So I guess it makes sense that, when Orson Welles aimed to make a documentary, one ostensibly about an art forger, he threw objective truth out the window with all kinds of glee. But again, accuracy and objective truth are difficult to pin down in any documentary. (I mentioned this on Twitter a couple of years ago: that documentary would need to be extremely long, and it would need to be directed by Ken Burns, or a Ken Burns type.) The PBS documentary wasn’t very good, in part because it offered a lot of surface-level insight to anyone with more than a passing awareness of Walt Disney.Īccuracy and objective truth are difficult to pin down in a documentary about Disney, because our takes on him are influenced by our preexisting opinions on the man. I have no doubt that there is a great documentary to be made of the life and times of Walt Disney, and the legacy he has left behind.
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What people are asking for when they ask for a documentary that is made objectively is either a) a film made by a series of robots or b) a film that more consistently aligns with their preexisting opinions. How can any documentary actually present objective truth? (Tumblr suggested that I let all of you answer this when I typed that sentence, and NO THANK YOU, TUMBLR.) As soon as the cameras turn on, 100% objectivity is out the window. However, the notion that a documentary should have objective truth is both eminently logical and utterly fallacious. I have, to be clear, not yet watched the show (and I’m not sure if I will, only because the recent spate of true-crime content in popular culture bores me in general). I’ve seen arguments about “objective truth” related to Making a Murderer, too, suggestions that the documentary has failed because it’s too biased. But he does, and it’s just a wild miscalculation.) Part of the problem with the documentary, for me, was that it attempts often to make declarative statements about a man who remains an enigma to so many of us. He won a Pulitzer! He writes about politics! The story of his autistic son using Disney films to communicate is fascinating! I have no idea why he appears almost as frequently as a man who wrote a literal book on Walt Disney’s life in this documentary. (For example, Ron Suskind seems like a nice guy. Some, I would argue, of the talking heads are roughly as qualified to talk about Disney’s life and career as I am. I was, however, about as surprised as those earlier viewers at the amount of talking-head interviews, especially considering how many of those interviews make a lot of leaps of logic.
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It’s not that the movie is a hit piece (it’s not). Now that I’ve watched the Disney documentary–a novel idea, I know–I disagree with some of those comments, but less than I would have assumed. When I read the comments initially, the tone of them basically read to me as “This documentary isn’t nice enough to Walt Disney,” which suggested that those in favor of this argument don’t get the point of a documentary, especially one that is–I should note–not officially authorized by the Walt Disney Company. (To their credit, the two men I’m referring to are among a very small group who appear in the film who did know or work with the man.) Some Disney fans took the film to task for daring to present him in a darker-than-hoped light. Some of Disney’s old co-workers–who are, to my surprise, interviewed in the documentary itself–harshly criticized the film for its reliance on talking heads who didn’t know Disney. Before I saw the documentary, I read comments on the Disney doc that were, putting it lightly, a bit critical. I won’t go into major detail about my thoughts on the Walt Disney documentary here, but I bring it up because issues of accuracy are hard to ignore within its whole. Debates of accuracy are, conveniently enough, of paramount importance to this week’s Criterion film: Orson Welles’ F for Fake.
(If the subtitle, which appears on the DVD cover, but nowhere else that I could see, is confusing, I’ll be clearer: this is the 4-hour documentary that aired on PBS as part of their American Experience program back in September of last year.) And the entire Internet, it feels, is debating the success and accuracy of the new Netflix show Making a Murderer, the latest in a long, long line of true-crime documentaries or documentary-style programs that have taken hold of our attention. For an upcoming bonus episode of my podcast Mousterpiece Cinema, I watched the documentary Walt Disney: He Made Believe. A Twitter poll decided which film I would watch and write about this week, but the timing felt perfect, for a number of reasons.
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