Documentary, Performance and Risk

207 Pages·2019·7.072 MB·English

by  James Lyons

DOCUMENTARY, PERFORMANCE
AND RISK
Documentary, Performance and Risk explores how some of the most significant recent
American feature documentaries use performance to dramatically animate major
categories of risk.
The fact that these documentaries do rely on such performance is revealing both
in terms of trends in American feature documentary, and in relation to the cur-
rency of ideas about risk in contemporary Western societies. The book takes a
detailed look at the performance of risk and demonstrates the rewards of close
critical attention to formal composition and performance. Covering An Inconvenient
Truth, Super Size Me, Capitalism: A Love Story and Jackass: The Movie, it explores
how these high-profile films offer up compelling narratives and images of indivi-
duals ‘acting on risk’. The films seek to both confront and control the contours of
their environments in ways that reveal much about how a particular set of beliefs
about risk and the individual have come to inform our lives.
This wide-ranging analysis of feature documentary is ideal for scholars and
postgraduate students studying documentary film, film and media studies.
James Lyons is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter,
UK. He is the author of Selling Seattle (2004) and Miami Vice (2010) and co-
editor of Quality Popular Television (2003), Multimedia Histories: From the Magic
Lantern to the Internet (2007) and The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators
and Contexts (2010). He also co-designed and co-produced the documentary
The Risk Taker’s Survival Guide (2014), which won the Ramillas Interactive
Award at Sheffield International Doc/Fest.

DOCUMENTARY,
PERFORMANCE
AND RISK
James Lyons
Firstpublished2020
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To the loving memory of Trevor Lyons and Jocelyn Avigad,
who, in their contrasting ways, knew a lot about risk.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Theorizing documentary, performance and risk 13
2 ‘Mr. Earth’: Embodying environmental risk in An Inconvenient
Truth 48
3 The risk of obesity: Super Size Me and the performance of
biopedagogy 78
4 ‘Skin in the game’: Financial risk and Capitalism: A Love Story 114
5 Warning: this film contains nuts: Jackass and the performance of
everyday risk 157
Afterword 191
Index 196
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m grateful totheCollege of Humanitiesat theUniversity of Exeter for providing
me with the research leave to work on this book. Thanks to colleagues in the
Department of English and Film for their support and encouragement, which
means an awful lot. I’d also like to express my appreciation to the REACT pro-
ducers and participants at Watershed in Bristol who did so much to stimulate my
thinking about risk and documentary at a critical time. Thanks to you all. I’ve also
benefited from my work with M2D, Exeter’s EPSRC research network exploring
DecisionMakingunderUncertainty.Theopportunitytoexaminemyideasofrisk,
probability and uncertainty in this environment has been enormously stimulating. I
am deeply appreciative of the guidance, understanding and professionalism of
Natalie Foster and her editorial team. The writing of this book has been a chal-
lenge, and their patience has been received with enormous gratitude. I am also
indebted to my family, especially my wife Karen, whose forbearance and support
has been amazing, and to Rebecca and Austin for all the fun and (some of) the
nonsense. Last but not least, thanks to the Goldsteins and the Avigads for being a
simply remarkable extended family.
INTRODUCTION
A medium shot of a young man sat on a bed, hunched over a laptop, looking
pensive. He’s dressed in black trousers and white t-shirt, which, when situated
against the white, minimalist interior of the upscale hotel room he inhabits, lends a
cool, almost clinical feel. We watch as he types, but not what he types. Shots such
as this comprise a significant proportion of the film’s running time, intercut with
footage from press conferences, government hearings, newsrooms and other perti-
nent locales. Within the room, the most dramatic physical event is the unantici-
patedtestingofthehotel’sfirealarm.Wewatchhimcloselyashereacts.Successive
bursts of the alarm tax his composure and raise concern. Not concern that there’s
actually a fire, but instead a ruse to induce his exit. In this respect it is a false
alarm – it appears, after all, just a routine test. Remotely, figuratively at least, alarm
bells are ringing, as the dramatic chain of events precipitated by the young man
startstoplayout.Thisfiltersbackinrealtime,asthehotelroomTVemitssnippets
of a news reporter describing the story as ‘straight out of a John le Carré novel’.
But, emblematic of the film’s measured, dispassionate tone and formal style, we
hear these words as we watch our putative ‘Alec Leamas’ trying prosaically to tame
his hair in the bathroom mirror, as if merely smartening up for a date or a job
interview.
Laura Poitras’s Academy Award winning documentary Citizenfour (2014), which
records the filmmaker’s meeting with National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-
blower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, and shows the handover of information
and computer files to investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, is most assuredly a
tale of espionage. The covert surveillance it sets forth is the most extensive act of
mass spying in history. Yet unlike a le Carré novel, no one is hurt or killed, unless
you count the casualties inthe US drone strikesSnowdenasserts hewas authorised
towatch from hisNSAcomputer. Snowdenstates atone pointthathe’scalmuntil
‘somebody,like,bustsinthedoor,suddenlyI’llgetnervousandit’llaffectme’.But