Documentality #5 - Controlling the Narrative

Hey, I saw All Saint's Day! So there!

     Troy Duffy is a bully, with the contradictory mentality of a victim. He refuses to recognize and take responsibility for his situation and behavior. Maybe if he actually took a few film and screenwriting classes, he could make better movies, instead of just coasting on something he did 15 years ago. He's making Boondock Saints 3 (that's the story, anyway). For crying out loud, is that all this man has in him? Is that all he knows how to do? A bunch of self-indulgent, masturbatory macho posturing bullshit, filtered through the arrested development of an ill-mannered, adolescent YouTube comment?

     What's worse, it'll probably follow the same structure, arcs, set pieces and plot points as the last two Boondock films. Go watch the second film, it's basically the first one but with different actors in all the supporting roles. A few years ago, Duffy talked about a Thriller he was writing, revolving around a serial killer. As he went into detail, I realized the skeleton of the script was exactly Boondock Saints! This guy is a grade-A douche bag.

     By the way, who did Eddie name check as an asshole director who keeps getting work? I couldn't make it out through his "cough".

Last edited by johnpavlich (2014-06-21 03:41:37)

I'm kinda with Dorkman when it comes to Stories We Tell. Exploring how we control narratives is an interesting idea, but I think we got too much of that and not enough actual narrative. Initially, the family seems blasé about the whole thing. I doubt was actually the case, but it left me feeling, "if these people don't care, why should I?" As the story moves along, it becomes clear that there are a lot of strong feelings there, but it was all so removed from what I was feeling about the story that I was kind of left unmoved by the whole thing.

People in this movie, particularly Michael, repeatedly say things that sound pretty devastating with a nonchalance that is very off putting. I find the picture the family paints of Diane rather unpleasant but unintentionally so, and her friends don't make her seem any better. The only fully positive portrait comes from Harry, who's an unapologetic defender of what he perceives as his story. But I didn't really like him, anymore than I liked Diane.

Sarah is mostly a non-entity in the film, and I don't think I would've been more interested had I been aware of who she was. Certainly most Canadian audiences would have known, but I'm with Trey in liking that she didn't trade on it.

Michael is the only reason I could make it all the way to the end.  He gets a lot of shit in this movie, and it's hard to tell how much of it is deserved. But by the end, he was the only one I was paying attention to.

As for Overnight, it didn't really leave an impact on me. I watched a couple of months ago getting ready for this episode, but at this point I can barely remember it, which is unusual for me. I didn't really find Duffy a compelling character to watch, so his total blindness to how destructively he's behaving isn't interesting to watch. He just seems like a one-note narcissist. Whether or not he made good movies is irrelevant when he's kinda boring.

Teague's comment about how "if I can't believe a word you're saying, you're wasting my time" is really interesting. It's kind of the opposite of how I approach film. Film is inherently a lie, after all, so in most cases expecting truth is kinda futile.

It is a question of what genre the film is claiming to be. We react to "real" events differently than we do fiction. The same shot of people jumping from a skyscraper will have a different feel and effect if it is in a 9/11 documentary as opposed to a new Transformers movie.

If the story isn't about the fact that a character is lying and we're telling a story about liars here, then the lying of the storyteller — or possibility of lying — undermines pretty much one hundred percent of my ability to suspend disbelief. I'm willing to go with you if the apparent veracity of the story doesn't vacillate — always fairy tale, or always journalism — but when you introduce the "but wouldn't it be so cute if this wasn't actually true?" question, my answer suddenly becomes "fucking no it wouldn't you dick," and now I'm not even sure if I can believe anything you've said.

The trope of someone who has left out some crucial detail of their past, which is later found out by the main character, comes to mind. "Everything else was true! It was really me! It's just that I'm not really Space Ghost, that's all!" Or whatever. They may be telling the truth now, but the main character has no way of knowing that, and is now dubious to the point of feeling betrayed and pissed off. To some degree, the thing they thought they were both participating in equally wasn't actually true. Is it just that they're not really Space Ghost, or could it be more? And how could you believe them even if they told you?

I'm not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that's how I react. And the only way this gets resolved is if there's (very quickly) a resounding answer to the question. If they immediately go "no no no, bad joke, sorry, I'm kidding, it's real" I can ramp back up some trust before the credits roll. If they leave it at the question, peace out.

I don't recall if (or when) it does either; maybe I could come up with the moment I started getting pissed in this movie and work out from there, but I wasn't really talkin' about SWT.

I'm just trying to explain the nature of that kind of reaction. Doc said he watches movies in generally the opposite way, so I'm laying out that thought process from "my" end of the spectrum so he has something to work with response-wise.

As I said in the episode, this is what I especially liked about SWT - it attempts something interesting with the very form of what a documentary is, or is generally accepted to be.   If you dislike documentaries that aren't honest about what they're portraying and have an unreliable narrator, that's normal.  Now imagine if the documentary was your actual life, and the unreliable narrator was your mother.

So me, I like that the movie messes with you the same way life messed with the filmmaker.   The doc is about the family history that she was presented with, some of which turned out to be fictional.    Which she then starts to deal with in a filmic way by making her own imagined versions of events. 

In the end, SWT isn't meant as a detective story that says "so this is what really happened", but an examination of how memories - and thus a lot of what we are - is just stories we tell ourselves.

Part of what Polley's doing is putting the audience in something like the position she'd been in most of her life. You're getting all these different narratives from people, often very vivid and emphatic that this is the truth, and what do you do? All facts are skewed necessarily by the storyteller, including the documentary itself, and the reveal is her way of saying to us "See how that works?"