Reality TV: Realism and Revelation

Personalising the documentary: from video diary to Errol Morris

This chapter begins to chart what we see as a significant shift in emphasis for documentary modes. This shift – a personalising of the form in terms of its aesthetics, address and representation of subjects – marks the increasing attention to the subjective in documentary television and video. What holds together the seemingly disparate formats we discuss is an attention to the subjective in both style and content. We examine, in particular, documentary and reality TV’s attentiveness to trauma, personal pain, injury and loss and to its modes of expression through confession, video diary, interview, observational techniques and so on. Over this and the following two chapters we point to the entrenchment of the revelation of trauma and psychological damage in post-documentary formats and its relationship to the broader psycho-social realm of therapeutic culture.

In the early 1970s Stuart Hall gave a valuable account of the specificity of televisual discourse and the types of transformation it operates upon ‘raw materials’. A number of the key points that Hall established are still pertinent to our analysis of reality TV. Hall importantly highlights the increasing interplay between non-televisual productions such as arts events, theatre, cinema and seminars which are relayed fairly unmodified through the television to a domestic audience and material produced either in a studio or on location for TV. The ‘technics of television’ he describes are relevant to this interplay and are predominantly defined as relay, proximity and intimacy. Television material tends to be fragmented and serialised, but also mediated through either a presenter or the production-editing process. But this mediation is obscured through the intimate, profoundly domestic nature of the medium. Also, as Hall indicates, television in its content has prioritised actuality – ‘pictures of people, events and places in the “real” world, transmitted to us via the medium of the set’ (1971: 5). The question of form seems indivisible here from content. Whilst television favours the documentary mode; it tries often to produce the sense of ‘live actuality’. Allied with the rapid transmission of pictures which lends to the ‘naturalistic’ reportage of ‘everyday life and events’ television bolsters a sense of first-hand transmission whilst appearing to offer visual realism (ibid.). Importantly, Hall highlights television’s affinity with documentary: both are popularly thought of as ‘reproducing the reality’ with which they deal (his emphasis).

Crucial for our analysis here is the cross-over between ‘high art’ forms and those produced with the television arena in mind. We focus then on the more culturally privileged art-house projects as well as video diaries and ‘auteur-driven’ documentaries. Those that privilege cherished cultural distinctions here may well throw their hands up in horror. But our discussion of the work of Andy Warhol, for example, alongside the television-created video diary, aims to link the creative impulse in both ‘elite’ and popular forms to prioritise the personal. This prioritisation is more to do with cultural shifts in thinking about and through the subjective and signals the increasing popularisation of the therapeutic as an avenue for filmmakers to explore the contemporary moment, the formal properties of documentary and the realistic capture of the complex individual subject.

In this chapter, then, we discuss the use of video diaries, to-camera monologues, and shock tactic interviewing to signal the increasing importance of the private world over the public in video and televisual forms. For the reality TV viewer amateur ‘pop psychological’ self-analysis and/or amateur or unscripted footage meld the pleasures of voyeurism indicated in previous chapters with the pseudo-intimacy of the therapeutic consulting room. Here the emphasis is less on capturing the rawness of an unmediated event played out before the camera and more on the hidden or secret emotional realism suggested by confession, individual close-up engagement with the camera and popular therapeutic knowledge that suggests even the layman or woman can unpack personal trauma because we all have personal histories that score our identity. This notion of a shared competency at the level of subjective history lends to the dominant function of the representations we discuss: revelation on screen as the route to a new emotional realism.

Video diary and the performative

This chapter looks at the development of the personalised documentary. In these documentaries subjective experience is central and informs both the documentary subject matter and frequently the dominant perspective; the form of address is frequently subjective, framed as therapeutic and confessional. This emphasis signals a shift in the grammar of documentary from an association of the word with factual explorations of the social world and its external structures to an association with uncertain knowledge, the impressionistic and personal world. This has resulted in documentaries that are constructed around memory, personal beliefs or individual dilemmas that are not necessarily intended to exemplify broader social issues although they may do so indirectly. Alongside this, the use of ordinary people who nonetheless have a general ‘savvy’ about media construction and media influence result in individual stories that have an idiosyncratic quality that arguably arises out of a culture that prioritises the newsworthy twist on self-inquiry. Both filmmaker and subject in a sense acquire a stylistic mark: the subject to legitimate their role in the documentary as extraordinary subject and the filmmaker as one who knowingly suggests their controlling, manipulative presence.

One key influence on the development of the personalised documentary is the use of the video diary. The entrance onto television screens of the first-person confessional in the video diary is well charted by documentary theorists (Corner 1996: 185–6; Dovey 2000: 55–77; Keighron 1993: 24–5; Kilborn & Izod 1997: 81–3). The biographical narrative has gained a distinct prominence in many forms of contemporary documentary, a strategy they share with a range of light-entertainment studio-based programmes as discussed in the previous two chapters. The video diary, a form arising from the spread of low-gauge videotape formats in easy-to-use camcorder technology, has become a commonplace sign of filmed intimacy or the captured moment on our television screens. The technical characteristics of the camcorder – its lightweight transportability, synchronised sound, easy editing facilities and relative cheapness – help produce a format that emphasises the intimate, spontaneous, exposing and endearingly amateur or superficially guileless moment. The video diary, for example, has become an essential element of the makeover/lifestyle programme and the survival/competitive reality show. These formats, with their clearly demarcated rules, challenges and group or couple dynamics frequently contain video extracts embedded within a structure that, for the most part, is highly regulated and policed. The seeming contrasting intimacy of the to-camera disclosure of the ordinary individual signifies a switch of power relations, as the ‘real’ individual speaks to the audience without the interference of camera crew, television hosts or coaches, and so on. The emphasis on the individual pointedly speaking to-camera at moments in the show taps into the current cultural preoccupation with the uninhibited and authentic emotional self being given media space and also being a stamp of authentic communication.

The life narrative that is told to-camera is obviously culturally and linguistically shaped. The power to structure perceptual experience, to organise memory and to segment and construct significant events in one’s life is highly dependent on the cultural tool kit of metaphors, symbols, myths and so on that the self-story teller can draw upon that will chime with his or her audience. In the post-war era in many affluent Western cultures, the language of psychotherapy has shaped notions of failure and success, inadequacy and need in a psychological model of interpretation. Dreams, family history, minor pathologies, fears and defences – these are the narrative criteria that make sense of and judge personal landscapes – common mythic themes on which individuals draw. The ‘intimacy’ of the video diary is mapped onto a cultural sense of ‘home’ as private, forgiving, predictably safe but also secret, hidden and possibly troubling or transgressive. Correspondingly, the way this cheaply produced video footage is widely used on contemporary mainstream television reveals a cultural emphasis on the subjective and embodied. As Jon Dovey notes, such miniature and highly mobile technologies could have been used to efface the filmmaker (as in Direct Cinema). Instead, the opposite aesthetic emerges in which ‘the contemporary video document is nothing but an inscription of presence within the text’:

Everything about it, the hushed whispering voiceover, the incessant to-camera close-up, the shaking camera movement, the embodied intimacy of the technical process, appears to reproduce experiences of subjectivity. (2000: 56–7)

Work that foreshadows current developments in video diary documentary includes experimental or avant garde praxis from the 1960s and 1970s. During this period artists concerned with interrogating social and media practices used video and performance to consider the individual subject as part of a complex of social practices, discourses and systems of representation. The role of public persona and private self was often explored. For example, the current emphasis on personal disclosure and the inner self in a range of reality TV programming was anticipated in Wendy Clarke’s The Love Tapes (1977) and the experimental work of Andy Warhol.

In The Love Tapes project, individuals from a variety of backgrounds are given three minutes of tape in which to deliberate on the intensely personal experience of what love means to them. Each individual is seated in a booth with a self-activated camera and the theme of ‘love’ as a catalyst to their discussion to-camera. Each video diary, whilst the same in length and subject, announced the multiple differences of the individual subject, for the repetitive formula counterpoised by the highly individual performances of each subject rendered each monologue unique (Renov 1999: 90).1 The abstract notion of ‘love’ is revealed to be both cultural and also individual: notions of love as private, emotionally intense, euphoric, damaging, and so on are part of the shared imaginary that the speakers draw upon. Yet their accounts also reveal their individual stories of meeting, notions of love, personal enterprise, beliefs, expectations of a relationship and so on.

In Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965) he continued his ongoing artistic examination of the role of the mass-produced image in commodity exchange. In this work, Warhol combined experimental technology and a multi-screen framework with the conventions of portraiture and performance. The piece is a film and video portrait of Edie Sedgwick shot in August 1965. Sedgwick is seated in front of a large television monitor which is playing back a pre-recorded videotape of her. She is positioned so that her head is about the same size as her video image which gazes as though looking out of the frame. The filmed Edie sits to the right of the video image in three-quarter profile as though in conversation with the videoed Edie placed slightly to the right and behind her. Warhol shot two 33-minute reels of Edie and then projected them alongside one another. The videoed Edie is front-lit, with a mask-like flat quality to her profile giving her an enigmatic quality whilst the filmed Edie has nuanced lighting which, accompanied by the glow of the video screen, gives her a three-dimensional quality. The televised Edie has the sculpted quality characterised in Roland Barthes’ analysis of Garbo’s image as: ‘the temptation of the absolute mask’ (1972: 56). The filmed Edie appears unsettled by her video companion and the juxtaposition of the two images suggests perhaps the outer carapace of the video persona – a public persona – and the inner vulnerability and multi-dimensionality of the filmed Edie.

Importantly, for the later use of videotape, Warhol experiments with the role of video and film in capturing public persona and inner self as the film of the two reveals Edie’s increasing discomfort as she encounters and tolerates her televised self. This can be read as an interrogation of the role of the moving image in concealing and disclosing the inner self. The filmed image of Edie is, of course, a media construction as much as the videotape version framed by the television. However, the seemingly greater, natural and more vulnerable quality of the latter, whilst intending perhaps to underline the superficiality of the video and mass-produced television image, in fact highlights both as media productions of equal weight. The more naturalistically-presented filmed Edie can be read as much as a performance as the harshly-lit video self. Both predict the masquerade offered by some film subjects to the video diary from the 1990s, in which surface identity and vulnerable interior are equally placed before the camera for the benefit of an audience.2 This process of examining the multiple self is also captured in much experimental work coming out of the feminist movement and its interaction with artistic practice in the 1970s and 1980s.³

Both Clarke and Warhol anticipate the performative documentary that came to the fore in the late 1980s and 1990s. Bound up with the moment and ethos of identity politics, a significant number of documentaries foregrounded the subjective matrices of identity fashioned by the cultural markers of class, race, ethnicity and sexuality. For example, the work of Pratibha Parmar, Gurinder Chadha, Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs, Rea Tajiri and Trinh T. Minh-ha drew upon an expressive, poetic, rhetorical and multi-dimensional style that often melded conventional fragments of historical or popular narratives with an intimate personal account of racial violence, ethnic legacy, sexual encounters, class consciousness and so on. Often the patterning of memory and expressive colours, music or voiceovers is juxtaposed with more conventional documentary material such as archival footage or interviews.⁴

As an extension of the feminist project of personalising the political, video diaries can be read as part of this larger media project to destabilise the masculinised all-controlling rational ego and to allow the inner private self to be acknowledged. They offer avenues towards undermining binary oppositions between evidence and experience, objectivity and subjectivity, the public and the private: categories that have underpinned much factual media work. As already noted in chapter 1, the BBC’s Video Diaries series provided a more mainstream space for the first-person documentary, with ordinary people given video cameras to record for broadcast their personal views (see Kilborn & Izod 1997: 81–4). The launch of this new format by the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit heralded the advent of a new format for confessional culture in which ordinary people produced subjective footage of their lives on cheap Hi-8 footage. As one Times newspaper reviewer of the 1992 series noted, many of these resembled ‘DIY psychoanalysis’ (Barker 1992: 353). For instance, in Searching for a Killer, Geoffrey Smith returned to Haiti to relive the traumatic experience of being caught in a bloodbath on polling day as a gunman sprayed bullets at Haitian voters, injuring Smith and killing his friend. Smith described his return as a means to purge the old nightmares and, as he faced fresh dangers, this self-help therapy appeared to work. He described his video diary in therapeutic terms: ‘The camera was my only companion … I needed a friend that would listen’ (in Barker 1992: 354). He described the process of filming as ‘a cathartic device’ in which he became attached to the camera, overcoming the trauma of the experience by burying himself in filming.

Also of particular note is Willa Woolston’s My Demons: The Legacy (1992) which shifts through a process of self-discovery via a journey which is ‘both a recovery of autobiographical history and a self-administered therapy’ (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 104–9). Woolston’s documentary records her journey from London across North America visiting her children and sisters. This is no travelogue, but video footage with an explicit therapeutic aim:

The record of her travel across the States becomes the trail of an inner journey in which she goes back to get the psychological roots of the physical and mental torture she and her sisters suffered at the hands of her stepmother. That mistreatment has left her with a life ruled by savage apprehension and relentless traumas. (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 105)

In the diary Woolston’s voiceover narrates her drink problem and suicide attempts as well as her damaged relationship with her own children. Crucial to the film are the long takes in close-up in which Woolston or other family members relate to the static camera their experiences of physical and mental abuse and the inaction of their father who was terrified of losing his new young wife (ibid.). Professionally edited in post-production the diary retained its amateur quality and included home movie footage taken by Woolston’s father of her and her sisters, seemingly happy with their stepmother. Richard Kilborn and John Izod argue that this mix of amateurishness and professionalism underwrites the documentary’s status as ‘deeply personal’ but also ‘acceptable (even trustworthy)’ in the way it is paced and edited (1997: 107). They argue that the professional qualities of the film complement the therapeutic symbol of a journey into ‘the realms of repressed memory’, but add that the inexperienced aspects of the filming signify Woolston’s isolated persona as she attempts to track back to ‘what she must perceive to be her unique and wounded self’ (1997: 109). In September 1992 the screening of the second of Woolston’s video diaries followed her revelation of family secrets and how her family coped with the public nature of this process. Woolston, a portrait painter, describes her diaries as ‘extremely distressing at first … A painted portrait is objective. Here you are being subjective. I was unaccustomed to looking at myself like that’ (in Barker 1992: 354).

Woolston’s video diary fits within the broader move within documentary and factual filmmaking since the 1990s to seize upon the personal and ‘human interest’; a move which has, in turn, produced an ambivalent response amongst feminist critics. The filmic pursuit of intimacy and the personal arguably corrected a skewed prior emphasis on the masculinised rational debate of public issues and events at the expense of affective or personal affairs. In fact, the displacement of the politics of social movements by the politics of identity and a recognition of the personal as political were legacies of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s and partly enabled the current ‘effusion of documentary subjectivity’ (Renov 1999: 89). However, the focus on the personal tended also to divide off this area into the ‘feminine’ and thereby to ghettoise it as trivial (van Zoonen 1991). Myra MacDonald (1998), has examined the interventions made by feminist television documentary makers since the 1990s which attempt to engage positively with the personal whilst resisting voyeurism and trivialisation; aiming instead for emotional and intellectual discomfort. She contrasts the ‘confessional’ mode of presenting women’s stories with that of the ‘testimony’. In the confessional mode, the woman confessing on screen is objectified and spectatorial pleasure comes from the viewing experience of detachment from the events being described by the film subject. She locates both television talk shows and video diaries in this mode; with the film subject being constructed ethnographically as the observed ‘other’ (1998: 109–10). MacDonald chooses to highlight examples from a number of ‘quality’ documentary series in this context – such as BBC2’s Modern Times and Channel 4’s Cutting Edge – confessional-mode documentaries in the respective series that tracked jilted female lovers and working mothers, locating each within a formula that foregrounds the individual emotional journey and dilemma, rather than emphasising the broader connection to women’s lives and surrounding social structures. In these examples, suggests MacDonald, the women are reduced to an exemplar of narrated experience. In contrast, the testimony mode made women’s subjectivity and social or political issues ‘textually available’ (1998: 114). Testimonial documentary allows the ‘possibility of access as exposition’ (1998: 112).

In Jane Treays’ Men in the Woods (2001, Channel 4’s True Stories series) the documentary retains subjective experience but arguably adopts a testimonial mode. Here Treays narrates her childhood trauma and its long-term effects while also exploring women’s fear of masculine threat more generally. Much of her film involves her speaking to-camera, or in voiceover, narrating the events that have marred her adult life. She was walking in the woods as a six-year-old child with her mother when a masked man brandishing a stick leapt from the bushes and masturbated in front of them. Treays either speaks directly to the audience of these events or the film is shot as though we are walking alongside her as we explore the interlinked intimate geography of the woods near her childhood home and her internal fantasy woods in which she frequently returned to the scene of the crime. This auteur-centred approach uses a poetic wander through the woods, which borrows occasionally from the uneven tracking of horror films intercut with grainy cine-footage of Treays as a windswept child laughing or staring trustingly into the cine-camera. The aesthetics stress this as an individual person-to-person exchange: there is no other point of identification but with Treays. When the camera turns on Treays’ mother towards the end of the film as she is confronted and challenged for silencing this woodland encounter in the name of family propriety, a generational and ethical gap emerges as Treays wishes to expose the incident and her mother wishes to let old demons remain buried: the past is past. Consequently, Treays connects her personal sense of alienation with the broader structures of middle-class self-containment, stoicism and respectability that shaped her family’s response to her trauma, pressurising her to bury the incident and get on with her life. Here, the power of the camera is revealed as the daughter refuses to turn it off and the viewer witnesses, and perhaps feels for the mother and her discomfort at facing long-repressed events dealt with through her own discourses of decorum, privacy and common-sense rather than through Treays’ therapeutic ones.

Men in the Woods meets MacDonald’s criteria for a testimonial work. It prioritises memory and is in keeping with the recent feminist autobiographical practice of linking individual recollections built around personal and familial autobiography and to broader debates around gender and identity (Kuhn 1995; Steedman 1986). An interactive cooperative mode of communication is present at points in the documentary as Treays interviews women with similar experiences of random sexual assault, many of whom spoke of their disbelief at their ordeal:

‘There must be a mistake,’ thought one, who was flashed at in a bookshop. ‘What has gone wrong?’thought another, at the complicity of the rest of the world in keeping the experience as one to be laughed at dismissively. (McLean 2001: 18)

Whilst self-indulgent perhaps in parts, with a nostalgic view of prelapsarian childhood before the assault, the documentary exhibits the provisionality and locatedness of experience characteristic of testimonial work (MacDonald 1998: 115–18). The reviewer who criticised this as ‘a wade through Treays’ psyche’ and a programme in need of ‘objective analysis and information on the sex offenders who were briefly interviewed’ missed the point (McLean 2001: 18). This was a story based in fact, but the lines between fact and fiction were muddied and the fantasy nature precisely depicted the act of telling and retelling a traumatic childhood event. The aesthetics complement the journey of self-discovery. And there is a broader self-reflexivity in the use of popular cultural myths to signal the way childhood and its dangers and fears – in this case the danger of a rogue male – are encapsulated in fairy stories and urban myths. For both the Men in the Woods and Our Father the Serial Killer (2002), discussed below, are accounts of intimate injury and also, in keeping with this style of personalised documentary, a process of accusation: of naming the abuser as part of publicly reclaiming the self. In many cases, the documentary presents the pathology of its subjects in a form that lurches between horrific, damaging or intense recollected events and representational strategies that elide such intimate confession with popular cultural myths: the bogeyman in the woods, the killer under the stairs.

Inside/out – private trauma and public knowledge

Witnessing is also the discursive act of stating one’s experience for the benefit of an audience that was not present at the event and yet must make some kind of judgement about it. (Peters 2001: 709)

In Our Father the Serial Killer, which featured as one of the British Everyman documentary series and was broadcast on Court TV, journalist John Edginton investigates claims made by Steve and Dianne Griggs that their father, Steven Griggs Sr, committed numerous acts of atrocity during their childhood and subsequently. They accuse their father of being a long-term serial killer of children and later of adults, too. These memories return to Steve Griggs as an adult and when he turns to his younger sister Dianne she corroborates his recollections. They report their father to the police who take their accusations seriously. But they are concerned that all the investigations are going to come to nothing. Having seen a documentary on criminal justice by Edginton they invite him to tell their story. He meets with them and like the police he finds them highly convincing. The documentary trails the pair as they investigate and challenge their father. The film is an account of intimate injury and also, in keeping with this style of personalised documentary, a process of accusation: of naming the abuser as part of publicly reclaiming the self. In this case, the documentary presents the pathology of its subjects (i.e. the harm they incurred and the case history of that harm) in a form that lurches between horrific, damaging or intense recollected events and representational strategies that elide such intimate confession with broader popular cultural myths of trauma: the bogeyman in the woods, the killer under the stairs, the mobile serial killer.

The Griggs are relentless investigators of their father. They unearth old newspaper evidence of children missing at the precise time and location of their father’s alleged murders; they offer highly detailed and convincing accounts of children that they saw murdered, of scenes of crime and the disposal of bodies. The difficulty for the police is that while they are unable to find evidence in support of the Griggs’ accusations neither are they able to disprove them. Much of the mythology of the serial killer ‘profile’ seems to fit their parent: he was in the army and was trained to commit violence. Furthermore, he was very dominant in the home which was situated in an isolated location, he dug out a huge cellar, he was mobile and had opportunities to kill. In addition, as the police noted, there are missing people whose disappearances remain to be accounted for in the surrounding area. Also, after the death of his wife the rest of his children moved away and failed to keep in touch. Only Steve and Dianne remained in the vicinity, seemingly not out of affection but to stalk their parent and safeguard the community from his predatory habits.

Edginton’s classic investigatory documentary technique reveals these facts, using interviews, documentary evidence and photographic stills. Its narrative structure is one of continuing investigation with minor revelations on the way. The audience follows both Edginton and the Griggs’ from those intense first moments when their horrific accusations are voiced, through their increasingly frustrated attempts to produce the evidence, to a growing realisation that whatever terrible crimes were committed by Griggs Sr they were unlikely to include relentless and continuing serial murder.

This more conventional process of documentary representation is intercut with the subjective perspective licensed by confessional programming formats in which the siblings, often highly distressed, recall to camera the horrific scenes which they either witnessed or in which they were forced to participate. They are shown recalling these events and making accusations to the documentarist, the police and media experts. Edginton re-visits the scenes of crimes as remembered by the siblings; remaining firmly off-camera but present through controlling questions and a voiceover that is increasingly sceptical of the factual status of the Griggs’ surfacing memories. Towards the end of the film they meet with a psychologist who confirms that they have undergone serious traumatic experiences but doubts their recollections of serial killing. It emerges, as Steve’s stories become increasingly unlikely, hyperbolic and contradictory that their memories are also connected to their own experience of abuse as children. Other siblings confirm that Steve and to a lesser extent Dianne were shockingly and consistently abused. One sister even says that she would not be surprised if their father was a killer. It is through these personal disclosures, inconsistencies of evidence and moments of intense confession-style revelation that the alternative crime story unfolds; not of serial killing but of child abuse. The initial investigation of a public and community-based crime becomes an investigation of psychic states in the aftermath of some terrible private and hidden traumatic event or series of events.

What is certain by the conclusion of the film is that the Griggs have undergone classic psychic trauma. They underwent events defined by their intensity, their incapacity to respond to them and by the long-lasting upheaval that this brings to their psychic organisation. They were unable to fully master or to work through the excess of traumatic experience successfully (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 465). If trauma can be understood as the compulsive return to the scene of a crime (Seltzer 1998: 260–1) then their remembering of abuse (it dominates Steve’s life to a debilitating degree) through the metaphor of serial killing constituted an apposite kind of working through. For the figuring of Griggs Sr as ‘serial killer’ is nothing if not a figure or trope of endless repetition; his crimes according to his children’s stories are innumerable and still unending; elaborate variations on a theme. And it is this trope of serial killing, with all its attendant mythology already established through film, drama, novels and reportage, that speaks to the viewer of something greater than individual trauma and which forms the connection between private suffering and the public narration of that experience. The serial killer, then, is a familiar and powerful cultural trope used by both Edginton and the Griggs in different but related ways to re-present the ultimately unrepresentable events of an abusive family past. Whilst the Griggs siblings clearly underwent extremely violent experiences as children, their trauma as trauma lacks clear origins that can be unearthed. As such the documentary does credit to this, perhaps inadvertently, by revealing the disjuncture between journalistic practice (embodied by Edginton) with its clear narrative structure, chronological time and factual reference and the Griggs’ memories which are marked by absences, gaps in chronology, fragments, flashbacks and repetition. The serial killer then becomes a familiar and powerful cultural trope used by both Edginton and the Griggs in different but related ways to re-present the ultimately unrepresentable events of an abusive family past.

As such, rather than understand the trauma of what are, after all, from the perspective of the viewer, highly mediated subjects of documentary practice, Our Father the Serial Killer can be read for its use of contradictory discourses of private distress and public crime story, personal memory and public history and the precarious manner in which these are yoked together. For example, in one scene Steve finds a newspaper clipping of an old unsolved child murder and ‘recalls’ that his father was the perpetrator of the crime. We follow Steve and his sister, together with police officers, to the scene of the crime near a river embankment where Steve describes in convincing detail how their father killed and disposed of the child. Eventually, the police realise that Steve is unable to recall any details which they could corroborate with the information they held back from the press. This is one of many inconclusive scenarios in which public facts and fears about crime in the community seems to connect with private recollections only to trail off into loose ends. By allowing Steve to declare publicly his recollection of these dreadful acts the documentary taps into the narrativising of private events popularised in the confessional forms already discussed and does so in a way that ultimately objectifies the film subjects rather than empowering them. Steve’s and Dianne’s crises, in which they bear witness to various atrocities, are increasingly undercut by the lack of evidence and the growing scepticism of law enforcers and medical experts so that they become spectacles of declining credibility.

In the riverside scene, among others, Steve concentrates, gazing into the distance as he focuses on his recollections, rather like a medium in a séance. As he gazes beyond the camera into the middle distance, the camera’s point of view locates him as overly intense, excessive and unsound. Edginton’s authorial voice, present through commentary and editing which guides the viewer into a more ‘correct’ understanding of the Griggs’ predicament, shifts the emphasis much more firmly onto the documentarist’s encounter with and investigative search for the ‘truth’ of his story. The siblings’ story of the search for evidence of the truth of their father’s criminality ultimately becomes subordinated to Edginton’s story of the search for the truth of their trauma.

This story is captured in a form, documentary, that is far more highly regarded than true crime or talk show confession but shares with such popular programming an attempt to construct a topography of un-representable elements such as interior states: memory, trauma and fear. And also, just as importantly for a public form, it reveals the ways in which trauma documentaries across the spectrum from the ‘serious’ to the ‘popular’ attempt to represent individual and also collective fantasies: mythological structures that explain culture to itself, structures which viewing subjects will recognise and with which they will connect. Like Treays’ film, it renders private trauma via public narratives.

One might ask what kinds of documentary forms are most effective at delivering these seemingly unrepresentable interior landscapes via broader mythic structures. We are talking for the most part about documentaries that are internally rich in representational strategies such as condensation, displacement, symbolism of all kinds. John Corner calls these ‘thick text’ documentaries; formats which incorporate the aesthetics and narrative devices of fictional and art film forms which speak to and incorporate structures of fantasy and the unconscious (Corner 2003: 94). These documentaries are rich enough to provide pleasure over and above the overtly informational and invite and merit a second viewing in the ways that, for example, a news programme does not. While Our Father the Serial Killer is not wholly in this league its composition is sufficiently thick to bear the burden of fantasy and trauma through the slow revelation of facts and the deferral of knowledge but also through the use of extra-diegetic music, its attention to landscape and locale, its fleeting use of horror film aesthetics. Its narrative builds suspense. It is partly a psychological and partly a genre-based detective story which builds to a climax in which the filmmaker confronts the by now very elderly father/serial killer in his own home and descends with him into the cellar.

This scene begins with the mobile camera circling the house, peering into the porch and through windows; drawing on a horror film lexicon of camera movement to disorientate the viewer, not only through its mobility, but by positioning the viewer as the intruder in the domestic space of the Griggs’ former family home. Griggs Sr is discovered sitting in an armchair and called to the door. The shock of this moment, for the viewer, lies partly in the frailty of this now elderly man whose shocking exploits loom so large over his children’s lives and the film itself. After a discussion in which the father denies everything and is both dismissive and bemused, he agrees to take Edginton into his cellar and proudly shows him round the dug-out and reinforced room. Such is the power of horror film iconography that it is difficult not to imagine the bodies immured within. They are an absent presence in the sense that even if they do not exist literally they do exist within the logic of the film. The film ends with the camera’s point of view, filming up the stairs and showing Griggs Sr looming at the top, fleetingly a photographic still of his younger face is transposed onto him to malevolent effect. The tenor is one of menace; a signifier of the monstrous father buried within this seemingly benign character and within the home. The filming in this encounter rather heavy-handedly signals the uncanny, the camera peeping through the window to discover the killer in his lair. The sinister extra-diegetic music accompanies the unveiling of Griggs Sr’s photograph, this black and white image of the uniformed father is only teasingly revealed, like a striptease, from the feet to the head, deliberately invoking a horror film genealogy. The viewer is left in little doubt that Griggs Sr is a bad man.

This dramatic and highly impressionistic climax, however, sits awkwardly in a format that operates more conventionally in investigatory and interrogatory modes and which is, overall, far more subtle than this moment suggests. One of the disquieting elements of the film is the contrast between established investigative documentary technique and the staging of distressing confessional scenes which are almost therapeutic in their intensity. These usually occur at the alleged scenes of crimes.

In one example, Dianne Griggs drives to the location in which her father allegedly lured a young boy to his death. She recounts her childhood memory of her father persuading the boy into the car and then sexually abusing him in front of the two siblings. Her father then drove to a desolate well and threw the young boy down there having taunted her brother to kill him and made him pull a knife on their captive. In an intense and claustrophobic scene Dianne convincingly recollects this event in a faltering and shaking voice punctuated by moments of complete breakdown. She sits in the front passenger seat while the camera films from the rear – in the position and point of view of the filmmaker (and of the two Griggs children as recalled). Dianne does not face the camera throughout this recollection. She is shot in near silhouette. Her placement in the intimate but de-personalised space of the car seems to jar alongside the clear surfacing of violent and disturbing memories. The filmed encounter clearly suggests the therapeutic encounter: situating the journalist and the viewer as therapists listening in on another’s private disturbed history.

At the corner of the frame, through the side window of the car, her brother is clearly visible, walking the ground where the well is supposed to be. Agitated and distracted, he seems to represent the recollected father as much as himself. Intense and driven in appearance he becomes a reconstructed illustration of Griggs Sr and an extension of the therapeutic scene of memory and/or fantasy. We, for a moment, are made to appreciate the relative safety of the enclosed vehicle as Steve roams around about outside. In this, and other scenes, Steve himself becomes an elided figure whose meaning is increasingly multivalent (child victim, adult survivor, crime witness, dangerous individual). The imputation unfolds that Steve is potentially dangerous; that he is someone who not only bears his father’s full name but whose identification with his father is as strong as his revulsion for him. Other scenes, such as one where Steve obsessively digs into a vault newly discovered on his land (reminiscent of his father’s cellar) or the episode where the police reveal that they are nervous of being alone with him, reflects the growing insinuation on the part of the filmmaker that it is Steve himself who may be disturbed rather than (or as much as) his father.

This is very much a landscape of trauma in which the scrub-like terrain seen frequently throughout the documentary comes to signify the anonymous killing ground, suitable for the concealment of serial killers’ victims and emblematic of the spaces where child abuse could be enacted without disturbance. Edginton follows brother and sister to what are presented as isolated lakesides, scrubland, the river’s edge and vacated houses all of which were alleged scenes of crimes and constitute a form of psychic topography. The scenes are charged with emotion as the camera records Steve patiently fishing for body parts in the lake or pacing agitatedly through woodland with a spade in his hand. As Corner notes, television documentaries of this type embrace the ‘impact of the picture not simply to be looked through, but to be looked at’; here landscapes and buildings require to be ‘read as a discourse about the world rather than a depiction of it’ as landscape becomes imbued with meaning; in this case memorials for traumatic events, possibly deaths (1996b: 96). The siblings claim that many journeys were made in their father’s car and that ostensibly happy family trips were actually taken to stalk victims, bury body parts or molest his children. Both the car journeys that Edginton and the Griggs’s take as the documentary is filmed and the anonymous scrubland they cover constitute fetish objects that stand in for the absent evidence. As the Griggs siblings drive or pace the scrub they tell a story of slaughter for which there is no concrete proof – no bodies, bones, murder weapons, witnesses – yet throughout the documentary they insist on the truth of their account: they reiterate to the journalist ‘I know there is nothing there but nonetheless…’. And every now and then the police manage to corroborate some small detail of their recollections – there was once a well in this isolated location which few people knew about; children do go missing. It seems nearly impossible to read the Griggs family drama as anything but contemporary family gothic horror; with the paterfamilias reminiscent of Tobe Hooper’s nightmarish Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): disposing of bodies beneath the porch, in wells and in rubbish dumps as he travels with the children along the country’s highways and byways.

Erik Barnouw asserted that the difference between the Direct Cinema and the cinema verité filmmaker was that the former took a camera into a difficult context in anticipation of a crisis and the latter tried to precipitate one (1974: 245). In terms of Direct Cinema Stephen Mamber explains how the Drew films, for example, operated within a ‘crisis structure’ in which the film’s momentum and its organising principle is provided by an ‘anticipated crisis moment’ (1972: 115). This structure is not a ‘given’ of documentary form but inherent already in fiction and at its worst ‘the story would be a fictional element to support a non-fiction result. At best the story would be a true representation of an exciting period’ (1972: 117). The ideal story, then, is one in which there are a number of possible outcomes, some of them resulting in real crises; crises that do not need to be manufactured for the filmmaker. In Edginton’s case, the situation of publicly-made accusations would be fertile ground for the generation of crises. However it would seem that not all crises are filmically equivalent. Steve’s revelation of the importance of his experience of abuse to his accusation of his father as a serial killer may well be a crisis moment for Steve but it is arguably insufficiently filmic to constitute closure within the organisation of the documentary. It is never explained why we do not witness the Griggs children confronting their father but it seems clear that a confrontation must take place, albeit a relatively manufactured one between filmmaker and the accused.

In this context, Steve’s moment of realisation is reduced to one of a number of ‘less important’ crises that punctuate the film; emotional breakdowns or ‘confessions’ with which television audiences are already more than familiar from both observational documentary and popular factual programming. Nikolas Rose has tracked what he refers to as the increasingly dominant ‘therapeutic imperative’ to heal ourselves which is evidenced in such confessional and autobiographical representations (1990: 214; see also Lasch 1978). He points to the ways that nineteenth-century disciplines prefixed with ‘psy’ – psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis – have moved away from being discrete fields of knowledge and become ‘intellectual technologies’ that both explain and render conspicuous certain facets of our behaviours and our relations with others (1998: 10–11). These ‘psy’ technologies, albeit bowdlerised and misrepresented, have infused social and media space via the popularisation of trauma as mass entertainment. Steve and Dianne’s claims are understood by viewers within this matrix of popularised ‘psy’ discourses which, as we have discussed, also occupy the public arenas of chat shows and radio confessionals. The first-person singular mode also has a disarming directness which seems to validate the perceived intimacy of the small screen. And whereas literary autobiography, for example, offers an essentially private and intimate encounter, on television the encounter muddies the boundaries of private and public spheres.

In doing so, it also confuses moments of personal revelation with the revelatory imperative of effective filmmaking or storytelling, and such moments run on parallel and sometimes connecting tracks. For example, Steve takes the filmmaker to his childhood home (not the house in which his father is later confronted). Standing in his bedroom, this is the point when Steve, for the first and only occasion, openly acknowledges the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and recalls his childhood fear that he would never leave that room alive. If revelation and truth-telling are the objectives of documentary, then this should be the climax of the film – it seems to be the one moment when he acknowledges the centrality of his own abuse in the private family to his public story of serial killing. But the room is bare, clean and whitewashed. There is no visible sign of trauma and no apparent hope of a movement towards resolution, it does not have the overt uncanniness of a ‘crime’ scene and there is no scope for confrontation. It is at this point that the absence of the signs of Steve’s trauma, while perfectly comprehensible in analytic and temporal terms, is incomprehensible filmically (see Elsaesser 2001: 199–200). As Bill Nichols notes, ‘Witness and testimony, deposition and refutation, accusation and denial – all depend on direct encounter and physical presence’ (1991: 232–3) which never happens between Steve and his father in this film. So too, all the other real crimes that are invoked by the film (such as the boy found dead at the river’s edge) remain unsolved. But the imperative of the documentary investigation means that we, as audience, cannot be left here with matters unresolved. In a sense, Steve is left behind at this point because he has finally led the filmmaker to a dead end and Edginton takes on the lone role of pursuer, seeking to provide viewers with a more revelatory, more filmic but also ultimately more ersatz moment of resolution. The encounter in the whitewashed room presages the filmmaker’s later encounter in the darker recesses of Griggs Sr’s cellar.

In other words, the drive within the narrative for a public resolution cannot be accommodated in this more private scenario of Griggs facing up to his past in the whitewashed room. The story turns out to be much more about the filmmaker’s drive to resolve the social trauma of a random killer than the personal trauma of the film’s subjects. An account of intimate injury it is also, in keeping with this style of documentary, a process of accusation: of naming the abuser as part of publicly reclaiming the self. In this (as with other documentaries, such as those by Errol Morris discussed below and Men in the Woods) the documentary presents the pathology of its subjects in a form that lurches between the terribly intimate and the broader public myths that shape our collective stories of dangerous spaces where we encounter strangers in the woods, roadside dangers and the holes and cellars where we might find vanishing children.

In this example the film becomes the space in which viewers confront not only the subjects’ personal family ordeal but our own broader anxieties about unprovoked violence as embodied in the mythology of the serial killer. In her study entitled Speak of the Devil (1998) Jean La Fontaine explains how experiences of child abuse by adult survivors become transformed into broader stories of satanic abuse in contemporary Britain and the US. She explains how bizarre allegations mask or explain away the fact that familial and community structures did not intervene to help the victim. The invocation of conspiracies and networks of ritual abusers ensure that there is always an irrefutable explanation for the lack of corroborative evidence. The enculturation of horror stories and the religious iconography and discourses of good and evil provide a ready-made lexicon for survivors to draw on that listeners will also recognise. This, together with the dominance of a therapeutic culture which encourages the telling and re-telling of trauma in every detail, ensures a fertile reception for these interpretations of individual trauma. These stories, like the Griggs’ story, provide comprehensible explanations for familiar childhood suffering and its invisibility.

Crucially, these stories are the locus where therapeutic knowledge, personal trauma and media-driven popular knowledge interlock to produce something else: the intersubjective social/media space which Mark Seltzer, in his book Serial Killers, calls ‘wound culture’. For Seltzer the continuing public fascination with stories of atrocity and serial murder reveals an erosion of distinctions between the body and the mind, the inside and the outside, the private and the public. He notes that ‘the uncertain relays between private desire and public space in wound culture are nowhere clearer than in the … resurgence, of the category of “the trauma” … on the contemporary scene’ (1998: 254). Personalised documentaries together with other vehicles for confession, autobiography, the display of psychic and corporeal trauma and so on are arguably symptomatic of the ongoing transformation in public culture; of the erosion of distinction between public and private. But this programme shows that this erosion – operating as it is through public entertainment-based forms of factual television – is complicated and conflicted – twisting together, as it does, the documentary subject’s personal story with the generic imperative to produce narrative-fuelled entertainment.

Errol Morris: documentary as psychic drama

‘REALITY? You mean this is the real world? I never thought of that!’

(First words heard in Vernon, Florida, dir. Errol Morris, 1981, USA)

Two broad themes run through the oeuvre of Errol Morris. Firstly he interrogates television documentary and developments in its form and prompts analysis of how the filmmaker might use formal innovation to think through the perilous and value-laden relationship between – crudely put – the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘popular’ in contemporary television documentary. His work melds the innovation of experimental practice with the populist imperatives of tabloid culture. And secondly, Morris’ work clearly exemplifies the move within recent documentary to examine interior states, memory and psychic trauma. These two characteristics locate these documentaries within a broader move within television, signified by the popular forms and new documentaries already discussed. This broader move can be loosely defined as a relatively open process of ‘working through’, in which contemporary television provides ‘a forum of contending definitions with no final result’ (Ellis 2000: 84).

As signalled earlier, in the early 1970s Stuart Hall usefully described the ‘technics of television’ as a one of relay, proximity and intimacy. These aspects had been obscured in the important but overly weighted concern with political and cultural economy in television studies to the detriment sometimes of ‘the aesthetic’ (see Hall 1996: 3–10). The notion of the aesthetic has had a convoluted and contested history in the debates about the form and nature of television in general and documentary in particular. There has been a tendency both popularly and within televisual critique to regard television as an ‘aesthetically impoverished medium’ primarily concerned with regular predictable output and enmeshed in the culture and concerns of everyday life (Goode 2003: 93). This has resulted in an overdetermination of its realist concerns, its access to the immediate factual realm and the imbrication of those representations in the everyday/domestic sphere. Often linked to this has been an emphasis on the popular address – an important emphasis – but one that again often negates the aesthetically challenging as the proper realm of independent cinema rather than the demotic space of television.

Errol Morris, in keeping with this paradoxical status of representational realism, has positioned himself against documentary practice that prioritises the historical world over imaginary ones. He has suggested that cinéma vérité in the sense of fly-on-the-wall realism, for example, ‘set back documentary filmmaking twenty to thirty years’ by presenting it ‘as a sub-species of journalism’ (in Bruzzi 2000: 5–6). He claims there is ‘no reason why documentaries can’t be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them.’ For Morris, a rigorous adherence to observational style or expression ‘doesn’t guarantee truth’ (ibid).6

We have seen, since the mid-1990s, a pervasive shift in comprehension of the word ‘documentary’. Morris’ work could be located within the new-style ‘poetic’ documentary which permits an engagement with fantasy and illusion by organising its material to produce emotional affect and even a dialogue with the ‘collective consciousness’ (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 83). Importantly to understand the therapeutic encounter in Morris’ work we need to think about the traces it bears of earlier televisual innovations, in particular the first-person accounts in video diaries and chat shows. It shares with these an emphasis on confession and the to-camera addresses of the main subject or subjects. It also prioritises a notion of ‘incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective reconstruction’ (Nichols 1991: 1).

Morris’ documentaries work hard with the twin aims of destabilising the sober discourses of documentary and with challenging conventional modes of filming recollections of real, often traumatic past events. He focuses frequently on individual memories and places these within a tapestry of archival, poetic and reconstructed scenes that prioritise the strange and often highly repetitive or ritualistic aspects of human behaviour. Gates of Heaven (1978), for example, explores the world of pet cemeteries whilst Vernon, Florida (1981) focuses on a community of bizarre swamp dwellers. The film Fast Cheap and Out of Control (1997) is an exploration of a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, a lion tamer and a mole rat researcher. His documentaries frequently focus on bizarre individuals and their stories. He describes his films as ‘mental landscapes’ that combine the journalistic and the ‘bold created image’.⁷ They share with tabloid culture a love of the perverse or the ‘exceptionally remarkable’ ordinary person. His documentaries can be seen as artful, intelligent representations of offbeat characters that allow them a dignity that extends beyond Morris’ claim that: ‘I’ve always thought of my portraits as my own version of the Museum of Natural History … these very odd diorama where you’re trying to create some foreign exotic environment and put it on display.’⁸

Morris’ work has been located within broader interrogations of the role of documentary in representing history within the context of reality TV programming and ‘the current post MTV generation of spectator-consumers’ (Conomos 2000: 1). The Thin Blue Line (1988) investigates the case of Randall Adams, an out-of-town worker, who is seemingly wrongly accused of murder of a Dallas policeman and is sentenced to death partly through the police and judiciary’s reluctance to indict a local teenager, Dan Harris who was also present at the scene of the crime. This film has been identified as a ‘reflexive’ documentary in that, like many of Morris’ texts, it draws attention to both the form of the documentary, foregrounding the problem of presenting representations that are adequate to an event to which there can be no direct access (Nichols 1991: 57-8). The Thin Blue Line relies on the conventions of interview but also highlights the difficulty of ascertaining the truth as police officers, prosecution and defence, witnesses and friends produce statements that contradict one another. Morris emphasises the contradictions rather than turning research material and visual imagery into an evidential account of guilt and innocence. Just as testimony becomes mutual recrimination, evasion and self-vindication in The Thin Blue Line, so Morris detaches his imagery from historical reference. His reconstructions or staged scenes often rely on emblematic images – the iconic drawing of a handgun against a stark background, the slow motion of a milkshake sailing through the air to splatter on the tarmac, a camera shot lingering on police officers’ feet. In these ways he rejects a conviction in events and the documentary maker’s hold on the power of visual imagery to consolidate his or her version of the truth. Morris has placed such fabrications of the frequently traumatic and often newsworthy real event within his critique of documentary’s claim to objectivity stating that:

Often we like to reduce documentary to journalism and we like to feel secure about journalism – that we’re not being tricked or betrayed or swindled or lied to. But no one really worries about it that much as long as it’s being presented in the right idiom. As long as it looks real, people are delighted. But what the reenactments do in, say, The Thin Blue Line is provide this wealth of visual contradiction. They’re never illustrations of what I think the world is. They’re illustrations of lies. They’re all ironic. They, hopefully, teach you how images can’t embody truth. (In O’Hehir 2000: 1)

These images refuse any direct correlation between documentary reconstruction and truth, realism and fact (see Nichols 1991: 57–8; 99–101). But by allowing the various interpretations of the murder to have a space and his ‘witnesses’ to reveal their own hidden motives and assumptions, Morris suggests that some versions of an event are more plausible than others:

Morris dramatises the quest for evidence and underlines the uncertainty of what evidence there is. He reminds us of how every documentary constructs the evidentiary reference points it requires by returning us, again and again, to the scene of the crime by means of a re-enactment that highlights suggestive, evocative, but also completely inconclusive aspects of the event. (Nichols 1991: 58)

This questions the ‘reality’ captured by film and the nature of spectatorship in interpreting the traces of the violent and traumatic past as it is relived in the present. As Linda Williams has claimed of The Thin Blue Line:

The preferred technique is to set up a situation in which the action will come to [Morris]. In this privileged moment of verité (for there are finally moments of relative verité) the past repeats. We thus see the power of the past not simply by dramatising it, or re-enacting it, or talking about it obsessively (though these films do all this) but finally by finding its traces, in repetitions and resistances, in the present. (In Rosenheim 1996: 230)

Nonetheless Morris refuses to plumb the depths of Leuchter’s psyche, to announce him as pathological, anti-Semitic, or evil and claims his search, whilst it is a search of ‘personality’ is also ‘a fractured fairy tale’ (in O’Hehir 2000: 1). Leuchter’s childhood is evoked in a montage of archival footage of prisons, death rows, executions and prison guards. Through this iconographic collage the spectator is invited ‘to appreciate the particular law-and-order ethos that Leuchter was raised in and which shaped his life-long interest in creating and perfecting execution technology’ (Conomos 2000: 4). Morris locates his documentary within the personalised when he declares Mr Death as ‘the story of a man who, hoping for the best, created the worst’ (in O’Hehir 2000: 1). He adds that, ‘there is something chameleon-like, something almost evanescent, ephemeral’ about Leuchter that evades the documentarist’s question: ‘“Who is this man?”‘ (ibid.).

Morris’ Interrotron Series (1995) mixed high-tech studio interviews, dramatic reconstructions and news footage to tap into and unsettle the conventions of reality TV. The series used Morris’ modified series of teleprompters ‘the Interrotron’, a device that enabled him to interview his subjects without being in the same room. Via a projected video image of Morris on a glass plate, the interviewee interacts with him but appears to be speaking directly to-camera without apparent intervention. Such apparent direct contact, intensifies the sense of intimacy of the interview and filmed close-up, the expressively lit faces of Morris’ subjects become fascinating texts to be read for each slight modulation of expression or voice. The Interrotron enables Morris to be virtually eclipsed by the filming apparatus in a model that has been compared to the therapeutic process: ‘The device intensifies the psychoanalytic valence of the film camera, operating as the equivalent of the impassive analyst in classical Freudianism’ (Rosenheim 1996: 222). Developed during commercial advertising shooting, the Interrotron enabled Morris to succeed in the illusion of closeness to his subject whilst appearing to be absent from the filmic process. As he has acknowledged, the Interrotron

enabled interviews to be edited in a way I’ve never seen anything edited before. I could essentially put together a seamless piece of interview that might have a hundred cuts in it. Obviously the cuts are there, but because everything is dutched with respect to everything else, you don’t notice them. You have the benefit of montage without having to interrupt what someone’s saying, or resorting to jump cuts. (In Rosenheim 1996: 223).

The artifice of Morris’ work has been described as ‘if not cinéma vérité, then the psychological vérité of cinema’ (ibid.). Many of the stories in this series focus on the retelling of murder stories and first-person recollection in montage with news footage, talk show excerpts, reconstructions, location footage, ironic extra-diegetic music and so on, compounding the overall sense of not one truth but a series of partial perspectives. For example, in Digging up the Past, the story of a posthumous confession fuels the bizarre but historically resonant account of a 1963 racial murder. Henry Alexander was one of four Klansmen who forced black truck driver Willie Edwards to plunge to his death from a bridge. Diane Alexander, prime focus of Morris’ documentary, dug up a chest on her husband’s instructions, after his death. The chest contained incriminating Klan memorabilia and newspaper cuttings of the murder which strongly suggested a resolution to the perpetration the murder. The documentary includes overtly tabloid-style reconstructions of the plunge of Edwards to his death and includes an excerpt borrowed from The Donohue Show in which Diane Alexander tearfully embraces Willie Edwards’ widow.9 Morris, however, confronts such over wrought conclusions revealing through Diane’s interview that she was willing to absolve her husband. As Morris notes, ‘the whole thing is really dreamlike. It’s the ultimate faux-redemptive ending – the search for some overarching principle of justice or God‘ (in Rosenheim 1996: 230). In this sense there is no clear dividing line between tabloid and avant garde culture, factual representation and fictional embellishment. For, whilst Morris’ work can be clearly aligned with a modernist technique in its use of montage, the self-reflexive play with technology and perspective and the juxtaposition of factual and symbolic material, it is also emblematic of contemporary popular news coverage – from talk shows to tabloid papers – for its use of the bizarre individual, the prioritisation of human interest emotion and scandalous story over fact and objectivity.

As is clear from the films discussed above, Morris is drawn to stories of death and of murder because they represent the limits of historical narration and factual reconstruction. To conclude our discussion of trauma documentary we will concentrate on recent examples of Morris’ work, particularly Stairway to Heaven (1998), which depicts a female subject whose revelation of her personal belief system is charged with her visceral encounters with death in a slaughterhouse. These experiences underpin her coping with and making sense of her autism. Here, Morris complements the woman’s estrangement and her unique visual perception through expressive formal techniques.

Stairway to Heaven was part of the First Person series of eleven half-hour television documentaries broadcast on Bravo from May 2000 and in the UK on Channel 4 in 2001. The first-person accounts in the films are stories of traumatic aspects of his subject’s lives told to-camera in the first person, by each individual. The bizarre characters featured in the series include the cryogenic expert who stole his dead mother’s head (I Dismember Mama); a woman who, while writing a book about falling in love with a serial killer, falls in love with a second one (The Killer Inside Me); the ‘Unabomber’s’ pen pal (Gary Greenberg, Unabomber Pen Pal); the parrot who may have witnessed a murder (The Parrot); the director of a museum of medical oddities (Gretchen Worden, Director of the Mutter Müseum); and the woman who, after her son’s messy suicide, became a cleaner at crime scenes (Joan Dougherty, Crime Scene Cleaner).

Morris’ subjects, their address to camera, the half-hour format and their tabloid titles – for example, The Killer Inside Me, The Stalker – foreground their allegiance with tabloid culture. Psychoanalysis and its popularisation are again crucial here, for it provides the documentary subjects with a ready language for addressing personal dilemmas. The assumption here (like the popular television talk show) is that what is spoken about provides the route to what is deeply felt. The documentary becomes one more stage in the coping, facing and working through of an individual distress. As indicated by the title of Morris’ The Killer Inside Me, the personal trauma functions as an anchoring point for the documentary narrative. It functions at the centre of how the subjects experience their relationship between the past and the present, between their private self and the public self. And most importantly, trauma functions as the enigma revealed – a bit like classical film narrative or, more appositely, film melodrama that proceeds via a flashback structure – the subject’s story functions around telling how bits of the past patch together to cause present distress or present strategies of survival. The documentary then adds another layer to this imaginary capacity for self-representation and self-construction. The self-reflexivity here is twofold: at the level of the documentary subject who shares her or his personal story of their self-understanding with the audience. And, on a formal level, the self-reflexivity of the filmmaker, who sometimes attempts to undermine the power relations of the documentary process and foreground their own filmic control.

Morris’ subjects are treated as articulate monologists, engaging with the spectator through direct, close-up to-camera accounts. Temple Grandin, the subject of Stairway to Heaven, stares into the ‘Interrotron’. As discussed above, the teleprompter enables the interviewee to maintain eye contact with Morris while gazing directly down the camera lens. Therefore the interviewee speaks in the first person and appears to directly address the audience without directorial intervention. Sharing perhaps a technological desire to capture the multi-perspectival ‘reality’ of recent Reality TV, as the First Person series developed, Morris moved to a modified Interrotron device with ‘20 cameras rolled into one’ – which provided multiple unusual angles on his subject – a process of attempting to re-present states of mind, error and self-deception.10 In keeping with the technique of the video diary, the self presented here to-camera becomes a marker of integrity; the interviewee is primary guarantor of experience and knowledge. Here, again the conventional concerns of documentary segue with ‘trash TV’ and are given shape through the discourses of the personal trauma. Morris’ work then exemplifies a broader popular script in which subjects try to ‘re-inscribe themselves into different kinds of media-memory’ (Elsaesser 2001: 199).

In all these documentaries, the subject often interprets the events – fear, abuse, extreme grief, and so forth – through a ragbag of discourses – popularised psychoanalytic language, medical discourse, language of human rights, legal discourse. Importantly, the documentaries also emphasise and expand upon those fictional or symbolic discourses the subjects use that add emotional tone – fairy tale and urban myth, horror and crime story, religious imagery. Both the self-conscious performance of Morris’ protagonists and the role of popular and media culture in clothing those performances are emphasised. Morris’ editing brackets Sondra London’s accounts of her love affairs with two serial killers in The Killer Inside Me with her recollection of a romantic masochistic childhood fantasy of being swept up by a dark stranger bogeyman. The documentary includes video footage of London being serenaded by her second serial killer lover in a courtroom as he disrupts his hearing to perform to the court and to camera. London herself, in a home video, clad in a bizarre part-vampire, part-dominatrix leather costume, performs one of her poems on serial killers as ‘fallen angels of death’. Referring to her current affair with a sadistic death-row rapist and murderer she concurs with Morris that her childhood fantasies have come true: ‘Well I’m riding on the back of that grim reaper’s horse, that’s for sure.’ London explains her lover’s evil nature through the mythic character Gemini – a figure of pure evil that possesses human beings. She invokes his self-description as ‘a possessed puppet of flesh’. ‘Evil is real’, London warns the viewer, ‘evil walks this Earth like a natural man’. This is the material of the talk show but Morris goes one step further in revealing the self-consciously performative element of some of his subjects, implicitly suggesting this as motivation for both their individual behaviour and their consent to appear in his films. At the end of The Killer Inside Me, in extreme close-up, London acknowledges that she ‘never wanted to be a repeatable person’ and she is certainly presented as unique and remarkable as the subject of this film.

In the First Person series, the accounts of trauma involve intellectualisation of the real or imagined shocks or frights the subject has experienced. In Stairway to Heaven, Temple Grandin recounts two crisis points which constitute the trauma of her narrative: the sensory overload of autism and a subsequent encounter with the enigma of death. Firstly, she recollects her childhood experience of autism before diagnosis. The sensory overload she experienced was of such an unbearable intensity and, in recollection, was so beyond her childhood sense of meaning that her response was one of horrified incomprehensible alien-ation from the surrounding world. She painstakingly explains symptoms of her autism, the experiences of a world populated by ‘an overwhelming tidal-wave of stimulation’. Everyday experiences trigger acute anxiety or fear: scratching petticoats feel like sandpaper ‘rubbing off raw nerve endings’, a bell sounds like a jackhammer in her ear. As with many autistic subjects, Grandin thinks more clearly through visual imagery than language. The documentary opens with Grandin’s claim: ‘I think in pictures. Pictures is [sic] my first language and English is my second.’ The documentary then attempts to replicate this way of negotiating the world, capturing Grandin’s sense that she has a video camera plugged into her forehead. One device that gives this exploration structure is the sense of a journey, of slow, hallucinogenic movement accompanied by Caleb Sampson’s impressionistic soundtrack and extracts from Aphex Twin’s haunting ambient sound collection. For example, in a section titled ‘Diagnosed Autistic’, Grandin describes her autism as being like a ball in a pinball machine. Over her account we see slow motion black and white images of a pinball ricocheting, accompanied by the click and whirr of the machine. As she compares the cattle’s passage through the slaughterhouse system to people on a moving escalator at an airport, we see low-shot imagery of people moving swiftly along the ramp, one behind the other, like the cattle accompanied by slightly frenetic music.

This skill with visual imagery is shown as the key to Grandin’s alleged ability to empathise with a cow’s mindset. After experimentation, she finds that by being strapped into a cattle-inoculating squeeze chute, held for 45 minutes and rhythmically squeezed by the soft leather-padded sides, her nerves are calmed, by what she calls her ‘neurotransmitter adjustment’. When she wants to find out about death, she enters a slaughterhouse – an experience that she renders spiritual: ‘I wanted to find out what happens when you die. Regular religion was too abstract, it was just meaningless, the slaughterhouse was real.’ This chain of associations led to Grandin’s current occupation as designer of humane slaughterhouses – her ‘stairway to heaven’ is a spiral ramp which uses optical illusions to lead livestock calmly from the pen to the bolt gun and is used by one third of all slaughterhouses in the US. Temple Grandin here, like the talk-show confessor, invokes an origin or absent cause for her particular graphic and visual skills and for her present self-identity and motivation.

Morris uses devices throughout the documentary including intertitles, found footage, music, dramatised sequences, photo stills and ambient sounds to render Grandin’s belief system. These stylistic traits give an affective dimension to her monologue. They sometimes elude clear comprehension but still succeed in avoiding turning her into raw material for poetic expression alone. Grandin’s personal experience is also a metaphor for the filmic process. For just as the cattle are led trustingly to their slaughter by a series of optical tricks, so the spectator is led through the film through a visual pattern of passages: dream imagery of opening doorways from Hitchcock’s Spellbound, slow-spinning graphics of a window frame, slow motion car journeys, detailed close-ups of slaughterhouse plans, canted camera views of cattle in pens, of suburbia, black and white stills of Grandin amidst the cattle.

Furthermore, the self-exposure of Morris’ subjects – as in reality TV, talk shows or other forms of confessional culture operates as a kind of ‘prosthetic trauma’ for the community of viewers vicariously experiencing the cathartic re-living of the traumatic event. Of relevance here is the role of television in constructing the viewer as ‘witness’ through its repetitious playing out of traumatic events. As trauma demands a witness to note the validity of recovered events and that witness then bears the weight of consolidating the ‘truth’ of the ‘victim’; so ‘trauma TV’ demands the viewer bear the weight of knowing responsibility. As John Ellis has claimed of television’s relentless cataloguing of individual and collective horror – as we watch the unfolding of these events readily accessible in our living rooms ‘we cannot say we did not know’ (2000: 11). At once distanced and involving, mediated and yet compelling in their intimacy the audience is invited to judge through tears, shock, disbelief, laughter or changing channels – the authenticity or relevance for them of the retold event (see Elssaesser 2001: 197). Witnessing foregrounds the importance but also the impotence of the viewer’s experience – as judge of the ontological status of a traumatic event he or she can never fully know as ‘real’.11

In Morris’ documentaries, the sense of intimacy between viewer and subject is partly undermined by his infrequent directions and questions to his subjects. Morris’ screen persona is often revealed towards the end of the documentary when he breaks the illusion of the to-camera address to ask the subject from off-screen a leading question. At the end of The Killer Inside Me, Morris intervenes to ask London, ‘Why this attraction to serial killers?’She retorts, ‘What a lame question, you can do better than that.’ Which he does, rephrasing the question until she answers. In Stairway to Heaven he asks Grandin to recite a poem written by her blind roommate. Grandin asks the off-screen Morris how she should pose whilst reciting the poem, should she lean back, would this make her look strange, should she recite now? This interchange and the starkly down-lit face of Grandin looking up, as though to heaven, as she recites to Morris’ instructions – reminds us of the power of the until now concealed filmmaker.12 It also undercuts our status as witness or confessor – the absent third party to whom all Morris’ subjects appear to speak directly. Such revelations of the filmmaker’s controlling subjectivity and the undermining of that control deliberately reveal the documentary as a dynamic intersubjective process. Morris’ work is self-consciously expressive and conceals, then reveals, authorship.

Death

Death is the absent presence at the core of many of Morris’ documentaries. His subjects haunt the slaughterhouse, they clean up after violent crime and they steal the head from their mother’s corpse. Here the logic and rationality of science segues with the ‘unnameable dread’ of our collective tales of horror. Death here is immensely practical but also powerfully enigmatic. It is central to Morris’ short films and is also in keeping with longer works such as The Thin Blue Line and Mr Death. In the First Person series Joan Dougherty, the crime scene cleaner, literally scrubs up the detritus of violent death once the forensics experts have departed. In her story she recalls the messy aftermath of her son’s suicide. Sondra London’s story is littered with death – John Schaefer, her first lover, killed two women and was linked to 28 to 30 other missing women. In Morris’ film, press headlines – ‘Man imprisoned in sex slayings seeks new trial’ – and news footage of two women found decapitated and mutilated by Schaefer jostle with printed extracts from his horrific written confessions to London. The thin line between the real of gratuitous murder and the sadistic fantasies of Schaefer are highlighted in London’s claim to ‘publish his murder fantasies as they came closer and closer to reality’. She adds, ‘I find he’s a good writer, he’s also a serial killer as well.’

More broadly, Morris’ work highlights an intrinsic relationship between trauma and death; individuals’ traumas as they are retold for television camera conceal a more general psycho-cultural anxiety about death. Here, the status of Morris’ work as personalised documentary is notable. Death is a fetishised object for many documentary filmmakers. Documentary seeks the defining fact – the assassinated President, the war or murder victim – whose ultimate moment and the story leading to that moment are retroactively sought. These moments are not always retrievable; a bit like the ‘traceless traces’ of the trauma story (Elssaesser 2001: 194). In terms of documentary desire to capture the real whether in objective or subjective form, death can both ‘powerfully convey a sense of reality [but] it is also the place where the real ends’ (Fetveit 1999: 798). Death then represents a conundrum for documentary as Vivian Sobchack has argued: ‘while death is generally experienced in fiction films as representable and often excessively visible, in documentary films it is experienced as confounding representation, as exceeding visibility’ (in Nichols 1994: 48).

Morris’ work, unlike many conventional documentaries, does not rely on an authoritative historical or social referent to anchor the absent presence of death that is frequently the backdrop to his subject’s bizarre post-traumatic stories. Instead death is offered as the catalyst for extravagant, sometimes absurd, personal responses shot through with pathos. Death works on many levels in Morris’ work. Most simply, he has partly aestheticised the stuff of tabloid culture: death, violence, sex interwoven with the bizarre. But we suggest that his work also knowingly begs psychoanalytical interpretation and borrows from a contemporary popularised therapeutic culture. Violence, sex, murder, death: this is also the meat of psychoanalysis, the intellectual tabloid of our culture. More broadly, Morris’ work highlights the intrinsic relationship between trauma and death; individuals’ traumas as they are retold for the television camera conceal a more general psycho-cultural anxiety about death. Here, the status of Morris’ work as personalised documentary is notable because it comes up against an elusive absence in its attempt to capture the real. As Bill Nichols notes: ‘at death’s door we find documentary endlessly, and anxiously, waiting. It hovers, fascinated by a borderzone it cannot ever fully represent. (1994: 48).

Since the 1990s survival has become a prominent theme in the public narratives subjects tell to the media. As these confessing subjects of factual programming compete for singularity and for redress in an increasingly crowded media forum, and as the programmes themselves compete for status and resources, the stories of trauma become more bizarre. The personal stories of trauma, violence and death, then, could be viewed as both a record of individual psychopathology but also as a cultural trope – ‘a strategic fiction that a complex, stressful competitive world is using to account for a world that seems threateningly out of control’ (Farrell 1998: 2). As will be seen in the next chapter, the narrativisation of personal trauma is present not only in complex auteur-driven documentary but in a diffuse range of popular factual programming.