Recently I have been watching the Errol Morris led T.V. miniseries Wormwood, and what
follows is my ambivalent feelings about the show, which might be relevant to
thinking of T.V. as a cultural forum. Though it does do some interesting
things formally, Wormwood for
the most part follows the familiar Netflix formula of True
Crime/Docu-dramas. Like most shows in this genre, the "truth," in
this case involving several layers of a CIA cover-up, is slowly peeled away for
the viewer. The ending of these types of shows, I find, is always
dissatisfying. Because they rest on a "truth" that can never actually
be revealed, they always seem to lead to a dead end, one that makes me feel cheated
(I haven’t seen the last episode of Making a Murderer for this
very reason).
Morris remarks towards the end of Wormwood that not telling the story is still part of the story, and
this might be taken as a structuring device for all shows in this genre. A
certain story has not been told, and now it will be told, but it will also not
really be told, because it can't be told (because there's still (and never will
be) enough evidence to tell it). This makes me think of those “scientific”
ghost hunting shows, in which a lot of work goes into never actually seeing a ghost.
In the case of Wormwood, and shows like it, a social or political problem is
raised, but no solution is given. There's something of a spectral (?) modernism
here: art and its forms can guide you, but it can't give you the answers. Yet,
this is also disturbing (again, spectral), because it forces us as viewers to a
precipice where we can either pursue "truth" on our own terms (which
is much harder work and less entertaining than when Errol Morris does it for
us) or we can give up and forget, which I think is what most of us do, until
some other program lures us in with the promise of secrets to be
revealed. Perhaps these shows show us that truth is negotiable (though
that sounds exactly like what we don’t need nowadays), but I’m mostly inclined
to be suspicious of them. I’m curious what you all think.
As annoying as the current instability of facts is, I don't think people ought to give up the notion that truth is, if not negotiable per se, at least positioned, discursively formed, sometimes opaque or occluded, and so on. So I'm not sure that I'd take issue with these shows on the "murkiness of truth" front alone (it sounds like you don't either). But, yeah, the point you raise about the "sorry, we can't deliver the truth in the end" docudrama form not incentivizing us to pursue truth beyond the bounds of the entertaining narrative is provocative.
ReplyDeleteI haven't gotten into Wormwood so I can't comment on it specifically, but having followed the exegesis around Serial and other some other installments in the recent true crime wave, it does seem that the form is at least well-suited to inspiring discussion. But then, do those discussions trend more toward being about the shows themselves -- questions of whether or not the narrative is satisfying, whether or not the creators instrumentalize the people whose stories of suffering they have taken on as object, etc. -- rather than about challenges to systems of power/pursuits of truth beyond those that have been staged by the show? I haven't conducted a survey of the discourse, so I don't have an answer there. But I suppose that, in their propensity to get us to acknowledge the capriciousness of litigation, these shows might be at least marginally productive?