'Mockumentary' pioneers are moving into straight - but still funny - narrative, writes Belinda McKeon
Early in January, when promo clips for the RTÉ TV show Dan & Becs began to air on television and to find their way on to websites such as YouTube, Bebo and Blogorrah, initial reponses ran the gamut from confusion to revulsion. "Please, please, please tell me this is a piss-take," went one online comment. "This is serious?" asked someone else. "Is this show reality or is it acted out?" asked a visitor to the Bebo.com page which had been set up for one of the show's characters, and which had further muddied the waters between reality and illusion. Another comment cut straight to the chase: "God help us all."
The show, it seemed, had unleashed a monster, giving airtime to the egotism, snobbery and brattishness of two privileged young Dubliners who seemed to sum up a whole, vainglorious generation. They talked in tortuous Dart-line accents, they flashed their whitened smiles, they flaunted their affluence and their insularity - all while they chatted away seriously into webcams and mobile phone video cameras about their dubious romance. Yes, maybe it was parody, but were the people behind this show qualified to parody the pretensions and the prejudices of Dublin 4? Were they not, perhaps, doing too good a job on the accents, making too good a hand of the mannerisms? Maybe they were Dublin 4 types themselves. Maybe, the whispers went, those weren't even put-on accents. Were they acting? Why were they leaving each other notes on their Bebo pages for all the world to see? Was it make-believe or lurid reality? Were the boundaries melting all over the country's TVs?
Now, The War of the Worlds this is not. When Orson Welles broadcast his radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel as a Hallowe'en special in 1938, many thousands of listeners were fooled by the programme's newsflash-inspired format into believing a Martian invasion of the US was under way. All that Dan & Becs might fool viewers about is the ability of spoiled twentysomethings to laugh at themselves. Lightweight though it might be, however, Dan & Becs has sauntered into the realm of mockumentary - that razor-sharp format tackled so memorably seven years ago by the Paths to Freedom series. Stereotypes as characters, serious speeches to the camera, a growing sense of farce, an audience who can't, at first, decide whether what they're seeing is straight or satirical; it ticks all the boxes.
BUT IRONICALLY, IT'S doing so just as the filmmakers who are widely regarded as having created modern mockumentary are turning away from the form. No variety of human pretension or delusion has seemed safe from the gaze of Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, the duo behind the notorious mockumentaries, This is Spinal Tap (1982) and Best in Show (2000). From the glam-rock scene to the dog show circuit, they riotously sent up the most pathetic, the most pompous, and above all the most pervasive of social and cultural conventions, by pretending to treat them with the po-faced seriousness with which the subjects of the documentary-maker's camera are generally indulged.
THEIR OTHER FILMS, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind, were somewhat gentler on their subjects - a community theatre troupe with dreams of greatness, and a folk group coming back together for a reunion concert - but, even for that, were no less excruciating. That painful-to-watch brand of comedy, that close-to-the-bone school of satire so familiar now from The Office and from Curb Your Enthusiasm; Guest and Levy have had a great deal to do with the crafting and the refining of that style. And now, it seems, they've had just about enough of it.
The new Guest/Levy vehicle, For Your Consideration, which was released yesterday, marks their openly stated move away from mockumentary. There's no illusion of a camera within the camera, no one-on-ones with the delightfully self-absorbed characters, no sense of an eccentric, or devilish, or just downright weird director putting a shape on the material, grappling with it as it gets comically out of his control.
The same core of actors return from the other films - Michael McKean, Parker Posey and Catherine O'Hara among them, along with Guest and Levy themselves - but the format is that of straight narrative rather than mockumentary. That said, the new film is arguably driven by the same engines of parody and spoof that powered the other films; For Your Consideration pokes fun at the hysteria, the nastiness and the shallowness of Hollywood and of the media circus that runs the film-making business. It takes its name from that very circus; For Your Consideration is the phrase used in trade advertisements to big films up in advance of the award ceremonies.
Most of the film's humour, meanwhile, derives from the chaos on the set of a low-budget wartime melodrama, Home for Purim, when online Oscar whispers begin to generate about its lead actor and the cast. But that second layer of comedy to which fans of Guest and Levy will be accustomed is missing: that layer both accessed and enabled by the viewer who is aware of the format. Guest and Levy may have tired of the mockumentary, but their work may not have the same punch without it.
Then again, mockumentary itself may be losing its punch as a genre. Michael Garland, the producer of Paths to Freedom, says that work such as This is Spinal Tap was a huge influence on the Irish show, but that the format may have had its day. "I think it's possibly a bit jaded by now," he says. "Paths to Freedom came along at the right time, in the middle of the Celtic Tiger period. If it had been a year later it might not have had the same impact, but a year earlier and people might not have gotten it." People know what to expect from the format by now, Garland says, and that can blindside its effect. "There is a sense of the game being up," he says.
Andrew Keogh, an independent filmmaker whose Dublin-based company, Western Plumbers (formerly Dogmedia), has made a number of short spoof pieces riffing on the documentary form, agrees. His work has explored the form of spoof and satire as much as it has derived its comedy from these forms; The Confession Sessions brought a video camera into the confessional ("the last sacred space"), while Jennie Balfe set out on an earnest quest to find its eponymous heroine, who had graffitied her name all over Dublin's inner city (she turned out to be a 12-year-old schoolgirl). Keogh's company has also written spoofs on Christmas charity singles and home improvement shows. But he's dubious about the relevance of mockumentary. "I like them, they're entertaining," he says, "but they fall into entertainment very easily. It has become one of those things that's really easy to sell on; I mean, it's just a style now."
Dr Harvey O'Brien, who teaches on the film studies programme at UCD, and who has a particular interest in documentary and its offshoots, suggests that the key to understanding - and overcoming - the limitations of the mockumentary form lies in the fact that some forms of subversion go deeper than others. When a format turns its subversive lens not just outward, to comic effect, but inward, to potentially disorienting, unsettling or even disturbing effect, the results can go beyond just raising an appreciative snigger.
"Usually, mockumentary is fairly basic social satire," he says. Guest's films fall into this category, for him, as does Paths to Freedom - and, no doubt, Dan & Becs. There's nothing wrong with a funny mockumentary, O'Brien says, but he's more interested in examples of the genre which are "more self-conscious and aggressive". Interestingly, one of the best recent examples was a TG4 series of spoof-documentaries, Incognito.
'MOST MOCKUMENTARY, LIKE Guest's, essentially parody the subject rather than documentary itself," says O'Brien. "Films that more aggressively parody conventions of the form, such as Man Bites Dog, or The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom - and that's a real title - they're subverting the whole concept behind film itself. They draw attention to how our concept of reality is fairly fragile, and to the fact that, ultimately, our agreed concept of what's real entirely depends on whether or not we say, yes, it's real. They play with our expectations of documentary, and of reality."
The mark of integrity in a mockumentary, then, would seem to be the ability to disorientate an audience and leave them clamouring for answers, uncertain what to believe. The pilot episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, which turned a camera on the Seinfeld creator Larry David as he pitched a new show called Curb Your Enthusiasm, had that jarring effect, as did the original series of Chris Morris's Brass Eye, with its episodes on sex (in which Morris posed as a talk-show host distinguishing between "good Aids" and "bad Aids"). The War of the Worlds effect, in other words.
And for that, you might need more than a webcam, an imaginary southside suburb, and a lot of internet chatter. Then again, imagine Orson Welles's Martians with Bebo profiles. Horror upon horror; he'd go for it in a shot.