I spent far too long in Blockbuster last night. For some reason, my mind could not wrap around the fact that they didn't have a copy of Saving Private Ryan, so I spent the next 20 minutes wandering aimlessly around until I grabbed Dr. Strangelove and headed home.
Somewhere during that aimless wandering, I came upon a DVD copy of Dane Cook's Tourgasm - a semi-documentary about Dane Cook and three other comedians touring college campuses. The four aren't friends, really, but they develop an odd working relationship. From the episodes I saw on television, I can tell you that one comedian is singled out as sort of a loser. A wimp. Sort of a tool.
In the crazy, no-holds-barred life of Dane Cook, rock star comedian, this other guy looks like a pansy. He complains almost constantly, dramatizes the smallest of differences that he has with the other men, and succeeds in outcasting himself to become the butt of several jokes.
It got me wondering, much like in the "bad guys" thought I had a while back, what this guy thinks of the documentary version of himself.
I've seen this before in reality television. The best programs create a narrative with their footage. Often times, they will take the two or three people that make it to the end and create a rivalry between them stretching back to the first episodes. It's the fiction of reality. The art of creating lies with truth. While the footage is real, the way its edited creates a false sense of what's going on. It might tell nothing but the truth, but it's far from the whole truth.
I remember seeing this program on (probably) Channel One in middle school about documentaries. It showed two versions of a girl's life. In one version, she got up fairly early, ate a decent breakfast, behaved herself on the bus and made it to school on time to be greeted by a smiling teacher. In the second version, they used footage of her getting up late, having to skip breakfast, being loud and unruly on the bus, and trudging up the steps reluctantly to school. The point being? We can paint anyone in almost any light.
But - if we saw a documentary on ourselves, would we like what we see? Would we be the hero of our own story? Could we handle watching it? And at the end of it all, what would the final judgment be? We could try to dismiss it - afterall, anything can be said about anyone else. Like the comedian touring with Dane Cook, maybe he was just painted in a highly negative light to create drama for the show. Maybe it was even staged. But if it wasn't, even taking into consideration the editing process, he still said those things that he said. Still acted fairly lame on several occasions. If we were in his shoes, would we try to change or rationalize the footage?
I've always said that the worst thing you can do to a person is tell them what they are. It defines them. And the only freedom we have is to define who we are. But a documentary does that for us. It defines us by reflecting back our actions and words. Perhaps if we were strong enough for it, we'd want to watch all of our actions replayed to us. To give ourselves an honest critique. To work on what we didn't like seeing. If we were even braver, we'd watch with those close to us, the trusted core of people that can be harsh and cruel and honest with us. Their feedback would be even plainer. Harder to swallow, but if we truly believed in them, their advice would be right.
It's just never that easy to take, let alone do something with. We want to believe that we're perfect, that we're already done. In adolescence facilitates growth easily. We just soak up our surroundings. Growing is the norm, so we roll with it, get excited by it, get scared by it, but keep doing it. Growth seems to slow down or halt completely for adults. But it's our job to keep fighting uphill. It's more difficult to keep moving upward, but life cannot get better if we camp out on the side of the hill.
Are we brave enough to watch the movie of ourselves in order to do that?
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