Jason Scott had some com­ments regarding my ear­lier post about Jason’s severe antipathy towards King of Kong.

I’m reminded of the debate about David Simon’s Almighty Verisimilitude, among other things. Of course Simon’s mate­rial is explic­itly meant to be fic­tion­al­ized, but that makes it inter­esting that he seems to be holding him­self to a higher stan­dard of detail-​​realism than some people seem to want their doc­u­men­taries to adhere to. So what is a doc­u­men­tary anyway? Obviously, a movie that depicts real events. But almost as obvi­ously, we expect the movie-​​maker to bring a per­spec­tive to the recording, and assume they may be selec­tive in their choice of facts to reveal in the pur­suit of that per­spec­tive. Documentary maker Jason Scott fig­ures King of Kong went too far when the facts it chose not to reveal seemed to be ones that would actively con­tra­dict the nar­ra­tive implied by the ones it did. And now, over at Jason Scott’s blog, there is some ongoing con­sid­er­a­tion of those factualities.

The fac­tual truth is only one of two related debates here: is the lit­eral truth revealed or dis­torted by this par­tic­ular movie, sure, but also: do we expect doc­u­men­taries to be about the real world, or do we expect them to use the real world as raw medium to con­struct an artistic truth? Both apparently.

Here’s Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America putting the debate to Ira Glass of This American Life, after he got him­self worked up com­plaining to Jonathan Goldstein (former TAL pro­ducer) about the same topic.