Yesterday Joy Moses, one of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress, wrote about the importance of A Place At The Table, a documentary about food security, that premiered just as the sequester began, cutting hundreds of thousands of recipients from the Women Infants and Children food program. And so I was struck today when AV Club critic Scott Tobias used the movie as a hook to argue that we’re more tolerant of stylistic stagnation in documentaries than we are in feature films, in part because we’re more likely to privilege the information in them over the way they’re presented. He writes:

I’ve often argued that the “movieness” of movies is undervalued—that we accept the indifferent, workmanlike craft of deliberate mediocrities over flashier, more conspicuous failures. But the “movieness” of documentaries rarely becomes an issue, which only encourages the stereotype of the documentary as a hearty gruel of talking heads and archival footage, spooned out as artlessly as the school lunches A Place At The Table criticizes so vociferously.

The thinking that documentaries need merely to seek or present some kind of truth, regardless of how those truths are presented, strikes me as dated at a time when the elasticity of the format is constantly being tested. Why should documentaries be forgiven any more than fiction films for failing to use the medium expressively or dynamically? Why give a pass to bland info-dumps like A Place At The Table?

I was curious to read the piece, in part because since I got back from the Sundance film festival, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what makes an effective documentary. One thing I think Scott may not necessarily be acknowledging about A Place At The Table is that, to a certain extent, it is a deviation from the norm to turn the camera on poor people and to treat them as if they’re experts, even if only on their own experiences. And I think I’m significantly more tolerant than he is of using documentary film to make arguments, something he acknowledges that he’s leaving out “entire categories of documentary unaccounted for, like acts of investigative journalism (the Paradise Lost movies, for example) or essays both personal (like the films of Ross McElwee or Michael Moore) and editorial (like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job or No End In Sight),” though I’m surprised that he’s comfortable with Kirby Dick’s powerful The Invisible War, a movie I think is as polemic and argumentative, and as designed to provoke action as much as A Place At The Table is. But I want to make a different argument: attention to the craft of filmmaking can strengthen documentary film’s ability to convey facts and to convince audiences. But it can also trade off with getting the facts across in a way that’s not just dishonest: it’s damaging.

I was struck most strongly by this problem watching Zhao Qi’s Fallen City at Sundance. The film is a beautifully-shot exploration of how a number of families are trying to rebuild their lives after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, an 8.0 magnitude event that killed 68,000 people in the region. Its lingering shots of buildings that have literally sunk into the earth, often shot from the hills far above the city where the movie is set, images of ruined structures being taken back by trees and grass, and chronicles of the construction of a replacement city are both gorgeous as photography and give a strong psychological sense of what it must be like to have your entire world disappear in front of you. But for all the time the movie spends on these striking visuals, Zhao literally never once mentions a factor that is critically important to understanding why the devastation is so severe, and why his subjects are responding to the events the way they are: in the earthquake, schoolrooms collapsed at a rate disproportionate to other construction, killing rural children at a high rate, and leading many parents and activists to believe that corruption contributed to shortcuts in school construction.
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This post discusses plot elements from the March 6 episode of The Americans.

Since its very first episode, The Americans has used its baroque scenario, which takes two KGB spies in an arranged marriage that serves as their cover as an ordinary American couple and plants them across the street from an FBI agent coming out of deep cover with white supremacists, as a way to blow out the biggest issues that face even ordinary marriages. This week’s episode took the idea that your spouse knows you better than anyone else—or as Curtis Sittenfeld would put it, ““Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable?”—and reframed it a different way: what does it do to people to share profound secrets? What does it mean to betray them? And what happens if you share those secrets, as Elizabeth does with Gregory and Stan now does with Nina, with someone other than the person you’re married to?

Stan may have been drawn to Nina from the beginning because she’s an attractive woman who is apparently more independent than her fellow Soviets in Washington. But increasingly, the two of them are pulled together because Nina, unlike Stan’s wife, though in a situation of Stan’s own making, understands what he went through when he was undercover with the white supremacist groups he was investigating in a way Stan’s wife does not. “Listen to me, Nina,” he told her when they met in the museum. “I’ve been where you are. I’ve lived it. I know what it is to feel fear in every fiber of your being and not be able to show it. I can get you out. But you have to stay with me, okay?” When he tries to quell her fears about being caught, shot, put on a plain to the Soviet Union and being found inevitably guilty, Stan tells her “You won’t be. You can do this, Nina. We can do this,” with a conviction that’s born out of doing it himself. When Stan and Nina pull off the caper that plants the diamonds in Vasili’s tea and the camera with pictures of documents on it in his radio, Stan is simultaneously proving to himself that, despite his boss’s belief that he’s not a good liar, he still has the wit and skills to protect himself should he need to, demonstrating to Nina that he can protect her, and freeing her from having to sleep with Vasili—which potentially makes her sexually available to him. As awful a thing as it’s been for Stan to put Nina under this kind of pressure, The Americans has done a subtle, careful job of demonstrating how tied up Stan is in the idea that she can survive. Giving her a new life is a proxy for returning to his own: the success of each enterprise seems to depend on the other, and if Nina were to be caught or killed, I can imagine Stan withdrawing deep into himself.

That’s a risky equation for the health of Stan’s marriage. And the impact on his wife of not knowing about his life undercover and his work at present is clear, even though she’d likely be even more wounded if she knew how much he was sharing with Nina. “I get that you can’t tell me things, the secrets and stuff. But there has to be something you can share with me from work. Your boss gets on your nerves, your partner thinks he’s funny,” Stan’s wife asks him a little wistfully. And in return, he relaxes a little, but only enough to tell her the safe version of the story. “Sometimes what I do get scary. Not for me,” he says, avoiding revealing the emotional connection between himself and Nina. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. But I have to worry about people. And today, it got pretty scary. But it worked out. It was a tough day, but it was a good day.” Stan may be in bed with his wife, but the relationship he’s putting work and emotional investment into is the one with Nina.

Elizabeth and Phillip, by contrast, find themselves torn from their homes by forces who first appear to be American agents, because while Phillip thought he and Elizabeth were functioning like a real couple, she was doing her duty and reporting her doubts about him to their superiors. “You told them. You told them I considered defecting. That’s why this is happening,” Phillip realizes, horrified, after finding out that Elizabeth wasn’t tortured, simply pressured with pictures of Paige and Henry, while Phillip, by contrast, was beaten and waterboarded. Elizabeth tries to convince him otherwise, but given what we’ve seen that Phillip hasn’t, we know she’s being partially untruthful when she insists “If I said anything that made them think, if I said anything, it would have been so long ago….I told them that you liked it here too much.” Elizabeth may have convinced herself that she wasn’t indicting Phillip by acknowledging that she had had doubts about him. But in reality, telling their superiors that she was no longer experiencing doubts about Phillip’s loyalties likely made Soviet higher-ups more suspicious of her than secure of him.
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The bridge is yours.

-Hispanics are the future of Hollywood.

-Inspirational lady scientists.

-I’m amused by the idea that Goldman Sachs owned a bunch of the CSI franchise.

-I’m glad they’ve figured out who ordered the acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet director.

-Why Duck Dynasty is so successful.

In the annual meeting of the Disney Company’s shareholders on Wednesday, Justin Danhof, the general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, which owns Disney stock, asked company president Bob Iger what he intended to do to about a liberal bias in the company’s news outlets, including ESPN and ABC News:

It’s particularly strange to hear Danhof cite Rob Parker suggesting that Robert Griffin III was “a cornball brother” for being engaged to a white woman and possibly having Republican political beliefs as evidence of some sort of liberal bias on the part of ESPN. The idea that it’s liberal to believe that people should date and marry within their racial and ethnic groups as a form of solidarity has no particular basis in the existing discourse. And while it’s not unreasonable to debate why African-American or Latino voters tend to vote Democratic or Republican based on those parties’ histories and platforms, I don’t know that there are a lot of people on either side of the aisle who saw Parker’s condemnation of Griffin as a constructive contribution to that debate. But in any case, it wasn’t as if Disney endorsed Parker’s analysis of Griffin’s racial loyalties. ESPN suspended Parker for 30 days over the comments and ultimately chose not to renew his contract, citing his comments about Griffin as a factor.

The example of Brian Ross suggesting that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado midnight screening of The Dark Knight is potentially a better example of bias, but it’s also a case study in how a broken reporting and vetting process can interact with political assumptions to put bad information on the air. The problem is less that Ross made that assumption—I don’t think there’s anything wrong about thinking through potential political affiliation and other motivations or influences as inspirations for reporting— but that he broadcast it without ensuring that it was factually accurate. If there were procedures in place that prevented Ross from attributing political motivations and organizational affiliations to the man who turned out to be James Holmes without solid reporting behind it, then the fact that he considered Holmes’ affiliations off-air wouldn’t have mattered. And it’s not as if it would be appropriate to have a rule that prevented, say, the on-air identification of Holmes as a Democrat or a member of an Occupy group, if that had turned out to be correct. The problem isn’t politics. It’s fact-checking. Iger’s acknowledgement that “we have at times either presented the news in a slightly inaccurate way through mistakes or in ways that we weren’t necessarily proud of,” is the right problem to identify. But it’s true that it would have been helpful if ABC News president Ben Sherwood had been more willing to publicly address the procedures or violations thereof that lead to Ross’ broadcast, which would have shifted the emphasis from political problems to reportorial ones.

Shifting that debate won’t satisfy everyone, of course. There are some conservatives who will always work backwards from outcomes, convinced that reporting that doesn’t reach conservative conclusions must be flawed because it didn’t arrive in a place that confirms their worldview or that makes them comfortable. But news organizations should stick to fixing processes that produce both inaccuracies and the perception of bias, rather than letting themselves be nudged into seeking outcomes that will take heat off of them.