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COMMENTARY
September 2, 2006
Killing Bush
Gabriel Range is a documentary filmmaker, of whom few had heard until this week. His 2003 television production, The Day Britain Stopped, was a pioneering essay in the “fake documentary”, in which imaginary future events are synthesized in fine detail. He has now achieved fame, even before anyone has seen his new essay in that genre, Death of a President. It will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 10th, and then show on the British TV channel, More4.The fame, or more properly, infamy, is for his audacity in making a film about the assassination of a U.S. President who is still alive. It will not be for the content of the film -- as Mr Range must know perfectly well. The face of the actual George W. Bush is digitally “pasted” over that of an actor, to create the illusion of reality. This method can only reinforce the sensationalism; it can only distract from any serious narrative or philosophical premise of the film. Thus, we cannot doubt that the filmmaker’s purpose is more political than artistic: that he wants a political sensation. Is the film a wish-fulfilment? One can go too far in psychologizing the behaviour of an artist, but it becomes irresistible in an environment where, as in Britain today, rhetorical suggestions that Bush should be assassinated have become “mainstream” and commonplace. Mr Range must at least have anticipated the criticism that his film could be a goad to an actual assassin. It starkly provides that crucial element of pre-enactment, that is the textbook conditioner of the diseased criminal mind. And in so doing, it becomes more effective than any conventional death threat. To put this another way, the film presents, and is intended to present, a threat to President Bush’s life, in a way that gets around the law. “Xenophobia, the hidden costs of war, and the nature of civil liberties in a hyper-media age, all come under the microscope.” I’ve extracted this line from the publicity puffery that accompanies the film. It will contain a “detective mystery plot”, about the identity of the assassin, in which a “Syrian-born” man is falsely accused. We can safely infer from this much, that the filmmaker’s political views are the glib, smug, clichéd, and indeed, asinine views we are used to hearing from the institutional Left, about the nature of “Amerika”. Needless to say, this plotline is already being flattered, by the same, as a “thought-provoking critique”. I take a dim view of documentary movie-making to start with, although I have seen a few historical documentaries, which use real footage and contemporary sound-overs to telling and useful effect -- in narrating a true story. The use of digital technology today, to clean up old imagery and sound recordings, and make them vivid and crisp, can wake us to the realization that events in the “mythologized” history of the last century, really happened. But this technology is a Pandora’s box. Actors and digitizing tricks can be used to “reconstruct”, or fake events entirely, for audiences that have learned no solid history in our schools. Such audiences have no defences against such frauds, beyond their postmodern scepticism of everything. They are easily manipulated. A deeper problem with cinema generally, is now brought to a head. Traditional art and drama never aspired to fakery in fine detail; it quite intentionally left much to the imagination of the viewer. The “suspension of disbelief” in a poem or a novel requires the reader’s full participation: he is the person who must flesh out the scene from the scant details provided. In doing so, he brings his moral intelligence into play, together with all his other faculties. A creative work requires a creative response. Whereas the faked documentary is a kind of kitsch, naturally at the service of the pathological. To synthesize everything, to the tiniest plausible detail, is to leave no room for the viewer’s own imaginative response. It is to overwhelm his capacity for moral reflection. The viewer is simply used. Mr Range’s documentary is a true “sign of the times” -- related, I think, to the extraordinary amount of fakery that was done by photographers and other media operators to “create news” from Lebanon recently. (See the website “Little Green Footballs” for a good inventory of the shams that have been exposed to date.) People who find reality isn’t cooperating with their illusions, have often substituted a new reality instead. But they now have the technology to bring their fantasies to life. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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