There's a quote that flashes on screen during Merchants of Doubt that sums up what its maker Robert Kenner is trying to tell us in this slickly produced attack on the American business of selling what used to be jokingly called "cancer sticks." In a film replete with the lies big tobacco has used to fool customers and regulators alike, a VP at Philip Morris quips, "I think that if the company as a whole believed that cigarettes were really harmful, we would not be in the business of making them." Yes, sometimes the best humor is unintentional. With 16 credited participants and lots of editing pizazz at his disposal, director Kenner fulfills the promise he displayed as a nonfiction polemicist in award-winning docs Food, Inc., Two Days in October, and The Road to Memphis.
Depending on how large your appetite is for films that talk truth to power, Merchants of Doubt jumps to the top of a short list of films by people so zealous in their calling that they probably don't check their weekly grosses in Variety. Seriously, Merchants of Doubt is as emblematic of this Obama era as Putney Swope was to the years of Lyndon Johnson.
The Hunting Ground The films of American documentarian Kirby Dick �" Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, Showgirls: Glitz & Angst, Outrage (on closeted LGBT politicians) �" are clearly designed to arouse as much as to entertain, to change the world around us. In the case of his 1997 doc Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, Dick eschewed questions of taste for shock-for-shock's-sake, and gave male filmgoers a big jolt: halfway through this touching portrait of an artist dying from lung disease, Dick allows Flanagan to reach us the way few have ever done by driving a large nail through his penis. My 19-year-old friend came as close to diving under his seat as was physically possible.
In his latest work The Hunting Ground, Dick directs a different kind of assault on the hetero male sensibility. In a film that posits that sexual assault has reached epidemic proportions on American college campuses, Dick introduces a cadre of brave young women who recount their own personal horror stories and their incredulity that their cries for help went largely unanswered by college authorities, male and female. Focusing attention on three campuses �" Harvard, the University of North Carolina (UNC) and our own Cal Berkeley �" the young women paint a frightening picture of today's college life, where rape seems almost to be taken for granted as a kind of rite of passage.
Anne Clark, a young woman from UNC, asserts that "two of us were sexually assaulted before classes even started." Andrea Pino, a Cuban American coed, notes the feeling that while the assault was underway, "You just hope you don't die." Even more disturbing is what the young women claim was the attitude of college administrators, including a female dean who told Clark, "Annie, rape is like a football game. What would you have done differently?" A male victim, Ryan Clifford, chimes in, "The goal is to protect the institution, not the student. They very much discourage students from reporting." Another student notes, "Rape is seen as a public relations problem, damaging [a school's] brand."
One of the inherent problems with The Hunting Ground is the difficulty filmmakers have in conveying statistical facts as opposed to emotionally charged personal testimony. As an illustration, Dick flashes a steady stream of statistical bullet points on screen, some of which seem to be in a kind of cognitive dissonance with each other. "A best estimate indicates that false [rape] reports" fall between 2-8% of the total. "Less than 8% of men commit 90% of [reported] rapes." Obviously, any number of rapes is too many. But is there a central clearinghouse for reliable figures for the incidence of sexual assaults at American colleges? The Hunting Ground is bold in raising the subject of sexual assault on men by other men, but here the statistical evidence is so small that one is left puzzled as to what, if anything, to make of the phenomenon.
I left a press screening of The Hunting Ground encouraged that one of our most gutsy nonfiction filmmakers hasn't lost his desire to provoke, but also wondering whether he's omitted some important perspectives from his searing attack on what he feels is a sad state of affairs at some of our greatest institutions of learning. I remember my feelings of relief after watching Dick's Outrage, that an important filmmaker had finally exposed, in his words, "closeted politicians who lobby for anti-gay legislation in the U.S." I remember his delight in tweaking the pomposity and secrecy of the film industry's ratings board in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, where he noted, "Violent films get through almost unscathed, but the ratings have this excessive focus against sexuality that puts independent film at a disadvantage." It will be interesting to see if Dick gets the kind of blowback to Hunting Ground that Rolling Stone magazine received in response to its recent expose on college sexual assaults, a reaction that resulted in a rare partial retraction/apology from the magazine.
At one point in the movie, Dick's camera catches a disgruntled fraternity member taking exception to his thesis. "Just because a woman said, 'No,' and you had sex, does that mean you're a rapist?" The press-screening audience chuckled in derision at the young, white frat-boy's perhaps alcohol-fueled indignation that his sacred "hunting ground" was under siege. But the rules of the college dating game may soon be radically redefined. (Both films open Friday.)