Lucy Lawless’ Kinetic Doc Debut, Never Look Away Puts a Face to War Journalism
While we’re currently inundated with troubling, heartbreaking photos and videos from around the world thanks to social media, it wasn’t so long ago that the only way the outside world got a sense of the sheer scope and human cost of geopolitical atrocities was by journalists traveling in, and getting their footage out. The Vietnam War moved our cultural images of war away from the powerful still images of WWII and towards the painful reality of action. You can know there’s violence when you see it, but you can feel the violence when there’s movement. Camerawoman Margaret Moth was one of those braving war zones to inform the world, this time filling the groundbreaking 24-hour needs of the newly founded CNN with the conflicts of the ‘90s. Directed by Lucy Lawless in her debut, Never Look Away documents the life and career of the spitfire with the same relentless energy as its adrenaline-junkie subject—and gives us a sense of what kind of person was putting themselves in danger to bring us the news.
Never Look Away alternates between interview subjects and harrowing footage describing the life of a cameraperson covering war, and interview subjects and harrowing footage describing Moth. The two blur together before we have much sense of the latter, caught up in the blustery bravado of a combat zone montage set to Heart’s “Barracuda.” It’s here that Lawless, documenting the life of fellow Kiwi Moth, gives in most to the least generous reading of her subject: The rocker adrenaline junkie who got a headbanging rush from tanks rolling in, explosions detonating and civilians grieving.
It’s not that Heart is a bad touchstone—though Moth’s pitch-black ‘80s shag and dark eyeliner more precisely channeled Joan Jett, or Elvira in combat boots—but that the juxtaposition is willfully blunt. Lawless sees Moth as a complex, wounded, principled figure. Introducing Never Look Away with a snuff music video grabs us by the collar, but it’s a disingenuously uncritical stance the rest of the movie doesn’t hold.
Most of the doc shows real empathy for the rebellious trailblazer (a bit too much, perhaps, when we learn she was dating a 17-year-old at age 30) who died of cancer in 2010. Never Look Away clearly admires Moth’s confident convictions: A “lion tamer” in the circus of her life, she fled New Zealand to pound psychedelics in Houston before becoming one of CNN’s first camerawomen. Moth was skateboarding, skydiving and ever-seeking excitement. As one of her lovers notes, if you got boring, you were gone.
That’s a kind of person we all know, and the familiarity these descriptors hold can give way to some simple, indulgent metaphors. “War coverage was just a different drug,” that kind of thing. These accompany repeated adjectives (“fearless” comes up a lot, possibly taken from the first doc about Moth, CNN’s 2009 film Fearless: the Margaret Moth Story) and speculation from the people, mostly men, who knew her in life.
Watching her colleagues wonder about her life before she stood on Lebanese rooftops waiting for the missiles to strike or smoked cigars in Kuwait with General Schwarzkopf is just as insufficient as actually hearing her siblings recount their upbringing. It all feels antithetical to a woman whose self-actualizing reinvention put a premium on the here and now. On the work. Anything we hear from her exes, her friends, her family, it’s all struggling for the same elegance as the copious, affecting footage Moth captured with her camera.