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DOCS MUST ROCK
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The week between Christmas and New Years 2002, we were at a restaurant having dinner with some friends. During the course of the conversation, I lamented the sudden death of Joe Strummer a few days earlier. One of my companions had not heard the news and blurted out: Joe Strummer’s dead?! This caused a stir from a few nearby diners who also expressed surprise and genuine sadness.
It may be an overstatement, albeit a slight one, to call Joe Strummer the voice of a generation. For a sizable number of folks between the ages of 40-50, he (along with his Clash band mates) reshaped our musical perspectives and challenged us to broaden our listening horizons. If the opening chords of London Calling don’t cause you to immediately disengage from whatever you’re doing and start bouncing around the room uncontrollably, well frankly, you’re not one of us.
So it was with great anticipation tinged with a dollop of melancholy that I rushed off to see Julien Temple’s documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. Normally, documentaries stir little enthusiasm within me. It is a genre that I largely assign to the bin of television. Something I might get around to watching when there’s absolutely nothing else on.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it has to do with a certain waft of the ‘you’re going to learn something from this’, left over from the educational films we were forced to watch as kids. The Rideau: Colonel By’s Peaceable Waterway -- a look at the history of the Rideau Canal. I react badly to that kind of Buckley’s Cough Syrup imposition from any art form. Tastes terrible but it’s good for you.
Perhaps documentaries evoke memories of Sunday sluggishness spent watching animal documentaries like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. “We’re going to send Jim up into the tree to wrestle that massively oversized boa constrictor from the branches.” After a dutiful struggle, Jim appears beside Marlin Perkins with said boa subdued if still flailing a little. We learn that along with man’s mastery of nature comes great responsibility, part of which is ensuring our family is safely tucked away from financial ruin with Mutual of Omaha life insurance.
There’s a certain drab sameness to the documentary format, like a dull college essay. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Inherent in its very structure is the whiff of didacticism.
Like the insufferable teachers we all endured at some point of time in our academic careers, documentaries claim to speak the truth. We’re not making this shit up, is the implied stance. But as soon as a camera starts to roll, when a writer and/or director assembles information in a particular order, omitting this fact, rearranging those two pieces of history, the truth is already as suspect as the Pope’s infallibility. As Lou Reed (himself the subject of more than one good documentary) sang, Don’t believe half of what you see/And none of what you hear. The line separating Michael Moore from Leni Riefenstahl isn’t fixed, differentiation depending as much on the viewer’s perspective as the filmmaker’s intent.All documentaries aren’t driven solely by the urge to educate or indoctrinate. The motives are sometimes much worse. I’m not talking about the stories of unbearably quirky common folk undertaking unbearably quirky exploits.. necessarily, although these too can descend into a freaks-on-celluloid kind of spectacle. Despite its obvious affection toward the characters, the non-Hitchcock Spellbound still left me feeling more than a little uneasy, having seen and overheard things that maybe should’ve remained behind closed doors, out of sight from an audience.
Apparently, for some documentary filmmakers, this is exactly the point. To pull back the veil on their personal lives and reveal to the world their travails, flaws and sordid little peccadilloes. The first time I remember encountering this phenomenon was with Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March. Legend has it that McElwee set out to make a movie about the lingering effects of General Sherman’s scorched earth advance through the Confederacy during the American Civil War but a bad break-up before filming caused McElwee to turn the camera on himself. Suddenly on his own, I guess there was no one around to inform him that, in fact, the Civil War was far more interesting and probably had broader appeal. At times insipid, rarely engaging and never entertaining, I just kept thinking, dude, don’t you have a therapist for this? I mean, you’re making me crazy.
I have nothing against broken-hearted southerners, gay Orthodox Jews or illegitimate children of famous fathers. I’m just disinclined to dedicate a couple hours of my life to watch strangers work through their issues. Those who make movies about their own lives are the same ones who actually give detailed responses to the friendly but rhetorical question: How are ya? Moreover, people I least expect to tell the truth are the ones making autobiographical documentaries.
That’s not to say there haven’t been any documentaries that I’ve enjoyed. Numerous Michael Moore films, An Inconvenient Truth, The Corporation, Super Size Me, Paradise Lost, were all time well spent. It’s just that as an avid moviegoer, I have little drive to see them at a theatre. With the exception of Errol Morris, the one thing nearly all documentary makers have in common is a lack of visual style unless you include cinéma vérité. Even it has been rendered nearly meaningless through excessive use by directors at either end of the budgetary scale and in every genre.
Music proves to be the irresistible draw for me to see a documentary at the movies. I tend to be a less discriminating cineste when the music takes centre stage although I certainly think Martin Scorcese expertly matched sight and sound with The Last Waltz. Politics, religious zealotry, criminal and economic injustice -- documentary DNA -- I can read about, study up on my own. The Ramones playing at CBGB? Until they build a working time machine, End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones will suffice nicely. Unquestionably, many music documentaries fall into the sameness trap that trips-up their non-musical counterparts. The VH1 Behind the Music arc so ably lampooned on The Simpsons. The rise from humble beginnings, fame achieved, massive consumption of alcohol, narcotics and groupies, somebody dies, the manager steals all the money, a precipitous decline and crash into the gutter of cheaper alcohol, narcotics and mankier groupies and then, redemption.
Really good music docs eschew that formula, choosing instead to examine musicians at crucial and interesting points in their careers. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart comes immediately to mind, following the label-less Wilco just before they’re about to take a major step up the stardom ladder with Yankee Foxtrot Hotel. loudQuietloud: A Film About the Pixies takes the opposite approach, showing the seminal 1980s group on their reunion tour as they soullessly reap the financial rewards that had eluded them 20 years earlier.
Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is much more of the formulaic music documentary with its early Joe, Joe on the rise, The Clash Joe, Joe in the artistic wilderness, redeemed Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros storyline. Director Julien Temple does bring a personal touch to the film though, with his insider knowledge (not to mention amazing archival footage) of the London punk scene in general and The Clash in particular. His record as a music video director certainly doesn’t hurt the proceedings either.
All of which is beside the point, of course. For me, it’s simply about spending a couple hours, waxing nostalgic and remembering fondly The Only Band That Matters.
