Uncanny documentary.

Maurice, Alice

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In this paper, I will be considering whether we might think of "the uncanny" as both a mode and condition of contemporary documentary film. Drawing on Freud's famous essay, I want to suggest that documentary --something so familiar, so close to our understanding of reality, so "heimlich," if you will--can become strange and disorienting to audiences, and disoriented as a genre. Tracing the etymological criss-crossing of "heimlich" and "unheimlich," Freud concludes that, at its heart, the "unheimlich" stems from something that was once familiar but which has become strange --something that "ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light." (1) In looking at various phenomena that cause a feeling of the uncanny, Freud includes "wax-work figures, artificial dolls, and automatons." In particular, he expands upon the work of Ernst Jentsch, who notes the strong uncanny feeling caused by such figures, and links it to the uncertainty over whether they are living or dead, animate or inanimate--an uncertainty which I think can be related to the "real" versus the "fake" or "staged" in documentary. (2) Freud reserves another category for the uncanny effects of doubles or doppelgangers, and the related notions of repetition and coincidence. In addition to those well-known features of the uncanny, I also wish to draw attention to Freud's lesser-noted discussion of the relation between fiction and reality and how that might be brought to bear on the question of documentary. Freud insists on the importance of our orientation towards a fictional text and its relation to what he calls "the world of common reality" in determining a text's ability to produce a feeling of the uncanny. That is, Freud notes that when confronting fiction, many things that would be uncanny in real life are not, in fiction, because of genre expectations. In other words, we expect witches and ghosts in fairy tales, so they don't produce an uncanny feeling; however, as Freud puts it:

   The situation is altered as soon as the writer
   pretends to move in the world of common
   reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions
   operating to produce uncanny feelings in real
   life... We react to his inventions as we should
   have reacted to real experiences; by the time we
   have seen through his trick it is already too late
   and the author has achieved his object; but it
   must be added that his success is not unalloyed.
   We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of
   grudge against the attempted deceit. (3)

In a sense, then, we must be properly oriented in order to feel disoriented. In adapting these notions to explore documentary film, I suggest that our contemporary moment disorients both the documentarian and the spectator. Confronted by the commodification of "reality" and the ubiquity of digital video technology, the documentarian seems to find his/her doppelgangers everywhere: reality television is often portrayed as the evil (or entertaining) twin to serious documentary, while the documentarian can seem gratuitous in the face of so much amateur video making and self-documentation. (4) This leads to power struggles within documentary films, and to unease in audience responses to them. Many filmmakers have capitalized on this sense of unease--on a productive uncanniness--to unsettle the spectator and the genre, with recent experiments with animation, lip-syncing, re-enactments, and documentary/fiction hybrids coming to mind. (5) Other films, however, become uncanny without "trying"--often in part because of their imbrication with amateur video and "reality culture."

In exploring this latter category, I'm focusing on Catfish (2010) as a model, in part because the film can be understood as a replaying of the story that functions as Freud's case study in the uncanny: E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman." In that story, the protagonist (Nathaniel) falls in love with Olympia--a woman he sees in a window, who turns out to be an automaton. In Catfish, our hero, Yaniv (Nev) Schulman, falls in love with a woman (Megan) whom he sees only on a computer screen, who turns out to be the patched-together online identity of an entirely different woman (Angela). I am interested less in the film's portrayal of the slipperiness of online relationships and more in what the film reveals about the relationships between documentarian and subject, documentary and audience. I argue that the film unwittingly points to the unstable role of the documentary in contemporary culture, and that its uncanniness is caused not merely by Nev's situation, but by the competing/doubled tropes of amateur video and professional documentary.

The trailer for Catfish, which portrays the film as a docu-thriller, includes a pull quote (attributed to the Financial Times) that calls Catfish "the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed." (6) It might be more accurate to say that it's the worst Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never directed. Nonetheless, as annoying and misleading as the ad campaign was, the film is, in its own very small and calculated way, a kind of modern-day Vertigo. A man falls in love with a woman who is not who she says she is--who is, in fact, a fabrication made to order, cut to the pattern of narcissistic male desire with special touches tailored to the man in question--Nev. The "modern day" aspect is, of course, that the love affair unfolds online, primarily on Facebook and through texts. The story unfolds this way: Nev, a photographer, starts an online and pen pal relationship with a young girl named Abby who is an admirer of his photos. She tells him she saw one of his photos in a news story, and sends him a painting she made of it--and from there they strike up a friendship. This leads to Facebook, which leads to his "meeting" other members of her family, including her half-sister Megan, with whom he proceeds to have an online romance. As we all know by now, it turns out that he is being deceived, that there is no Megan, and that Angela, Abby's mother, has fabricated multiple people with online profiles to carry out her convincing deception. And also, little Abby didn't paint any pictures Angela did. Ultimately, Nev discovers the deception and he and his filmmaker pals (including his brother) go on a road trip to unmask what they call "the Facebook family."

Despite the fact that this film is ostensibly about Facebook, the perils of online relationships, and the performativity of online identity--the whole story begins, quaintly, with old-fashioned snail mail. That is, Abby sends Nev a painting in the mail. Early on in the film, Nev opens what he says is the 3rd package he's received from Abby (it's the second package we've seen in the film). And so, we might think of the whole film not as a traditional documentary so much as an unboxing video. The unboxing video is, as I'm sure you know, an extremely popular YouTube genre that consists of people simply opening boxes. Typically, they are opening new products they have just purchased--an iPhone 6, or the new Xbox gaming system, or, especially, new toys. While some of these videos (such as those with people opening Kinder surprise candy eggs) turn on the excitement of what's inside the box, most feature no surprise at all--just the mundane experience of opening up something you bought. They show off the fancy packaging, and then go through the sometimes arduous process of opening blister packs to reveal precisely what you know is inside --that new Star Wars toy or your new Samsung Galaxy phone. They are, as they sound, very boring, though not, I suppose, for the millions of people who watch them. The whole trajectory of Catfish can be mapped, in a sense, by the progression of unboxing moments. It begins with Nev opening up "Abby's" painting of his photograph, and it ends with the final package he receives--a painting of Nev, painted (like all the others) by Angela and sent after they have met in person and her hoax has been revealed. The picture of Nev works as a neat ending for the film, but it also reminds us that it was always only pictures of himself he was receiving--from "Abby's" paintings of his own photographs to images of "Megan" posted on Facebook and the aspects of her identity that seemed to fit so well with his own interests, to, finally, a picture of Nev himself.

Each box, in fact, contains multiple paintings, and each "opening" suggests a kind of Russian nesting doll structure, with each item representing a new member of Abby's family and/or a new discovery. As he unwraps the multiple paintings contained in the "third box," Nev tells us he "just learned" that Abby puts a "strand of her hair" in each painting so that it can be identified through DNA testing; he then shows off a painting of Abby's mother, which leads to the discovery that "she's hot" (as Nev's brother exclaims off-camera). The film, too, works like a set of nested boxes--Nev unboxes Abby's painting, which leads to his "opening" new boxes (in the form of Facebook pages) which contain new people (her family and friends), including and especially Megan, his erstwhile online lover, until he finally gets a surprise when he discovers the deceit. He does this by opening more boxes in this case, music files. When Megan writes and performs a song for him, Nev, his brother Ariel ('Rel), and friend Henry (the filmmakers) get suspicious and start Googling (which leads everyone who watches the film to think, "Wait, you really just started Googling things now?"). And as he opens music file after music file after YouTube video, he hears an "uncanny" resemblance to Megan, until they realize she's just been grabbing songs off the Internet, posting them, and claiming they were hers. They end up driving to Michigan, driving up to Megan's supposed mailbox, which he opens, only to find his own postcards with return-to-sender notices on them. And the final "box" he opens is Angela's house, where he finds the author of his fantasy.

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The unboxing/nesting structure is just that--a structure that the film struggles to impose and to re-create when necessary. Amid accusations of manipulation, dishonesty or outright hoax, the filmmakers have admitted that, once they realized what they were actually documenting (the trick played by Angela), they had to sometimes go back and shoot things (like Facebook conversations and screen shots) that they hadn't initially caught on film. (8) Like the forms of communication within it, the film is a hybrid of old and new--an unboxing video and Internet love affair fashioned into a good old-fashioned detective story, complete with a femme fatale. Pointing to the film's conspicuous use of computer screens, icons, and Google maps, Caitlin Benson-Allott has suggested that the film exceeds traditional narrative strategies, and in so doing reflects and demands "an algorithmic spectator, one accustomed to fragmented exchanges and for whom narrative is only one form of connection." (9) I would argue that this sort of footage does not challenge or replace the narrative structure; it gives the film a veneer of newness, but the "screens" footage functions pretty much like archival footage or road footage would in other films--that is, as filler, as B-roll, as illustration or visualization of an idea or event, and sometimes, as the event itself (opening up a file, typing a text). It does, however, thematize digital connectivity, encouraging viewer identification with Nev. Texting, messaging, posting--these are all part of the fabric of people's lives, and this movie embraces that (while also questioning that embrace). Facebook montages do not take the place of narrative, but they might reiterate the same "veneer of newness" that technology provides in real life. That is, the Internet provides ample cover for an old problem made new (and disturbingly literal): namely, that people are not necessarily who they say they are. Benson-Allott, for her part, notes the way online relationships provide the "tantalizing blend of separation and intimacy" that stokes Nev's desire--a desire which is "predicated on distance."" And yet this is not a product of online identity so much as the cause of its power, since distance (or inaccessibility) necessarily instantiates desire.

Perhaps most importantly, though, computer screens function as a guarantor of authenticity, as does the low-tech, amateurish filmmaking. Nev is our surrogate and sufferer, but his bumbling documenters also present as young people who just film themselves, even as they call themselves filmmakers. From the very beginning, it's made clear that they don't know what they're doing. The first shot of the film features Nev talking to camera, chastising his brother: "If you're making a documentary, you're doing a really bad job...''The film starts with a question mark (are they making a documentary?), and also establishes the authentic, impromptu, and casual tone. Rather than make a proper documentary in which, as Nev suggests, they would "set it up, organize a time with [him], [and] put together some materials," they offer up spontaneous, unrehearsed moments like this one, in which Nev devours a slice of pizza and talks with his mouth full. And so the line between making goofy videos of each other and making a documentary are blurred, as are the generic boundaries between amateur video/ reality television/and "documentary," where documentary signals seriousness of purpose--what Bill Nichols calls a "discourse of sobriety" (11) highlighting professionalism and social importance. The film exploits the playfulness and intimacy between brothers and friends, and in doing so reiterates the "diversionary" (to use John Corner's word) and self-centered model of reality television, including the video confessionals and amateurish quality we've come to associate with reality TV and Internet video alike. And of course, since Catfish the television show is now in its fourth season on MTV, it's hard not to see the film as simply an extended audition or pilot episode. And yet once the investigative mode kicks in, and once the privileged young men looking for a good subject meet up with Angela, a middle-aged mom who cares for disabled children and who may suffer from mental illness--a sense of sobriety and social responsibility is activated. Importantly, Nev also becomes less passive once the secret is revealed, settling into the active detective role and increasingly calling the shots (both in terms of the relationship and in terms of the film, as he repeatedly tells 'Rel and Henry what to do, where to drive, and how to shoot).

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To return, then, to the "uncanny"--it's not just that Catfish seems to repeat the story of the boy who falls in love with an automaton. Rather, it seems to me that the film is itself uncanny--in that it bears an uncanny resemblance to a documentary, and that it elicits a certain uneasy feeling in viewers. This sense was summed up, perhaps, in the response of one audience member at the film's Sundance premiere, who said, "I think you guys did a great job, but I don't think it's a documentary." (12) Many critics accused the film of various levels of dishonesty or outright hoax--some claiming the whole thing was orchestrated, while others simply quarrel with the timeline and whether things were accurately represented or simply re-enacted or staged for the camera. In this sense, watching the film, for some, reiterates Nev's situation --that is, the situation of being someone who is falling for a hoax, or at least believing in something that is, in some way, not quite what it says it is. Remember Freud's notion that we react with "a grudge against the attempted deceit" when an author creates a text that seems to follow the rules of "common reality": "We react to his inventions as we should have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late..." The film also produced angry responses from those who were repulsed by the relative privilege of the filmmakers, their exploitation of Angela, and their generally juvenile, self-indulgent attitude. (At one point, as they drive in the dark toward Angela's house in a scene edited to suggest a horror film, the air of suspense is summed up by Ariel who murmurs, "I feel like we're about to get our S.A.T. scores back.") Still others just thought it was a bad film--a "reeking fillet" (13) (Amy Taubin) or simply "a wretched documentary" (A.O. Scott --though offered with the caveat, if "judged by the usual standards"). (14) Even so, Scott's New York Times review summed up what seemed to be a common response: He notes the many problems with the film, but says, "But at the same time--precisely because of these lapses--Catfish is a fascinating document, at once glib, untrustworthy and strangely authentic." It is that "strangely authentic" which I think we can understand as a response to a kind of documentary uncanny. That is, it feels so wrong, it's somehow right--it's so bad it's good, it's so fake it's real. It documents something other than the online relationship between Nev and Megan, but works like it at the same time. As one online blogger put it: "I think this film is genius due to the fact that I have this odd feeling, not dissimilar to the way I felt about my ex-girlfriend. I love it and hate it and can't quit thinking about it." (15) The film seems also to encapsulate our own disorientation--not just with online identity--but with the multiplicity of non-fictional modes and viewing attitudes cohabitating with, even possessing, one another. As such, it presents two relationships--that between Nev and Angela and that between the viewer and documentary--and reveals both to be primarily narcissistic in nature.

This description is perhaps related to notions of the "postdocumentary" discussed by John Corner and others, but I think it is more about the viewer's disorientation, and about the productive possibilities of that disorientation, which, as noted above, some documentarians have certainly explored. But the documentary uncanny is activated most powerfully, perhaps, when unwitting--as I think it is in Catfish. To alter Freud's terms a bit, when we are assuming the documentary is behaving like a documentary - where "moving in a world of common reality" means retaining the documentary's expected relationship to reality--then the sense of the uncanny produced by the film will be like the sense provoked by real life. In this case, Catfish seems, at times, to be mechanical, going through the motions of "making a documentary." This goal is announced at the beginning (when Ariel says, in response to Nev's resistance: "I'm making a documentary about Abby through you. Do you understand that?") and is reiterated numerous times throughout the film. In other words, the "we're making a documentary here" has this incantatory value (the phrase that keeps Nev in line, and keeps the film going when there are doubts), but also suggests that "we all know how that's done," so let's get on with it and do all those documentary-like things already. At times, the uncanniness is related to fakeness, and comes from moments that seem to be reenacting something they've already done but failed to capture on camera. This evokes a "we've been here before" feeling that is strongly connected to the uncanny. (16) At other times, it's the string of coincidences that either betray the orchestration of the documentarians, or prove that truth is in fact stranger than fiction. And sometimes, it is not entirely clear why we are even watching or what we are even watching (a feeling akin to watching many things, like unboxing videos, on YouTube). The cumulative effect--besides anger, for some--is that the idea of documentary is foregrounded in a way that makes it alien or strange, such that we recognize it and are spooked by it--love it and hate it--at the same time.

Notes

(1) Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917-1919), James Strachey, ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 224. Online, PEP Web.

(2) It's important to note that Freud borrows from Jentsch but then parts ways with him on this idea of the "intellectual uncertainty" between the living and the dead provoked by these figures. In particular, Freud's reading of Hoffmann's "The Sandman," central to the essay, hinges on the notion that the doll, Olympia, whom the hero mistakes for a real woman, is not the main source of the story's "quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness"(226).

(3) Freud, 249-250.

(4) On reality television's relation to entertainment versus "serious" documentary, see Murray," 'I think we need a new name for it': The Meeting of Documentary and Reality TV," in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65-82. In the same volume, see also John Corner, "Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions," 44-65.

(5) Clio Barnard's The Arbor (2010), Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir (2008), and Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012) are recent, high-profile examples of the "uncanny" effects of distanciation techniques including dubbed sound, animation (in the case of Bashir), and reenactments.

(6) "Catfish Official Movie Trailer," http://www.iamrogue.com/catfish, accessed February 10, 2015.

(7) My students regularly point to this scene as another possible "faked" moment, since mail stamped "return-to-sender" would not still be in the mailbox, since it would be stamped by the post office. The stamps actually say "returned to this address for proper disposition," so it's unclear.

(8) Likely there were more re-shoots than just the Facebook screen shots, but they don't really admit to much more than that.

(9) Caetlin Benson-Allott, "The Algorithmic Spectator," Film Quarterly 64.3 (Spring 2011): 58.

(10) Beson-Allott, 58.

(11) Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 166.

(12) Kyle Buchanan, "Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have a Truth Problem," Movieline, Jan. 29, 2010, http://movieline. com/2010/01/29/does-sundance-sensation-catfish-have-atruth-problem/. Accessed April 10, 2015.

(13) Amy Taubin, "Document This," Film Comment 46.2 (March/ April 2010): 61.

(14) A.O. Scott, "The World Where You Aren't What You Post," New York Times, Sept. 16, 2010. Online. Accessed April 10, 2015.

(15) http://www.iscatfishfake.com/2010/09/10-reasons-why-catfishis-fake-and-5.html. Accessed July 31, 2015.

(16) Freud discusses the sense of deja vu associated with repetition or coincidence. He tells a story, for example, of getting lost in an Italian city and finding himself returning to the same place over and over (a red light district--though he fails to comment on that). He also links this feeling of "having been there before" to the female genitalia, noting that "neurotic men" find "something uncanny about the female genitals," and attributing this feeling to the return to the womb, to "the former home Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived, once upon a time and in the beginning" (244).