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A years-old tweet resurfaced, repurposed1, on Threads2 a few days ago. I shared it to my IG story saying “I have a lot to say about this,” and that “a lot” grew and grew into a whole essay. My loss of mental real estate is your gain.
Me personally, I love an “at that time,” especially in an accent so Southern that “time” has two syllables. But I digress. Both my example and this recurring tweet’s don’t actually speak to the quality or insight of a documentary. The “at that taaahm” to me signifies someone who has established themselves as an authority on a typically arcane bit of lore or procedure. The sitting down in a chair before their interview starts is a (constructed) peek behind the curtain. Letting us see some of the set-up lets us in on the ruse. The visual language tells us that the filmmaker is willing to expose, and thus seemingly do away with, the artifice. We’re going to get something unpolished, something un-produced. Something authentic.
One of the promos for the immensely popular3 docuseries The Last Dance was about 33% famous people taking their seats or looking at the camera.
It’s aesthetics like that that have become a visual shorthand for authenticity, and that have come to shape or expectations for all kinds of media. For instance, the mockumentary sitcom has trained at least a generation and a half to not see its cues. Traditional multi-camera sitcoms like Shifting Gears4 have audience reactions that, whether they’re live or piped in, make their presence known. They call attention to themselves as cues—here’s where we laugh, here’s where we go “ooooh!”—and they call attention to our viewing experience as a collective one. We’re participating in a group experience, however synthetic, when we watch one of those. A single-camera documentary-style sitcom like Abbott Elementary5 doesn’t have a laugh track or soundtrack, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t traffic in similarly heavy-handed cues. Glances at the hand-held camera are silent, but they’re still cuing you to laugh. They’re also making you feel like an individual co-conspirator in the narrative—Gregory Eddie is looking past his colleagues in exasperation at you, not an audience full of people. It’s flattering.
And yeah, it’s not just sitcoms. Commercials have started using similar visual language, to more insidious effect. Documentary filmmaker Kevin Perjurer points out how dangerous it is that a commercial, whose aim is to make people like a brand and ultimately buy a product, would co-opt the visual style of a documentary interview. The brand (in this case, Chipotle) is cashing in on our inherent trust in the authenticity that a hand-held camera connotes, so that we are more likely to trust its self-serving claims. Plus, in a good interview, there are opposing forces: the subject has information, the interviewer wants information. This doesn’t mean that they are antagonists, but just that they are not working in service of each other. But in a commercial where the interviewer has been hired by a brand that also employs the subject, there is no opposing force. Everyone there is in service of the brand.
That brand dominance bleeds into the documentary world as well. Too much of what falls under the Documentary heading is actually just PR campaigns and brand extensions. I remember feeling this way while watching the 2022 Janet Jackson “documentary” JANET JACKSON, which promised more access to Janet than we had ever had before. But the flip side of more access is less insight. We the audience cannot learn anything that Janet, both subject and producer, doesn’t want us to learn. The filmmaker is in service of the subject. So really, all we learn that we didn’t already know is that Janet told Justin to lay low after their wardrobe malfunction incident at Super Bowl XXXVIII6; and that by the time they filmed their iconic “Scream” music video, Michael had distanced himself from Janet, and she never knew why. Both things that paint her in very flattering, passive lights—the forgiving martyr, the rejected baby sister.
Documentary filmmaker Ezra Edelman spoke to this point quite eloquently a few months ago, on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. (Tragically, he came back on the podcast to discuss how Netflix and Prince’s estate have effectively banned his Prince documentary, so he definitely saw this coming.)
When Edelman warned against labeling these brand extensions as documentary journalism, host Pablo Torre responded with the safe defensiveness that I got when I called Top Gun: Maverick jingoistic propaganda—“but I enjoyed it!” And like…yeah, dude. You’re meant to enjoy it. Especially if you’re already a fan of the subject. Brand extensions, just like propaganda, are designed to be maximally appealing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be effective. It’s not your fault that you enjoyed something that was designed for you to enjoy.
To me, the problem comes when we can’t tell the difference between a product or brand being sold, and actual information being conveyed. The lines between entertainment, information, and brand-management are so blurred as to not exist, and that makes us pretty weak consumers of all of them. The word “documentary” confers truth and accuracy. But we’re currently in an environment that treats the aesthetics of authenticity as though they were authenticity itself. We’ve been trained to look for specific superficial markers, but not to verify what we’re being told. I mean, too few of us have even been properly taught how to identify AI-generated images or text.
And this is particularly bad when our nation’s leadership is so all in on reality manipulation that calling it “gaslighting” makes it sound almost cute. Like, when I say the lines don’t exist—Trump is out here doing Tesla ads in front of the White House to boost his co-president’s plummeting stock. Co-Cos Trump and Musk are betting on everyone buying into the aesthetics of reasonability and authority—they are rich, powerful white men who can speak from the Oval Office—and therefore not questioning their efforts to dismantle the entire government and recreate it in their whimsically malevolent image, with neither a check nor a balance in sight. Major media outlets are buying into it, reporting on Musk’s ongoing rampage like he’s an advisor with legally recognized power rather than a drug-addled despot who bought an election. Political leaders are buying into it, acting as though holding little auctioneer paddles at the State of the Union is a sufficient protest, but physically, genuinely objecting is a breach of decorum worthy of censure. But we as a collective cannot buy into it. We can’t be such passive viewers of what’s happening that we allow aesthetics to win over reality. We can’t be comforted by what amounts to glances at the camera from the people with the power to do something real.
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