Documentary's Awkward Turn

Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship

Jason Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317952190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary's Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats. It examines difficult and disrupted encounters between social actors on the screen, between filmmaker and subject, and between film and spectator. These encounters are, of course, often inter-connected. Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered: when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when a subject who had been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame, when a film perceived as a documentary turns out to be a parodic mockumentary. This book makes visible the ways in which awkwardness connects and subtends a range of transformative textual strategies, political and ethical problematics, and modalities of spectatorship in documentary film and media from the 1970s to the present.

1
Awkward Aesthetics

Michael Moore and Christopher Guest

The work of Michael Moore represents a significant shift in the style, rhetoric, and public visibility of mainstream American documentary film, a shift rooted in Moore’s signature device: awkward humor. In popularizing documentary film to an unprecedented degree in the United States, Moore’s films also had a major impact on public perceptions of what a documentary film was. Critics argued that Moore’s creative chronologies and selectively edited interviews undermined conventional ideals of objectivity, and his bumbling screen persona reconfigured expectations concerning the authoritative voice of the documentary filmmaker.

This chapter argues that Moore’s films incorporate representational strategies developed in the mock documentary films of Christopher Guest. Both filmmakers create moments of awkward humor in part by constructing differentials in perception among filmmaker, subject, and viewer. As I discuss in section two of the chapter, Guest’s mockumentaries also parody the awkwardness of many formal conventions in documentary filmmaking itself, subjecting these conventions to comic incongruities that subtly undermine their role in the construction of documentary authority. The films by Michael Moore examined in section three defuse mockumentary’s parodic intent while enlisting some of its comic strategies toward a critique of real-world social and political issues. But Moore’s rhetorical frameworks cannot always contain and channel the filmmaker’s awkward humor and the multiple forms of shame and shaming it generates.

Through the work of these two filmmakers, documentary and mock documentary grow in popularity while the distinction between the two grows increasingly blurry; taken together, their work stands as a significant aesthetic influence on the subsequent wave of reality-based entertainments including offbeat portrait films, reality television shows, prank and hoax films, and other documentary/fiction hybrids. As a group, these media forms represent what Tom Gunning terms a “cinema of attractions” that flouts documentary film’s traditional claim to a sober informational function, is premised upon provoking for the viewer an oscillation between belief and incredulity, and often relies upon awkward humor to provoke its desired effects.¹

Guest’s characters are marked first and foremost by their painful lack of self-awareness. One of Moore’s signature rhetorical strategies is to frame his political opponents to make them come across as if they were fictional Guest constructions: We laugh in disbelief as they look straight at the camera and make un-self-conscious proclamations of viewpoints the films frame as ridiculous and offensive, amazed that these people could be “for real.” By framing his adversaries this way, Moore aims to suggest that they are without shame. One goal of his films, then, is to use humor and pointed rhetoric as forms of public shaming. Moore presents his own on-screen persona as an awkward everyman up against powerful forces. But for the most part, Moore himself doesn’t inhabit shame; he is thoroughly confident not only in his political positions but in the deliberate strategy of his methods as well. When Moore puts himself in awkward positions such as being detained by security guards while trying to board an exclusive elevator to the office of General Motors CEO Roger Smith, his naïve protestations of ignorance are a pose meant to cast shame upon a corporation that ruins the lives of its workers while remaining utterly inaccessible to their questions and demands.

However, the shame generated by Moore’s awkward moments takes multiple forms, in different contexts implicating not only Moore’s political adversaries but also sympathetic figures in his films, the filmmaker himself, and the spectator. It can vector in unexpected directions, disrupting Moore’s own representational strategies and rhetorical goals. More specifically, scenes such as Moore’s prolonged ambush interview with an aging Charlton Heston at the conclusion of Bowling for Columbine (2004) (discussed in section three) may produce what Malin Wahlberg terms a “frame breaking event,” in which the spectator’s embodied and affective relation to the scene comes into conflict with the film’s mode of address and ideological framework.²

I. The Subject of Laughter: Incongruity and Superiority

The idea that laughter represents a feeling of superiority toward the object of the joke marks one of two or three major conceptual umbrellas for grouping theories of humor. Others commonly cited include humor derived from a sensation of psychological relief and humor based upon a sense of incongruity in the object of laughter.³ Freud’s analysis of wit and jokes articulates one version of superiority theory. He points to some jokes’ “hostile” or “tendentious” quality, describing how they clear away social barriers and provide an outlet for aggressive tendencies.⁴ Freud also links the concept of schadenfreude—or pleasure in someone else’s misfortune—to a feeling of superiority that he characterizes as childish in nature.⁵ In its broader cultural usage, schadenfreude is generally taken to mean happiness at the ill fortune of others whom one believes to deserve this ill fortune.⁶ Superiority theory is often traced to Hobbes’ formulation in Leviathan of laughter as “Sudden Glory … caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.”⁷ Jerry Palmer goes back even further, noting that for “Plato and Aristotle, laughter derives from the inadequacy of the laughable person,” but, like Hobbes, they suggest that this pleasure “is in itself not a worthy aim.” The primary justification for it is that “it can serve to educate wrongdoers by deriding them.”⁸ This notion of an educative function points toward the view of laughter as a form of social correction articulated by Henri Bergson.

Bergson’s theory of laughter is widely known for his analysis of what he terms “mechanical inelasticity”—when something living behaves in a manner that suggests the “rigidity” or involuntary movements of a machine. When passers-by laugh at a man who falls while running down a street, for example, Bergson argues that the source of humor is “the involuntary element” in his fall, the “lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy,” that causes him to continue the same movement when circumstances (e.g., a stone in the road or change in the pavement) should have demanded otherwise.⁹ But he situates such points in a broader discussion of how laughter has a “social meaning and import” and that “the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society.”¹⁰ Comic figures, then, are often characterized by their “unsociability”—their cluelessness to the world around them and, especially, to how others see them. Bergson claims that laughter contains “an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor.”¹¹ In other words, laughter expresses a sense of the need for social correction, even as it defers an explicit statement of that correction.¹²

Superiority theories may be imbricated with analyses of comedy rooted in ideas of formal incongruity. Not all spectacles of incongruity produce a sense of superiority, but often both elements are present in the production of comic effects. Noël Carroll demonstrates this point in his seminal essay “Notes on the Sight Gag,” arguing that the comic moment proceeds from a marked divergence of perspectives on a given scene: the way the viewer perceives the situation on the one hand, and on the other, the way the character is perceived to understand the situation.¹³

Writing about the sight gags in Buster Keaton films, Carroll argues that they often depend for their effect upon the character’s inattention to or unawareness of his surroundings. He argues that the formal object of the humor, even in sight gags as simple as the clown slipping on a banana peel, is the incongruity between our perception and the clown’s: He doesn’t see that which is in plain sight for the viewer—and we can see that he doesn’t see it. So, while the clown is the “comic butt” of the joke, Carroll suggests, “[o]ur amusement is not purely sadistic pleasure at someone taking a fall. Rather the pleasure comes of a visually motivated conflict of interpretations over the nature of the scene.”¹⁴ Carroll’s explanation, then, is not far from Bergson’s superiority theory—in Bergson’s discussion of the man who stumbles and falls, we laugh at the incongruity between his movements and actions and our superior perception of what they should have been.

The object of “tendentious” joking in Freud or of the “sudden glory” felt by Hobbes’ laugher; the “absentmindedness,” “physical obstinacy,” and lack of “adaptability to society” in Bergson’s comic figure; all point to the sort of person that, in the contemporary idiom, we might label as ineluctably awkward. Carroll’s essay is rooted in a more purely formal analysis of differentials in perception and so uncovers comic logics in scenes from films like The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) in which the characters are not inherently awkward or even necessarily comic. The situations Carroll posits as exemplifying the logic of the sight gag, however—ranging from the simple slip on the banana peel to the more complex scene in Hitchcock—all confer awkward moments upon the characters involved. Awkward humor in the context of documentary film and other reality-based media is rooted in differentials in perception and affect among filmmaker, subject, and spectator, sometimes fostering a sense of superiority in the spectator. The viewer may vacillate, as Tom Gunning puts it, “between belief and incredulity,” between perceiving the onscreen subject as plausible and as utterly implausible—a tension that may extend to questioning the filmic referent’s documentary veracity or constructedness.

Jerry Palmer explains a structural basis for this vacillation or tension in the sight gags in silent film comedy. He argues that a major structure of comic gags is the coexistence of two contradictory syllogisms to explain an action or spectacle. In other words, in comedy, a scene or action can often be simultaneously understood in two different ways; however, one explanation is more logical and plausible than the other. He illustrates this principle with a scene from the Laurel and Hardy film Liberty (1929). Laurel and Hardy struggle on the scaffolding of a building under construction, inadvertently raining down a hail of dangerous objects upon a policeman at the foot of the building. The cop seeks shelter in an elevator shaft, and Laurel and Hardy then get on the elevator and ride down the shaft, landing directly on the cop and seemingly squashing him to death. Laurel and Hardy then exit the elevator. When it ascends, where the policeman was squashed, now stands a midget in a policeman’s uniform.

The first of two possible syllogisms holds that the event is totally implausible, because a) the result of being squashed by an elevator is death (major premise); yet b) the cop is squashed, but he survives (minor premise); so c) the event is not plausible. But the second, contradictory syllogism, which allows for the scene’s comic effect, goes as follows:

• a) The result of squashing is a reduction in size.
• b) The cop comes out smaller.
• c) Therefore, the event has a measure of plausibility.¹⁵

Palmer’s explanation for the comic effect of visual gags such as this one holds that a tension arises between these two competing syllogisms, in which the mode of reasoning that perceives the event to be plausible is inferior, based upon a lesser logic. But it is the structural possibility of this lesser logic within the gag itself that serves as the basis of the comic effect.¹⁶ Arthur Koestler offers a related structural explanation of comedy as involving the joining of “two or more independent and self-contained logical chains.” Comprehending the intersection of these chains in a joke or gag produces in the viewer/listener a moment of what Koestler terms “biosociation,” a sudden emotional release of tension produced by the revelation of how the two independent logical chains in the joke operate together.¹⁷ Another way of putting this is to simply say that biosociation is the moment of “getting the joke”—when we comprehend how the joke makes sense and feel included in its logic.

In the documentary tradition, however, there is an overarching premise that suggests the plausibility of anything we witness on the screen: the claim for the ontological status of the filmic referent as real rather than fabricated for the film.¹⁸ This fundamental premise of the documentary mode—the notion that the event we are seeing is real and spontaneous—produces Palmer’s comic tension in the context of documentary comedy. The viewer’s sense of the incredibility or even implausibility of the comic moment is counteracted by his or her belief in the truth-value of the film itself; the claim to indexicality compels viewers to accept the premise presented in the film as more plausible than implausible.

Therefore, in documentary comedy, there is usually a reversal in priority between Palmer’s syllogisms, as compared to how they operate in a narrative film: Because of the film’s purported ontological status, the explanation that holds an event to be plausible outweighs the viewer’s sense that the bizarre nature of the spectacle renders it implausible. However, as with the gag in Liberty, a tension between the two possibilities remains, which produces a similar comic eff...