I Do Love a Good Documentary, So Let's Talk About Them!

I firmly believe that the best way to tell a story that needs to be told is through a well done documentary.  If done right, the viewer leaves with not only a much better understanding of something they were at best only casually familiar with, but also an insatiable appetite to learn more about it.  Some of the greatest docs tell stories that are stranger than fiction...or put another way, if the story they told were instead a work of fiction, nobody would believe it could actually happen.  But they can also be good when you find out there is a whole other side to something you thought you knew.  

Rather than spend time narrowing it down to a short list and doing a deep dive on the top three,

I'd like to just talk about a bunch of them.  We'll still have a winner, because it would be a deep disservice to deprive the world of a Big Empty Best Documentary Award™.  And besides, the Academy doesn't do a top three write up.  In fact, they don't even do a write up on the winner.  We here at the Big Empty bring the lunch pail to work.  If 30 seconds of witty banter followed by 30 seconds of listing the nominees followed by a big reveal, a dramatic walk to a stage, and 60 seconds of tearful thanks before the music tells them to GTFO is your truth, I'm not here to take anything away from you.  I just give you more...that's all I'm saying.  Agree or disagree with me, I have the burden of justifying what I do and I take it very seriously.  All the Academy will do is say "we're the Academy, are you saying we're wrong?!" 

Streaming platforms and social distancing have combined to turn the last year into somewhat of a golden age of documentary production, so as I sit here typing, it's possible that a slew of brand spanking new ones just dropped on Netflix, Prime, or HBO Max.  For a documentary lover like me, this could feel like pay dirt.  Perhaps.  But it's more important to know why I enjoy a good documentary.  The Documentary is ultimately a platform that is setup to succeed where the rest of our news and cultural media fails.  The audience comes to a documentary already willing to invest the time to follow along on your deep dive into important nuances that help provide answers where more typical nightly news or Entertainment Tonight type platforms will (by design) always come up disappointingly short.  With this premise though, more does not always mean better.  As I'm quickly learning, the documentary assembly line churning out more material than ever may not always create for the purpose of educating or generating interest.  Many will succumb to the temptation to be more attention grabbing than informative, thus mimicking the disease of mainstream media as opposed to curing it.  Some will do a little bit of both, leaving us with useful takeaways while also providing lots of filler that is more manipulative than substantive.  For this reason, we are now formally announcing the creation of a new award that applies only to this category!  Yes you didn't misread that....buried in the middle of this post is some actual news!  Unlike other more flattering awards given here, the Big Empty Editorial Staff is here and now declaring that any documentary is eligible for the not so honorable distinction of receiving any number of "Dirty Laundry Awards."  Named after the song by the great Don Henley (this blog ultimately has musical roots), documentaries will receive this special recognition any time they employ salacious techniques to draw conclusions for you the viewer that are not well supported with evidence in the movie or by its creator(s).  Remember when we were in high school and we got verbally abused by teachers when we submitted a paper that wasn't properly cited?  Well so why the HELL should you get away with it just because you made a movie?  Your moviemaker status will not make you safe here.  You have been warned.  Now while this award may have some overlap with the usual disdain that the Big Empty Editorial Staff reserves for those who have "made shit up for no good reason", the Dirty Laundry award reserves a special place in Big Empty purgatory for the film maker who set the table to do better than the mainstream media and for reasons that only they can explain, chose deliberately not to.  

So with all that said, what will follow will be a series of posts that will discuss a few important documentaries, good bad or indifferent and explore what they do and what they do not do well.  None (save the winner) are worthy of any ranking recognition, but all are here because they discuss something important about our culture.  I hope you the reader will enjoy and be compelled to take a look at something you don't normally think about, or consider a second look at things you do know about from another angle.

I'll start with one that I just watched a few days ago 'Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests.'   It's at the forefront of my brain right now for three reasons:

1) the subject matter is a topic that I've had sincere interest in for over 20 years

2) the movie had an emotional impact on me that was deeply personal

3) it is not what I would consider a good movie, or a good use of the documentary format to deliver the kind of impact that it had so much potential to have.  

The review immediately follows this post (link here).