 Starring: Aileen Wuornos, Nick Broomfield
Director: Nick Broomfield
Year Of Release: 2009
Plot: Having made Aileen: The Selling Of A Serial Killer in 1992, director Nick Broomfield was unexpectedly called as one of the witnesses at one of the female serial killer’s final appeals before her execution. This took him back into Aileen’s world, talking to her friends, as well as getting some of the final interviews with the now deranged murderer before she was killed by lethal injection. |
Yesterday in
Part 1 of this look at truth in documentaries, I took a look at the problems of how honest different styles of documentary filmmaking are, and whether there’s any way to make a documentary that can be said to be 100% truthful. However it’s not just in the way documentaries are made that issues arise over how truthful they are, but also how reliable the ‘facts’ a film presents are.
Broomfield’s films about Aileen Wuornos are particularly interesting in this respect, as he’s honest enough to say at the end of the films, that he doesn’t know who to believe. This is actually quite rare, as normally documentary filmmakers edit things together and add a voiceover to suggest that they’ve got to the truth (or at least their version of it), but for Broomfield that’s impossible. For example in a Michael Moore film, he lets you know exactly what you’re meant to think about everyone who appears in his films. So if the person he’s interviewing or talking about agrees with his point of view, there’s no suggestion that they might be exaggerating or lying, but if it’s someone who disagrees with him, he’ll do his utmost to discredit them and what they’re saying.
That’s not really an option open to Broomfield, particularly in Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, as by the time he made the movie Wuornos seemed delusional and kept changing her story from day-to-day. Initially she wants to change her story from what he said in the first film, admitting she wasn’t killing in self defence and she was doing it to rob the men. Then when she doesn’t think she’s being filmed, she suggests that she did kill in self defence, but is more or less being forced to say she didn’t. In her final interview she talks delusionally about how the police knew she was killing and encouraged her, so they could make money out of having a female serial killer.
There are suggestions she’s changing her story because she thinks it’s the best way to ensure her execution is carried out, having gotten fed up with waiting, but it could be because she’s literally lost touch with reality while locked up by herself 24/7, or that she knows she lying, but wants to get revenge on the police and control what people say about her after she’s gone, whether it’s the truth or not.
Broomfield’s difficulties with whether to believe Aileen and those around her also run through the first film, The Selling Of A Serial Killer, where not only are Wuornos’ accounts of the killing unreliable, but everyone around her seems utterly unreliable, from her lawyer to her adoptive mother to the police, because they all seem more motivated by money than actually telling the truth. As a result Broomfield finds it difficult to come to any conclusions, other than his distaste to the death penalty.
A delusional serial killer may be an extreme case, but it highlights a problem with most documentaries. How can we trust what we’re being told? Ultimately there’s no way to tell whether interview subjects are telling the truth, or filtering what they say to hide things that they don’t want to talk about.
The problem with many documentaries is that they don’t want to admit their interview subjects might be unreliable, or even that they’re just giving their interpretation of something. To a certain extent filmmakers have to go on trust, as it would rather undermine anything a documentary ever said if they had to include disclaimers saying, ‘This interview subject may be lying’.
But it’s not just interviews that may be unreliable. For example, if a filmmaker just films somebody going about their daily business, it’s impossible to tell how much someone is acting up for the camera, whether they’re self-censoring what they say, or how much the presence of a camera is effecting what’s going on. For example, there’s been a fair amount of research about TV shows that follow police on the beat, with some of these reports concluding that the sheer presence of a TV camera aggravates the situation and increases the likelihood of a suspect being violent and resisting arrest.
The unreliability of the information documentary filmmakers sometimes get was highlighted this year with a movie called Bananas. The documentary is about Nicaraguan workers who say they were made sterile by the pesticide DBCP used at Dole banana plantations in the 1970s. The film even accuses Dole of causing the death of some workers, and champions attorney Juan J. Dominguez, who was seeking damages for the affected workers.
After the documentary was made, a major problem came to light – none of it was true. Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten had become an unwitting participant in a gigantic extortion attempt, where Dominguez and his Nicaraguan counterpart had recruited the men who were claiming to have been made sterile (many of whom had never even worked for Dole) to lie as part of a false case that could have cost Dole $40 billion in damages. The film was part of Dominguez’s plan to try and force Dole to settle the case. Gertten had simply believed what his interview subjects had told him, and took the evidence they gave him at face value. Although this might be said to be naive on his part, all he did was what many documentary makers have to do, because it’s simply not possible to verify every single fact an interviewee might reveal.
If you’ve read both parts of me waffling on about truth in documentaries, you might be wondering whether you can trust a single word any documentary says. My answer would be to look at all documentaries as arguments rather than the unalloyed truth, as even the documentaries that seem most straightforward are still giving you a particular version of the facts for particular effect. It’s undoubtedly true interview subject are sometimes unreliable, the presence of a camera can effect the events being filmed, and sometimes filmmakers are deliberately missing things out to promote a particular viewpoint. So rather than just taking documentaries at face value, viewers need to make up their own minds about what they’ve seen, and always be aware of how a filmmaker might be manipulating their reaction to the subject.
Most of the time nobody is deliberately trying to mislead the viewer, but it never hurts to keep your bullshit metre running whenever you see a documentary, just so that you’re always aware of what a documentary is doing, and therefore whether you want to trust the info it’s giving you and its interpretation of this facts.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling Of A Serial Killer - Or, can a documentary tell the 'truth'? - Part 1
NEXT: Alexander – Director’s Cut - Or, when should you stop editing a film?
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