The Guilty Pleasures of Mock Reality

Once upon a time, entertainment was about escaping reality. Matinee idols with impossibly white teeth and square jaws and blond bombshells with impossible gravitational resistance swept us away better than anything in the real world.

But savvy modern audiences have become anesthetized to the formulaic boy-meets-girl equations and the ensuing happy endings. They crave a greater and greater fix of something different--a need being fed by TV’s reality programming. Meanwhile, the film genre that has come to be known as “mockumentary” is further obscuring the line between real and counterfeit.

With the theatrical re-release this month of the seminal “Spinal Tap” (along with its goody-laden DVD), and the release Wednesday of “Best in Show,” co-written and directed by “Spinal Tap’s” Christopher Guest, as well as the release of the much-anticipated “Blair Witch Project” sequel next month, the mock documentary is enjoying a banner season.

Often called the granddaddy of mockumentaries, “This Is Spinal Tap,” Rob Reiner’s fictional documentary about the world’s loudest and least talented heavy metal band, was not actually the first of its breed. Even as mock rockumentaries go, “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash,” Eric Idle’s 1978 response to Beatlemania, preceded Reiner’s film by six years.

Still, some may argue that when Orson Welles wreaked havoc with “War of the Worlds,” he was inaugurating the mock documentary format way back in 1938. More than 60 years before true believers freaked out about a Blair Witch, Welles unleashed considerable art mischief by employing the signposts and grammar of nonfiction to conflate the boundaries between reality and entertainment.

Today, the boundaries between reality and entertainment are blended nightly, most notably in this summer’s reality TV mega-hit, “Survivor,” but also in the fudged realism often found in the burgeoning genre of trashtainment: “Jerry Springer,” “Judge Judy” and, of course, professional wrestling.

“I think our enjoyment of mock docs and reality-based programming stems from the basic ‘rubbernecking’ instinct that we all have ingrained deeply in our brains,” says Ed Sanchez, co-director of “The Blair Witch Project.”

Sanchez believes there is a basic attraction to watching bad things happen to people. In effect, films like “Blair Witch” and TV shows like “Cops” or “Trauma: Life in the ER” work on the principle that misery loves spectatorship.

Likewise, comedies like “Spinal Tap,” “Waiting for Guffman” and even “America’s Funniest Home Videos” exploit the same instinct, according to Sanchez. “It’s fun to watch the backstage antics of a stereotypical--and seemingly real--rock band or people struggling to get along on an island. Whether fiction or reality-based, it’s a different kind of fun from fictional narrative films or TV shows because, in a way, we feel like we shouldn’t be seeing some of this stuff we’re seeing.”

Guest prefers to believe that people enjoy his mock documentaries because they are, (a) funny and (b) uncommonly authentic. Guest’s technique is to write an outline for the film--but no dialogue.

“The actors know the intentions, the backgrounds, the dynamics, and then we shoot it,” he says.

There’s no rehearsal. This can create a more resonant realism that may prove more affecting than the realism suggested by hand-held cameras, shaky cameras, talking-head interviews or the deliberately botched techniques that mockumentary directors toil over.

“Best in Show,” the new movie about world-class pooches and the owners who love them, employs many elements of a documentary, but they are blended with scenes of traditional narrative. While we are privy to the intimate therapy session with Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock’s hyper yuppies, clearly a documentarian’s camera would not be welcome there. And while characters do talk to an off-camera interviewer, sometimes the camera seems invisible; it is suspiciously unacknowledged by the characters. Guest calls this lax mock documentary style a “hybrid” form.

But when Eugene Levy’s hopelessly nerdy Gerry Fleck (Levy co-wrote and stars in “Best in Show” as well as “Guffman”) tells the interviewer about his congenital two left feet, he is speaking his lines for the very first time before the camera. Notes Guest: “It looks different from other films where a line is repeated maybe 10 or 20 times.”

Guest Prefers the Term ‘Documentary Style’

Guest has never been particularly fond of the term “mockumentary,” a word he says was coined after the release of “Spinal Tap.” “It’s a tiresome term,” he says. “And it feels like a cliche. Not that there are many movies--there are no movies made like this, essentially.”

Instead, Guest prefers to say that he works in a documentary style. But his assessment that there are no other mockumentaries seems to fly in the face of movies such as “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” “The Big Tease,” “Bob Roberts,” “Zelig,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Burn Hollywood Burn (An Alan Smithee Film),” “Dadetown” and even “Spice World,” among others.

The genre is so robust that in 1997, the Rotterdam Film Festival had a special program, “Fake,” that included some of the above-mentioned films. Whether they are utterly believable until the credits roll (“Dadetown”) or goofball fluff in which a man with a mike occasionally pops up (“The Big Tease”), the films all play with verite with varying degrees of success.

Yet Guest excludes these movies from his subgenre. His films are not about faking it, but about the truth and spontaneity and humor that come from his technique of making movies without screenplays and without rehearsals, he says. Films done any other way, Guest insists, won’t arrive at the character realism he strives for.

Mike Montello, a co-producer of “The Blair Witch Project,” agrees it is the element of spontaneity and surprise that makes the mockumentary appealing to audiences.

“We are an extremely media-literate society. People watch sitcoms and dramas, and they can predict what’s going to happen--right down to almost exactly what the characters are going to say--before it happens,” he observes. “Shows like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ are not so predictable because each line isn’t scripted--the outcome is not predetermined. People really do want something different.”

Like a bungee jump where thrill-seekers strive for a sense of controlled danger, the pretend pandemonium of faux reality gives a jolt to jaded moviegoers who have been spoon-fed genre formula ad nauseam.

“ ‘Blair Witch’ threw people for a curve because the old cliches weren’t there to fall back on,” recalls Montello. “No scary music, no hot chick who’s going to get naked then die, no omniscient POV [point of view] shot to map out the area and give the audience a sense of where they are, nothing. You knew something bad was going to happen, but you had no idea how, what or why--and that’s unsettling.”