Bases teóricas de las variables

The only twenty-first-century television show to match the satirical spleen of the eighteenth century is Armando Ianucci’s The Thick of It, a well-informed send-up of the black arts of

spin practised inside the New Labour Number Ten.³⁰With a gloriously tempered, foul-mouthed portrayal of the Downing Street Director of Communications (a thinly veiled portrait of Alastair Campbell) at the centre of the web of a wonderfully dysfunctional government, this timely satire is shot documentary style, as if caught on the hoof. The team went on to make the equally successful feature film version, In the Loop (2008), which happily used its bigger budget to take the cast to the United States to show how the Brits were flattered into joining the Bush crusade in Iraq.³¹The same cinematographer, James Cairney, continues to make good use of the whip pans following conversations and jump cuts that convey the authenticity of documentary. It opened to rave reviews in the UK, but American notices were much more guarded, remarking that ‘its exuberant, boundless cynicism will test the demand for political satire in an Obama-infatuated America’.³² Some British cynics asked, what demand?

Celebrity culture has been a fertile ground for mocumentarists since the start of The Norman Gunston Show on Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1975. Played by the comic actor Garry McDonald, as a gormless chat show host prone to gaffes, Gunston got to interview unsuspecting visiting celebrities such as Paul McCartney and his then wife Linda. ‘That’s funny: you don’t look Japanese’, he said to her, alluding to John Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono.

As the show prospered, the budgets enabled him to travel abroad, subjecting the likes of Muhammed Ali, Mick Jagger and Charlton Heston to his toe-curlingly embarrassing cack-handed interview techniques. He did three series for ABC and a special for BBC2, before moving to Australia’s commercial station Channel 7 in 1978 and making series that later aired on UK Channel 4.

The idea of a disguised comic harassing celebrities was given a guerrilla twist in 1995 by English comic Paul Kaye, who invented ginger-haired American geek Dennis Pennis to snatch one line exchanges with celebrities at events such as movie premieres. A typical line to Demi Moore was: ‘If the part really demanded it, would you consider doing a film that required you to keep your clothes on?’ The only quip he claims to regret was his line to Steve Martin:

‘How come you’re not funny any more?’, which led to Martin cancelling all his scheduled press interviews on that tour. Although originally conceived for BBC2’s The Sunday Show, Dennis Pennis was one of the first comic acts to enjoy more success in its three video forms.³³ Kaye killed the character off after a couple of years because of the long wet nights spent hanging around outside events in the hopes of making a minute of shot footage if he was lucky. It did not pay as well as the tabloid pics that make such door-stepping so worthwhile for the paparazzi.

The man who has made the most from the faut naïf interviewer schtick is Sacha Baron Cohen. His comic character Ali G first appeared on Channel 4’s The Eleven O’Clock Show as the ‘voice of da yoof ’ in 1998, which won him a British Comedy Award as Best Newcomer and his own Da Ali G Show.³⁴Despite being an upper middle-class Jew educated at Cambridge University, Baron Cohen presents as a deluded youth believing himself Jamaican, albeit from the unlikely ‘ghetto’ of Staines, a featureless dormitory town to the west of London. From deep within the character he so fully inhabits, he confronts the great and the good with all the deep-seated nervousness they feel in acting correctly within a multi-cultural society. ‘Is it ’coz I is black?’ he asks them, voicing the unease, while appearing to misapprehend their name, job or orientation, casually throwing in misogyny and homophobia to further unsettle his guests. Having blown his cover in the UK, the second series was Ali G in da USA,³⁵where he was able to sandbag a rich collection of the unsuspecting American

establishment, from former UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali and billionaire Donald Trump to presidential candidates Ralph Nader and John Cain. He affected to confuse Gore Vidal with Vidal Sassoon, and he called Buzz Aldrin ‘Buzz Lightyear’. He went on to make a feature film, Ali G Indahouse,³⁶where he improbably gets elected to the British parliament, and to present the MTV awards, but the problem is that the heat of success rapidly burns the joke out, so Cohen has had to move on.

He had also developed two other characters in Da Ali G Show: Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter, and Borat Sagdiyev, a journalist from Kazakhstan. Borat contributed brief inserts on such issues as Etiquette and Hunting to both the UK and the US shows, before being elevated to the star of his very own road movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006).³⁷In this feature film, supposedly in New York with his producer to do a documentary for Kazakh TV, Borat falls in love with the image of Baywatch’s Pamela Anderson and persuades his producer to travel across the States to find her in California, driving an ice cream van accompanied by a pet bear.

The story is deliberately absurd, a McGuffin that enables a rich set of exchanges with middle America. Invited to a polite dinner party in a Southern mansion, he apparently mistakes a man who says he is ‘retired’ to say he is a retard, then asks to be excused and returns to the table with his shit in a plastic bag – on the pretence that he doesn’t understand the workings of the WC. At a rodeo, his jingoistic support for the troops in Iraq is well received, but the applause withers as each injunction ratchets up his xenophobia until he’s shouting ‘Kill all Jews’, and turns to boos when he starts singing (and deliberately murdering) the US national anthem. At that point, with perfect metaphorical timing, the white horse carrying the Confederate flag and its rider fall over behind him and the film cuts to the next scene. It left this viewer wondering how Baron Cohen and his crew escaped with their lives, and unsurprised that the police were allegedly called 91 times during filming. Subsequently, many of the film’s unwitting subjects sued for misrepresentation and the insult to their dignity, not least because the film has taken a lot of money. This was a critical and commercial hit from its opening weekends in both the USA and the UK, massively aided by negative reaction from the Kazakh government, which gave the film such acres of free press that the Kazakhs have now reversed their policy and invited Baron Cohen to Kazakhstan, an obscure country that he has helped to put on the map.

At the time of writing, Borat had taken a worldwide box office gross of $128.5 million, and Baron Cohen’s latest film seemed set to repeat the trick. His gay Austrian fashionista has acquired an umlaut and another publicity fuelling round of abuse. Brüno (2009) premiered in London, with Baron Cohen as usual in character, complete with hot pants, boots and busby, claiming to be ‘the most famous Austrian since Hitler’.³⁸Austrians, not best known for their sense of fun, have complained about the revival of Nazi stereotypes, and some gay and lesbian organisations also seem to have misunderstood Baron Cohen’s satirical portrayal of homophobia. The film’s stunts include Brüno crashing (in more ways than one) a Milan fashion show in a velcro suit and appearing on an American TV chat show nursing an ‘adopted black baby’ he claims to have given ‘a traditional African name: OJ’. The studio audience erupts in outrage, and the delighted shock of laughter these moments prompt is in recognition of the absurdity of our celebrity culture and its egocentric behaviour. While creative minds like Baron Cohen continue to mock these risible realities, Swift’s spirit lives on.

Hoaxes

Whereas filmmaker–performers from Chris Morris to Baron Cohen may hoax their subjects for audience amusement, some of their predecessors were keen to hoax the audiences themselves. The Holy Grail in this respect was the panic engendered by Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which managed to convince many gullible Americans that their planet was being attacked by aliens from outer space. Beside this, the British propensity for practical jokes on 1 April – April Fools’ Day – is mild, best represented by BBC Panorama’s spoof 1957 report on the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.

The success of this hoax was due to the authority of the programme and its eminent presenter Richard Dimbleby, and that in turn led to charges of abuse of trust. The context in which it is seen is critical to the success of hoax mocumentaries, and inevitably leads to complaints from those who have been gulled.

One of the more successful hoaxes was executed in his native New Zealand by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and co-director Costa Botes. Forgotten Silver (1995) is a sophisticated documentary purporting to have discovered the work and charted the life of Colin McKenzie, a long-forgotten pioneer of New Zealand filmmaking. It uses the full panoply of arts history technique, from trotting out interviews with experts and McKenzie’s

‘widow’, to contemporary stills and extracts of footage from his ‘reportage’ of Gallipoli and his ‘masterwork’ Salome. Although being shown in a NZTV quality drama slot, the story had previously been ‘broken’ in the New Zealand Listener, a well-regarded arts magazine, which created a context of credibility. As the New Zealand academics Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight explore, Forgotten Silver worked because it played on the fragile sensibilities of a still young culture concerned to build and protect its national myths:

A central part of the effectiveness of the programme with New Zealand audiences is the subtlety and variety of ways in which its filmmakers exploited cultural stereotypes and accepted notions concerning the nature of New Zealand history and society. This is combined with the more general conventions of documentary-making, forms of representation which . . . draw upon naturalised myths concerning notions of ‘objectivity’

and ‘truth’. Outside of the use of outside experts (such as film historian Leonard Maltin) and scientific knowledge to validate the claims made by witnesses and the historical record, a second and more interesting feature, in terms of myth, has Jackson as a reporter performing the roles of both detective and tourist for an audience.³⁹

The filmmakers claimed that they had intended the audience to realise gradually that this was a hoax, though were pleased at how successful they were at creating the illusion, and argued that their film was better researched and more ‘true’ than most products of the

‘infotainment’ industry. As Jackson said:

We never seriously thought that people would believe it because we kept putting in more and more outrageous gags – custard pies in the Prime Minister’s face, making films out of eggs, and the Tahitian colour film.⁴⁰

The irony is that it worked not just because it was very well made but because people wanted to believe it: it was a valuable contribution to New Zealand’s limited cultural history.

So people were not just angry to be made fools of, but to be deprived of this cultural gain.

Other hoaxes also trade on their public’s wilful delusion, not least in the fantastic world of extra-terrestrial aliens and abduction.

Americans have an apparently inexhaustible appetite for all things alien, which seemed to peak in the 1990s, in the vacuum caused by the end of the Cold War. In 1995, Fox TV screened what has been called ‘one of the most controversial TV documentary specials ever aired in prime time’. Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?⁴¹contained graphic black-and-white film of the apparent autopsy of an alien reportedly killed in the infamous 1947 Roswell incident, when the story has it that a UFO crashed and the US government hushed it up. The autopsy footage was said to have been sold to a London-based film producer called Ray Santilli for $100,000 by the original cameraman, flown into the USAF base under great security nearly 50 years before. Ten million people watched the first transmission and the film has been seen by many millions more around the world since. It was only in 2006 that the English sculptor and film special effects maker John Humphreys finally admitted to having made the dummy used in the hoax autopsy. He also said that he appeared in the film as the chief surgeon and helped Santinilli shoot the footage. The latex models were filled with sheep brains, chicken entrails and knuckle joints bought from Smithfield meat market.⁴²UFO watchers everywhere preferred the original story, which had been presented by Star Trek actor Jonathan Frakes, and who encouraged viewers to decide for themselves the validity of the autopsy footage, as he regularly did in his Fox TV show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, which mixed fake and true stories.

A similar hoax film appeared in 1998: Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County.⁴³Shown as a one-hour special on UPN in the United States, their advance publicity announced:

‘The recently acquired videotape is the sole testament to the fate of the McPherson family, missing since last Thanksgiving Day’. Purporting to be a home video shot by the McPherson’s 16-year-old son Tommy, the footage is intercut with various ‘experts’ and ‘Ufologists’, who discuss the ‘evidence’. Recognising public scepticism, these different approaches were given chapter headings such as ‘hoax theory’, ‘cover-up theory’ and ‘reality theory’ to suggest that this was a forensic investigation. The careful construction of the material leading up to the climax of the alien encounter, and a subsequent discussion accepting this as authentic, leave the suggestible viewer in no doubt. Like all good drama, it has managed the conflict and given voice to the doubts and dissenters before laying them to rest and letting the protagonist triumph. That said, the cast list on the end of the show should be all a sentient audience needs to know, so, when it was aired in New Zealand, NZTV-2 saw fit to cut the credits off, lamely arguing that it was required to make the transition to the next show and anyway, people could see it was a spoof. As Roscoe and Hight write, hoaxes work due to contextual factors, ‘not least of which was the attitude of network broadcasters who appeared willing to participate in promotions which encouraged a confusion of these programmes’

ontological status’.⁴⁴

One such programme deliberately grossed people out, but in a good cause. In 2007, Dutch TV station BNN announced a new reality TV show in which a terminally ill woman would decide during a live show which of three patients would receive her kidneys and thus save their life. Dutch politicians including Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, church leaders, media commentators and medical experts fell over each other to condemn the appalling taste of De Grote Donor Show/The Big Donor Show before it was transmitted on 1 June.⁴⁵But an hour into the 80-minute programme, it was revealed to be a hoax and the ‘dying woman’

was an actress, although the kidney patients were for real. They had agreed to participate knowingly in the stunt to raise awareness of the serious shortage of kidney donors in the Netherlands, causing people like them to wait over four years for a transplant, with 200 a year dying on the waiting list. The TV station had taken up the cause because their former director of programmes, Bart de Graaf, was one of those who had died, aged 35. Dutch Education and Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk – a molecular biologist and former Head of the Dutch Cancer Institute – who had days before called the show ‘inappropriate and unethical’⁴⁶recanted and called it ‘a fantastic stunt’.⁴⁷

The new millennium has seen continued borrowing and porous boundaries between genres, that reflects the audience’s ease with reading form. Two examples serve to illustrate the point. In 1999, the writer and executive producer of the enormously successful Seinfeld sit-com, Larry David, made a mockumentary about himself: Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. In it, he mocks the conventions of civility that rule his affluent, Jewish, Los Angeles life and reconstructs himself as a man who gives vent to the thoughts and feelings that we routinely suppress. So successful was this device for puncturing the artifice of polite society, that this comedy of exquisite embarrassment went to series and has become a beacon in the alternative comedy pantheon. Shot in documentary mode, Larry David continues to play his alter ego with a devastating tendency to say what’s on his mind, and the supporting cast all use their own first names in this subversive take on social truth.⁴⁸

In 2000, a trainee producer on a BBC TV course asked a mate to help him out with a filmmaking exercise, and a delusional office manager called David Brent made his screen

Figure 6.1

Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm documents the embarrassments of life

debut. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office is a sit-com that takes the form of a docu-soap. Set in a paper wholesaler’s office in the unlovable town of Slough – which the poet John Betjeman once invited enemy aircraft to bomb⁴⁹– the show purports to be a documentary about the bored office staff and their boss, who fancies himself as an inspirational leader and natural comic. This acute observation of urban angst, set in the kind of dead-end office milieu where many of its audience now work, struck a chord with them, though some were allegedly convinced it was a documentary. Most responded to the comedy of embarrass-ment and The Office went on to make a clean sweep of the BAFTA awards for 2001. The show has subsequently won many other awards, sold container-loads of DVDs, and been remade in various languages, including French, German and American. The American version, made by NBC and first aired in 2005, has also been an award-winning success but makes the characters kinder and more aspirational, as required by the American audience. As The New Yorker wrote: ‘The BBC and NBC are two offices separated by a common language’:⁵⁰

The challenge that faced the American ‘Office’ was to honor the spirit of the original while tweaking the workplace dynamics so that audiences would want to watch more than twelve episodes . . . The British ‘Office’ was a pitiless meditation on rules and class. The American ‘Office’ doesn’t care about class . . . In the British ‘Office’, we never learned

The challenge that faced the American ‘Office’ was to honor the spirit of the original while tweaking the workplace dynamics so that audiences would want to watch more than twelve episodes . . . The British ‘Office’ was a pitiless meditation on rules and class. The American ‘Office’ doesn’t care about class . . . In the British ‘Office’, we never learned