The series’s messy ethics yielded Durst’s retrial and, nine years later, a dragging second season in which Jarecki’s ego shares the spotlight with the momentous court proceedings. Season two provided no reveals that hadn’t been available for years. It did, however, provide seemingly endless footage of Durst’s victims’ families praising Jarecki’s first season. Clearly, Jarecki wanted a second standing ovation, although no such applause came from season two’s audiences. The shouts for “encore” had already come and gone once Durst was convicted three years before the season’s release.
The Flip Side
This is not to say that personal narratives can never help a documentarian expose some aspect of reality. More stylized, personal films are probably necessary in the age of documentaries’ low box office returns, the era of formulaic true crime “investigations” congesting your least favorite millennial’s Netflix watchlist. Twinsters (2015), a documentary following the reconnection of twins separated at birth, is made all the more powerful because one of the twins directed the project. Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) is directed by Dick’s daughter, Kirsten Johnson, who recruits her father to act out zany death scenarios to help both father and daughter process his dementia diagnosis.
Then, there is the infusion of directorial style. The cinematography of Some Kind of Heaven (2020), reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s candy-coated, overly-staged narrative filmmaking style, is exaggerated to reflect the surrealism of being at the end of one’s life while still having dreams to pursue — a central theme of this strange and touching documentary set in the United States’s largest retirement community.
Twinsters
“More stylized, personal films are probably necessary in the age of documentaries’ low box office returns…”
These examples succeed because the films’ stories and themes justify the directors’ formal experiments. There is only so much room for a director’s style and personality in a documentary that is fundamentally not about them.
The Thin, Glaring Line
This Morrisian problem, in truth, has existed since the genre’s inception. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), generally known as the first documentary, sees Flaherty stage several scenes with Nanook (or, as he was actually named, Allakariallak), from making him gawk at the Western technology of the gramophone to letting Allakariallak ham up his actions and reactions for the camera. In a cinematic field previously dominated by staged content, it is unsurprising that the first grasp for authenticity is half-fiction and inauthentic to Allakarialak’s lived experience.
Ninety years after ‘Nanook,’ docu-icon Errol Morris contributed another kernel of wisdom, confirming that this problem never disappeared.
“Oddly enough, people don’t want truth,” Morris said. “They want to avoid having to think.”
In an era when reality and entertainment continue their quickening merge, perhaps it is time for critics to draw a classifying line in the sand. We must ask, what is a documentary? How can we take a documentary at face value when the genre has consistently lied to us? Are we looking for collective truths or personal truths? Are we interested in a director or a world? Simply put, documentaries must make us, and their directors, think again.
