All this has left the documentary world suffering an identity crisis. What even is a documentary anymore? There is more money than ever, but it has come with expectations that didn’t exist when the industry was closer in ethics and taste to public broadcasting than to Hollywood. The people agreeing to tell their stories are now asking for control, or cash, leaving documentarians navigating a sense of responsibility (or fealty) toward their subjects; the demands of the algorithm; and their desire to make great work. For the audience, it has become almost impossible to sort works of art or journalism from glorified reality TV or public-relations exercises: An HBO Max subscriber can scroll through the documentaries tab and find two movies about Lizzo that she herself executive-produced, 41 films and series described as true crime, an Oscar-nominated movie about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and Wahl Street, “a glimpse into global star Mark Wahlberg’s life as he juggles the demands of his personal and professional worlds and hustles to grow his expanding business empire.” Hollywood is now showing signs of retrenching. With budgets shrinking, filmmakers worry the problems of the doc boom could be exacerbated by a doc bust, and that the old-fashioned idea that documentaries could be trusted to tell honest, complicated stories may go down with it.
There are skyscrapers, and then there are supertalls, often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk. First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. Now they’re all over the place. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000; there are now a couple hundred worldwide, including Dubai’s 163-story Burj Khalifa (a hypodermic needle aimed at space), Tianjin’s 97-floor CTF Finance Centre (reminiscent of a drill bit boring the clouds), and, encroaching on my sky, Manhattan’s 84-floor Steinway Tower (a luxury condominium resembling the love child of a dustbuster and a Mach3 razor).
At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. She isn’t playing. Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.” It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot.
For readers of contemporary literature, the 21st century has been a period besotted with memoir and its close if slightly more esoteric cousins, autotheory and autofiction. In her latest novel, “My Nemesis,” the American author Charmaine Craig explores the murky terrain of memoir by chronicling the fictional relationship between two women writers. Tessa, the narrator, is a New York-based memoirist whose books address divorce, motherhood and “the absurdities of middle age”; while Wah is a university lecturer in Los Angeles who has published a nonfiction book about her adopted daughter’s experience as a victim of child trafficking overseas. They meet when Wah’s husband, Charlie, “a decently published philosophy professor,” contacts Tessa about one of her books. A quasi-flirtatious correspondence ensues and soon Tessa and her husband, Milton, begin a series of sometimes-cordial bicoastal visits with Charlie and Wah.
It became a time when song no longer soared
but climbed, hand over hand up a taut rope.
One cracked voice was all it took. Cathedrals
bombed and gone, carcasses opened to the sun,