Sin #72: Confessions

Documentaries have a way of packing much more of an emotion wallop than the usual sensationalistic stories we hear from the news. They provide a personal input and tap directly into the psyche of their subjects, drawing us in. A few weeks ago I saw a documentary called "Dear Zachary: A Letter to A Son About His Father" that features one of the most shocking stories I've ever seen on the screen. It all starts with Andrew Bagby, a medical student with two wonderful parents and great friends (the movie is directed by Kurt Kuenne, one of his close friends). Andrew is lonely and depressed in his internship and one day meets a medical resident named Shelley Turner (a woman in her 40s that has already 3 estranged children from different men). His friends know that something is very wrong with her but Andrew starts dating her for a while; he then senses her jealousy and manic depressive tendencies and tries to leave Shelley. In a violent rampage she kills him and flees the country. What happens next is truly horrific as justice lets Dr. Turner walk away and then she reveals that she is pregnant with Andrew's son.

The story of "Dear Zachary" is the stuff of tabloid glory and a more morbid filmmaker could easily have turned it into a soap opera of unnerving melodrama. Fortunately the movie never takes that road and instead it becomes a powerful tragedy of a failed system and the suffering of an entire community (the one bright spot in the whole piece is the heroism shown by Andrew’s parents, who have faced terrible struggles).

Another amazing work is “Tarnation” in which a man named Jonathan Couette makes a home movie documenting his life. Within a 200 dollar budget, the use of editing tools from a Macintosh computer, hours of video footage and family pictures, it goes very deep and affects us with its protagonist’s honesty.

“Tarnation” doesn’t feel like a regular movie and sometimes enters into the realm of conceptual video art with its use of old movie footage and kaleidoscopic color scheme; it’s like a video diary on acid but its accumulative power is undeniable. The footage Couette captures related to his psychological disturbed mother reminded me of the family footage in “Capturing the Friedmans”, another disturbing and haunting work that focuses on the destruction of the family nucleus after the shocking accusation of the father’s pederasty. The details of the case sometimes go on such a level of pornographic detail that it makes us recoil in disgust but, just like a car wreck, we can’t look away. The Friedmans are so tormented by the sins of the father that they remain a fascinating case for any psychiatrist and a hypnotic voyage into madness for audiences.

These three documentaries feature some of the most harrowing scenes in recent memory and subjects that are intrinsically frail and weak, in other words, completely human. While none offer comfort at the end and leave us really in a state of emotional exhaustion, they create a stark portrait of the dark nature of man.