“Everybody is an unreliable narrator.” Errol Morris

Originally posted June 2021

Intro
The search for truth and ascertaining what can be ‘known’ is an ongoing theme in philosophy, science and documentary filmmaking. It’s also been a theme of my life. I grew up in a religion obsessed with having and knowing The Truth. On Sunday mornings church members would often stand up and bare witness their testimony of the church’s Ultimate Truth. Religious expectations required that members always end testimony with the phrase, “I know that this church is true.” I was trained to say those words for many years, but as I turned eighteen, I began to realize that I lacked confidence in the doctrine’s veracity. So I left the church. For some time, I had no idea what I believed about the world, so I became comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing. It may sound unsettling, but it’s actually quite a freeing way to live.

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When I became a researcher, discomfort with ambiguity crept in. I craved more certainty in my findings. As a Qualitative Design Researcher for a large tech company, my job mostly entailed interviewing people about their use of technology. After interviews, I would compile my notes and video clips and analyse them for patterns, themes and insights. While partnering with other researchers, I began to notice that this process was more subjective than I’d imagined. Some researchers would highlight particular insights they deemed important and leave out others entirely. Had I analysed that data, the report would definitely look different. The findings would overlap, maybe even be the same, but the emphasis would be different. This ability to sort through the data and decide what was significant and to have an opinion on it was actively encouraged. However, during presentations, research insights would often be scrutinized by team members who worked in other disciplines who believed in a certain scientific way of knowing — of finding the truth. For most of these disciplines, numbers were the most valuable form of data. Numbers didn’t add emphasis. Any evidence of subjectivity in the qualitative research was taken as a flaw and a reason to cast doubt on the findings. I’ve often wondered how to reconcile these very different schools of thought and ways of seeing ‘truth.’

There is also a lot of overlap between the methodologies of qualitative research and documentary filmmaking, so it would make sense that there are similar conversations in both fields about the role of subjectivity. Some filmmakers, like those in the cinema veriteé tradition, believe that if they strictly follow a set of stylistic constraints, they will be guaranteed a truthful outcome. However, I tend to agree with Errol Morris when he says that “Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression… it isn’t guaranteed by anything” (Morris quoted in Bruzzi, 2006, p. 6). According to subsequent explanations, what Morris meant by this is that if truth, or iterations of it, exist, they must be actively sought — just picking the right style or method will not guarantee a truthful outcome. In fact nothing can fully guarantee that, as there are too many variables to account for, however that doesn’t mean that layers of truth do not exist.

In this paper, I will look at some of the perspectives on truth, including objective reality versus subjective truth, as discussed by filmmaker Errol Morris. Using a particularly illuminating interview from 2004, I will analyse elements of Morris’ philosophy of investigative realism in relation to documentary filmmaking. Key to this discussion will be Morris’ definitions of truth as a spectrum of control, especially in regards to setting up scenes and interviewing subjects. As interviews are the main overlap between documentary filmmaking and qualitative research, I will use my situated knowledge of qualitative interviewing methods to look closely at some of the questions posed by interviews and their claims to truth. I will end by referencing a short case study on the dueling Whitney Houston films and their filmmakers respective views on subjective truth in relation to Morris’ views.

What’s an investigative realist?
On his views regarding truth, documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris has professed to be an “investigative realist.” According to Morris, what he means by this is that he believes in the existence of some indisputable facts about events taking place in the world. He explains, “…underneath the question [of truth] there’s a physical reality. I am a realist in that sense, I believe in the real world. Just like there’s a fact of the matter of whether there was an attack on August 4th in the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s not up for grabs. Either we were attacked or we weren’t attacked” (Morris in The Believer, 2004). Morris, as a former philosophy student and private detective, believes in an objective set of physical realities, things that either happened or didn’t happen. But he also concedes that people may have different views or feelings around what happened, in addition to different reasons for not telling or wanting to acknowledge ‘the truth’ of the physical reality (The Believer, 2004). Morris believes “Pursuing truth is a high aspiration — I believe in it as a calling” (Grierson, 2017). A big part of pursuing truth, for Morris, is to uncover the reasons and motives behind why someone might tell lies.

Morris’ films were a reaction against certain ideals that had been set up in early documentary films, namely cinema verité and direct cinema. In both of those styles of films, filmmakers attempted to be unobtrusive observers of the action they were filming without additional artistic embellishment. However, the problem of this style of filmmaking, for Morris, was not in it’s style per se, but in its claims to ‘truth.’ Cinema verité translating literally to ‘film truth.’ The problem is not that this style of filmmaking can not make interesting, valuable contributions to film, but that it claims to have The Truth, and to be The Truth. For Morris this was an unacceptable claim.

“What I don’t like about verité is this claim that somehow you’re guaranteed truthfulness by virtue of style. That’s my complaint. That somehow because a film has been made in a certain way — handheld camera, available light, fly on the wall — that somehow it becomes more truthful as a result. I respectfully disagree. My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in veriteé. Maybe more so. I don’t believe that truth is handed over by stylistic choice. It’s a pursuit” (Morris in The Believer, 2004).

Morris is not arguing that cinema verité style films can’t be truthful. But he is saying that just because you set up a certain stylistic, or methodological framework for your film does not guarantee that you will shoot something ‘truthful’ nor does it mean that the ultimate meaning of the film will be truthful. As it’s been documented that many early documentary filmmakers who claimed to be unobtrusive observers had actually staged scenes or cast characters outright (Nichols, 2019, p.34), we can see that making a claim to truth based on style or method can be a dubious and even a dangerous claim.

A spectrum of control
For Morris, truth is an ideal that must be consciously pursued, but controlled and uncontrolled cinematic space is a different proposition entirely. Morris’ films, especially Thin Blue Line, have been critiqued for including reenactments, artificial lighting, staged backdrops, and interviewees looking directly into the camera — elements that up to that point had been used only for fiction films and were off-limits to documentaries wanting to be taken seriously. Morris has always actively defended these stylistic choices against these critiques. In an interview with The Believer magazine in 2014, he discusses the stereotypes of fiction vs nonfiction films and the amount of creative control and license that go into each style. Though long, I reproduce it here in order to show the entirety of his line of thought.

“I believe we have two ideas [about how movies are made] in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinema verite. What does the auteur theory tell us: everything you see on the screen has been controlled. The casting, the lighting, the framing, the selection of what emulsion to use in the camera, the words that are spoken, the wardrobe, the makeup. Everything that you’re seeing has been controlled by some central authority. There is a kind of puppeteer — the director — pulling the strings. The flipside of it is verite: everything you see in front of the camera is uncontrolled. The director observes, records, but in no way influences, in no way determines what will happen in front of the camera. And so what people are really talking about is not truth and fiction when they talk about drama and documentary. What they’re talking about is control and lack of control. What I think I’ve done, and I guess that’s what makes me perhaps ‘modern’ is that I draw the line in a different place. The line between the controlled and the uncontrolled is somewhere else” (Morris in The Believer, 2004).

Basically, Morris is saying that ‘truth’ in relation to the filmmaking process, is always a spectrum — a mixture of fiction and reality, by this he means, of things that are spontaneous and things that are controlled. Morris says the most uncontrolled elements of his films are the interviews: “I don’t tell people what to say. My use of extemporaneous talk turned into narration is the documentary element in what I do. What people are going to say in front of the camera, and how they are going to present themselves in front of the camera are not controlled by me. It’s one of the strengths of my interviews that I really, honest to god, have no idea what people are going to say” (Morris in The Believer, 2004). This is in contrast to some documentary filmmakers like Werner Herzog — who has confessed to crafting specific lines and scenes for his subjects to say in order to enhance his chosen storyline (Simington, 2016). Some other documentarians think this is dishonest, and I do tend to agree, but on the other hand, it’s really only a couple of moves away on the control spectrum from Errol Morris.

Morris says the interviews he conducts for his film are not controlled in relation to what people choose to say, however controlled and influenced are different things. Just like in qualitative research, when you’re interviewing someone, you know that your presence is having some sort of effect on what the person is going to say (Goffman, 1990). This is where the idea of performativity comes into play. The documentary subjects, even during an interview, are performing, even unconsciously, for the camera and the filmmaker (Bruzzi, 2006). Morris’ argument however, is not that there isn’t any element of performance, but that truth is dependent on whether the subject is autonomously choosing for themselves what actions/words they’re going to perform without telling them what to say.

Are interviews the key to truth?
Documentary films contain elements of many other disciplines including social science and qualitative research. The interview portion of a documentary is the biggest overlap in methodology with social science. When conducting an interview, a filmmaker has a decision to make on how and where to carry-out an interview and how structured or uncontrolled it should be. Many of these choices during an interview determine where on the ‘Morris truth spectrum’ a film lies (pun intended). Filmmakers can play with expectations and set up an entirely scripted interview and make it look spontaneous or you can have an entirely spontaneous interview on a very staged set. Again, the style of the shot does not determine whether or not the interview itself was scripted or spontaneous.

However, that’s not to say there isn’t any pressure placed on an interviewee by a filmmaker or researcher to say certain things even if it’s fully unscripted. In addition, the setting, the questions, and the edit are still fully in control of the filmmaker/researcher. The control over context, where the interview is placed in the film, also has a lot to do with it’s ultimate meaning. This is why reality TV show contestants are constantly whining about “getting a bad edit.” There is a lot of control on the filmmakers’ part. To deny that would be dishonest or naive. But in searching for ‘truth,’ there’s a lot of space between a scenario in which uncontrolled factors influence an interview, and scripting an interview. So, though there may be many outside elements influencing an interviewee, as long as he isn’t telling them what to say, Morris believes his interviews are uncontrolled. which in turn means they hold an element of truth. When a subject tells a lie during an interview, that is also the truth of what happened in that moment. Truth has many layers and aspects. But Morris is fully aware of this fact during his interviews. It’s actually the reason he calls himself an ‘investigative realist’ in contrast to a ‘naive realist.’ Morris doesn’t believe the truth is something that people are generally going to just hand over to you, but something that must be pursued (Morris, 2014). But how does one pursue truth without influencing it?

Case study: Macdonald v. Broomfield
In the recent documentary on the life of Whitney Houston, Whitney (2018), filmmaker Kevin Macdonald had to counter for some of the ways that his interview subjects were purposefully leaving out details and obfuscating the truth during interviews. He explained, “People were not being fully truthful. A lot. A LOT! I’ve never encountered so many people who gave me just a superficial PR perspective on things” (Macdonald in Bunbury, 2018). As an experienced interviewer, had he not known where to probe deeper to get more meaningful answers from his interviewees, Macdonald, ultimately would have had a less truthful film. This film would have ended up needing to create a narrative based on surface details, much like Nick Broomfield’s earlier documentary on Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston: Can I Be Me? (2018). Because of Broomfield’s lack of access to Houston’s close friends and family, he had to form his documentary around interviews with record label insiders, other distant connections, and his own intuition. However, a key insight from Macdonald’s film, the revelation of early childhood abuse, was also available to Broomfield since he interviewed the same brother, Gary Houston, for his film. However, I would argue, Broomfield’s style of interviewing did not make this subject feel comfortable enough to reveal that deeper truth. Ironically, the style of the interview, while not guaranteeing ‘truth,’ can have an effect on the amount of truth that is revealed.

The existence of these two similar films forced even reviewers to grapple with the subjectivity involved in documentary filmmaking: “Broomfield and Macdonald offer such different versions of the events of Houston’s life as to accidentally remind us of the naivety of the assumption that these movies are objective in the first place.” (The Ringer, 2018). Interestingly, Broomfield has stated that he believes only in subjective truth (CBC, 2011). Macdonald, on the other hand, seems to hold a similar view to Errol Morris: “The world is full of opinion. What we need is people who go out and find the facts” (Burrel, 2012). However, the presence of subjectivity does not negate truth. Both films contain truth, both objective (events) and subjective (feelings). It seems that the beliefs of a filmmaker do not always influence how much truth is included in their films.

If truth during an interview must be pursued, as Morris and Macdonald argue, then, I would say it’s the skill of emotional intelligence that allows for that pursuit. The art of interviewing uses emotional intelligence to infer what is being left out and to attempt to probe deeper and attempt to find a deeper meaning. This probably isn’t a controversial statement for documentary filmmakers to accept, but is difficult for qualitative researchers to concede. However, it’s obvious to me that the methodology and skills required are ultimately the same for both fields and will always be subjective and done differently by each interviewer. This isn’t necessarily a flaw, but part of the ongoing, iterative process of searching for truth. Ultimately, it’s still a subjective choice to decide when you’ve discovered the truth. It’s a delicate balance that will always be managed differently by different people. Broomfield was content with the level of truth that he was able to reveal. Macdonald was able to take that level down by one more layer. Are there yet more layers and dimensions of the truth to be discovered? Always.

Conclusion
Morris’ filmmaking career can be seen as an attempted rebuttal of both the naive realism of cinema veriteé and of the radical postmodern view that reality does not exist outside our conceptions of it (Horgan, 2019). Morris’ philosophy of investigative realism asserts that facts, physical realities exist, outside our conceptions of them, but that ultimate truth within a documentary film can’t be guaranteed by a certain style or method since we are all unreliable narrators of our own subjective experience. Therefore, he takes his job as a filmmaker to be a pursuit of ever deeper layers of truth, especially in regards to historical events. In this stance, Morris walks a fine line between the two extremes of objective realism and subjective constructionism. Using part of his own term, this stance could be rightly called postmodern investigative realism. Facts exist. Events occurred. But their meanings are fluid, and contingent and always up for debate. Filmmakers who take an active role in that debate may risk becoming too involved and constructing truth instead of finding it. But those who are conscious of this possibility are more prepared to walk that fine line between constructing meaning and manufacturing events.

Copyright. 2020 Brighton Hudak-Kay

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