Faux Docs as Natural Virals

Well, another film is being heralded as the next "Blair Witch" of viral web marketing. It's no surprise that it's another faux documentary (or "docu-fiction" as these filmmakers prefer to term it.) "September Tapes" is creating all the confusion that a good mixture of reality and fiction should (even though the film has been widely covered from its screenings this year at Sundance and Cannes.) Mike and I have been having some lively email discussions about the campaign, but I think the important issues relate more to the faux doc format (and why that drives filmmakers to build natural virals.)

Back in 2000 when I was raising funds for "Nothing So Strange" (which is also in that genre-bending faux doc style, seperate from the kind of "mock-doc" format practiced by Christopher Guest) we had describe this new narrative ground to skitterish investors -- and we were just shooting Bill Gates and absorbing American political figures, not shooting in a war zone (hats off to Christian Johnston for balls-of-steel production realism.) In an effort to explain it, I relied upon the idea of "reality hacking":

"Public figures, public places and real life events are made use of to forward an entirely fictional narrative, which is then packaged to look as 'real' as the real life events 'borrowed' in the production process. The result? A Barbara Kopple documentary from a parallel dimension."

We also tried to describe it as "ambush filmmaking," a term that director Brian Flemming had used in the past to describe his own work, which we offered up as an "unusual combination of unobtrusive digital video filmmaking, subversive storyline writing, guerrilla staging and the appropriation of public figures and places for dramatic use."

Drawing up historical examples of filmmakers who practiced these techniques was difficult in 2000: I had to rely upon really the one great reality hack film example of all times, Haskell Wexler's 1969 "Medium Cool". Back in that 2000 funding proposal, I described:

"What is unique about [NSS] is it's adoption of 'real life' events and figures recontextualized to serve a dramatic purpose. While many movies in recent years have included some 'borrowing' (for example, Forest Gump's use of CGI to insert new actors into historical footage, or Contact's recontextualization of a Bill Clinton Whitehouse press conference), only one notable film has ever interwoven this technique as deeply into the storyline -- Haskell Wexler's groundbreaking work "Medium Cool," which interweaves the fictional story of a television news cameraman becoming embroiled in the issues and violence erupting around the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Artfully combining documentary footage, staged scenes and Wexler's own footage from the DNC riots, the film generated huge debate about the direction of American filmmaking when it was released in 1969.

If Wexler had the Web as a media tool in 1969, he would have invented the viral marketing of film -- it's a simple evolution from the real revolution of shooting a film in a non-controlled environment, hacking reality in the process at both the film level and the marketing level. Ultimately, it's the versimilitude issue that makes it work: media consumers are hardwired to recognize the aesthetic look of "documentary" or "news coverage" from that of "fiction" or "feature", and on an instinctual level they assign versimilitude to those works that "look like the kind of works you should trust."

Their truth/fiction filters go kablooey. If a journalist did such a thing, they'd call it propoganda or lies or a lapse in journalistic ethics. When a filmmaker does it, it's an act of aesthetic meditation and mediation. It sets the meta-question about that versimilitude into motion in the buzz machines faster than the antidote of factual news coverage can keep up with it. This is a big part of the reason why whenever I talk about "viral marketing" I'm talking about something far more subtle and insidious than "click here to tell a friend" -- true viral marketing absorbs the aesthetics of "potentially trustable source" by steering away from the obvious marketing visual cliches (or subverting them.)

posted to Memetics on June 09, 2004