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| List of Illustration | p. ix |
| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction: The Intelligence Work of Documentary: Publics, Politics, Intellectuals | p. 1 |
| The Sentiment of Trust: The Documentary Front and the New Deal | p. 41 |
| National Fabric: Authorship, Textuality, and the Documentary Front | p. 43 |
| Voice-Over, Allegory, and the Pastoral in New Deal Documentary | p. 89 |
| Lyrical Tirades: New Documentary and the New Left | p. 141 |
| Revolutionary Sounds: Listening to Radical Documentary | p. 143 |
| Documentary Counterpublics: Filming Prison | p. 205 |
| The Public Sphere of Suspicion: Documentary in the New Obscurity | p. 267 |
| The Vision Thing: Documentary, Television, and the Accidental Power of the President | p. 269 |
| Tense Times: Documentary Aporias; Or, the Public Sphere of Suspicion | p. 319 |
| Notes | p. 361 |
| Filmography | p. 415 |
| Index | p. 421 |
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Excerpt from the chapter: "Tense Times: Documentary Aporias; Or, the Public Sphere of Suspicion
THE “US” IN QUESTION
Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), director and narrator Michael Moore engages in one of the theatrical confrontations with power that established his reputation as a provocateur. On the premise that politicians would not be so eager to support the so-called war on terror on its Middle Eastern front if their own children were in the military, Moore goes to Capitol Hill with a U.S. marine, a stack of enlistment forms, and brochures on different branches of the armed services, hoping to coax congressional representatives into volunteering their children for duty. Of course, no representative takes him up on his offer, and Moore is led to pose a series of rhetorical questions over a closing montage of young, smiling American soldiers, movingly and skillfully edited. “Who would want to give up their child? Would you?” Moore asks, and, over an image of George W. Bush and his children, “Would he?” The young men and women shown in the montage expect that they will be sent to war only when it is “absolutely necessary,” says Moore. He closes his series with one last question: “Will they ever trust us again?” The montage of official perfidy that follows, in which Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney offer long-discredited justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, implies that the young people depicted in the first montage would have good reason to be cynical, although the sequence leaves somewhat ambiguous who is identified by “us,” the despised state officials, the mass public addressed by Moore, or both. The film’s final line plays on this ambiguity in a dialogue that Moore and his editors construct from a piece of footage of the president making one of his iconic public speaking gaffes. On this occasion, Bush mangles the saying “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” substituting “... can’t get fooled again,” a misremembered Pete Townshend lyric, for the correct ending. “For once,” Moore deadpans, “we agreed.” Few will miss the sarcasm and irony of this line: by re-presenting and remarking on footage of Bush’s embarrassing slip of the tongue, Moore articulates the frustration of all those who disagree with the president but have no platform from which to express it. Underscored by the triumphal sounds of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” the Neil Young song that kicks in after Moore’s last line, a song recorded in 1989 as a protest against the George H. W. Bush administration, the ending of the film suggests that popular frustration can be channeled into the anarchic energies of laughter and resistance.
This ending leaves no doubt that Moore and the president are on different sides. At the same time, it reminds viewers that “us” and “we” are constructions about which the producers, subjects, and audiences of documentary alike should maintain a vigilant suspicion. Indeed, given the degree to which the film has, by this point, employed techniques of irony and parody, together with Moore’s habitual manipulation of historical narrative, the question of “us” can be heard as a reflexive expression of doubt. The distrust Moore attributes to the cheerful young soldiers—or, rather, to the future projected in their images—seems to be directed at all Americans in positions of responsibility and authority, even those critics of power, like liberal documentary filmmakers, who are clearly on the side of the innocent. By concluding in these skeptical and somewhat ambivalent terms, Fahrenheit 9/11 leaves open the question of whether its own commercial success could be taken to prove that a significant transformation of the cinematic public sphere was taking place.
As I was finishing this book, the trade journal Variety announced the end of the commercial boom in feature documentary ushered in by the unprecedented box office revenues of Moore’s 2002 film Bowling For Columbine, which grossed $21.6 million in domestic ticket sales and $58 million worldwide. The occasion for this announcement was the release of Moore’s latest film, Sicko (2007); Variety wondered whether Sicko could revive the flagging theatrical market for nonfiction. Since 2004, the year that Fahrenheit 9/11 led a cycle of politically themed documentaries into theaters, total domestic box office for documentaries had dropped steadily, from $171 million in 2004 to $116 million the following year, to $55 million in 2006, and only $2 million at the midway point of 2007.(On its opening weekend in wide release, ticket sales for Sicko more than doubled the last figure, and after four weeks the film had grossed more than $22 million.) Suggesting that the fortunes of documentary in mainstream theaters in recent years had been a fluke, Variety explained the slump of the last eighteen months as a “market correction” and a “return to rationality.” The magazine made little attempt to explain the shift in consumption patterns, other than to note that a “fatigue factor” had set in with the movie-going public, owing to the “hard subject matter” of war, suffering, and natural disaster that filmmakers were said to have focused on of late. This explanation overlooked the obvious fact that many of the films of the boom, and those that earned the most money, had been concerned with exactly these themes.
The brief recent window of opportunity for documentary filmmakers in the mainstream was initially seen by many commentators as evidence of a collective embrace of truth, rejection of entertainment, or “hunger for the real” on the part of North American audiences after a series of national debacles: the Clinton impeachment crisis, the election crisis of 2000, the September 11 attacks, the consequent ramping up of national security anxieties, and the increasingly disastrous and unpopular Iraq war. Although the attention of mainstream media outlets was predictably focused on the success of those films that were in wide national release and had the financial backing sufficient to generate national publicity, the more interesting phenomenon was the distribution of documentary themes and dispositions across various levels of the culture, from the capital-intensive preserves of network television and the contemporary art scene to the cottage industries and desktops of nonprofessional filmmaking. Released in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and during the opening of the new American wars in Central Asia and the Middle East, Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to initiate a political documentary cycle, a tide of feature-length films concerned directly or indirectly with presidential politics ( Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Elections [Richard Ray Perez and Joan Seckler, 2002], Bush’s Brain [Joseph Mealey and Michael Shoob, 2004], Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy [Steven Grandison and Greg Palast, 2004], Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry [George Butler, 2004], and The Hunting of the President [Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason, 2004]); terrorism and national security ( Control Room [Jehane Noujaim, 2004], Persons of Interest [Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse, 2003], The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear [Adam Curtis, 2004], Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War [Robert Greenwald, 2004], WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception [Danny Schecter, 2004], Why We Fight [Eugene Jarecki, 2005]); and the experience of the war in Iraq from the perspective of its planners ( No End in Sight [Charles Ferguson, 2007]), ordinary soldiers ( Gunner Palace [Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2004], Occupation: Dreamland [Ian Olds and Garrett Scott, 2005], The War Tapes [Deborah Scranton, 2006], The Ground Truth [Patricia Foulkrod, 2006]), and civilians ( Iraq in Fragments [James Longley, 2006], My Country, My Country [Laura Poitras, 2006]). These films found audiences in theatrical venues, on the film-festival circuit, on home video, on the Internet, or in art spaces, where the avant-garde was showing renewed interest in documentary strategies. Other filmmakers found support for similar work from cable television networks like HBO and Discovery Times—which produced a documentary miniseries, Off to War (Brent Renaud and Craig Renaud, 2005), about the training and deployment of Arkansas national guardsmen— and from the few PBS series that contract with independent producers, such as Frontline, P.O.V., and Independent Lens.
Most of these films found ways to suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that traditional news sources had not provided truth about political events, or at least not an effective truth, one on which citizen-viewers could act. This argument was present in the work in ways other than the straightforward statement of it as a premise. In the ABC television miniseries The Path to 9/11 (2006), the methods of docudrama allowed the producers to suggest that the Clinton administration had failed to act on numerous occasions when it had the chance to eliminate the threat posed to Americans by Muslim terrorists. (The liberties that the series took with its source materials, including the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, drew the wrath of former president Clinton himself, who orchestrated a public relations campaign against the broadcast, helping to ensure the series’ critical and commercial failure; the network was forced to run the series without advertising, attempting to pass it off as a “public service,” and to abandon plans to market it, along with study guides, to schools.) Other films drew heavily on the principles of cinéma vérité, including the use of visual or audio-visual evidence of realities too grim or too banal for mainstream news media and the adoption of perspectives more subjective and intimate than commercial journalism could afford and retain its national-public identity. Representative of these tactics were certain films produced by HBO about the second Gulf war, like Baghdad E.R. (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, 2006), or Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory Kennedy, 2007), which used vérité videography and interviews to expose the ugly physical and psychic consequences of the American military occupation of Iraq. Through an intense publicity campaign, the network was able to garner considerable attention for these productions, including an endorsement from the New York Times for Baghdad E.R.: a columnist called it “required viewing for all but the youngest Americans.” But the pornographic interest of these films in what ordinary television would not show or speak of—the insides of bodies, the sexual lives and fantasies of soldiers—added little to the available knowledge of the places they visited. Their function could be better understood from their position in the network schedule (the premiere of Baghdad E.R., for instance, led into one of the final episodes of The Sopranos) or from their place in the industrial logic of HBO, where they shared production staff with the exploitation documentary series Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions, than from their sentimental and chauvinistic reduction of the war to its effects on American soldiers, as if they were its only casualties.
More significant alternatives to the mass public sphere were offered by those independent productions that made use of affinity networks created through public-access cable, the Internet, satellite “narrowcast,” and other alternatives to broadcast, commercial cable, and theatrical distribution. Notwithstanding the logic of their arguments or the reliability of their sources, which were highly variable, these works could make more legitimate claims than the HBO tagline “It’s Not TV” to a position outside the commercial mainstream. Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, for example, a three-hour-long telefilm about the historical connections between Muslim fundamentalism and American neoconservatism that was rejected for broadcast by HBO and without a commercial distributor in the United States, was made available to download for free from a number of Web sites, including Google Video and the Internet Archive. The activist media organization Deep Dish TV used a network of satellite-dish operators and public-access cable stations, as well as direct DVD sales and the Internet Archive, to distribute Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation (2004), an anthology of short works about the war and Iraqi and American civilian resistance to it. MoveOn.org and other liberal groups made canny use of house parties to promote and benefit from screenings of films by Moore and Greenwald, redirecting the Brownian flows of interest on the Internet into more intimate social forms. A similar constellation grew up around a number of 9/11-conspiracy films. These films, usually produced in digital video, ventured to explain the state’s role in the 9/11 attacks, which they called an “inside job.” The explanations for the attacks offered by films like Painful Deceptions (Eric Hufschmid, 2003), Mega Fix: The Dazzling Political Deceit That Led to 9/11 (Jack Cashill, 2004), and Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the 9/11 Investigation (James Walter, 2005) had been thoroughly refuted by a variety of experts and professionals in both official and commercial-public media, but this discouraged neither their makers nor their audiences, since populist epistemology dictated that only such explanations and evidence as had not yet found their way into centralized information networks could be true. Thus, expert opinion, whether it was offered under the auspices of the 9/11 Commission or Popular Mechanics magazine, was suspect by virtue of its standing in established institutions and its access to mass-public means of dissemination. The obsession in the conspiracy community with proving, using documentary methods, that the U.S. government was behind the attacks seemed to demonstrate that the decline of public confidence in reality had been overstated by some documentary theorists and that the real problem was public confidence in the public itself. Among the more interesting and influential examples of this mindset was Loose Change (Dylan Avery, 2005–2006), a nonprofessional feature-length documentary by a self-taught filmmaker from rural New York. Its place in the public sphere of suspicion invoked by Moore at the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, and in relation to the affirmative ideas of publicness outlined in earlier chapters, can be better understood if I describe it as an event within a structure of national feeling, one whose theatrics of community it is occasionally possible to witness in person, as I did on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Wearing black t-shirts that bore phrases like “Investigate 9/11,” partisans of the “9/11 Truth” movement assembled at the World Trade Center site on the morning of the fifth anniversary, where a memorial service honoring the victims and their families was being held. Offi cial public ceremonies marking the anniversary, including the reading of victims’ names, speeches by state officials, the laying of wreaths, and performances of musical elegies, were taking place in the deep pit referred to as ground zero. At street level around the subterranean block, crowds had gathered to observe the ceremonies, which were broadcast by loud-speakers to the periphery of the site, as well as to more distant publics by electronic means. Some of the marchers handed out paper-jacketed DVDs of Loose Change, a ninety-minute film purporting to prove that the U.S. government orchestrated the events of September 11 and then covered its tracks by fabricating evidence that Arab terrorists were the culprits.
On a Web site related to the film, its producers later claimed that nearly ten thousand copies were given out at ground zero on the morning of the memorial ceremony. A number of versions of this wildly popular film were already available for purchase, download, and streaming on the Internet. Although reliable numbers for a film self-distributed in this way are hard to come by, impressive claims have been made about the reach of Loose Change, including estimations of some ten million viewings through a variety of Web sites, and sales of more than fifty thousand copies of the DVD. However inflated these numbers might have been, the film and others like it played a role in spreading the 9/11 Truth movement through their unsettling use of familiar images and sounds, their sensational “findings,” and the word-of-mouth and hand-to-hand means by which they found many of their viewers. Especially in the last of these tactics, Loose Change takes to one extreme the democratic vocation of social documentary film and applies this vocation to a public imagined in equally extremist terms.
Abiding by a selective idealization of popular democracy, one that combines a belief in certain items in the Bill of Rights with an anticorporate interest in decentralized media production and the valorization of common sense over professional and intellectual knowledge, Loose Change directs its skepticism against official explanations of events and against the journalistic and scientific establishments. A casual and subjective attitude to public facts is evident from the opening title, which warns viewers that possession of the information in Loose Change may be a crime under “Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT act [H.R. 1362],” and punishable by detention “without trial at Guantanamo Bay,” even though this section of the act—H.R. 3162, not 1362, which concerns pay equity, not terrorism—merely describes lexical and grammatical changes to the section on terrorism in the United States Code. The film continues in this manner, using desktop-computer production techniques to demonstrate that “eye witnesses, video footage, and a little common sense” can be used to refute the analyses of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States and other investigative agencies. Most of Loose Change’s claims are built on discredited conspiracy theories, misreadings of images and documents, and coincidences of the type favored by assassination buffs, a hyperactive, stream-of-consciousness approach to history that Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style.” Although the film has been recut a number of times in response to copyright challenges and criticism, the persistence of the most fantastical claims from one version to the next suggests that the filmmakers are as focused on ensuring a wide and expanding audience for their film as on creating reasoned public discourse, notwithstanding the film’s closing challenge to its viewers: “Now that this evidence has been presented, what will you do about it? Will you find comfort in the official version of events, or will you go out and investigate for yourselves? Will you share this information, or will you ignore it? Will you be at ground zero on September 11th?”
As is made clear by the rippling American flag that fills the screen during this exhortation, most of these are conventional questions in American political documentary, where an infinitely expansive public address is routinely paired with the critical values of curiosity, controversy, and collectivity in the pursuit of social and political change. By associating the potential circulation and diffusion of their film with its social power as a critique of authority and a call to action, the makers of Loose Change—which is not marked with an indication that its makers reserve copyright and begins by exhorting its viewers to duplicate and distribute the video—superimpose the ideal of the public sphere onto new technologies of communication, a relatively conventional idea of how oppositionality is achieved in new media. In States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000), one of the few works of documentary theory to take on the problem of documentary publics, Patricia R. Zimmermann contends that commercial-industrial control over the means of cultural production and reception “devastates any democratic public sphere,” while emergent media of telecommunication, from the satellite, the Internet, and public-access cable TV to the camcorder, the personal computer, and the cell phone, can be counted on to create “newly imagined public spaces,” in which “debate and controversy” are mobilized to oppose the national and international centralization of corporate and state power.
It is tempting to think of Loose Change, an essentially homemade film with an international reach, as proof of these claims, until one notices that most of the visual evidence Loose Change supplies in support of its arguments is taken from commercial, highly capitalized sources of public information and edited using consumer-grade electronics and software. Nearly every video frame of the work is, in this way, stamped with the subjectivity of consumption. The film’s otherwise incongruous title, distinguished from the shrill titles of similar films by its indirection, can be read as a comment on this paradox: loose change, after all, is what’s left after you buy something. But the title also marks a different aspect of the film’s claim to serve as an alternative to mainstream publicity: its foregrounding of circulation. The medium of a fleetingly ethical encounter with strangers (“spare some change?”), loose change allows us to count ourselves into a public and, at the same time, to evade more significant forms of contact. A potential sociality of this sort is one characteristic of any space of circulation we can properly call a public. This imaginary aspect of the public sphere, one of its strengths as a model of a social organization, is also a source of pressure on its users. A public that does not demonstrate the potential to extend its reach to new members, to strangers, is simply a group. Without the capacity to generalize the concern of the film’s audience beyond the activity and the duration of viewing, a documentary film is just another pastime, commodity, or source of unassimilable information.
When Loose Change asks its viewers if they will gather at ground zero on September 11, it indicates its makers’ doubt and confusion about how publicness inheres in the making and viewing of documentary film. Compared to the millions of viewers it is claimed have seen the film on DVD or online, what would a gathering of several dozen or several hundred in person mean, beyond constituting a topical common space? The announcement of the September 11 assembly expresses the film’s anxiety that its methods and questions would not have the sovereign force their makers intended, that of displacing the authority of the state—present in the official ceremonies of memory and in the accompanying display of police and legal power over city space—with the popular power of publicity and publication. Thus, given the makers’ manifest faith that new technologies might provide the means to finally discover the true causes and culprits of 9/11, the invitation to gather in full view of one another in a public place was a conflicted and nostalgic gesture. This appeal to the ritual power of an embodied public and to the use of documentary form to galvanize such a public draws on the most venerable traditions of American liberal discourse. But it does so in ways that evince a striking distrust of those traditions and their textual conventions. If it can be taken as proof that the problems I have been tracing persist into the present, Avery’s film is also a symptom of doubt and suspicion about that intellectual tradition. That is to say, however limited its authority as a documentary, Loose Change documents a contradiction seemingly endemic in American political documentary at present: on the one hand, a reinvestment, on all scales of production, in the democratic and artistic potential of documentary forms and, on the other hand, the profound difficulty of imagining the effect of these forms, beyond the time and space in which they occur.
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