A Documentary I Liked

I like nonfiction better than fiction, so when it comes to documentaries, I have to pick three.

The last documentary I bought tickets to watch in a theatre was Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me.

Now, you need to know that although Spurlock gave a lot of credit to a "girlfriend" in that movie, he was later accused of cheating on her by harassing women on jobs. That probably should continue to be the dead end of a man's career. 

But when his movie came out, Spurlock had a clean record, a valid case to make, and an heroic willingness to sacrifice not only his sex appeal but his sex life to science. The movie was about his personal project of eating junkfood for a few weeks and documenting how much harm it did him. He picked McDonald's meals for the test but it could have been heat-and-serve meals, or KFC or Arby's or some other fast food chain. He ate junkfood three times a day, gained weight rapidly, developed chronic minor health complaints, and then undertook another project of eating healthy food to recover. 

Your mileage would vary, if you tried the same experiment, but whatever else he did wrong, Spurlock had a message that Generation X needed to hear. Millennial babies do, too.

But I don't want to let a documentary by a sex offender stand as my favorite, so what about my favorite documentary before that? Before 2004, my favorite documentary was Roger & Me by Michael Moore. 

Michael Moore has disappointed his fans in several ways, too, over the years. He promised to do a "Walk With Mike" project, and blog, about walking for weight control. Never did. He claimed to be from Flint, but it turned out he actually grew up in a higher-rent neighborhood, and during Flint's water crisis, well, he's no Dolly Parton. Around the turn of the century he sacrificed his career by giving up making snarky documentaries and wandering off into unverifiable conspiracy theories. Oh, and don't forget, Roger & Me suggested that he was a real freshman-class baby-boomer. Junior-class, more like. Other things said in the movie are of, shall we say, questionable veracity as well. Moore was not meticulous with data and misinterpreted statistics to fit his story.

There is still a fair bit of truth in Roger & Me,. It raised questions about how accurate filmmaking can be as a way to present facts. Hollywood tradition has always been that, if you want to make a movie about a dog, and you happen to get perfect footage of a cat, you proceed to make the movie about the cat. 

But Roger & Me was not made in Hollywood--that was part of its point--so maybe we should pick another documentary. I loved Meryl Streep's performance in a film called A Cry in the Dark. She played the part of a woman who had never been allowed to think of herself as pretty--not that there was anything wrong with the woman's face. It was a stretch for Streep and she did it, I thought, exceptionally well.

Cry was a big influence on my preference for nonvisual communication. As youall may remember, the story is about a young couple whose baby has been dragged out of their tent and eaten by a dingo, while they were camping at a nature park. They go back into town and report the baby lost, and learn that, when bad things happen to people, these days, the immediate family are suspects. The mother, played by Meryl Streep, broke down and cried when talking to reporters. Mortified to see pictures of herself crying in he tabloids, she adopted a flat, teeth-clenched, no-emotion manner for telling paparazzi to go away, from that time forward--and was promptly vilified as a Stone-Faced Something-Or-Other Who Didn't Even Miss Her Baby and accused of having sacrificed the baby to Satan. I saw that that's how far "face readers" will go, and I wanted no more to do with "face readers." I think we can all be better off by limiting ourselves to verbal communication until we've built individual relationships with people who've learned not to fixate on faces! 

Because visual communication can so easily be so misleading, I prefer books to movies as sources of information. Perhaps that makes it appropriate that my final selection of a favorite documentary should document a true story of how horribly misleading visual communication can be.

A Cry in the Dark is on Youtube and can be watched free with ads. An official digital version, retitled Evil Angels (if you've seen the movie you know why that was the title of the book), can be bought from various digital movie sites, ad-free.