The solo voice of the documentary miniseries
Allen v.
Farrow
, whose first episode has just premiered HBO, is that of Dylan Farrow, the director's daughter who accuses him of having sexually abused her in 1992, when she was seven years old, and who for the first time tells her story in front of the cameras.
However, within the choir that covers her, with her mother Mia Farrow at the helm, the presence of veteran journalist Maureen Orth stands out.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn walk through New York in 2016. In video, the 'teaser' of Allen v.
Farrow. (PHOTO: JAMES DEVANEY / GC IMAGES | VIDEO: HBO)
Orth has covered some of the most relevant pop culture cases of the last thirty years.
His book
Vulgar favors
served as the plot base for the
Versace
season of
American Crime Story
.
The journalist's intervention in this documentary is more than justified: in 1992 she wrote for
Vanity Fair
one of the first reports on the Allen case, dedicated to telling Mia Farrow's version.
Almost everything related to the events that appears in the documentary was already told in that report.
In another of his books,
The Importance of Being Famous
, published in 2004, Orth dissects some cases related to popular culture, fame, and the influence of the media on public opinion.
In it he makes a simple diagnosis by way of introduction: “The ubiquitous world of celebrity - which now cuts across entertainment, politics and the news - is dominated by skilled stage directors who understand the DNA of fame and know how to create it.
They can direct the coverage and cameras wherever they want.
The Internet can kick-start any rumor whether it's true or not.
Reality is now something that is created, something to play with to adjust it to the maximum appeal.
Welcome to the world of
reality
soap
operas
, where fame sells anything and in which complicated real stories are offered as entertainment and end up turned into films in which it is difficult to separate fact from fiction ”.
"
True crime
(the genre that recreates real crimes in documentary form) is still a reformulation of the seriality that the tabloids and newscasts already used," explains Concepción Cascajosa Virino, tenured professor at the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication from the Carlos III University of Madrid.
“There is only a different packaging, some narrative formulas brought from fiction and a distance from the facts.
What has changed is also the legitimacy that the genre has for this formula between the fiction series and the documentary, the status in front of the tabloid press.
That is why today they are discussed in areas where traditionally they would have been ignored or despised.
And commercially its importance has also been extended, by occupying those spaces of fiction and documentary ”.
Allen v.
Farrow
is the latest example in a list of documentaries that, through revisionism, have placed at the center of their history the testimonies of alleged victims of stars as diverse as Michael Jackson and R. Kelly.
Are documentaries that focus on testimonies impossible to contrast and give voice to only one of the parties questionable?
"This is one of the most delicate matters," says Elías León Siminiani, director of documentaries such as
El Caso Alcàsser
and
El
Caso
Asunta (Operation Nenúfar
)
.
“Many times it is not easy to get the voice of both parties.
Either because there is such a level of confrontation between them that it makes it impossible for them to coexist in filming or editing, either because one of the parties is not available or because there is no interest on the part of the financier in a certain point of view.
There are splendid examples of filmmakers who have managed to make documentaries telling only one side of the story.
For me the idea of dialectics is essential.
But I find it really difficult.
It would cost me a lot to do it.
Of course, if I am in a position to choose, I always try to tell a story that allows me a minimum level of dialectics between competing visions ”.
What a documentary has said that man does not doubt
The particularities of each of the three cases mentioned make them very different from each other.
In 2018,
The Washington Post
published a report that confirmed that senior executives in the music industry looked the other way when they began to learn of R. Kelly's alleged sexual abuse.
The singer had already been brought to court on several occasions for alleged crimes of sexual abuse of minors and for possession of child pornography.
For none of them was he condemned.
What was proven was that he had married the singer Aaliyah when she was 15 years old –he 27–, for which she lied about her age when signing the marriage certificate.
Surviving R. Kelly
(in Spain, its first season is on Netflix) offered dozens of testimonies from women who claimed that the singer had sexually assaulted them, in most cases when they were teenagers.
Two months after its North American broadcast, the Cook County Illinois State Attorney's Office charged Kelly with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse.
The trial will be held next April.
The
Leaving Neverland
Hangover
, the two-episode documentary centered on the testimonies of two alleged victims of Michael Jackson, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, and their relatives, and which HBO released in March 2019, is almost the opposite.
The extensive judicial record of Michael Jackson is more than known, in one case he was found not guilty and in another he reached agreements that avoided a trial.
This time it was Jackson's heirs who sued HBO to try to prevent its broadcast.
HBO continued with its plans and the singer's heirs with theirs.
In December 2020, the latter achieved another step in their judicial fight: a judge has accepted that the matter go to the arbitration phase.
In the case of Allen there is still no news about a possible legal action by order of the director - he has only released a statement to ensure that the documentary "is full of falsehoods" -.
He gave his version of events last year in
About Nothing
, His Memoirs, a version told only partially in
Allen v.
Farrow
, like Moses Farrow, son of the actress, who defends Allen and who has accused his mother of physical and verbal assaults, drawing a home that is far from the idyllic image shown in the documentary.
Allen was exonerated of the sexual abuse of his daughter after a seven-month investigation.
In the child custody trial that the director and actress had in common, a psychiatrist declared that the report that favored Allen's exoneration was deficient.
A part of
Allen v.
Farrow
focuses on the alleged weaknesses of the process that cleared Allen.
The multiplication of documentaries
The audiovisual tradition on which these documentaries are based is not new and has its roots in literary - how can we not think of
In Cold Blood
- and journalism, but its rise in the hands of platforms is recent.
Three documentaries, which aired between the end of 2014 and the end of 2015, inaugurate it: the
Serial
podcast
, whose first season was intended to sow doubts about the guilt of Adnan Syed, the alleged murderer of Hae Min Lee, his girlfriend, in 1999, when both they were little more than teenagers;
The Jinx
, an HBO documentary that tried to surround real estate businessman Robert Dust to blame him for the murder of his wife, who disappeared in 1982, and of a friend in 2000;
and
Making a Murderer
, a Netflix documentary focusing on doubts surrounding the guilt of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, both sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, a local photographer.
These three serial documentaries were not only a public success (two years after their broadcast, the first two seasons of
Serial
had reached 350 million downloads), but they also opened the door to a second judicial assault in each of the cases. .
However, the case of Robert Dust is different.
The businessman was arrested the day after the broadcast of the latest episode of
The Jinx
.
The Los Angeles police arrested him thanks to the last sequence of the same, in which, during one of the interviews, Dust got up to the bathroom and, without noticing that he was wearing a tie mike, he said to himself : “What the hell did I do?
Kill them all, of course ”.
However, the same evidence that incriminated him has served so that his lawyers find a way to try to exonerate him: the audio in which Dust said “What the hell did I do?
Kill them all, of course ”was edited.
The two sentences, the question and the answer are not really such, they were separated by many others and ordered in reverse in the monologue that Dust was muttering in that bathroom.
The holy trinity of the genre had blessed him and his parishioners made it an almost weekly ritual, Netflix through.
Wild, wild country
,
The keepers
,
Amanda Knox
, the continuation of
The Ladder
,
The disappearance of Madeleine McCann
,
Abducted in plain sight
,
The Alcàsser case
... The list is endless and shows the great work of Lisa Nishimura, vice president of documentaries and
stand up comedy
of the platform, chosen one of the 100 most influential people of the year 2020 by
Time
magazine
, thanks to which documentaries based on real cases have become one of the main assets of the platform.
But is it morally defensible as entertainment?
He was asked by
The New York Times
in 2018. Is our obsession with
true crime
becoming unpleasant
? Arwa Mahdawi asked in
The Guardian
a couple of months later.
"It always happens," says Siminiani.
“Something powerful, innovative and punchy comes out, and then the thousand replicas come.
The styles that surprised us end up abatement by dint of repeating themselves and the slogan goes on to try to resemble as much as possible this or that work that has been successful.
For me it has to do with inbreeding.
The proposals end up staring at each other's navels.
Right now we are all fascinated with
The Departed
.
I would not be surprised if we soon see many proposals from infiltrators.
But one detail is forgotten:
The Infiltrator
is the result of ten years of work.
Who is willing to work for ten years on the same front?
These weaknesses do not seem to have daunted a public that now also welcomes this new vein within a genre that has stood out for turning anonymous people into celebrities after pointing them out as victims of alleged errors in the judicial system.
Now, in the heat of #MeToo, it also feeds on celebrities to be singled out as beneficiaries, thanks to their status, on the alleged deficiencies of this, something that is at the very origin of #MeToo.
In the words of Margaret Atwood: “The #MeToo movement is a symptom of a broken judicial system.
Too often, women and other complainants of sexual abuse were unable to obtain a fair hearing through institutions - including corporate structures - so they used a new tool: the Internet.
With journalistic investigations such as those that brought celebrities like Weinstein or Bill Cosby to court, the media has made an effort to become a counterweight to those weaknesses in the judicial system.
But the rigor of these journalistic investigations is also necessary in television documentaries, despite their peculiarities.
In Cascajosa's words: “I believe that
true crime
has a hybrid nature between news and entertainment.
I think what should be asked of you is to follow the standards of the former in relation to research.
Is it difficult to achieve that and at the same time fulfill what is expected of the second?
Without a doubt, but that is why I believe that the ethical basis of journalism is fundamental and must be applied.
On the other hand, there must be respect and consideration for the victims ”.
At the premiere of
Allen V. Farrow
, director Robert Weide pointed out the obvious: "In films on controversial subjects there are subtle ways to make them believe that you are asking your audience what they think when you are actually telling them what to think."
He added a good suggestion: “As a spectator, think of yourself as a jury in a trial.
Anyone can manipulate the audience by presenting only one side of the case.
But could you, as a jury, give a fair verdict listening only to the prosecution and not to the defense?
In this regard, Siminiani points out that this subgenre is one of the most dangerous due to its potential for manipulation: “The border with morbidness is always very close to the narrative, especially if you want to reach the public as quickly as possible.
Normally you work with huge amounts of footage, either filmed by the production itself or from archive.
At the same time, we usually work with testimonies of events that happened a long time ago, which brings into play the limits of memory that, practically, make it impossible to achieve
the truth
.
If you unite all these elements and there is no firm will to review your ethical position regarding the story, the manipulation is practically assured ”.
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