88: Archival Footage

I've been catching up with a handful of 2023 movies I missed, because they're on the end-of-year awards ballot for my critics' circle. This year's catch-up batch gave me a few discoveries: my least favorite movie of 2023 (and now let us never speak of it again), and a pair of documentaries I wouldn't have otherwise sought out, but am glad I made the time for.

Based on their subject matter, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie and The Disappearance of Shere Hite don't seem to have all that much in common. Still takes stock of Michael J. Fox's career up to the early aughts, around the time of his disclosure that he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's; it also functions as a sort of memoir, with space to explore what life is like for him now. Disappearance is more of a history piece about sex educator and feminist Shere Hite, the publication of her 1976 book The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, and the response and eventual fallout of her work. Their styles are very different. Still, the two documentaries play on common strings, and they use similar methods to communicate their stories.

Both films are about charismatic people who were suddenly thrust into unexpected fame for their work, and who eventually disappeared by degrees from the public eye (Fox retired from acting a few years ago; Hite renounced her U.S. citizenship, and she has since passed away). Both rely on their subjects' own words. Fox tells his own story through voiceover and direct-to-camera interview. Hite's story is pulled from excerpts of her writing, and given life again via a voiceover performance by Dakota Johnson. Crucially, both rely on extensive archival footage. Fox's life is traced by repurposing clips from the movies and TV shows he starred in. For her part, Hite was a model in college so she could pay for school, and Disappearance makes use of the photos to help give us a sense of who she'd been as a person.

Both films' use of archival footage is perfectly suited for the subjects at their centers. Fox is charismatic; Hite had been, too. Both had been thrust into the public consciousness when they were very young. Both were performers who started with nothing. The clips of Fox's acting work in Still draw attention to the fact that, although Fox was incredibly famous, nobody who watched his work really knew who he was. The clips are re-edited into the story of Fox's life, so that when the documentary discusses the early years of his marriage to actress Tracey Pollan, the footage we see is of their work together on the sitcom Family Ties; other clips are repurposed more liberally, such as a bewildered Marty McFly standing in for Fox's own bewilderment at being suddenly struck by fame. Hite, for her part, had been a reluctant model, at least according to Disappearance. Later in life when she promoted her books, her appearances on newscasts and talk shows betrayed her reticence and her frustration with not being taken seriously. It's clear that she never had training for going in front of a TV camera. But the camera loved her, and she had a flamboyant sense of style.

Both documentaries use their archival footage to construct a double image of their subjects: first, the public persona, the version of the person everybody saw, and thought they knew, and had an opinion about, as well as the second, private identity. Because Fox and Hite were both playing their own roles, the repurposed footage also serves to emphasize the fact that their public personas weren't actually them. Audiences assumed Hite was a man-hater who didn't know how to conduct research, and that Fox was fine. The footage in each documentary reveals the truth under the surface: Hite was driven and intelligent; Fox was wrestling with his diagnosis for years before he announced it publicly. Still takes the time to point out the motions Fox used to mask his symptoms, teaching us what to look for, so that we know what audiences at the time overlooked.

The double image of the public persona and the private person is what unifies these two documentaries. All celebrity-memoir documentaries are acts of public relations, giving the illusion that we're being given access to something that no one else knows exists. Still doesn't manage to fully sidestep this issue. Director David Guggenheim calls Fox out in an interview portion for not saying when he'd started to feel pain. This callout is strategically placed near the end of the documentary, and it serves to both raise the question of whether Fox is being entirely forthright about his condition with the filmmakers, and also put the same question to bed. After all, there are matters of medical privacy best left unrecorded. In revealing that there is a curtain between public and private life, Fox is able to step back behind the curtain once more.

As for Hite, Disappearance bookends her life story with modeling clothes for photography. The time spent modeling in her youth had been for money; the time in front of the camera after she'd retreated from the United States is framed as a reclamation of her ability to perform herself. Both films reveal the double life of celebrity, and neither manages to fully satisfy the question about who their respective subjects are, really. Neither documentary needs to answer the question anyway. They're less about definitive answers and more about underlining the fact that the difference between person and persona exists at all.

Still is streaming on Apple TV+. The Disappearance of Shere Hite is available for rental or purchase on most major streaming platforms.

What I wrote about:

For Bright Wall/Dark Room's Best of 2023 issue, I wrote about Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up.

What I talked about:

And for Think Christian, I joined Josh Larsen, JR. Forasteros, and Joe George to talk about the best TV of 2023...which means I had a platform to sing the praises of Trigun: Stampede.