 81n50; and hoax films 84–5; and irony 4–6; and mutual recognition 6, 53, 57, 62–3, 65–7, 72, 76, 79; and parody 10, 16, 18, 23, 29, 31, 33–5, 50n45, 140; and PBS 54; and politics 17; and portrait films 13, 16, 31, 52–7; shifts in 1, 4, 15, 35; and social actors 5, 11, 20n5; and social class 14–16, 39–42, 52, 66, 70, 72–5; and spectacle 13; and storytelling 19, 54, 66, 75 Don’t Look Back 54, 55 Dovey, Jon 4–5, 39–40, 47 Ebert, Roger 10, 39, 59, 66, 82n52 Eitzen, Dirk 4, 39 “Epic Beard Man” 119–21 Exit Through the Gift Shop 2, 103–4 Flaherty, Robert see Nanook of the North Forgotten Silver 84 Freud, Sigmund 11, 24, 53, 84, 90, 120, 128 Funt, Allen see Candid Camera Gaines, Jane 13–14, 28, 128 Gillespie, Eleanor 66 Glieberman, Owen 105 Gore, Chris 69 Grey Gardens 16, 52, 56–66, 77, 79 Guest, Christopher 10, 15–16, 28, 31–2, 74 Guetta, Thierry see Exit Through the Gift Shop Gunning, Tom 13, 23, 26 Guthman, Edward 69 Hardt, Michael 143 Harries, Dan 29, 140 Hartman, Geoffrey 111, 118–19, 121, 124, 129 HBO 54 Henderson, Mitchell 119–20 Heston, Charlton 44–7

Hicklin, Aaron 88 Highsmith, Patricia 53 Hight, Craig 31, 84, 140–1, 145 hoax films 11, 83–5, 103–5 see also comedies of deception Hobbes, Thomas 24–6 Hoffman, Jan 131–2 Hovde, Ellen 64–5, 81n50 I’m Still Here 83, 103–5 Internet Movie Database 70, 74 Jameson, Fredric 30 Jauss, Hans 35 Jenkins, Henry 124 jokes and joking 11, 24–7, 84, 120 Juhasz, Alexandra 84, 122, 134 Kael, Pauline 39 Kavka, Misha 112–14, 117, 171, 174 King, Geoff 30, 112 Knight, Arthur 59 Koestler, Arthur 27–8 Kotsko, Adam 2, 6–7, 147 laughter 24–5, 28, 79 Laurel and Hardy 26, 32 Lerner, Jesse 84 Letterman, David 78, 82n53, 104–5 Lovell, Glenn 73 MacDougall, David 81n42 Mamber, Stephen 50n39, 65 Marchese, David 100–1 Marjoe 55 Maslin, Janet 69 Maysles brothers 58–60, 62–3 Metallica: Some Kind of Monster 79 Mills, Brett 140 mock documentary see mockumentary mockumentary 28, 31; and documentary conventions 18, 23, 29–35; and televisual conventions 8, 18–19, 140–1, 172 Modern Family 19 Moore, Michael 9–13, 15–16, 20n10, 23–4, 28, 35–47, 55, 74, 83, 171 Mulvey, Laura 111 Nanook of the North 8–9, 27–8

Index Nichols, Bill 11, 13–14, 17, 20n5, 56, 62, 77, 81n42; and epistephilia 88–9, 101, 120–1, 127–8, 133–4 Nichols, James 37–9 Office, The (American) 155–9, 164–8; and British The Office 160–3, 165, 167, 168, 172–4 Office, The (British) 143–155; and American The Office 160–3, 165, 167, 168, 172–4 O’Keefe, James 90, 107n28 Palmer, Jerry 25–9; 31, 48n12, 50n44, 69 Paskin, Willa 100–1 Peeping Tom 114 Phoenix, Joaquin see I’m Still Here Plantinga, Carl 30, 32 Prelinger, Rick 54, 66, 75 Price, Sarah 70, 72, 79 Pryluck, Calvin 65, 107n35 Purdie, Susan 11, 51n52, 86, 97 Purdy, Jedidiah 5–6 reaction videos 17–18, 109; and comedy 114, 116, 119–20, 130; and disavowal 130; and epistephilia 111–13; and ethics 110–11, 117–18, 120–1, 130–1, 133–4; and Twilight 123–4 reality TV 56, 112–13, 115, 135n8, 137n48, 171–2, 174 Reiner, Rob 29, 33 Renov, Michael 15, 30, 111, 134n5 reunion videos 18, 110–11, 131–4 Rich, B. Ruby 54 Robinson, Rashad 88 Robson, Kenneth J. 58 Rogan, Joe 129–30 Roger and Me 39–42, 74 Rony, Fatimah 28 Roscoe, Jane 31, 84, 113–14, 171 Ruby, Jay 58 Rules of the Game 117, 141, 142 Ryzik, Melena 103 “Scary Maze Game, The” 114–20, 122 schadenfreude 24, 69, 86; see also superiority Schank, Mike 73–4, 76 Schwartz, Mattathias 119–20

185

Schwartzbaum, Lisa 66 Scott, A. O. 1, 9–10, 21n39 Sedgwick, Eve 9, 86, 90, 94, 98 shame 3, 8–9, 85–6; and American Movie 75–7; and contempt 9, 86–7, 93–4, 101, 110; and Michael Moore 23–4, 36, 39–41, 46–7, 74; and The Office (American) 167–8; and reaction videos 110; and satire 87, 90–1, 93, 98, 104–5 Shaviro, Steven 46 Shklovsky, Victor 30, 35 sight gags 25–7, 29, 121 Smith, Chris 70, 75 Sobchack, Vivian 46; and documentary consciousness 140–3, 146, 150, 153, 160, 169n4; and ethical care 114, 117–18, 133; Solondz, Todd see Storytelling spectatorship: and body genres 126; and derealization 110, 118, 128, 130; and disavowal 52–3, 62, 64–5, 77, 119; and documentary consciousness 146, 150; and epistephilia 88–9, 100–1, 128, 150; and ethics 9, 15, 110–12, 118, 121, 133–4, 136n27, 140–1; and males 111–12, 132–3; and mimicry 18, 46, 109–11, 116, 127, 132; and sentimental attachment 167–8; and theory 44; and time 141–2, 145–6; and transformation 142, 160, 167–8 Spinal Tap 78 Stein, Linda 96–7, 107n40 Stone, Alan 46–7 Storytelling 75–7 superiority 5, 9, 11, 28, 38–9, 41, 48n12, 75, 86, 97, 100–1; theory 24–6 suture theory 17, 89 Taubin, Amy 69–70 Taylor, Charles 75–6 This Is Spinal Tap 10, 18, 29–35, 78 Tinkcom, Matthew 62–3 Tomkins, Silvan 8–9, 14, 85–6, 110 Torchin, Leshu 85, 98, 103, 108n43 trolling 110, 119–20 Tufnel, Nigel 31–2, 35, 40 Tyszkievicz, Eugene 63–4

186

Index

Veteran Feminists of America 96–8, 101 viewer identification 8, 44, 52; and Mark Borchardt 15, 66, 68, 75; and Michael Moore 16; and The Office (American) 157–61, 173–4; and The Office (British) 145, 148–50 Wahlberg, Malin 145 Walker, Rob 119–20 Ward, Paul 29, 140, 160

Weeks, Kathi 141, 148–9, 156 White, Mimi 4–5 Williams, Linda 115–16, 126–7, 129 Wright, Melissa W. 130 Yes Men, The 11, 17, 87, 90–2, 97 Yes Men, The 83, 85, 87 Yes Men Fix the World, The 83, 90–2 YouTube 122–3, 134 Žižek, Slavoj 53, 57, 67, 78