docu-mental

One of the best qualities of TV news is its unbelievability. Maybe that's the secret to the widespread appeal and long-term popularity of network and cable news programming: its so easy to watch without taking seriously - to consume the packaged, predictable, perfunctory information-product of the McLuhanesque cool medium and let it slide right through, like shit through a goose, without much effect, and then watch whatever reality show is on next.

A well-made documentary film, on the other hand, is not as pasteurized, homogenized, bite-sized, overproduced, and packaged for fleeting mass consumption at 6:00 and 11:00, therefore it might take longer to digest, might actually require chewing, and consequently could stick to your ribs.

My friend Dr. Jack Thunder recently offered me the privilege of watching about 90 films on various social issues during the next several weeks, as part of a process by which some of them will win something. Besides the fact that I have no credentials whatsoever, it's nice to be asked to participate - put me in, coach, I wanna play! However, I'm beginning to notice some effects on my otherwise stable psyche.

I'm going docu-mental, Doc!

The piece about Ariel Dorfman's exile from Chile following the Pinochet military coup on 9/11/73 and the ensuing "disappearance" of Salvador Allende, his inner circle of democratically elected socialists, and many innocent sympathizers, for example, stayed with me for a while. I now have a couple of Dorfman's books on my To Read list, and I have a couple of friends I want to consult about his work.

A couple of days later I was transfixed for an hour by a Canadian film about a group of wholesome teenage girls in an outdoor education program and their 34-year-old male sexual predator teacher. Their first-person accounts of rendezvous to help this snake "clean his boat" left me a bit shaken.

Then a couple of days later, Zelda went camping with some friends at Zaleski State Wildlife Area, so naturally my paternal fears have been working overtime. She came home yesterday with nothing worse than sore muscles from hiking nine miles of hills and a coating of dirt from being outside for two days. So I'm relieved and reassured that she's a big girl and she knows what she's doing, and that I'm overreacting (moi?) just a bit.

As I haphazardly develop a set of standards - somehow 'I like it' or 'I don't like it' isn't enough - for discriminating between one film and another, maybe the level of my own reaction is as valid a measure as any. I take my temperature. If a film gets under my skin and shakes me up a bit, it must doing something right.

Tonight I'll watch one or two more movies, and if the stars align, one of them will grab me by the throat, gut, third eye, butt, brachial plexus, or gonads and rock my world for one hour and fifteen minutes. At least I hope so.