In the last two decades, documentaries have detoured dramatically away from didactic or public-spirited works that once dominated the form. In the past, most documentaries celebrated human accomplishment (for instance, The Plow that Broke the Plains) or showed history-in-the-making (war newsreels like The Battle of San Pietro or The Spanish Earth); even the renegade surrealist Luis Bunuel’s documentary Land without Bread had a social conscience. Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness portrayed the plight of the blind-deaf; Errol Morris’ documentaries solved crimes and righted injustices. But many documentaries now popular on Netflix or HBO are, simply put, freak-shows. These films feature eccentric people involved in grotesque forms of misconduct – the audience marvels at two things: the incredible events shown on screen and the fact that the protagonists of these films were so massively narcissistic as to allow themselves to be filmed committing all manner of crimes and misdemeanors. It’s hard to ascribe any redeeming social value to The Tiger King (a homosexual exotic animal fetishist) or Wild Wild West (members of a sex cult) or Don’t F**k with Cats (internet-obsessed serial killers). Documentary as freak-show was probably pioneered by the Maysles’ brothers Grey Gardens, an account of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mentally ill aunt (with daughter) living in awe-inspiring squalor in a crumbling mansion on Long Island. The bearded lady in her vest of tattoos will always enthrall more people than the the 4H home economics exhibits with their mason-jars of pickles and lingonberry jam. Two recent exemplars of the freak-show sensibility in modern documentary are The Vow, currently on HBO, and Tread, a documentary on Netflix.
The Vow (2020) traffics in that most problematic of human emotions, Schadenfreude. There is a distinct, if questionable, pleasure that we feel in observing the self-inflicted travails of those that seem to be better than us. In The Vow, a cadre of self-absorbed Hollywood types fall under the spell of a tyrannical guru, Keith Raniere. The guru’s acolytes are a noisome group of minor-league actors and actresses, pretty people with good educations who have suddenly realized what, sooner or later, all of us discover to our dismay – notwithstanding our merit, the world isn’t set up as a playground for our desires nor as a garden delivering perpetual delight. To be alive is to be disappointed: no doubt Julie Andrews and Raquel Welch (to name two actresses iconic to my generation) suffered dark nights of the soul in which they questioned their beauty and value. Everyone can name prominent celebrities who upon reaching the very pinnacle of their achievement, then, promptly committed suicide: Anthony Bourdain and Philip Seymour Hoffman come to mind. The fact is that the world isn’t constituted to reliably deliver happiness although reality can always be counted on to inflict suffering. When the bright and beautiful discover this, inevitably, a sense of malaise sets in – why am I, despite my intelligence and beauty, not exempt from suffering? And, this malaise offers an opportunity for a con-man man like Raniere. KR, as I will call him, devised a set of banal platitudes that he actually patented as an algorithm for artificial intelligence. These platitudes are simple-minded, the sort of pablum that first-grade teachers administer to their students to enhance their self-esteem. (The people in The Vow are notably well-endowed with self-esteem.) Gathering a group of disciples, KR set up a pyramid scheme requiring his followers to enlist more and more adherents to his cult. On the face of things, there was nothing extreme about KR’s beliefs, which were, as I have noted, a compound of cliches and truisms of the most simple-minded and obvious sort, not dramatically different from the stuff promoted by Norman Vincent Peale. In fact, the whole enterprise had a noxious aura of self-satisfied well-being and good mental hygiene – ideology promoting a sound mind in a sound body. (The Pollyanna-ish members of the group played volley-ball as a community exercise.) In The Vow, our access to this cult is a glib filmmaker of Afrikaaner origin, a tall handsome doofus named Mark – this fellow has produced a well-reviewed film essay with the charming title What the F**k do we know? Mark is spectacularly narcissistic and a dolt but he’s charming, a bit like a successful used car salesman. He marries one of the guru’s female associates and rises to a high level in the organization – as you acquire merit you are awarded little scarves to show your rank in the cult. Mark becomes KR’s best friend and spends innumerable hours walking with the squat, somewhat toad-like cult leader – on the phone, the two chirp to one another using pet names: “Markus” and “Keithus”. Mark is convinced that he is in the presence of a latter-day Jesus Christ and so tape-records everything that transpires – this proves to be a great benefit to the filmmakers who would later exploit these recordings. (Needless to say the very pretty people in the cult weren’t camera-shy and there is lots of footage of them cavorting in wholesome ways; on the other hand, the level of treachery implicit in tape-recording every personal conversation is pretty breathtaking.) Of course, there’s a dark-side that is the subject of a portentous “reveal” – or series of “reveals” since the subject matter of the film is very thin (it would make a good 15 minute Sixty Minutes episode) but has to be stretched to nine hours. It turns out that the upper echelons of the cult involve some kind of a sex ring in which female subjects willingly submit to be branded in the groin with the initials of the guru KW. This stuff is undoubtedly amusing and even hilariously funny when the female subject, the doc’s heroine as it were, tries to justify to the camera why exactly it was that she allowed herself (voluntarily) of course to be disfigured by a cauterizing instrument – she’s married and says to one of her female friends: “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to get X– (her husband) to go down there, when I’ve got Keith’s initials branded next to my vagina.” This is possibly something she should have thought through before agreeing to be branded. The show lags and is repetitive because profound stupidity isn’t interesting in its own right and the documentary’s characters can only prostrate themselves so many times before the loathsome little guru before the film gets tedious. As is always the case, there’s not enough footage to go around, particularly to underlie the shocking and serious aspects of the documentary (the branding and sex-cult scenes) and so the filmmakers have to just roll the tapes and amuse us with blurred lights rotating on screen like a sort of demented and out-of-focus color wheel – it’s not a good solution, but the admissions on the tape are so jaw-dropping that you’re willing to excuse the rather slovenly film-making. (Shoah or The Fog of War this is not.)
The appeal of the show is entirely Schadenfreude. First, the movie gives us license to view beautiful women and handsome men, all of them prosperous and educated at first-rate and expensive schools, making utter fools of themselves. These are accomplished folks whom we might ordinarily admire but the movie exposes them to ridicule – indeed, ridicule of the most toxic sort: we laugh at these people because they aren’t aware that they are ridiculous. The more they try to justify branding one another. sex-trafficking and their other lapses into utter folly and crime, the funnier they are. Second, we enjoy the inevitable demise of the guru – the vicious little con-man is going to end up in prison (we know this from media reports) and so we will delight in seeing his comeuppance. These aren’t particularly meritorious emotions and The Vow is a sort of guilty pleasure. The most astonishing aspect of the film is the universally accepted notion that human beings exist to be happy. Why would we think this to be true? The evidence is all to the contrary. And I note that there are no single mothers attending Community College in the cult and, certainly, no minorities –no Black and Brown people as we have been taught to consider them. I would guess that these groups of people would be under no false illusions about whether life is supposed to deliver happiness. The only thing that life predictably delivers is suffering and the only practical wisdom in the world is learning to survive with this truth.
The pathetic thing about the dupes in The Vow is that the secret truths revealed to them by KR are completely devoid of any substance. KR’s theories lack the wild extravagance of Scientology or, even, the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints. In fact, his teachings seems primarily derived from motivational lectures delivered by Amway salesmen. Many years ago, I received as a visitor a close friend from college. This man was exceptionally handsome and accomplished, the son of a prominent Twin Cities orthopedic surgeon. He had the best car, the best drugs, the finest and most loving family and friends. Once, he stole my girlfriend: she didn’t think much of me, but fell so deeply in love with this beautiful fellow that her unrequited passion (when he later abandoned her) caused her to join the Peace Corps and depart the country. (She told me that she waited in suspense at the jet gate at the airport, hoping against hope, that he would come to rescue her at the last moment.) Not only was this fellow tall and handsome and athletic, he was also a genuinely nice man and talented, he knew hundreds of folk songs and could sing for hours around campfires while he accompanied himself on the guitar. When the man came to see me, a few years after college, he asked that I draw a circle representing my wishes and dreams – then, he had me draw a circle representing my capacity to achieve those desires. “The objective is to make the circle of your capabilities equal the circle of your dreams,” he told me. And, then, he commenced evangelical efforts on behalf of Amway, a pyramid scheme that, in those days, peddled laundry soap. I must say that for a moment, I almost forgave his erotic interlude with my girlfriend...almost, but not completely.
There are nine episodes of The Vow and this account is based on watching only three of them – all very repetitive and crammed with irritating self-aggrandizing interviews. I’m not sure that the dubious appeal of the show will warrant another six hours with it – but once I started watching a program, I generally stick it out to the end. Raniere is awaiting sentencing in October 2020 on five felony convictions. Wikipedia tells me that, as I surmised above, Raniere derived most of his gimcrack “philosophy” from involvement with Amway prior to founding his own cult.
The appeal of Tread (Paul Solnet, 2019) is more straightforward and less queasily problematic. Tread is the story of a brilliantly articulate malcontent who spends a year manufacturing a metal-clad behemoth of a bulldozer and, then, uses the machine to demolish most of a small town in scenic Colorado. Like the protagonists in The Vow, the hero (if you can call him that) is fantastically loquacious and has recorded the memoirs of his conflicts with the residents of the town on a casette-tape. (I’m probably not spoiling the show too much for you to advise that the hero isn’t going to be around to assist the documentary filmmakers in making the picture.) In this picture, there’s no fancy color-wheel blur – the camera just shows a giant close-up of the casette, gears spinning like the wheels of doom. This guy, a typical small-town know-it-all, is named Marvin Heemeyer. He’s an accomplished welder and a hard-driving businessman, a self-made man who migrates to Granby, Colorado after achieving success in the muffler business in Denver and Boulder. Heemeyer is something of a thrill-seeker and spends all of his leisure time, before acquiring the maniacal obsession that destroys him, plowing tracks in the high-country powder snow on his Polaris. He’s an attractive man and ends up in bed with the town’s most attractive divorcee – she speaks with a slight, and intriguing, Australian accent. Everything is going great for Marv until he has a run-in with the City Council, a group of well-meaning morons that control Granby. (Marv construes the City Councilmen as a vicious and sinister cabal of villains plotting against him; he calls one of them a “barbarian” – although these men are a little smug, there’s no objective evidence that they would be smart enough to successfully conspire against a ham sandwich.) Marv feels that the City has wronged him through its “good ole boy” network and one night, while lounging around in his hot tub and drinking a beer, God comes to Heemyer and tells him to take revenge on the evil Sodom and Gomorrah that is Granby. (The film has one of the strangest but most apt epitaphs ever stated: “He was a loner who spent too much time alone in his hot tub.”) Biblical correlates accumulate – like Noah, Marv spends an entire season welding together a massive armature on his big Komatsu bulldozer; this will be the vehicle of his salvation. Working in a shed in the middle of town, Marv equips the bulldozer, now a veritable Killdozer to cite Theodore Sturgeon’s unrelated short story, with high-caliber machine guns and Tv cameras, complete with compressed air jets, to keep the lenses clean as the tank-like vehicle smashes through half the commercial buildings in town.
Heinrich von Kleist’s famous novel, Michael Kohlhass, involves a law-abiding citizen who is driven into homicidal fury when someone cheats him in a horse-trade. Kohlhass ends up burning Brandenburg, raising an group rebels that defeats several armies, and has to be talked into surrendering by no less than Martin Luther. Kleist says that Kohlhass “was the most righteous and, therefore, the most terrible man of his time.” Heemyer replicates Kohlhass on a more modest scale. He is enraged because a neighbor acquires a tract of land that he desires. This leads to a series of squabbles with the City Council over zoning and a sewer access line. When the City Council rejects Heemeyer’s increasingly unreasonable demands, he hires a lawyer and sues. Inevitably, he loses the lawsuit, blaming his lawyer for treason. His attractive girlfriend, probably concerned about his obsessions, abandons him. When his father dies, Heemyer begins interpreting the signs around him and these portents all lead him to one conclusion: he must wreak vengeance on Granby. The final orgy of destruction, more or less, lives up to its advance build-up – at the outset of the film, a panicked cop calls for the National Guard. The fortified Komatsu bulldozer smashes down a half-dozen buildings while the local cops and sheriff’s deputies futilely blast away at it with the shotguns, SWAT sniper rifles, and pistols. There’s plenty of footage of Heemeyer’s spree and it’s impressive. The bulldozer rolls over parked cars, pushes aside earthmovers and county bulldozers without breaking a sweat, and, then, plows down entire buildings reducing them to rubble. Needless to say, this doesn’t end well although for a few hours, it seems, that Heemeyer and his revenge reign invincible over Granby.
The film is effectively designed, a combination of reenactments (shot in semi-darkness to disguise the fact that the reenactors don’t look much like the principals in real life) and actual newsreel footage of the bulldozer destroying the town. Heemeyer in the cockpit of his tank in the reenactments is filmed from behind, a silhouette brooding over the controls with flickering TV screens guiding him on his rampage. The City Council is shot as a group of small-town boosters with unctuous and sinister smiles on their face. Some talking heads, many of them still devoted to Marv, put in their two-cents worth, and there are some nice drone shots of Granby and the very pretty Colorado countryside. The director has a couple of tricks up his sleeve – because of a paucity of footage, he uses the same shot over and over again, an image of Marv, with an avuncular grin, gazing into the camera. It’s an image of nice guy, a hail fellow well-met, but when the camera suddenly pans down, late in the film, we see that Marv has a big, bazooka-sized rifle at this feet. An image of an old Nazi publication, Angaben zum Fuehrer (“Particulars as to the Fuehrer”) is shown several times, but without any explanation as to what this image is doing in the film. (The suggestion is that Heemeyer is some kind of neo-Nazi, but this is never shown in the movie.) History is written by the winners and most of the commentary in the film is provided by Marv’s sworn enemies, indeed the men who had their businesses trashed by his ‘dozer. The film is refreshing in that its doesn’t draw a moral and makes no effort to explain what motivated Heemeyer to construe a series of minor disputes as a pattern of vicious conspiracy such that it required him to destroy a whole town. I have often counseled people that men and women can endure the most terrible calamities – the death of children, horrible diseases – with equanimity. But no one can abide an injustice, real or perceived. And, so, we are left with the dispiriting observation that Kleist made about Michael Kohlhass, like Heemeyer an actual historical figure: he was “both righteous and terrible.”
(Heemeyer’s rampage inspired an excellent Russian film, Leviathan (2014) directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev The internet tells me that after Heemeyer lowered the shield over the top of the bulldozer, he was effectively trapped inside. In other words, the mission was suicidal from the outset. Heemeyer’s rant recorded on cassette contains some phrasing that has influenced far-Right terrorists. The so-called Boogaloo boys have adapted as a motto Heemeyer’s statement: “Then, I become unreasonable.”)
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