The Postmodern Documentary

Dear Readers:

It’s me again. No, not that Me, the real me. But how many me's can there be, and is there an autonomous, authentic me?

Practically speaking, we shift personas according to the social context: in church, school, tavern and home. But while our public and private identities may shift, we have a core value system on which we base our moral judgments. And, more importantly, these judgments are contingent on competing sets of values: I may think all life is precious, but I kill the Black Fly. One value, my comfort, outweighs the Black Fly’s life in this particular situation. Most ethical dilemmas are situational, and thus call for a flexible rather than absolute moral code. I don’t kill insects that don’t bite me, but an exception might be made if I were around someone with arachnophobia.

So it makes some sense to say that the unified-self is a mythical construct. My problem with this, which is a conservative view in contemporary academia, is that dispensing with the core self leaves nowhere to locate moral responsibility. Who is culpable if we say those who do evil are products of their environment? Mitigating factors must always be considered, but they must also be attached to the particular human agent who chooses a certain course of action.

Theoretically speaking, the conceptualization of the self has been a major preoccupation of psychology, philosophy, art, and politics. Here’s a thumbnail historical sketch.

One of the philosophical conceits stretching from the Enlightenment to the early 20th Century is the concept of a core, unified self. This intellectual trope, however, began to unravel with the onset of modernity. In the literary arts, the “stream of consciousness” mode (a phrase coined by William James) reflected this sensibility in novels by Proust, Woolf, and Joyce. Cubism and Surrealism presented pictorial abstractions that fore-grounded the limits of a unified perspective. Picasso, Braque, and others sought to depict objects in a way that encompassed all perspectives, and thus defined these limits in a metaphorical way. Musically, Stravinsky, Berg, Varese, and Stockhausen, de-centered conventional ideas about lyricism and tonality in a way that expressed the chaos of conscious and unconscious experience.

Postmodernism built on this emerging awareness by rejecting not only the idea of subjective perception, but the perceiving agent as well. Building on the existential dictum that “existence precedes essence,” postmoderns posited that, since language defines identity, the subject (us) is a linguistic construct. With language acquisition we enter into a pre-determined structure of thought that constrains any true freedom of being. Hence, structures of knowledge that reinforce the status quo require an intellectual deconstruction that releases the agent from the repression of the “Grande Histoire,” those ethnocentric meta-narratives that seek to control and marginalize the Other. The Other here being defined as those persecuted on the basis of gender, race, and ethnicity.

The postmodern aesthetic sees Culture as always co-opted by the status quo, and thus as intrinsically degenerate. Culture, as the representation of society gone mad, is the ultimate expression of nature’s decadence. As the source of culture, nature represents the primal corruption. Which allows me this imperfect segue into a discussion of postmodern documentary film making.

In a narrative sense, the alien character of Nature is a consistent theme in the work of Werner Herzog. Grizzly Man (2005) is no exception. Herzog, always interested in the “heart of darkness” tale where the protagonist must face the physical peril of journeying into the wild, as well as the psychological peril of confronting the demons within, uses Timothy Treadwell as a foil to promote his view of nature. We see Treadwell’s footage, but we hear Herzog’s voiceover that Treadwell held the “sentimentalized view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and harmony.” Treadwell is thus the naïve transgressor of the “invisible” boundary between man and nature. But in many ways, Herzog’s voiceover is deconstructed by Treadwell’s footage. What we see is a patently American kind of obsessive optimism combined with a spiritual faith in the belief that the self can triumph against all odds, as is reflected in his pleas for rain to a religious and secular pantheon of gods. The beauty of Treadwell’s spectacular nature footage resists the Herzogian reading of man’s deep-seated alienation from nature. In a reverse of the Kantian, Treadwell’s sublime shots often trump the beauty of Herzog’s dramatic sense. What Herzog defines as surreal, Treadwell’s talking to the animals, is belied by the fact that we all talk to our pets. Herzog ‘s conclusion that “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable” ignores the “inherent truth” in the immediacy of the images Treadwell gives us. Images that resist Herzog’s attempt to contain them with language. The “strangeness and bizarreness” of Treadwell’s self-perceived mission is only “believable” insofar as it conforms to the “truth” of Herzog’s interpretation.

For Herzog, the disharmony and chaos of society is mirrored in nature. On the set of Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog offered this commentary on nature: “[It] is vile and base….I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away….There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder….there is no harmony in the universe.” But if society reflects the “overwhelming indifference of nature,” as Herzog’s voiceover suggests, than what “line,” or boundary is there to transgress? If the gaze of the bear offers “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy,” what of his conviction that Treadwell’s “footage is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature.” But if nature is truly “indifferent,” it is also ineffable in its resistance to the incessant anthropomorphizing Herzog visits upon it. So how can its depiction provide “insight” into the self? It may be that within Herzog’s co-optation of Treadwell’s footage inheres an insecurity about ceding control of the visual images. And while Herzog controls the editing, there is a surplus in Treadwell’s filmic text that escapes the seamless reading Herzog puts forth.

In terms of the formal aspects of the postmodern documentary, Herzog, like Errol Morris and Michael Moore, deconstructs the conventions of the documentary genre. There are no illusions of objectivity, but rather an oxymoronic kind of artificial realism. As Michael Corvino notes in Film Quarterly (Spring, 1980), “the viewer knows that the most realistic-looking documentary is never objective; although the viewer understands that the investigative film-maker, when all is said and done, still selects footage and adopts a certain editing style; although the viewer accepts, begrudgingly perhaps, that nothing is ever as it really happened; although the viewer knows all these things, he himself remains accustomed himself to viewing the realistic-looking documentary as though it were somehow real.”

Peace - Randy