Make an Argument: Documentaries
By Eric Hughes
August 10, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I’ve seen a few notable ones recently, and thought I’d devote Make an Argument this week to what made them great. Two of them, actually, moved me to tears, and I’ll be the first to admit that that doesn’t happen to me often (documentary, or otherwise). Far from a heartless bastard, I need to be struck by just the right amount of – you know… - for my eyes to start wellin’.
Documentaries are underserved here on BOP, and I’ve yet to talk about them in this space, too, so here goes. They’re in the order I saw them, which so happens to match my list of least liked to most liked, too:
Food, Inc. (2008)
Watching Food, Inc. was like unwrapping the wool from my eyes in real time. I mean, talk about eye opening – I’d no idea the industry was this effed up! From the government subsidizing the components that most benefit corporations to one company controlling the genetically engineered seed market to food titans buying up all the organics and DIYers you mistakenly thought were totally independent, Food, Inc. covered a ton of space in an hour and a half – and left me feeling quite bleak that the industry could ever reverse itself.
Like a lot of business saturated with greed, the food industry is caught in an unsustainable trap of how to maximize profit margins at the expense of health and safety. This comes through, visually, through plumping up chickens so much that they can barely walk (if, well, they can first upright themselves on their feet), feeding cows with cheap nosh – mainly corn – that just isn’t natural for them to eat and stripping farmers of their creativity as growers to conform their farms into just one more cog in the big wheel of mistake.
According to the film, all that home style, Midwestern food packaging on meat and other products is a total misconception. The industry isn’t at all like the endlessly green pastures and happy little sheep marketing makes it out to be.
Though the subject matter is heavy, it’s presented in an easy to follow, cookie cutter format. Almost like the creators of it stole from the Michael Moore playbook on how to keep viewers engaged.
The Cove (2009)
Probably the best documentary I’d seen to date – until it was trumped by another one I’ll get to next – The Cove is a fascinating caper of a film (if a documentary can be so named). It uncovers the secret dolphin killings in Japan that go on all the time for the “benefit” of institutions that profit off of people who think dolphins are just the darndest mammals.
What happens, as caught on hidden cameras, is this: Dolphins are forced nearly ashore by fishermen, who corner them by emanating piercing sounds in the water. They’re corralled into a cove (hence, the title) up and around a corner unseen by the naked eye and judged on their prettiness at the fishermens’ discretion. (Don’t get any ideas here; it all happens fairly quickly). Those that pass the test get snatched from the water; those that do not get slaughtered with sharp weaponry so that they don’t end up in the next dolphin round up.
We, as Americans, only like the ones that look like Flipper, so those are the ones that the Japanese spare.
Flipper is mentioned here, as it is on film, since the leading man behind the spying expedition to capture on camera the rumored slaughters is former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry. He, in part responsible for capturing and training the five dolphins that shared a role as Flipper on TV, claims a dolphin once committed a form of suicide in his arms by voluntarily closing its blowhole – thereby suffocating itself. He vowed from that day forward to free dolphins already in captivity, and be an advocate for those that might soon be one day.
The Cove did many things for me, but mainly it shed light on the cruelties of such a pointless industry. Dolphins are smart creatures; so much so that they might be the smartest mammals on the planet next to humans. They can survive in the wild, without our intervening, and understand when they’re in captivity. They don’t enjoy dolphin shows and jumping through hoops, and only appear so because of a natural “smile” scrawled upon their faces.
And dolphin meat, which Japan consequently has plenty of, isn’t beneficial to the unsuspecting humans who consume it because of being packed with dangerously high levels of mercury.
There is absolutely no positive to such a horrifying business.
For the Bible Tells Me So (2007)
Finally, the cream of the crop of my recent documentary mania is For the Bible Tells Me So, an absorbing piece of movie that grasps homosexuality’s place in the church, as told through the stories of a handful of men and women who grew up Christian – only to turn out, at the protest of their parents, gay. Narrative is woven through interviews with the gays and lesbians, as well as their parents, who speak of their experiences in raising kids with same-sex attractions.
As a Christian male who happens to be gay, the docu certainly hit home for me. So much so that keeping dry eyes during the film’s final turns – as the stories wrap up in beautiful crescendos – I found impossible.
My opinion comes with a bias, I guess, yet I don’t know how conservative Christians – many of whom either draw from just a handful of antiquated Bible verses or, well, don’t know the Bible hardly at all – could digest all that gets thrown at them in 90 minutes, then maintain that gays deserve places at the table far removed from church membership and, in most cases, leadership. Would it be nothing short of divisive to stifle a guy’s relationship with Christ simply because he prefers intimacy with another man? But I digress…
For the Bible Tells Me So is beautiful art, from the mother who reverses her opinion on homosexuality after her lesbian daughter commits suicide to the proud parents of a gay son, whose peaceful rallies for acceptance bring about a sense of renewal on the part of his mom and dad. It’s a thoughtful study on an issue that has unfortunately become so hot button.