Over the last year I’ve been fascinated (and terrified…and also amused) by any and all news involving QAnon. While their rise to political significance has been truly strange and troublesome to watch I’ve also gotten a particular, peculiar amount of glee (since the election at least) from watching each of their predictions— Trump winning, Trump arresting Obama, Biden, the Clintons, and the rest of the baby-eating liberal cohort, JFK Jr. coming back in some way— proven unequivocally wrong. Their storm didn’t come. Their strong man lost and slinked back to Florida. They alienated themselves from their friends, family, and co-workers for the sake of a game on the internet. A part of me does feel sorry for them but a larger part of me blames them for helping to create the culture of misinformation and vitriol of the last handful of years. Of course QAnon is a symptom of a larger problem caused by white anger towards minorities and immigrants due to a fear of a loss of status. A cross-section of middle-class whites were always going to be afraid of how social changes would affect their way of life and status in it and, as has happened several times in the course of our country’s history, they were always going to lash out. However, they didn’t need to believe that Tom Hanks drank the blood of babies as a part of an all-encompassing child-sex ring. Someone (or someones) reached back towards ancient anti-semitic tropes, added hints of a a bad espionage novel, and created a lie for a vulnerably toxic mass of bitter contrarians. Who was responsible for this? Could casting harsh daylight on them rupture this following that seems to persist despite a dearth in “Q-drops” since the election? This is the question that the new HBO doc-series sets out to answer over the course of 6 hour-long episodes.
Like many of these docu-mini-series that have proliferated in the years following HBO’s The Jinx, the filmmaker, Cullen Hoback features himself heavily in the footage as a intrepid reporter and truth-seeker (the same way that many of the QAnon vloggers and podcasters see themselves). And, in keeping with the genre, the case is unspooled like a mystery complete with misdirections and cliff-hangers at the end of episodes. While I was entertained by the show and am glad that the filmmaker set out to uncover the person behind this insidious entity I do wonder if the genre got in the way of the stated mission to stop the spread of misinformation and out Q on national scale. This is all to say that this docs-series, like many that I’ve seen of late, should have just been a single 2 hour documentary. When the show premiered four weeks ago it produced a lot of fanfare and publicity but now, weeks later, after the show has finished and the filmmaker made his claim of who he believed Q was, the response has been relatively minimal. Was it really important that we be given so many twists and turns over the course of several weeks to eventually arrive at an answer that was right in front of us all along? In narrative that can be fun but when it’s a matter of current social problems it feels disingenuous at best and misleading at its’ worst. Hasn’t the structure and roll-out of a mystery series hampered the impact of this potentially important discovery? The filmmaker clearly spent years of his life doggedly working on this subject and this work but the final assembly and presentation on HBO plays its’ audience in a way that reflected its subject in a way that left me feeling deeply ambivalent.
Supplemental Response #3
ReplyDeleteMichael, I really like this post because it brings up questions about documentary format that I’ve been thinking about for the entirety of this class (and before as well). What has contributed to the rise of the documentary series lately, and what makes a subject more suited to a documentary series as opposed to a documentary film? I continue to see streaming platforms release documentary series after documentary series, even though many of these shows only have the material to make a compelling 2-hour film.
I too watched the QAnon series on HBO as it was released over the last few weeks, and I found myself frustrated with it in the same way. It feels like Hoback turned in a 15-page paper when the assignment only called for 5 pages—there were tangents, roads that led to nowhere, and the occasional lack of focus. The series wanted to be two things: a mystery series, as well as a deep character study (but was unable to determine which character to focus on). It morphed into a series about three particular people, with QAnon as the framing device. The question he’s trying to answer is so specific that I found myself wanting to watch what I think would be a more interesting series, one that tries to answer a different, more complicated question: Why did/do people believe in QAnon? I think that’s a more complicated question, and one that does warrant a detailed docu-series.
This leads me to the question of the documentary series in general, as it extends beyond this QAnon series. I don’t know all the inner workings of streaming acquisitions, but it seems to me that narrative films and limited series are already determined to be a certain length when they are pitched. But with documentaries, the choice to make your story a film or a series might be determined by other factors: the amount of footage gathered, the potential for money made, and (what I think is the most interesting) the rise in popularity of the documentary series. I wonder how much of the decision to make the QAnon series a series instead of a film was Hoback’s decision, and how much of it was HBO’s.
I don’t know if any of this made sense, and you definitely have a better discussion of it, but I just wanted to say that I concur with your thoughts about the docu-series, and I’m very interested in the subject myself.