To achieve this influence, the films often begin with the premise that we think we know someone, “People think they know Gordon”. Then the documentary reminds us that we don’t know them at all: “The Music You Know, The Story You Don’t.” Any assumption I think I know Gordon Ramsey lacks insight and I’d argue most civilians don’t believe they really know a famous person. There have been moments when a celebrity’s presence or skill has reached beyond the screen and I’ve felt captivated, but not familiar – not closer to knowing how they feel about their parents, or if they’re afraid of the dark. Audiences today are highly aware of their para-social relationships. The notion that the audience believes they know the celebrity undermines the conscious interplay between famous person and civilian, and disavows the audience’s power to enable celebrity in the first place.
After revealing the shocking premise that we don’t know this person, the film is primed to deliver a truthful glimpse into the life of the celebrity. We’re given the opportunity to build a relationship founded on honesty, stripped back to the real. With this, the documentary positions itself as an intervention to reset the narrative, or as a moment in time where we can watch the individual deal with what Ramsey calls the ‘needle of fear’ as they invest in a new project, or to witness the tyrannical arrogance of Melania Trump smugly claiming: ‘Everybody wants to know, so here it is.’ (I really don’t want to). We can experience the famous person’s syntax in conversational form, watch them make coffee, walk through their minimalist living room and talk to their assistant. The audience can witness personhood and fame intersecting, of public and private spheres co-mingling in front of the camera.
Importantly, this is contingent on technological developments as Michael Cannan writes on documentary for the BFI: “The camera is now able to follow its subjects across social boundaries that previously served to keep it from intruding, to enter the semi-private places and intimate spaces of everyday life whose portrayal was previously the privileged province of fiction.” While this medium may be entertaining, in the realm of Netflix documentaries, I don’t think we are much closer to the real or to everyday life. Multiple decisions have gone into the film’s making: where to film, when to film, who to film, what personality or project to centre. They portray a synthesised reality with vested interests.
This fact alone doesn’t always make the celebrity narrative inherently bad. But the paranoia around fact and fiction does render any claim to ‘documentary’ redundant. The documentaries are desperately suggesting their subject is a good or normal person to such an extent, they become unreal, difficult to know, almost sickly repellant. This unreal aspect has been written on by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, in his foundational 2009 text Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, in which he describes ‘a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real’. Consistently, it feels as such, both in our television and broader political landscape.
In the last century, documentary has been one of the most important mediums to reveal lived experience and social change. Some have left indelible marks on myself about the ungraspable aspects of human nature and action. Grappling with deep complexity, leaving me disoriented, but left with a kernel of authentic feeling and real shock. Netflix and other major platforms monetise the power of this medium, and our historical implicit trust in documentary.
The documentaries recently released churn out narratives which are entirely self-contained and hyper-sensical, packaging narrative as product and moving forward without stopping for rest. It’s disconcerting to think of the ethos behind Netflix, who have described their biggest competitor as ‘sleep.’ In conversation with David Beckham, Victoria Beckham states near the end of the three episodes, “I’m not stopping yet”. In many ways Netflix could be considered as speaking through her, as the platform continues to release more tiresome iterations of similar formats.