COMMENTARY : Documentaries Offer Lesson in Getting Real

Documentaries may attract only a small sliver of the moviegoing audience, but they raise a welcome ruckus. We’ve been through the annual ritual in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences neglected to nominate many of the year’s best. We’ve heard the recent plaints from disgruntled participants in Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream.”

What may be lost in all the accusations and arcana is a larger fact: Documentaries now are often the most exciting of films.

This excitement comes at a time when the theatrical documentary remains a peripheral, even vestigial part of the mass-audience movie scene. Big-screen documentaries circulate today primarily at film festivals, but it’s crippling for a filmmaker who wants to shake things up to reach only a cult audience, especially when the best of these films are so much more enlivening than almost anything coming out of the studios. Movies, even the most acclaimed, are rarely about anything anymore. They don’t take us to places we’ve never been--or, more precisely, they don’t try to make sense out of where we are.

That’s what the best of the new documentaries do. Kopple’s “American Dream” has a real subject. Ostensibly a movie about the disastrous 1985 strike by the meatpacking division of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union against the Hormel factory in Austin, Minn., it enlarges to become a great, sorrowing epic about the fate of the American dream in the Reagan-Bush era.

This is a presidential election year and yet the movies have never seemed more de-politicized. The biggest controversy in film has been “JFK,” a piece of ex post facto muckraking about a President assassinated almost 29 years ago. It’s maddening that what is tearing up the country right now is not being dramatized by Hollywood.

There’s principled rage in a few of the films by the new generation of black directors, but for the most part Hollywood has ducked the drama of social controversy--you have to turn your hearing aid all the way up to detect even the softest static about joblessness, homelessness, racism, sexism.

It’s not as if Hollywood has never had a tradition making “socially conscious” movies; it’s not as if movies about “issues” have to be unrelievedly boring. On the contrary, they often are controversial, but controversy is too potentially divisive, too uncontrollable for the marketeers. Although the studios are becoming more adept at hustling outrage--witness the ad campaigns for some of the new black films, or the TV talk shows and Op-Ed features built around everything from “Fatal Attraction” to “The Hand That Rocked the Cradle”--they’re not really in the business of shaking audiences up. There’s no percentage in it.

While it’s true that many of Hollywood’s socially conscious classics, going back to the ‘30s, had a dreary civic-mindedness, at least one felt that the studios were trying to connect with audiences in ways that mattered to our workaday lives (and not just our fantasy lives). From “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” to “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Boyz N the Hood,” the movie tradition of social outrage has helped to reflect, and shape, our national consciousness. Movies have become so derelict in this area that audiences, particularly young audiences, may believe that the only thing films are good for now is kick-back escapism.

For casual moviegoers, documentaries don’t have the “entertainment value” of high-gloss studio features. Although some of them, like “Truth or Dare,” are built and marketed around star power, most still carry the taint of educational indoctrination.

But why should a whole school of filmmaking be torpedoed just because we all slept through those documentaries in high school about the basic food groups?

No one could mistake Kopple’s “American Dream” for a science-project snooze, or a Hollywood dinosaur, either. Kopple could make a great movie about a local union strike precisely because she didn’t Hollywood-ize the dispute. She discovered the film’s true subject in the course of making it. What may at first have seemed like a clear-cut case of unions vs. bosses became a movie about the local union against its parent union.

We’re used to seeing unions in the movies portrayed as righteous underdogs, not only in Hollywood films but also as a part of the documentary social-activist tradition (which includes Kopple’s own 1976 film about a Kentucky coal miners strike, “Harlan County, U.S.A.”). In protesting the pay and benefits cuts, the leaders of Local P-9 found themselves squaring off against a labor hierarchy, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, that they grew to believe was essentially fronting for Hormel (which rolled back wages in 1984 by more than $2 an hour despite profits of more than $29.5 million).

P-9, as well as the International, represented primarily in the movie by the director of its Meat Packing Division, Lewie Anderson, operate in a Reagan era where unionism, even in the popular imagination, has been castigated and devalued. Collective bargaining is all on the side of the employer, which is why P-9, headed during the strike by Jim Guyette, hires a labor consultant to stir things up in the media. Guyette says to his people, “Belief is something that will carry you a long ways,” and yet his union’s strike is soundly quashed.

Anderson, who pleads with P-9 not to strike, isn’t portrayed as a monster, and that’s a key to the film’s humane approach. He tells the union members what will happen if they strike and he’s eerily correct in almost every detail. He’s trying to avert a human tragedy. What he doesn’t recognize is how the forces in play have made that tragedy inevitable, just as he doesn’t comprehend the irony in the accusation of criminal self-interest he levels at P-9--”I’ll get mine and the hell with everybody else.” It’s the motto of his era.

Documentaries serve other sorely needed functions these days besides political activism. They bring to the screen the kinds of subject matter that would otherwise never make it unadulterated into the mainstream. A film like Jennie Livingston’s “Paris Is Burning,” about the drag-ball culture in Harlem, has an almost expeditionary quality. It’s a movie about an alternate-universe subculture in which one’s ability to look and play the part means you are the part--you may be gay and homeless and strung out but if, as you strut down the runway, you can pass yourself off as a pampered lady of leisure, or a straight-arrow executive, or a Vogue model, then that’s who you are.

Even when a documentary is keyed to a famous personality, it can often serve up richer insights than many of the films that personality is famous for. “Truth or Dare” is a new-style piece of celebrity self-glorification--the “Don’t Look Back” of the ‘90s--but it’s fascinating because Madonna seems to exist only for the camera, not just as a performer but as a person. Earlier pop stars have appeared to live only for adulation, but Madonna’s one true originality may be that she understands the voraciousness of the media in using up images. So she doesn’t spread herself too thin. Forever inventing a new “look,” she’s the logical extension of the posers in “Paris Is Burning,” a performer who exists only in her guises--glamorous pop star, tramp, crusader against censorship, heartbroken waif.

“Hearts of Darkness” also has a world-famous pop culture figure at its center--Francis Ford Coppola, revealed mostly in footage shot in the Philippines by his wife, Eleanor, during the making of “Apocalypse Now.” In his defeats as well as in his glories, Coppola has always seemed the quintessential American filmmaker: a combination blowhard and seer, both profligate and practical.

The filmmakers who assembled “Hearts of Darkness,” Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, must have been ecstatic at what they had to work with. Their movie brings us shudderingly close to the ordeals in the Philippines that filtered back to us in the press. Watching it is like discovering the keys to the kingdom, and it’s something more too--a portrait of the artist in the throes of a self-immolating movie fever.

Why is it that, rightly or wrongly, so many documentaries, as well as quasi-docudramas like “JFK,” have had their “realism” scrutinized in recent years? Perhaps it’s because, in an age of media bombardment, the question of what’s genuine and what’s fake is central to our sanity. There are so many ways of being bombarded: by TV, the talk shows, the nightly news, newspapers, radio, magazines. The increasing conglomeratization of the media means that the organization doing the reporting may turn out to be owned by, or in cahoots with, the organization being reported upon. Then comes the spin-controllers, and the spinners of spinners. Everyone claims their own purchase on the truth. Who can sort it all out anymore? Young audiences may not even care--they can just get high on the blur.

The sharpest media hucksters use this quandary to sell everything from jeans to political candidates. It’s no accident that Madison Avenue has discovered the black-and-white hand-held-camera look; it’s the same look you’ll see in a lot of the upcoming presidential campaign spots--the documentary-like sheen of the carefully rehearsed unrehearsed. We’re supposed to be the most “visually sophisticated” generation ever, but being aware of the ways in which film can be manipulated doesn’t mean we’re not susceptible to the manipulation.

In the midst of all this sound-bitten media gabble, and the dreariness of most Hollywood films, is it any wonder that many of us look to a different type of film for grounding? A documentary like “American Dream” can seem restorative not only to our film sense but also to our sense of the balance of things. Our dissatisfaction with the made-up plots and gaseous star turns and recycled wares of most Hollywood movies has created an appetite for the documentary. It’s not so much that we crave “the truth,” but that we crave a different kind of truth. We crave a challenge to the national temper.