TV Junkie (2006)

2 years ago

TV Junkie (2006)

AND YOU WASN’T POLITE

By Tess Lynch

The documentary TV Junkie showed up on my radar the way most of my favorite documentaries did: before TiVo — and this is maybe the one regrettable thing about TiVo — I would surf, with razor-focus, usually late at night, the HBO On Demand documentary section. This was, of course, after I’d exhausted the whole catalogue of Fox RC offerings, as well as one amazing season of Shipwrecked on the BBC. I am a big enough person to admit to loving reality shows and documentaries, frivolous crap like The Real World and creepy dark stories about crazy people like Asylum and Cat Dancers; I’m sentimental about and fascinated by people who allow themselves to be filmed, maybe because I’m a self-conscious actor, or maybe because, as a person who likes to tell stories, I am selfishly stealing their real-life characteristics for my own fictions (I do draw the line at things like More To Love (gave it a pretty good college try, though) and The Bachelor, and actually I hate all of the Real Housewives except Nene — this is because these are people who are cast as fictional versions of themselves in an uncreative way. There is no nuance. Screw Luke Conley. Give me Irene and Stephen any day).

stop being so polite!

That’s the thing. The enforcement of “plot” — some stuck in post-production during the editing process, some built into the infrastructure of the show (the matching of roommates on The Real World or the Housewives being prime examples — the ultimate failure in this kind of manufactured drama could be There Goes The Neighborhood, the ultimate snore) — it’s hard not to become acutely aware of it, as if it were subliminal advertising. It goes against the great part of documentaries! The story is there, and that’s when you show up. You tell the story as it happens. You don’t try to make a story out of a situation you think up over Nescafe, tapping a Formica tabletop and plugging people into a drama formula. I may watch it, but it’s still garbage!

Road Rules challenge

The only way to force a plot in an interesting way is if you act alone. For instance:

I decide to make a video of me taking myself very seriously, and the plot I’m trying to illustrate is merely a layer of the seven layer dip of art I’m about to lay on your chips;
I pretend to ignore the presence of the camera;
I express serious, personal sentiments that are not appropriate to showcase as art, or as interesting; in fact, they may be things I would never admit to a person, but because I feel that the lens is intimate, I will disclose these things to many people by way of the camera;
I incriminate myself for no reason in a way that seems premeditated, even though it seems that it could only ever cause me harm.

When people film themselves this way, the viewer gets to connect emotionally with them, pity them, judge them, and tear them to pieces. You see these subjects do the most horrible things, and yet they’re so self righteous! We, and the camera, see more than they do. We see how not-in-control these people are. TV Junkie is the perfect microcosm of all of these wonderful, horrible elements.

point and shoot

TV Junkie is the story of Rick Kirkham, a correspondent for Inside Edition who became addicted to a) filming himself and his family and b) crack cocaine. The documentary was cut together from three thousand hours of footage (!!!!), a lot of it confessional-style: Rick used to confess to the camera about his crack binges, or maybe he’d just film a particularly gnarly fight with his wife. He seemed to film himself as some people might pray. When he needed to confess, when he needed to remember, when he wanted to mark an accomplishment or capture a fleetingly real sentimental moment, he filmed himself and his wife and children. Mostly himself, of course.

At a certain point, the footage of Kirkham and his family turns dark. This was partially due to his crack addiction, and partially due to the fact that, unlike Mr. Kirkham, his family would have preferred to go about their business without some doofus with a camcorder looming over them. Especially as this doofus filmed more and more frequently, ignoring pleas to put it away, seriously, we can just remember it in our minds! There is a fight, one of those real horror shows with screeching and “Hey, hey, come back here, don’t you dare!” that, by way of its capture, makes the Kirkhams seem like shadows on the wall after a nuclear bomb; and yet, of course, Rick can’t stop.

It’s a distinct form of narcissism, I think, the addiction to seeing yourself as others might, projected onto a screen. Things look simpler, and though the light is not always flattering, nothing is ever unimportant; being on film elevates our actions into being contextual, part of a larger plan that we might be able to glimpse if we keep watching, watching, dissecting. Perhaps we could even see the end, or see the point, or understand why we were ever here in the first place. It becomes a cheap way to beat death. Maybe, too, the uglier we allow ourselves to be — and especially when we confuse the ugliness for truthfulness — the more we’ll be able to forgive ourselves.

Tess Lynch is a product of modernism. She tumbls here.