Low Budget

Brain on Fire

Fahrenheit 9/11 brought forth good and bad. Good is that documentaries really can make lots of money. Good is that it's now possible to laugh, or at least chuckle, at the psycho-neo-cons who are inexplicably running the country. Bad is that now nobody knows what a documentary is. Bad is that liberals are often in a corner defending the spotty, self-absorbed, Michael Moore.

Good and Bad are the stream of follow-up movies. Film-makers are cleaning out their trunks, puffing out little shows, and sending all manner of trash out into the theaters. Some of this trash will turn out to be freshly discovered treasures. Some will be relatively inoffensive, and some is just bad. Outfoxed is marvelous, and you will never watch Fox News again without laughing. Bush's Brain is a bit of a stretch. Corporation is mindless trash, and mostly serves to give conservatives an easy target. Fortunately, none of them went to see it.

What is a documentary? Even traditional documentaries have a weak claim on truth. Some may rigorously report nothing but facts. Yet facts are very small things. Picking a few to draw a picture results in a picture that came mostly from the mind of the fact-picker. Even those that present "facts from both sides" create a balance point. That balance point is rarely objective truth, and usually is the point of view of the filmmaker. Fictional movie creators have at least as much chance at getting to the truth, because they are more constrained by an internal logic that is, in some sense, honest. Fahrenheit 9/11 is mostly true in this sense. Facts may be fudged, points pushed, and the narrative tied to a conspiracy theory that is implausible. But the movie gives us a true picture of what is wrong. Truer than could be obtained by a 'real' documentary.
-dan jeffers

posted by dan @ 9/18/2004 06:07:00 PM