Michael Koresky recently wrote about rewatching Southland Tales, and reconsidering his past writing alongside it. “The act of criticism is creative…but it’s also essentially interpretive, and thus open to all manner of personal blind spots, misreadings, mood swings, and environmental circumstance,” he says. “This is why films are worth revisiting and opinions are worth revising.” Artistic self-reflection can invite a wistful uncertainty, a guilt associated not just with your past ideas, but with the kind of person you once had to be in order to hold them. With fiction, there’s still the safety net of the text itself: Ruminate all you want; the movie is going to be just fine, critical injustice or not. Nonfiction film’s net is frayed and thin, dependent on an understanding of the raw connection between artist, spectator and participant. For the latter, the folks whose lives form the nonfiction canon, these revisitations are invitations to those who’d box them in. Subject finds these people and sits with them, years after the movies that made their lives famous, granting them another 15 vulnerable minutes in the spotlight to encourage media literacy—and therefore, a more thoroughly informed empathy—among documentary viewers.
There are more documentary viewers now than ever. The documentary boom of the streaming era continues to stretch nonfiction to its limits, dragging any exploitative news story out into an algorithmically friendly four-episode series. If you can put “Sex” in the title, refer to some kind of drug or imply a grisly death, you’ve got yourself a deal with Netflix. Most of you will have noticed this, even subconsciously, as your content carousel has become interchangeable with a grocery store tabloid stand. “If it bleeds, it leads” filtered from journalism to nonfiction filmmaking from the jump, but as docuseries began dominating the Twitter trending topic water cooler—finally proving the form viable (read: potentially lucrative) to the hungry profiteers powering these tech companies—bloodthirst became a determining factor.
“Social docs that nudge the world and try to make you love the have-nots and improve the environment—those have probably not increased in the last decade,” said Sheila Nevins, head of MTV Documentary Films. “What’s been discovered is the lust of murder, the everydayness of murder. There’s something about your neighbor cutting off the head of her husband that’s particularly enticing.”
The market is flooded; true crime is such a fad that there’s a successful comedy skewering its obsessives. With this wave of interest in documentaries comes renewed confrontations of the form. How ethical is playing up the viral “mystery” of a family member’s brutal death? How well do audiences understand what they’re seeing, how it was made, and how it affects those in front of the camera?
Subject provides context for these questions, presenting the state of the industry to the precariously tense bubble of its audience while returning with modern eyes, sobered by the gold rush, to some of the rare films that broke into the mainstream. Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall (documentarians who, among other things, produced last year’s Sirens) turn to some of the best documentaries ever made, but rather than return to those responsible for the docs, they focused on those to whom the documentaries hold a responsibility.
Subject hands the mic back to some of the people made famous by Hoop Dreams, The Staircase, The Square, The Wolfpack and Capturing the Friedmans. It allows them to return to the parts of their lives that were melted down, poured into molds and shaped forever in the public eye by these documentaries. Subject then contrasts the individual experiences of a story becoming a subgenre. True crime, coming-of-age, activism. With this intimacy comes confrontation: These categories are inherently reductive; the form inherently ogling.
It makes it easy to accept how easy it is to turn these people—from The Staircase’s Michael Peterson to The Square’s Ahmed Hassan—into characters. Good guys and bad guys. Creeps hiding something, heroes fighting the good fight. It’s equally easy for Subject‘s delicate reframing to shift back into the unbalanced status quo. Seeing the subjects’ post-doc lives brings varying levels of clarity and satisfaction to us, the insatiably vampiric viewers.
Subject counters by parrying this instinctual impulse, or countering our still-present fascination to inspire more compassion. It’s hard to extend ourselves for Peterson, for example, when he’s showing us his tell-all book. But it’s just as hard to deny his daughter, Margie Ratliff, our consideration during a bitterly funny anecdote about shutting down Sophie Turner, who wanted to discuss playing her in the fictionalized Staircase miniseries. We still wet our fangs, but the dinner conversation is more thoughtful than usual.
Some of the other participants—like The Wolfpack’s Mukunda Angulo and his mom, and Hoop Dreams’ Arthur Agee, now a father who lectures about media—are human springboards for wide-ranging issues facing documentaries as a form. The payment of participants gets plenty of play, as does the decolonization of docs. None of these problems are solved, but introduced in personal, easy-to-grasp ways. The vague complications around Capturing the Friedmans are less penetrable, and the doc’s confounding weak spot. There’s clearly discomfort and pain here: Jesse Friedman believed he had found an outlet and a champion—not to mention a romantic partner. But that relationship’s timeline and the doc’s impact upon it are hazy; how Friedman feels about his life’s wounds, and how much that has to do with the doc itself (his mom calls Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in 2003, “a charade”) is opaque.
I don’t expect a sex offender, a would-be basketball star or a political refugee to share a comfort with introspection. They, like the films that reshaped and crystalized parts of their lives for us, are unique. The diversity of consequences faced by Subject’s participants has a humanizing vitality, though the film’s structure can lean too far into a siloed approach, which makes the pace chug as we stop, shift gears and rev back up for a new chapter. But even that is less jarring than the mid-movie brake screech when we pause to answer the question of “What does the word ‘subject’ mean?” You can see the skidmarks on the celluloid, smell the panicked hot rubber wafting from the screen.
But when its pet topics enter into conversation with one another, revealing a throughline underscoring the basic rights of everyone working on a film project, Subject cruises along. In the film’s most propulsive sections, passion is as paramount as self-awareness, with vigorously cut documentary snippets affectionately emphasizing its self-critical points.
Subject recognizes that the documentary industry is in the same place as the rest of the entertainment world—a place where profit drive is flooring it off a cliff, at the expense of everyone in the car. Fiction filmmakers are realizing that even if they stick to making IP films, the results might just end up being shelved as a tax write-off. Nonfiction filmmakers are realizing that, as the pressure to produce mounts, exploiting those they turn their cameras on gets easier and easier.
That friction doesn’t disappear with good intentions. This meta-doc, with its meta-subjects, runs into the same ethical conundrums as everyone did the first time around. Those who’ve agreed to return are once again at the mercy of filmmakers who have control of the final edit. They are once again revealing themselves, exclusively in relation to the movies that originally thrust them into the greater world. Is this ironic return to form, this muddy act of redefinition, successful? Thoughtful? Useful? Like many of the questions Tiexiera and Hall raise, this facet is better approached with continuous discussion than with half-answers. The process is imperfect, but the conversation is iterative: The more we engage, the better we’ll get.
As the SAG-AFTRA strike comes to an end, there’s never been a better time to think deeply about the rights of the people whose faces bear the weight of our movies. Most of us (unless you’re my grandmother) understand that actors are not their characters. Anthony Hopkins is not after your liver. But how many binge-watchers consider that nonfiction subjects are not their edit?
Adjacent to documentary participants, reality show contestants have begun to speak out about the treatment they weather for a similar fate: A taste of fame—costing only their eternal privacy—forever at the mercy of an audience without an understanding of frankenbites, of waivers, of filming schedules, of the conditions faced by those who might not have known what they were signing up for. Along these lines, when I think about the people sacrificing their time and privacy for a documentary, I think of calls for personal-essay writers. “Do you have a deeply embarrassing story? A dark secret? An anecdote that will forever make your name un-Googleable? Then do we have $75 for you!” The task is painfully personal. The reward is, at best, a favorable split between sympathy and notoriety as you air your story.
But if there wasn’t value on both sides of this, for both storyteller and listener, we wouldn’t be so tempted to keep revealing ourselves. Because there is an ineffable allure to laying ourselves bare, Subject argues, a plan to roll camera should make us slow down, not speed up. Later in Koresky’s essay where he reconsiders the act of putting yourself out there, specifically in film criticism, he writes that “anxiety—of being misunderstood, mistaken, or misguided—is a powerful motivator in critical writing.” It’s a powerful motivator whenever you’re revealing something of yourself, or presenting yourself to the wider world. If you’re being watched, you should at least feel seen.
Director: Jennifer Tiexiera, Camilla Hall
Writer: Camilla Hall, Lauren Saffa, Jennifer Tiexiera
Release Date: November 3, 2023
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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