Documentaries used to be easy: a shot of a guy with facial hair driving his car; some sort of Expo where people are behaving oddly; a pop-punk song that’s a bit on the nose; and a doomed attempt to set up a legacy celebrity. That’s what I used to like: grainy film footage, fuzzes of sound, filming on a windy day. Ideally, it would win an award from an academy you have never heard of. Michael Moore would turn up at some point wearing a big T-shirt and a hat.
This is no longer the case Documentaries are big business now, with budgets and cachet. This has ruined documentaries for a cultural cycle (if I were to guess, this era of documentary will last about seven years – starting with 2019’s Fyre – so they’ll be normal again around 2026). The language of documentary has changed because the audience has changed: everyone who willingly appears in a documentary now knows they are one snappy soundbite away from being the Fyre Festival Bottled Water Guy or Carole Baskin From Tiger King. Essentially, documentaries used to have a whiff of homework about them, a certain librarial dorkiness, and now they are for everyone. This is good in one way (more people watching documentaries!) and very, very bad in another (more people watching documentaries). It will be impossible to make a true documentary in an era when millions of people watch them on Netflix, because everyone participating in them – everyone who appears on camera, smoothing down their shirt and asking if their mic pack works OK – knows they are this close to being 2023’s first meme. Nobody speaks normally when they are trying to become a gif.
