GROUND ZERO
‘Ground Zero - The Production of Authenticity’ is a work in progress looking into the confessional celebrity documentary.About ten years ago, I worked as an assistant to Riete Oord while she was developing a documentary with Paloma Faith, then one of the UK's biggest pop stars. The premise was slightly contrived: Paloma was about to embark on a tour with her newborn baby, whom she supposedly wanted to raise in a gender-neutral way. In practice, this seemed to mean little more than not dressing her daughter in pink all the time.
I was masquerading as a sound recordist—a skill I have not truly mastered to this day—and, in that role, was privy to conversations between her management team and the hopeful director, who was trying to secure a BBC commission. The management insisted on editorial sign-off before agreeing to participate. For a public service broadcaster, this was an impossibility. The project therefore collapsed before it had really begun.
Around the same time, Netflix released Gaga: Five Foot Two, a confessional documentary about Lady Gaga directed by the artist Chris Moukarbel. Netflix does not operate under the same editorial constraints as a public broadcaster, and Gaga's team—whom I regard as the epitome of a pseudo-progressive celebrity culture—were able to use the seemingly honest and intimate form of documentary to present her as vulnerable and exposed. Yet the entire performance remained meticulously controlled. The film also functioned as the launch of a new phase in her career: abandoning the extravagant costumes in favour of a supposedly stripped-back authenticity.
The scene in which she discusses this shift with her stylist beside the swimming pool marks, in my view, ground zero of inauthentic authenticity. I am not suggesting that anyone is lying. Rather, I do not think anyone is telling the truth either—although, admittedly, we all know there is no such thing as an objective truth.
Restaging that scene in my Walthamstow back garden with professional actors, became the starting point for a project about the production of inauthentic authenticity.
This mode of self-presentation has since become a recurring feature of streaming documentaries. Via Paris Hilton and the Beckhams, it took many within the liberal establishment to watch the Amazon Melania Trump documentary to recognise what was happening, but I would argue that there is, in fact, remarkably little difference between her and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.