In his practical textbook, Directing The Documentary, the filmmaker Michael Rabiger offers what he describes as a "contemporary solution" to the problem of eliciting naturalistic 'performances' from documentary participants:

The technique of reflexivity… is to deliberately include [the participant's] relationship with those behind the camera - his questions, jokes, and even uncertainty about filming - as part of the movie. This may or may not work because participants tend to deal with their unease by throwing the initiative back on the film crew. A director, invited to become a character in her own film, will usually follow the authorial tradition of giving only a modest or minimal response. Then a vacuum develops at the threshold that the director won't cross. In Nick Broomfield's hilarious The Leader, The Driver, and the Driver's Wife (1992)… Broomfield uses boyish disingenuity to draw out the South African white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche and we know full well why Broomfield holds back.(1)

It is interesting that Rabiger chooses to praise Broomfield's use of this technique, especially since the most dramatic moment in Broomfield's latest film, Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), highlights both the benefits and pitfalls of using it. My aim here will be to contrast this use of reflexivity with the much more direct style of Michael Moore.

Broomfield's 1992 film, Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer, chronicled the trial of Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed seven men, six of whom were clients. The film showed how, as Aileen was processed by the legal system, her story quickly became a money-making machine; her lawyer was filmed arranging press interviews on her behalf (and collecting thousands of dollars in agent's fees) and crooked cops were eventually fired for selling the story to Hollywood. Near the beginning of the follow-up film, Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Broomfield explicitly states his own thesis on Aileen's crimes: teetering on the brink of sanity (having been sexually abused since the age of nine), Aileen reached breaking point when a client (a sex offender with a history of violently abusing women) subjected her to an horrific sexual assault and threatened to kill her. The severity of the assault, along with the trauma of having been forced to kill the man in self-defense, resulted in a psychotic breakdown as Aileen proceeded to kill six other men… or so goes Broomfield's account. Having spent twelve years on death row, Life and Death finds Aileen claiming that none of the murders, not even the first, were committed in self-defense. For Broomfield, this shocking admission (resulting in the failure of a legal appeal against Aileen's death sentence) is all too convenient coming from a woman who, Broomfield believes, is not only psychotic but simply desperate to die.

A master of the reflexive approach, halfway through Life and Death Broomfield does a remarkable thing: he not only secretly records a conversation with Aileen but he deliberately makes a point of letting her know that filming has stopped (even though it has not). His reason for doing this is that he wants Aileen to admit that the first killing was an act of self-defense and that she is lying to her legal team. Finally, she admits to the deception. The ethical stakes in this scene are huge. We are left to assume that Broomfield passes the footage onto no one: Eileen's legal team is not informed of the admission and Eileen goes to the execution chamber forever unaware that the conversation was secretly filmed. In some ways, this deception is the complete inverse of the normal use of the reflexive technique Rabiger discusses: rather than manipulating the participant's nervousness whilst they know they are being filmed, naturalism is elicited by letting the participant believe they are not being filmed.

Although Broomfield (in the film, at least) offers no defense of his actions, one has to presume that his intention in the scene was to preserve Aileen's dignity and her status as a lifelong victim of 'the system'. Throughout the film, Broomfield's message seems to be: 'Look! This woman has been so badly treated by the system that she's been forced into adopting the woefully inappropriate label "serial killer" in an attempt to be executed.' Yet if we were to look at Aileen's situation from a Lacanian perspective, we could just as easily claim that Aileen's entirely unconvincing deception was a way for her to sustain an inner sense of freedom. As Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out, this type of unconvincing masochistic deception need only be a "gesture", but it should be enough of a gesture to serve as support for the subject's belief in her existence. (2) Or, to put it in straightforward terms, everyone knew that Aileen would ultimately be executed - the fact that she managed to push the act through on her own terms (i.e. by protesting so unconvincing that she had killed in cold blood) quite possibly helped her come to terms with this fate.

In his article on the film, cultural critic Mark Lawson attacks Broomfield's technique:

He… gives considerable weight to Aileen's "confession" to him that she killed all her victims in self-defence but refuses to say this in court because the system has now made her desperate to die. This statement is treated as reliable fact, but this is a woman who has also confided that aliens are controlling her brain. It is a weakness of Broomfield's ad-libbed, non-journalistic style that there is no method for weighing the veracity of competing claims. (3)

Apart from his erroneous assumption that the motives of individuals suffering from psychotic breakdowns cannot be analyzed and identified at all, Lawson's biggest mistake here is to assume that the job of the documentary filmmaker is to adjudicate between competing claims. It should be observed that Broomfield never presents his films as codified arguments; instead, the making of each film itself becomes a part of the narrative and this process includes Broomfield's own doubts and hunches about what he uncovers. Towards the end of Kurt and Courtney (1997) - a circular and ultimately frustrating investigation into the facts surrounding the death of the rock star Kurt Cobain - an exasperated Broomfield wonders aloud if any of his participants have been telling the truth. When watching a Broomfield movie, one should always wait patiently for what I, cheekily perhaps, like to describe as the obligatory 'I began to wonder…' moment. Watching Life and Death, however, it is interesting to note that Broomfield's ad-libbed style allows us to see 'through' him and identify various truths that he himself fails to see. This happens most clearly when Broomfield expresses dismay over the fact that it takes a Florida State psychiatrist no time at all to declare Wuornos sane and fit to be executed. Again, is it not possible that the psychiatrist involved realized that Aileen was effectively speeding-up her execution (and, in a sense, committing suicide) for what could have been interpreted as a perfectly sane reason? Yet we, as an audience, feel no need to forgive Broomfield for his possibly flawed interpretation simply because he presents it so tentatively.

If Broomfield's films can be characterized as being filled with agonized doubt then an interesting comparison can be made with that most confident and polemical of all documentary makers: Michael Moore. Any doubt Moore expresses about the truthfulness of his participants is entirely ironic and used for comic effect. In his controversial feature-length investigation into the Columbine High School murders, Bowling For Columbine (2002), Moore satirizes those who blame the murders on the music of Marilyn Manson by flippantly blaming the murders on bowling - of course, his actual target is not the tenpin bowling industry but, rather, those forces within society which seek to provide easy answers to complex problems. At this point, one could imagine Broomfield making the same point, but in a far-less exaggerated comedic style. The difference between Broomfield and Moore is that whereas the former structures his films as a kind of personal voyage of discovery, the latter pre-plans his films as arguments - each step along the road is merely the next step in the journey towards his (political) conclusion.

Despite these apparent differences, Broomfield and Moore do have one thing in common: namely, their use of what Rabiger calls the "technique of reflexivity". Note, for instance, the way Moore uses the presence of his film crew to provoke nervousness amongst his often uneasy, and occasionally unwilling, participants. Of course, Moore's use of this technique is fairly unusual because it is not intended to produce naturalistic 'performances' - quite the opposite. And it is no coincidence that the technique is used whenever he wants to make a strong political point: one example being the scene where Moore 'returns' the bullets embedded in Columbine victims by taking the kids themselves to Kmart's headquarters. But such strategies involve risks. One of the teenagers who accompanied Moore to Kmart, Mark Taylor, is alleged to have complained: "[During filming] I had no idea what Moore's agenda was… I believe that every American has the right to have a gun. We should have the right to protect ourselves." (4) This quotation (and others like it) was not difficult to find: Bowlingfortruth.com is but one of a whole community of websites set-up with the intention of discrediting Moore and the claims made in his films. Moore has responded to most of these on a point-by-point basis (5) but the debate continues. Ultimately, Moore should hardly be surprised at this response, given that he presents his films as forceful, fully-fledged political arguments.

The real difference between a Nick Broomfield film and a Michael Moore film is that whereas Moore frequently uses the technique of reflexivity, Broomfield's films are what I would describe as 'fully-reflexive'. For Broomfield, reflexivity is not merely a useful and clever technique to be occasionally used during filming; instead, it is an entire approach to filmmaking which ultimately defines his style. Reflexivity not only defines Broomfield's relationship with his films' participants, it also informs his relationship with us, the audience. It opens up what might be described as the 'gap of doubt' necessary for the production of subtle, aberrant readings (such as my own reading of Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer detailed above). Such a gap does not exist in a Michael Moore film - you have to either agree or disagree with him and any disagreement ultimately leads to the kind of suspicions about Moore's integrity expressed on Bowlingfortruth.com. Which, as a final thought, rather makes one wonder: just who does Michael Moore make his films for?

Notes:

(1) Rabiger, M. Directing the Documentary (Focal Press, Boston and Oxford, 1998) p. 190.

(2) Zizek, S. The Ticklish Subject (Verso, London and New York, 1999) p. 281.

(3) http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1084039,00.html (accessed 28th June, 2004).

(4) http://www.bowlingfortruth.com/bowlingforcolumbine/cast.htm (accessed 28th June, 2004).

(5) http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ (accessed 28th June, 2004).

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