First Person

Saw First Person, the Errol Morris interview show. (Remember Errol Morris? I'm still working through all of his films.) This one opens with credits played over anatomical diagrams, glass eyes, brains in jars, etc. Morris normally interviews oddballs and weirdos but we are now out of his usual compassionate realm and getting into a kind of exploitative place. Some of the people he interviews are complicit in their own exploitation, such as the grotesque Josh Harris, but others are more unaware of or indifferent to their strangeness, such as Joan Dougherty, a crime scene cleaner.

The series is like a curiosity shop, or a book of outlandish facts. Very disjointed but chock full of fascinating tidbits. The episodes range from the cheerily macabre (such as Joan Dougherty and Gretchen Worden, director of this museum) to the freakishly grotesque (Josh Harris and Christopher Langan who is perhaps tricked into expressing support for eugenics) to the bewildering and geeky (Richard G. Rosner, a professional high school student, and Clyde Roper, a giant squid expert.) Every single episode would make for excellent water-cooler dissection. The topics are outre but humanized by the people talking about them. The show is uneven but has something for everyone.

Also interesting is the constant presence of Errol Morris. He uses a new-fangled method of interview by close-circuit television, allowing the interviewee to look directly into the camera and simultaneously at the interviewer at all times. The effect is that we the audience are having a conversation with the freak du jour. However Morris slightly gets in his own way by making the television constantly tilt and shift like the head of a confused puppy. This keeps the subject compositionally off-balance, but renders every angle a Dutch one. It gets a little aggressively annoying sometimes. Also there's Morris himself. He often shouts his questions at the subject, perhaps seeking honesty out of ebullient confrontation. A few times I felt he was feeding his interviewees, suggesting ad-ready tease-able phrases or more colourful analogies. The best episodes are the ones where he is most able to remove himself, but the worst ones, where he is clearly editorializing and feeding, cast a pall over these "good" episodes. I suppose I didn't want to see how this particular type of sausage was made. Again the nature of reality in documentaries rears its ugly head.