29. What Happened to the Blockbuster Documentary?

Often, when we look at our screens, we’re looking for distractions, But just as often, we want to be informed. This election weekend, maybe a frantic mixture of both. If we can be informed and be entertained? Even better. Almost all of our coverage on The Entertainment so far has been focused on narrative spaces, telling fictional stories or adapting reality into something broadly fictional. But, of course, much of what has been on screens since 1922’s Nanook of the North has existed in a hazy space known as the documentary. What is a documentary? It seems like a deceptively simple question until you start to unpack it. Is a documentary news? Should its standards be that of journalism? Of the essay? Of authenticity? How authentic can a documentary or, for that fact, the news ever really be?

These questions are, of course, evergreen while the key players change. Just this past month, Am I Racist?—directed by Justin Folk, and starring The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh—became the highest grossing documentary of the decade and had the highest opening weekend for a documentary in 20 years since Michael Moore’s unprecedented and unparalleled blockbuster documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Walsh is, of course, very far from Michael Moore’s politics, and yet may be a kind of successor of the Moore revolution in documentary filmmaking centered on a scrappy outsider trolling the establishment. I wondered: is this a political realignment of the popular documentary? Will there ever be another blockbuster documentary? To dive into these questions, I asked Joshua LaBure, critic, host of KIOS at the Movies, and documentarian himself, director of The Women Who Ran and The Instrument in Six Movements, among others, to come on the show and talk through the wild ride of the genre over the past several decades.

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