Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.74.1.2.08
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
Resumomore than thirty years after Robert Rosenstone wrote the preceding words in 1988, the historian and film scholar's critique still describes the contemporary fact-based drama and its subset, the docudrama, a fact-based drama about public events, upon which this article will focus. What might be called traditional docudramas include films such as The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), and Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012). These traditional docudramas represent past events and characters as though they are fully known and knowable, their narrative transparent, and they present their “single interpretation” of history with unacknowledged authority and omniscience. As Rosenstone notes, these films not only dismiss historical alternatives but also present their factual story worlds and characters with the same certainty as do well-made fictional scripts. Steven Spielberg's The Post, for instance, dramatizes how the publishing of the Pentagon Papers led to the Watergate break-in, a line of historical causality that is factually ambiguous,1 with the same authority with which a horror film such as Get Out (Jordan Peel, 2017) dramatizes how the zombified black characters in the Armitage household have been transformed by unwilling brain transplantation.There is a small subset of docudramas, however, that use more tentative rhetorical techniques to tell fictional stories while also raising questions of how we understand the past. This article will call such films “cracked docudramas”2 because they retain traces or suggestions of how their creators came to know and represent history. Films such as BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018), Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014), Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016), The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), and I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017) are cracked through their formal strategies; using unsettling or unresolved textual elements, they hint from the inside at what informed their making from without. Their intentionally disquieting constructions point the viewer to alternative histories that linger ghost-like behind the specific interpretations that their creators have chosen, offering hints of the more open representation that Rosenstone encourages.In questioning how we know the past, cracked docudramas are associated with historical metafiction, one of the dominant narrative styles of twentieth-century postmodernism. However, unlike in the most inventive or imaginative of the high postmodernist metafictions—novels such as Ragtime (E. L. Doctorow, 1975) or Libra (Don DeLillo, 1988) or films such as JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) or Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1980)—cracked docudramas do not present the past as infinitely mutable. They adhere to a more accepted historical consensus of what did occur. But in the tradition of historical metafiction and unlike more traditional docudramas, cracked docudramas use textual dislocations to remind the viewer that their recreations represent selected perspectives on how the past might be interpreted.This article will look at The Post as a baseline example of a traditional docudrama and then three cracked docudramas made in the second half of the 2010s: I, Tonya, Jackie, and BlacKkKlansman. It will consider them in the context of three academic approaches to writing history and interpreting the past.Summarized in this section are three scholarly approaches to representing the past that relate history to narrative. This article does not argue that filmmakers consult academic historiography to make their docudramas (they do not), but it will use these three approaches as critical frameworks to analyze how cracked docudramas can dramatize a more complex representation of history.Split Construction: To the French historian Michel de Certeau, historical writing juxtaposes two contrasting discursive forms: narration and logical discourse. Narration represents the chronology of historical events documented with archival evidence, while logical discourse is the historian's interpretation of these events. They run in opposing temporal directions: narration moves from a given historical moment forward, following chronology but less aware of its future consequences, while logical interpretation runs from the time of the historical writing backward, drawing out its meaning. These contrasting perspectives account for the tension between narrative reconstruction and contemporary interpretation that is so essential to historical writing. De Certeau introduces the term “split constructions” (Writing of History 92) to account for the layering of these two forms of discourse and insists that in historical writing, narration and logical discourse are kept distinct, fenced off by quotation marks and delineated by academic citation. He calls this a “laminated text.” By virtue of this lamination, split-constructed historical texts are always cracked. The differentiation between the archival or the narrative text and its subsequent interpretation encourages the reader to engage the tension between these perspectives.De Certeau developed this technique in his first book, The Possession at Loudun, which juxtaposes the early 1630s archival record of the apparent demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns in Loudun, France, with his commentary about a society in transition, beginning the slow movement from religious authority toward the development of reason. De Certeau asks, “How could history be sure?” and writes, “Divided between commentary and archival sources, it refers to a reality that once had a living unity, and no longer is” (Loudun 7–8). Finally, he uses the term “cracked” itself, stolen by this article to refer to the subgenre of docudramas to be examined here, when he writes that his book The Possession at Loudun “is cracked from top to bottom, revealing the combination, or the relation that makes history possible” (Loudun 7–8). This article considers I, Tonya as an example of split construction.Trace: De Certeau maintains a clear distinction between narrative and interpretation; by contrast, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur blurs it. In the third volume of Time and Narrative, a study inspired by de Certeau, he introduces the concept of a trace, a track made by something that earlier passed this way and left a vestige, a remainder. A trace is a current “sense of a mark” that “invites us to pursue it, to follow it back” (Time and Narrative 120) to find what passed. Unlike split construction, a trace intentionally blurs the distinction between the time when it is perceived and the time to which it refers, being a form of “hybrid time, issuing from the confluence of two perspectives on time—the phenomenological perspective and that of ordinary time” (Time and Narrative 122). Perception of the past in a sense vibrates, simultaneously being perceived as a mark, an immediate present phenomenological tangibility, and a reference back in ordinary or historical time to when the original event occurred. Because the trace requires the reader to navigate two overlapping orders of time, it suggests a sense of the contingency, the tentativeness of historical reconstruction. This article will consider Jackie as an example of trace.Collective Memory History: One of collective memory's founders, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, writes that the “past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present” (40). Because of this relative reconstruction, collective memory's relationship to history is contested. American anthropologist James V. Wertsch and psychologist Henry L. Roedierg III find this relationship problematic: “history aspires to provide an accurate account of the past, even if it means we must give up favoured and often self-serving narratives. In contrast, collective remembering inevitably involves some identity project—remembering in the service of constructing what kind of people we are . . . ” (320). American historian David Glassberg, however, sees this identity project as precisely memory history's power. The varying reconstructions of the past serve as a form of triangulation, seeking “to understand the interrelationships between different versions of history in public” (9). The triangulation itself is a form of cracked-ness, inviting the reader to recognize differing community's variations in historical interpretation. American media historian Carolyn Kitch focuses it further: “people understand both the past and the present through ‘collective frameworks’ of shared symbols and narratives” (83). This article will consider the opposing collective frameworks within BlacKkKlansman. It will look at how the film's opening and closing frames, with their highly performative images of the Klan, torque the narrative fissures in the less stylized, enclosed story. The article also will examine how the film's contrasting readings of The Birth of a Nation focus not only on content but also on disparate narrative receptions, evoked by the remains of the “cinema of attractions” that still linger in Griffith's work.Many traditional docudramas rely on the same self-referential narrative strategies used by well-made Hollywood films; they set up a clear dramatic question early in their stories that they then resolve near the end (usually at the second plot point and into the beginning of the third act). Conflict-and-resolution motifs give these films a strong sense of closure and a satisfying dramatic structure. However, while very powerful for nonhistorical films that claim limited reference to the world beyond their fiction, this technique diminishes the ability of docudramas to reach outside their stories. By relying on self-reference, this conflict-and-resolution structure limits its resonance to the confines of the story world; it raises and then answers its own dramatic questions, diminishing the film's ability to explore the more ambiguous historical conflicts that extend beyond the script.The Post illustrates the problems of self-reference. It celebrates The Washington Post owner Katherine Graham's (Meryl Streep) decision to join the successful 1971 lawsuit against the Nixon administration, whose eventual outcome granted the press freedom to publish the Pentagon Papers. But although the film is structured around this historical event, it is driven by a dramatic structure that features Graham eventually gaining the courage to stand up to the white businessmen on her board of directors. Early in the film, Graham rehearses her planned talk to the board, but she ultimately defers, allowing a male aide to speak in her place at the meeting. Graham's deferral to these businessmen becomes her central character problem, and the viewer is invited to wonder whether she will overcome it. This is resolved much later in the film when her editor in chief, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), faces off against the board members over whether to publish the Pentagon Papers. At first, Graham mulls her responsibility to the paper's employees whose jobs might be jeopardized, receiving nods of support from the board members. The audience is teased to expect another cave-in to the suited corporate types. But then she stands, ponders her contrasting responsibility to her readers, and announces her decision to publish by confronting the most patronizing board member: “This is no longer my father's company. This is no longer my husband's company. It's my company, and anyone who thinks otherwise probably does not belong on my board.”This is a very satisfying completion of her character arc, clearly resolving the dramatic character question raised early in the film. By dividing both sides of the argument into distinct dramatic blocks, reiterating her responsibility to her employees versus to her readers, the film illustrates the cost of making such a decision. But by so resolving Graham's self-contained dramatic question, it diminishes the more external, abstract, and ambiguous historical considerations around the Pentagon Papers’ publication. Rather than recognizing the decision as a response to the conflicting pressures of the historical moment—for instance, political exigencies, ethics, contingency, or the corruption of the Nixon administration—The Post presents it as the outcome of an individual's self-discovery.De Certeau's split construction, which uses logical discourse to interpret the preexisting historical archival record, demonstrates the limitations of such personalization. He argues that split construction, the lamination of logical interpretation over historical narration, is a form of historiographical discourse in which “one continuous half is based on another disseminated half. The former [the logical discourse] is thus allowed to state what the latter [the archival narrative] is unknowingly signifying” (Writing of History 94). “Unknowingly signifying” suggests that any archival narrative is open to many readings, limited by the precise logical discourse that shapes it. Further, by virtue of being laminated, the text maintains the distinction between archive and logical discourse; with access to both, the reader is thus free to negotiate the tension between them.The Post's historical record is that Katherine Graham allowed The Washington Post to join The New York Times in arguing against the government's claim of prior restraint. Dramatizing Graham's personal growth over this serves as unacknowledged logical discourse, organizing the otherwise more ambiguous meaning of the historical record so that even the viewer with no prior historical context is likely to see the papers’ publication in terms of her personal triumph. This intertwining, however, blurs the distinction between archive and its interpretation; it breaks down the lamination of split construction—the viewer cannot see the publishing of the Pentagon Papers except through Graham's development. Because her character line is so dominant and its outcome so interwoven into the interpretation of the archival record, the film does not hint at any other possible readings of this event.But historically, there were other readings. Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, said in a memoir that his goal was not merely to see them published but “to try to end it [the Vietnam War] immediately,” (Ellsberg) yet the war continued almost two more years after the papers’ publication. His ambiguity about revealing the papers is reflected in a 2015 statement made by Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter who first published them, as summarized by the paper in 2021: “Contrary to what is generally believed, Mr. Ellsberg never ‘gave’ the papers to The Times. Mr. Ellsberg told Mr. Sheehan that he could read them but not make copies” (Scott), which in fact The New York Times did. Reporter Dana Priest writes how Edward Snowden's case in 2013 both celebrated and revealed the limitations of the Pentagon Papers decision in discussing the new “‘insider threat’ program” that requires that “All contacts [by military and intelligence employees] with the media, even social ones, must be reported.” Temple University professor emeritus Richard H. Immerman, a historian and former assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards, argues that nondisclosure agreements have now replaced the Espionage Act, in violation of which Ellsberg was charged, to enforce prior restraint.Beyond failing to acknowledge the possibility of other readings, The Post does not address another critical element in split construction: the organization of time. According to de Certeau, narrative discourse runs forward chronologically from the beginning of the historical event, whereas logical discourse runs backward, interpreting the historical event from the time of the writing. This dual chronology allows historical discourse to narrate history as it might have happened, while interpreting it in retrospect from the historian's temporal perspective. Yet both discourses in The Post, the narrative discourse of the Pentagon Papers and the logical discourse of Graham's learning to speak up, run in the same direction. As a result, there is no chronological tension in the text of The Post itself, no lamination between history as it might have been experienced in the 1970s and how it was subsequently seen at the time of the making the film in 2017. Although the comparisons between President Nixon's hatred of the press as represented in The Post and President Trump's then current and apparently similar hatred overtly surrounded the reception of the film, they are diminished by the lack of a reflective voice structured into the text itself.3The Post fairly represents one line, possibly the dominant line, of historical understanding about the decision to publish and the impact of publishing the Pentagon Papers. But in the film's failure to acknowledge the possibility of alternative interpretations, The Post, like other traditional docudramas, remains trapped in Rosenstone's “closed world.” By creating “a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation” (Rosenstone 1174), it avoids the very question of how the viewer knows and interprets the past, including the recognition that all interpretations will inherently be incomplete. Steven Rogers's script for I, Tonya, by contrast, offers one way to dramatize this.Juxtaposing dramatic scenes with faux interviews, I, Tonya tells the story of Tonya Harding, the first American figure skater to land a competitive triple axel, but one who came to popular attention primarily because of her team's attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan. Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and onetime bodyguard Shawn Eckardt conspired to smash Kerrigan's knee, removing her from the US Figure Skating Championships and assuring that Harding qualified for the 1994 Olympics in her place (they both ended up being allowed to go). Harding's role in the conspiracy has never been fully resolved.Although it is a rhetorical device to tell a fictional story, the contrast between faux interview and scene suggests the laminated quality and temporal tension of de Certeau's split construction because it creates both a historical record and its later interpretation. Unlike in The Post, where Graham's character growth bleeds into and blurs the viewer's attitude toward the Pentagon Papers case, the interviews and scenes in I, Tonya create a distinctly dual-layered text, whose levels are clearly meant to be read against one another. The distinction is made cinematically; the interviews, which function as interpretative text, are shot in direct address and composed in tight academy frames while the scenes, which function as archival narrative, are shot in wider-aspect ratios and are composed in traditional dramatic address. Their differentiation points the viewer toward their interplay. For instance, in one scene, Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), annoyed by Harding's suspicion about his conspiracy involvement, suddenly punches her. In the subsequent interview, Harding (Margot Robbie) interprets by saying, “Bam. He freakin’ nails me right in the face. That's when I knew.” This demonstrates laminated historical discourse per de Certeau because the narrative archive (Gillooly's punch), open to many readings (Gillooly hits Harding frequently throughout the film), is overtly shaped by the specific logical interpretation (Harding's “That's when I knew.”). It is presented as a process rather than a declaration of absolute knowledge. As de Certeau puts it, “each of its halves [the narrative archive and the logical interpretation] says what is missing from the other, rather than its truth” (Loudun 8).Also, unlike in The Post, where the narrative archive and logical interpretation both move forward in time, the interviews and scenes in I, Tonya unwind in opposing temporal directions; the interviews looking backward on the advancing narrative progression of the scenes. Thus, the film creates a tension between how events are experienced in real time and how they are understood upon historical reflection. Early in the film and in scene, the young Harding, whose working-class background had never been accepted by the social world of figure skating, triumphs by completing the triple axel to great applause. This sound bleeds over the interviewed Harding reflecting upon how it made her feel: “I was loved . . . I knew I was the best figure skater in the world.” Then her mood starts to change, and she adds, “At one point in time,” until finally turning away from the camera. The older Harding connects that past emotion to her present state. “I'm sorry. Nobody ever asks me about this anymore.” All that has passed between her athletic accomplishment and intervening fall is made tangible in this temporal juxtaposition.Much later, after being forbidden to skate competitively due to her legal sentence, Harding becomes a female boxer. I, Tonya ends visually with the glory of her completing the triple axel intercut with the humiliation of her being knocked unconscious in the boxing ring, dramatizing in scene the sad devastation of her career. But in interview, by contrast, Harding seems to have come to an understanding, “America, you know. They want someone to love, but they want someone to hate. And they want it easy.” She continues, maybe commenting on her involvement in the Kerrigan affair or possibly on her new acceptance of never belonging to the figure skating social class: “The haters always say, ‘Tonya, just tell the truth.’ But there's no such thing as truth. It's bullshit.” Then, after a pause, she says, “And life just does whatever the fuck it wants.” This gives her logical interpretation dual temporality; it dramatizes her growing reflective acceptance of what happened to her against the baseline unwinding of the archival narrative of her demise. The viewer is asked to navigate how to take this. Does Harding's final logical interpretation, her interview in which she blows off the haters, convince the viewer to reinterpret all that has happened to her and accept how far she has come? Or does the viewer feel that the weight of the historical archive, presented in scenes, overwhelms the thinness of her current acceptance, dismissing it as the mere rationale of a sad character lacking self-awareness?I, Tonya is, of course, not a documentary, but a cracked docudrama whose scenes are as fictionalized as the interviews commenting on them. The film uses its dual construction as a rhetorical strategy to allow the viewer to balance the interplay between historical archive and its subsequent interpretation. By foregrounding this, I, Tonya suggests an openness to the complexities of historical motivation and causality not invited by The Post.Jackie is structured around a dramatized version of the factual Life magazine interview that Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) gave to Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup, identified only as “the Journalist” in the film) in the aftermath of her husband's assassination. The moment of President Kennedy's actual shooting is not explicitly dramatized or recounted in either the film or the interview; however, it emerges almost inadvertently through fragments of Ms. Kennedy's thoughts in both media forms. Theodore H. White's Life magazine interview records this one vivid summary: She remembers the roses. Three times that day in Texas they had been greeted with bouquets of yellow roses of Texas. Only in Dallas they had given her red roses. She remembers thinking, how funny—red roses for me; and then the car was full of blood and red roses. (158)Ms. Kennedy gives even more intimate details in her stream-of-consciousness recounting to the Journalist in the film.Both are vivid and immediate but not yet processed memories of what just happened. In the film, Ms. Kennedy goes on: “I was trying to keep the top of his head down, keep it all in. He had the most wonderful expression on his face, you know? Just before they'd ask him a question, just before he'd answer. He looked puzzled.”One reading of Jackie is that it is about the creation of history—how Ms. Kennedy moves from these personal associations, vivid but ephemeral, to the public trope of Camelot, serviceable and permanent, through which to celebrate and fix the historical memory of the former president. Whereas the interview/scene pattern in I, Tonya immediately imposes a temporal order on that film, Jackie's opening, present-tense, vivid but not yet processed memory pattern does not. Ms. Kennedy must first step out of her chaos before she can create enough public distance to memorialize her husband. She must understand what happened, decide whether “the most wonderful expression on his face” represents her earlier memories of the president anticipating a question or her registering his death, how her not wearing her sunglasses connects to his skull coming off, and how she wants her listener to take her almost clinical description of its color.This quality of disorganized association that Ms. Kennedy experiences early in the film, the fragile connection that she makes (or at times fails to make) between these vivid sense memories and what they mean suggests Ricoeur's trace: “a relationship of a cause to an effect between the marking thing”—Kennedy's being shot in the head—“and the marked thing” (“trying to keep the top of his head down”), as she seeks to figure out “the significance belonging to the relationship between the vestige and its passage” (Time and Narrative 120). Unlike de Certeau, who considers the historical archive as durable and distinct from the logical discourse that organizes it, Ricoeur sees the archive as more ephemeral than and less distinct from the mark that points to it. The mark memorializes the tentativeness of the present's access to the past, which “may even disappear” (Time and Narrative 120). In this sense, the trace is more metaphor than metonym. Recognizing its fragility, Ricoeur says, “[H]istoriography is situated on the fault line between within-time-ness and ordinary time . . . ,” and “historiography, in this sense, must always be poorly grounded” (Time and Narrative 123). Dynamic, fragile, and at times discontinuous, the trace he discusses in the third volume of Time and Narrative is foreshadowed by his consideration of metaphor in his earlier The Rule of Metaphor. There, he sees the power of metaphor in its intermittency, as simultaneously a copula, a connection, and a break; “a metaphoric truth . . . preserves the ‘is not’ within the ‘is’” (Rule of Metaphor 249). The intermittency in Ricoeur's trace contributes to both its tentativeness and its vitality.The trace, however, is too fragile and impermanent to secure Ms. Kennedy's goal, an enduring public memory of the president. The viewer senses her growing understanding of this as she initially asks a broad question on securing historical truth, speculating on how history is validated and maintained. When “something is written down, does that make it true?” she asks the Journalist. Then later, recognizing that the medium of record is shifting, she acknowledges the importance of television, where “people can see with their own eyes.” This is reinforced by the film's early recreation of Ms. Kennedy's televised tour of the White House, suggesting she has already secured some part of the Kennedy legacy.By fixating on the idea of Camelot as a stable trope for maintaining the president's memory in the second half of the film, Ms. Kennedy resolves her progression from private trace to public representation. The viewer sees this in her growing rejection of the “is not” in the metaphorical copula of the trace as she moves to the greater affirmation of the metonymic trope. Her initial trace retains the “is not.” To best think of this, the viewer might imagine a hypothetical sentence Ms. Kennedy could have uttered early in the film, such as “The wonderful expression on my husband's face is/is not the expression of a living man.” By contrast, when the final trope asserts its authority and denies any ambiguity, in a similarly imagined sentence at the film's end, she might have said, “My husband's administration was Camelot.” The representation becomes fixed; it ultimately becomes Rosenstone's closed world. Yet this does not reduce the overall openness of Jackie, which should be seen not in terms of these ultimate results, but in its dramatization of the process. The stability of Camelot is earned throughout the film, and hence the viewer is aware of and has considered the other possibilities along the way. Jackie, which opens with an almost abstract meditation on memory and trace, takes the viewer to the Camelot trope, the ever-present audio recording superimposed over the recurrent images, showing Kennedy playing football or sailing at Hyannis Port, which becomes the metonymy, the more static definition of his presidency. Thus, the viewer feels the progression, the locking down, of historical memory.Jackie is a cracked docudrama because it calls attention to the act of narrating or constructing history through the progression from private trace to public trope. While I, Tonya's split construction demonstrates the interpretation of a limited historical archive, Jackie focuses on historiography itself.Film scholar Carl Plantinga argues convincingly that BlacKkKlansman evokes in its viewers what he calls reflective spectatorship: “spectatorship that is psychologically active, questioning, critical, fascinated and thoughtful” (152–53). Reflective spectatorship is based on a softer, less political reading of the later theories of Bertolt Brecht, where, as Plantinga puts it, the playwright, rather than arguing for alienation alone, concedes that “alienation and distancing techniques can be used in the context of an emotionally engaging film or play” (151). This article endorses Plantinga's finding of reflective spectatorship in
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