Joss Whedon

Surprise! Real jolts are found in docs

By JOHANNA SCHNELLER

Friday, May 14, 2004 - Page R1

In an article in last Sunday’s New York Times lamenting that television insiders are posting TV plot spoilers on the Internet, I came across an idea that stuck with me. Joss Whedon, the creator of the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called surprise "a holy emotion. It makes you humble. It makes you small in the world, and takes you out of your own perspective. It shows you that you’re wrong, the world is bigger and more complicated than you’d imagined." He was talking about television, but I think he’s also onto something true about today’s Hollywood films.

When was the last time a mainstream American movie took a turn that really floored you? Had an unexpected unhappy ending, found a plot twist you didn’t see coming from miles away, put the protagonists in a position you didn’t anticipate? Independent movies, such as The Saddest Music in the World, still do this (you rarely know where you are in director Guy Maddin’s world, which is the glory of it). But Hollywood movies used to, too. I didn’t see Faye Dunaway’s revelation (or her fate) coming in Chinatown, for example, and that film was as studio-made as they get.

Nowadays, however, every story point is plotted on a time graph to coincide with the average audience member’s biorhythms (well, practically), every explosion is timed to detonate at 15-minute intervals, and every ending is safe. Did anyone think that Lindsay Lohan would stay plastic in Mean Girls, that the Rock wouldn’t walk tall in Walking Tall, or that Julianne Moore would leave Pierce Brosnan in Laws of Attraction (which could have been called Formulas of Screenwriting)?

Long before you see them, mainstream Hollywood movies have been tested and re-tested, cut and re-cut, to fit a mythical Averageperson’s expectations — because God forbid Average should leave the theatre not feeling soothed and smart. I mean, what if he told two friends that the movie was (horrors) unpredictable? Maybe those two friends wouldn’t go, and the $622 that two tickets now cost would go unearned by a major corporation.

I don’t know who this Averageperson is, or why anyone started thinking that every picture should be made for a lowest-common-denominator Everyone.

I only know that, when I want to be surprised at the movies these days, I go to documentaries.

Even though they’re shot and edited with a point of view, documentaries are fast becoming the only place you can see anything remotely like real human behaviour, with all its surprises; and they’re the only films that haven’t been ironed out in advance, washed free of jarring colours and shrink-wrapped for your protection. Documentary filmmakers go to places with an idea of what might happen, and a hope that something different will happen. Do you think that Nathaniel Kahn, the illegitimate son of the architect Louis Kahn and the filmmaker of the 2003 Oscar-nominated documentary My Architect, planned that he would be put gently in his place by a kindly scholar when he went to Bangladesh to view the capitol building that his father had spent far more time thinking about than he had about his kid? In the beginning of the doc, Nathaniel alleges that he’s making the film to "find" his absent father; in the middle, he reveals that he’s exorcising his anger against his father’s indifference; and by the end, he has become profoundly moved by his father’s gifts to the world and chagrined at his own small agenda. Now that’s character development; that’s an arc. You won’t find that in Envy.

Filmmaker George Hickenlooper (who also made Hearts of Darkness, the doc about the filming of Apocalypse Now) knew he had on his hands an odd story about life on the fringes of fame and glamour when he set out to make his documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip about L.A. disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer. His subject, a gnome-like groupie so timid he makes Andy Warhol look energetic, has spent the past 30 years quietly finding and promoting new acts — everyone from The Ramones, Blondie and David Bowie through Hole, Oasis and Coldplay — solely because he likes music and hanging with musicians.

Hickenlooper knew that Bingenheimer’s mom had abandoned him when he was 15 (literally, she dropped him on the doorstep of Connie Stevens’s house — because he was a fan of hers — and drove away, not to be seen again for five years. Stevens wasn’t home); that he was a stand-in for Davy Jones in The Monkees TV show; and that he possessed a vast collection of photos of himself standing near every musician who has ever passed through L.A. But he could not have known that the first thing out of Bingenheimer’s childhood neighbour’s mouth, upon being shown a photo of him standing next to Marisa Tomei on the night she won her Oscar, would be a disbelieving: "You were invited?"

He could not have known that Bingenheimer’s dad (whose first name is, thrillingly, Bing) would have a house full of photos — and two paintings of sad clowns, by the way — but only a single snap of Rodney, posing with the Easter Bunny at about age 4. He may have known that the briefly trendy nightclub that Bingenheimer ran in the 1970s has become a karate studio, but he could not have known just how lonely Bingenheimer would look dropping his mother’s ashes off a London pleasure boat among strangers, or how poignantly his life-long ache for love would register when he said that Sonny and Cher, with whom he used to pal around, "were like a mom and dad to me."

Even documentaries with a rigid agenda, such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (message: McDonald’s food makes you fat) and Ron Mann’s Go Further (message: try, as actor/activist Woody Harrelson urges, to tread more lightly upon the Earth), can be full of surprises.

Spurlock did not expect to find a Texan who eats two to three Big Macs a day, but when he stumbled upon him, he put him in the film. (Tex’s lifetime tally, by the way, is 19,000 Big Macs. He keeps track.) I did not expect Spurlock to barf his first Supersized Double-Quarter-Pounder-with-Cheese meal out his car window — or to pan over for a good long shot of the puke. So we were both surprised.

Nor could I have imagined the look on Harrelson’s face when a junk-food-junkie buddy, upon hearing Harrelson preach that milk is full of blood and pus from the sore udders of overstimulated cows, asks: "But not vanilla milkshakes, right dude?" And I have thought more about why raw-food chefs, such as Harrelson’s, are compelled to say things like: "Eating outside is more joyful" (and pondered if that’s reason enough to never go on a raw-food diet) than I’ve thought about the entire 180 minutes of The Alamo.

My writer husband is fond of saying, "There are two kinds of stories: the kind you know you want to know [the news, etc.], and the kind you don’t know you want to know." I prefer movies to be the latter. When every moment is telegraphed, when you don’t even care that the trailer gives away the best parts of the plot because the plot is so predictable, I don’t feel smarter or safer or soothed, I feel deadened. Take me out of my narrow perspective, make me feel small in the world, give me that holy surprise. Let me see — and feel — something real. Even if it’s a real mess.