From THE VN/VO:
It is as if my online video rental service likes to play tricks on me. This last week, they sent me two of the same documentary DVD's. Now, they didn't each have the same title- one was entitled "Michael Moore Hates America", and the other was entitled "Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction."
After a few hours wading through "real life" situations calculated to the point of dramatization, quotes spliced far beyond their context, and edits that read like a script, I realized that for all intents and purposes both of these "documentaries about documentaries" were really the same damn movie.
In the Moore movie, director Michael Wilson attempts to debunk a few of Michael Moore's documentaries through his own supposedly straightforward and truthful investigative filmmaking. In the Faces of Death expose, the original "Faces" director somehow attempts to scrutinize the legitimacy of his own movies through supposedly straightforward and truthful investigative filmmaking.
When examining these two films (and the hundreds of others like them) relative to our culture as a whole, we begin to see a perilous condition that may help explain a lot about the way the modern masses digest and shape our political and socio-economic landscape. Life in our culture is generally good- or, at the most pessimistic, just normal. Fine. Manageable.
However, that's not exciting enough. Fact-based reality has become far too mundane to hold most people's interest in politics and social issues. Thus, we'd rather policy be based on a mix of sensationalism and an edited version of reality, focused only the worst or best effects of any issue.
Okay, so documentaries are often journalistically corrupt and blinded by agenda. Big deal. Well, it does become a big deal when you look at the reasons why, realizing that these reasons apply- acceleratedly so- to most forms of media, which in turn is almost always the initial impetus for political action.
You see, real life is boring. Or, better put: real life is, in actuality, rather sparse on disastrous social problems, downward trends, and all of the various issues that "make good stories." This is not to say issues don't exist- of course they do. This is also not to say that the incidents of socio-economic problems which are rare have no place in the national debate merely because of their rarity.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Interesting opinions
2 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
You have a very interesting analysis that is applicable to a country with a large population. It was unlikely that I would know more than a few folks living in St. Paul, unless it was my profession to know them - i.e. an insurance man whose bread and cheese came from knowing lots of people and thus having lots of opportunities to sell policies.
In addition, the pronouncements coming from Washington would not mean all that much in Flyoverland - unless you were a federal employee and it was your boss (a cabinet secretary) issuing some new regulation.
It's a different ball game when you live in a country with a small population, like Israel's.
Even with 5.3 million Jews, you get the feeling that everybody knows everybody. Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who etc. News of a terrorist attack comes in on the radio, and sure enough, a few days later (at the most) you learn that the school guard's brother was the bus driver on the bus that was bombed, or whatever.
Therefore, everything that occurs in a small country like this is a whole lot more intense. When 200,000 people gather in Zion Square in Jerusalem that is 3.77% of the country in one place. Imagine 3.77% of 300 million people gathered in one place, like Times Square, or near the Washingon Monment. That is 11.3 million people.
This doesn't mean that life is not ordinary or mundane here. Of course it is. There are wives/girlfriends to sleep with, babies to change, the rent/mortgage and bills to pay, groceries to buy, dinner to cook, dishes to wash, beds to be made, laundry to do, etc., etc.
And there are brisses, bar mitvahs, weddings and funerals to go to. In other words, life goes on. But when the thunder claps here, it claps a lot lot louder.