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Keeping It Real

by Sunny Bergman
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, New York, 2004
DVD/video, 51 mins., col.
Sale (Video/DVD): $348; rental (video): $75
Distributor’s website: http://
www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

In this documentary Sunny Bergman purports to examine "the development of an ‘experience economy’, in which companies offer ‘authentic’ experiences, a chance to witness or even participate in real-life adventures." She also "examines this increasing demand for ‘authenticity’, while at the same time trying to fathom the meaning of the concept itself, both in her own life in that of so many others". (box jacket; my italics)

Three stories are loosely mixed in this film. A hilarious story about a company selling visits to Amsterdam, guided by a make-belief homeless person; the media success of a sailor and world adventurer who pretends to shoot only real life action while every scene is carefully set and directed to make it look real or "authentic" and the story of a Dutch yuppie who quits her job——in advertising, of course——to make a solo tour of the world in a small sailing boat and who returns soon enough after the first disappointments. In between these stories are a few reflections on what is supposed to be the "experience economy", a badly coined phrase for the fact that some people are willing to pay for staged out-of-the-ordinary experiences, and others are willing to take their money and fool the gullible. Of course, marketers are to blame. It is they who are the vultures capitalizing on the need of so many people who have become bored of their own lives. Far from giving a thorough anthropological or philosophical analysis of this boredom among a sizeable portion of affluent western consumers, Bergman only registers these phenomena and adds her own message: "beware of these false prophets! Don't let yourself be misled by the sellers of authenticity because it is fake".

Surely, even fake experiences are experiences in their own right, and every role-player, actor, child or psychotic will testify to the reality of the imagined. So where is the problem? Or should we ban the reading of novels that are powerful enough to make us cry; should we pronounce a fatwah over films where we identify with the hero, with the spinster or bachelor who finds love at last or with the man who survives against all odds?

In limiting herself to a statement about the ethics of the marketing of staged experiences, Bergman has missed an opportunity to criticize and understand this trade and the paradoxical need for excitement without risk that underlies it. Perhaps she only wanted to come to grips with her own private "adventure"——casually documented in this film as well——when she had a relationship with an African man and found out that she didn't care for the man himself but only for the authenticity she believed he would bring into her life. (Of course the guy doesn't see the point of wanting to be "authentic" when most of his life has been a struggle to survive.) So the movie appears to have been a public confession and its raison d'être is to find redemption for the sin of loving a person for the wrong reasons, or at least, for the supposedly wrong reasons. Redemption, as Jerry Springer knows, is the one thing we get from the anonymous masses when god is beyond our reach.


 

 




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