Movies as imitations

I don't like true crime very much. 

I had been thinking about this on the very morning I watched Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo (2008), which is not a true crime story but is told like one, with interviews, old photos, old videos stopped into freeze frame, and a central mystery. It's actually more like part of the ghost hunters genre than the true crime drama, but you'll agree those have a lot of overlap in their basic structure.

Anyway, I'd been thinking, with no small amount of superiority -- and my apologies if this offends you personally, dear reader -- that loving true crime means you are not a very interesting person. You are much more interesting if you spend multiple hours each day obsessing over the professional performances of a bunch of men who hit a tiny ball around a field, because you assembled them into an imaginary team that competes against other imaginary teams all season long. (The point is, we all have our comfort food.)

But a movie that imitates the true crime format? Hell yeah, I like that a lot. Maybe even love it.

Lake Mungo is in the broader found footage/mockumentary genre that had plenty of life back in 2008, but it feels like a more sophisticated effort than many of the things you would typically find in that genre. More sophisticated for how it looks, but not because it looks slick or visually dynamic in the ways we usually aspire to see in motion pictures. No, it's more sophisticated because it looks and feels exactly like real true crime, with actors giving performances that mimic the rhythms of real people so closely, you'd swear these were actually Australians living in regional Victoria circa 2008.

In fact, I was surprised to discover that the movie is set in the town of Ararat, surprised because I had never been to that town until a week ago. I can't actually say I've been to it, because we decided against stopping there to charge our car on the way back from camping last weekend, opting to continue on through to the larger Ballarat about 45 minutes later. But I've driven through it, and only a week ago. A week later, I randomly watched this. (It's been a week of quite a lot of movie coincidences. I also saw, but have chosen not to write about, two different movies set partially on the Italian island of Capri, which were Contempt on Monday night, which I wrote about for other reasons, and Another Simple Favor, which I saw Thursday.)

Anyway, it's about a teenage girl who drowned -- not actually in the titular lake, which is not actually a lake but an arid desert-like climate -- and about her family trying to piece together what led up to it, and also what came after it. The latter being that they may still be seeing her around as a ghost. 

It's one of those ghost stories that you'd think would be less chilling because of the documentary-style format surrounding the spooky details. But it's pretty damn chilling. It put me in mind of the scariest real documentary I've ever seen, The Nightmare, in that the talking head interview format not only doesn't sap the movie of its scares, but might actually increase them in some conterintuitive way.

But back to what I really came here to talk about.

One of the core reasons we like movie is because they imitate. One of the highest pieces of praise we can give a movie, albeit a somewhat broad and simplistic piece of praise, is to call it "realistic." The closer something on screen seems to resemble something we can actually recognize, the more successful we think a movie has been.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions to that. Sometimes you want a movie to be fanciful, to purposefully explore the artificial. But even in wild fantasies or experimental films, we want to connect to something that is emotionally true or observant about whatever it is the movie is exploring.

I don't suppose this is a surprising revelation, or that it is even a revelation. All art attempts to communicate emotion truth to the observer, something we can relate to our own lives or experiences, even if the art contains subject matter that is vastly different from our own experiences. 

But a movie like Lake Mungo can reveal things that may be obvious to us in new ways. Specifically, that there is something in the very act of imitation that is, in itself, fascinating, and that, in itself, elevates the material even beyond our own particular preferences.

I have no particular preference for true crime/ghost hunter material, in fact, quite the opposite. But I have peripherally caught enough of it to understand the basic narrative details of the genre. And Lake Mungo certainly appeals to me for two reasons: 1) because it scared me, which may be the most important part; 2) because it is so good at reproducing the core narrative building blocks of a familiar genre that this act of reproducing is itself an engrossing fascination, leading me to spend 90 minutes watching a thing I might not care to watch if it were a documentary. Since it's only an imitation of a documentary, I love it.