I love documentaries. I even prefer them to movies and fictional tv series. I can't even imagine life without them.
At the same time I think that documentaries about people's personal lives are actually a mild form of exploitation. I like watching them as I mentioned before but I also feel like a voyeur whilst doing so. The world of television is probably a hard and brutal environment and the more misfortune the subject of the documentary is experiencing the more interesting it becomes to the viewers and therefore to the makers of the documentary and the network. There are some ethical questions that can be raised here. Nowadays we live in a world in which most people apparantly like to become famous or known to the rest of the world but on the other hand it must be terribly stressful to appear in a documentary. The pressure must be enormous and unbearable.
A good example is this is the British and former USSR Up Series. Absolutely great documentaries but I can't understand for the life of me why the people who appear in these series keep committing themselves to doing it. It's probably okay if you are content or even proud of your life but when you are experiencing all kinds of problems appearing on television can beome too much. Some of them have appearing in these series for 50 years now which probably means 50 years of nerve wracking pressure not to mention the fact that it can be devastatingly confrontational to see yourself in earlier stages of your life. The thought that a good deal of the western world sees you as well must make one feel vulnerable in a certain sense. The only way to deal with that may be the thought that you can get something out of it, a questionable motive but that is how the world works. The participants couldn't even refuse when the series started because they where kids who, at the time, probably thought that the whole thing was going to be big fun. That doesn't mean that I don't like the series though.
It's a good thing that I wasn't chosen to appear in a documentary like the up series because I would have quit the series as soon as I became 21, with a big sigh of relief and a feeling of freedom. There is no way that I could have dealt with appearing on television every 7 years. It would have wrecked me.
09 Jun 2014, 8:52 pm
