Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Abstract

©2022 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois more than thirty years after Robert Rosenstone wrote the preceding words in 1988, the historian and film scholar’s critique still describes the contemporary fact-based drama and its subset, the docudrama, a factbased drama about public events, upon which this article will focus. What might be called traditional docudramas include films such as The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2017), Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995), Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), and Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012). These traditional docudramas represent past events and characters as though they are fully known and knowable, their narrative transparent, and they present their “single interpretation” of history with unacknowledged authority and omniscience. As Rosenstone notes, these films not only dismiss historical alternatives but also present their factual story worlds and characters with the same certainty as do well-made fictional scripts. Steven Spielberg’s The Post, for instance, dramatizes how the publishing of the Pentagon Papers led to the Watergate break-in, a line of historical causality that is factually ambiguous,1 with the same authority with which a horror film such as Get Out (Jordan Peel, 2017) dramatizes how the zombified black characters in the Armitage household have been transformed by unwilling brain transplantation. There is a small subset of docudramas, however, that use more tentative rhetorical techniques to tell fictional stories while also raising questions of how we understand the past. This article will call such films “cracked docudramas”2 because they retain traces or suggestions of how their creators came to know and represent history. Films such as BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018), Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014), Jackie (Pablo Larrain, 2016), The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), and I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017) are cracked through their formal strategies; using unsettling or unresolved textual elements, they hint from the inside at what informed their making from without. Their intentionally disquieting constructions point the viewer to alternative histories that linger ghost-like behind the specific interpretations that their creators have chosen, offering hints of the more open representation that Rosenstone encourages. In questioning how we know the past, cracked docudramas are associated with historical metafiction, one of the dominant narrative styles of twentieth-century postmodernism. However, unlike in the most inventive or Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority