Moore Vs Theroux: Documentaries Struggle

"The European intellectual tradition has grappled with the difference between subjective and objective knowledge since ancient times" (Chapmanand Alison, 2009)

It's statements like the above from "Issues in Contemporary Documentary" by Jane Chapman, that has led me to investigate the way documentarians try and stay objective whilst making a documentary. Everyone struggles to keep an open mind and see both sides of a story with global issues, or any issue for that matter, there is always an opinion formed quite early. Of course, it all depends on the facts that we are given but then it is the documentarians’ job to try and make sure all the facts that are shown are true and that both sides of the issue are shown. Whilst watching Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" (Moore,2002) and Louis Theroux's' "Louis and The Nazis" (Cabb,2003) you can tell, by the different styles and conventions that were used, that they struggled to stay objective. Theroux makes documentaries about various subjects. Some are on controversial subjects such as the Nazis and others are more informative and show an insight into different ways of life. Theroux got started in documentaries when he started working as a correspondent for Moore on his show “TVNation” (Moore, 1994) which was co-founded by the BBC. Once that ended the BBC signed Theroux on a development deal. Throughout this essay I am going to compare Theroux and Moore, one of which describes themselves as a non-fiction filmmaker, not a documentarian, to show how they are both similar and different from each other and how they do or do not stay objective.

In these documentaries, the people conducting the interviews, Theroux and Moore, are both very average and normal looking guts that an audience can relate too. This is very different from making a movie where they would cast someone who is considered good looking or well-known. By having these normal guys in a documentary, it will help the audience believe the information they are being given without distracting them from the facts. It also means the people being interviewed tend to feel more comfortable around the interviewer and are therefore more willing to talk about their beliefs and views. They would be more open and honest because they would not feel threatened by the person asking the questions. If someone famous was giving the interview might feel like they want to give a certain answer to please the interviewee or because they already know the interviewee's beliefs or views.

“Research is simply forming the answer to these questions before you dive in. If you skip this vital step, you may easily find yourself wasting countless hours and budget dollars pursuing people, themes and events that will never see the light of day”(Anthony Q. Artis, 2014)

Doing research on your chosen subject gives you the answers you need to know whether the documentary is worth making or not. It will allow you to get the facts and find the right people so that you can begin to plan the documentary in the direction you want to take it. You can start to plan what questions you are going to ask certain people with some idea of the answers you are going to receive. You can also begin to think about what it is you want to show the audience or how you want to set up shots to help portray the people you are interviewing in a certain way. By not doing any research you waste time and money on a project that might end up going nowhere. You could also end up getting sued for slander if you make any statements that you cannot back up.

Within the first six minutes of“Louis and the Nazis”, Theroux tells Tom Metzger that he “thinks slightly less of him” for some of the languages Metzger uses. I feel that this is slightly subjective as Theroux is supposed to stay impartial. By saying this so early in the documentary it will influence the audience to think negatively of Metzger before they have heard what he has to say or what it is he believes.

Whereas Moore opens his documentary by showing how everything is seemingly normal in America before walking into a bank where you get given a free gun just by opening a new bank account with them. Moore shows the audience the newspaper article where he found the article with the slogan “More BANG for your BUCK”. Even though it comes across like he is making a mockery of the bank, which he is, Moore is still staying somewhat objective, as his aim is to show that restrictions on guns and ammo should be put in place, not to completely get rid of them. He adds humor to keep people interested by showing that it is slightly ridiculous how easily accessible weapons are. He definitely has a subjective agenda, however, at the same time, he is not completely agreeing with either side. He is a neutral party to some extent.

“Participatory documentary gives USA sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result.” (Nichols, 2001)

This easily reflects what happens in Theroux’s documentary. For example when Theroux is at skips house in “Louis And The Nazis”, him being there with the crew alters the situation Theroux is put in when Skip asks him whether or not he is Jewish. Skip asks for the camera to be turned off and even says “Well because you’ve got the camera right now I’d allow you to stay. If not, I’d probably kick your ass and put you in the street somewhere”. We can see how Theroux reacts to what has been said and his response which shows us he was uncomfortable but trying to stay impartial. Theroux responds by saying“I’m not a racist and I actually think it’s wrong to be racist. And so, I feel as though by saying whether I’m Jewish or not I’m kind of, in a way, acknowledging the premise that it really matters when I think it shouldn't and it doesn’t”. This statement makes it clear that he does not agree with Skip, or the other racists that he interviews, which means that Louis is not very open-minded about how they think and their way of life. However, by staying calm and articulate whilst they slightly raise their voices and use bad language, he makes them seem like angry and violent people and so the audience will think this is the same for all skinheads. Since he is only interviewing people who are racist it may also come across that he is representing the other side of the argument. This then counteracts the fact that he is being subjective. He is bringing balance to the documentary and making it clear that the documentary is not pro-racism.

During an interview on “Louis Theroux in conversation |BAFTA Guru” (YouTube, 2017) Theroux talks about the conversation with a skip and how he had already decided not to say whether he was Jewish. He says he was not going to say “partly as a principal and to be honest partly because [he] knew it would wind up the skinheads … that there was a likely to be a tension there”.This proves that Theroux used the fact that he has some stereotyped features of someone who is Jewish to his advantage to create some of the tension we see onscreen. Theroux does this in “The most hated family in America” (O’Connor,2007). He asks specific questions that he knows will strike a reaction and cause a tension which then creates drama.

Moore seems to us how he and his crew being there alters what happens to his advantage. In his film “Bowling For Columbine”, for example, when he takes two of the boys who got shot at the Columbine school massacre to the K-mart headquarters. At first, he was told to turn the cameras off, which he does but then turns them back on when someone from media relations comes down to talk to them. I feel that because Moore had the cameras there the people from Kmart did not just kick them out and were not outright rude to them. They were trying to be polite and then basically just left Moore and co down in the lobby. Whereas I think if Moore and his crew were not there then the whole scenario probably would have happened very differently.

The way Moore speaks to those he interviews is also very different than the way Theroux conducts his interviews. Whilst talking to James Nichols about Americans right to bear arms, he begins to badger him slightly before James agrees that there should be some restriction on the types of weapons that are easily accessible or even allowed to be owned by anyone. Michael Moore: “Do you think you should have the right to have weapons-grade plutonium here in the farm field?” James Nichols: “We should be able to have anything...” Michael Moore: “Should you have weapons? Should you have weapons-grade plutonium?” James Nichols: “I don't want it.” Michael Moore: “But, should you have the right to have it if you did want it?” James Nichols: “That should be restricted.”Michael Moore: “Oh. Oh, so you do believe in some restrictions?” James Nichols:“Well, there’s wackos’ out there.” Badgering is a questioning technique that interviewers use when someone is not answering the question or is avoiding the question. Sometimes it is done to get the person to say the answer that the interviewer wants. This is a subtle way of being subjective about the topic.

Moore is also asking hyperbole questions, which is when the question is quite exaggerated, this puts the audience on the edge of their seat waiting for the person to answer. It’s used to create a reaction. By using this outrageous question, he is also pointing out a loophole in the law about having weapons as the wording is not specific about what type of weapon you can have.

Moore and Theroux have both visited Pastor Phelps, who is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, in Kansas on separate occasions. Moore goes as part of his television show “TVNation” (although the episode was not aired it can be found on YouTube) and Theroux goes when he is the film “The most hated family in America”. The group is known for hating gays and anyone associated with them as well as for picketing funerals with signs that say things like “God Hates Fag Enablers” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”. When meeting Pastor Phelps both Moore and Theroux handle the situation differently.

Moore visited when they mostly pocketed at the funerals of gay people or anyone who had died from aids. He was driving around in a pink minibus with lots of pro-gay posters on along with numerous stereotypical gay men. He rubbed Pastor Phelps face into the homosexuality of the people and content he brought with him to try and get a reaction out of him. Which he did to some extent before Pastor Phelps realized he was outnumbered and left. Moore and co followed him north where he was picketing and started dancing and kissing around them, in my opinion, making the protest look like a joke. To which Pastor Phelps and co-packed up their stuff and left. Moore completely had an agenda here and was not subjective at all. He purposefully set out to antagonize Pastor Phelps.

Theroux spent three weeks with the people who are a part of the Westboro Baptist church, which mostly consists of the Phelps family. He first meets Pastor Phelps when he is recording a video message for the church. Theroux asks him a basic question, “how many children do you have?”, which Pastor Phelps skirts around and refuses to answer. Theroux asks again as he wants to see what his answer will be considering some of his children have left the church completely. Although he asks twice I would not consider it badgering because he lets it go quite easily afterward and comes across very innocent. However, this does make Pastor Phelps comes across as untrustworthy and a bit skeptical. The second-time Theroux meets Pastor Phelps is after one of his church services where he was preaching about god hating fags. This timeTheroux talks to him more like a reporter to try and get some information about what Pastor Phelps thinks of his church but he still does not get any proper answers. In this Theroux stays objective and lets Pastor Phelps make himself look like someone who has something to hide about is the so-called “church”.

By the end of Louis and theNazis, Theroux has become more subjective through his interview techniques. He begins to badger people and even uses leading questions. He does this when talking to John Malpezzi about Tom Metzger’s paper when he says to him "Why don't just say no?" which means he's trying to get Malpezzi to agree with him. This is not very professional and is not objective at all.

When Moore goes to Kmart he ends up badgering the people there to basically meet with someone who can do something about taking bullets and guns off the shelves at their stores. Even though he was badgering them I don't feel that he was being overly subjective here as his agenda from the beginning was to try and show that restrictions need to be put in place when it comes to guns and ammo. Some people may argue that this was subjective as it benefits one side of the argument, however, I disagree as it just goes to show that even the people selling the guns and ammoagree there need to be some restrictions. I feel that this is one of the ways that he succeeded in doing something to help his cause as in the end he did get Kmart to stop selling ammo and was even surprised at how fast they were going to do it.

However, at the end of the documentary, when interviewing Charles Heston he badgers him about why the crime rate involving guns is so high in America compared to other countries. He does say to Charles during the interview that he is part of the NRA but even he thinks there should be restrictions.

When Moore brings up the six-year-old girl, who got shot by another six-year-old, he becomes very subjective as he asks a loaded question to get a reaction from Heston and even resorts to form of emotional blackmail in the end by leaving the little girls photo. While they were talking Charles Heston walks away and leaves Moore to show himself out. Moore does follow him and calls to Heston to look at the picture of the little girl. The big issue with this scene, that makes it look very subjective, is the fact that it looks like it was shot in two takes. When watching the scene, it looks like there should be two cameras. One behind Moore facing Heston and the second in front of Moore looking up at him. It could have been one long take with the cameraman turning around but the way they have cut it makes Charles Heston look a lot guiltier and therefore like the bad guy as he walks away. By portraying Heston in this way, as the representative for the NRA, it makes anyone involved with pro-gun rallies look bad too. Shortly after the film’s release, Charles Heston announced some restrictions that were put in for having guns but he tells everyone that it had nothing to do with the actual documentary.

"However, even when made by a collective, a documentary can never be wholly objective. Gaylor as the editor of the website decides ultimately what is or isn't published - there is always a point of view." (Chapman and Alison, 2009)

This statement by Chapman holds a lot of truth as, when making a documentary, things are always changed in the edit to fit what a person wants to show therefore creating an opinion. During in the editing, process clips can be taken out or moved to a different place to create more meaning to things that are being done or said. Such as in “Bowling for Columbine”, the shots are not in chronological order and some appear more than once with other clips in between them, this is done for a reason. It would have added more meaning to certain scenes by splitting them up and putting something else in between. This is evident when he is talking to James Nichols, halfway through the cuts and shows an interview with two boys in an arcade before he cuts back to Nichols. When showing clips of Charles Heston at a pro-gun rally supposedly in Denver right after the Columbine school shooting, Moore claims it was only 10 days after, they use editing techniques to hide the cuts between two different rallies that Heston spoke at. The first shot we see of Heston at a rally he is wearing a blue shirt and tie. They then cut to a shot of a billboard promoting a rally and then to people taking their seats at a rally. The room looks similar to the one in the first shot so the audience would most likely believe that it is the same rally and therefore wouldn’t notice the difference in the next shot. In the next clip of Heston at a rally, he is wearing a white shirt with a red tie. In the clip, he mentions how the mayor of Denver told him not to come here and they overlay it with clips of people protesting. The first clip is actually from the 129th NRA convention in North Carolina in2000, nearly a year after the Columbine school shooting, in “response to AlGore’s call for gun control” (Sanchez, 2015). However, because of where it is placed you would assume it is said at the same rally that’s after the shooting. This paints Heston out to be this horrible guy who didn’t care about the shooting.

Louis Theroux makes his documentary more subjective through the voice-overs that he puts in. What he says in his voiceover mostly undermines what the supremacists have said in the clips before it. "It had been a long, and in some ways, depressing day. I'd found Tom's attitudes exhausting and I'm still more confused when the karaoke bar he took me to turned out to be largely-white. I could assume that, for Tom, karaoke sometimes took precedence over racism." After spending a day with Thom Metzger, Theroux said this in his voiceover.

His basically implying he does not think Metzger is as big of a racist as he makes himself out to be. It portraysMetzger as a liar and by the end of the documentary, the audience will also think of him as a hypocrite due to what they have seen. Since he goes to Mexico to basically go on a bar crawl in a very multicultural area and then has a friend who is “non-white”.

At first in “The most hated family in America” he uses the voiceover to tell the audience a little about the Westboro Baptist church so that they know what they believe in and what they do. After that though, Theroux goes back to using his voiceover to question the beliefs or slightly mock those he is speaking too. By saying “seeing seven-year-old Elijah get hit by a drink was a reminder that among the victims of the Phelps was their own children”, Theroux implies that the parents within the church cause harm to their own children. He asserts to the audience that the children, especially the younger ones, are innocent victims who do not fully understand what it is they are being told to believe.

“The notion of objective reality is ridiculous” (Rosenthal and Corner, 2005)

Thinking that we can show reality on the screen that is completely objective is ridiculous as everyone has an opinion on the topic they have chosen. Even if a documentarian starts out with an open mind throughout the filming process they would develop an opinion which would show on screen with the questions they ask and how they respond to the answers they receive. Documentary footage, like a movie, gets cut down and only certain parts which serve the purpose of the documentary get chosen and therefore would be somewhat subjective.

Therefore, I do think documentarians struggle to stay objective throughout the process of filming a documentary, especially about controversial subjects, as they are something you can not help but to form an opinion on. Both Theroux and Moore become subjective throughout their documentaries. However, I feel what Theroux is slightly subjective so that he can represent the opinions that are different to his subjects and therefore create a balance within his documentaries. Whereas Mooreis openly subjective throughout his documentary. From the very beginning, you know what his opinion is and what he wants to do. This is probably why Moore describes himself as a filmmaker and not a documentarian.