I had no idea what I was getting into when I started watching Grey Gardens. All I know was what I got from a short Wikipedia summary: that is was about the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy living in a decaying estate in East Hampton. Needless to say, I ended up finding this documentary fascinating.
Big Edie and her daughter Little Edie were - and I can’t think of any other word for it - a wreck. They’re constantly bickering; they never wear proper clothing; their house is quite literally falling apart. And yet, somehow they make for an interesting documentary. I think this brings in the notion of truth that we discussed.
The truth of the lives of these two women is that they are no longer in their glory days. They spend most of the film reminiscing about their pasts. They show the Maysles dozens of old photos of themselves. They were glamorous and beautiful. But that was the past and the reality is both have deteriorated along with their house. Little Edie makes skirts and scarves out of anything but actual skirts and scarves. I’m fairly certain Big Edie was naked in several shots (the cameraman was kind enough to only shoot her face in these cases). The way they live now is only a poor shadow of their old lives. But for them, it’s the reality they live in. They don’t seem to completely notice their complete squalor as they sing and bicker endlessly. Their reality appears to be different from what we see in the documentary. “Of course, we can’t disregard the factual. It has normative power,” Herzog states in his speech. However, I think these two women are doing a pretty good job of just that.
The next question is whether or not we are actually seeing the entire truth. It might be the case that much of what we’re seeing is simply a show put on for the camera. The women rarely leave their house, so boredom must be a factor as well. Still, this documentary manages to show us enough of the truth for us to understand its message. The whole point is to show the odd, deteriorating lifestyle of two once-wealthy women obsessed with fame and beauty. And that’s exactly what we see. Sure, it’s only a glimpse into their everyday lives, but we see enough of it to understand that these women are falling apart. It’s both fascinating and terribly sad.
I think that it's a sad thing to watch because we don't want to see that happening. It's hard for humans to conceptualize the fact that, one day, their lives won't be like it is currently. Life deteriorates as we get older, but we like to ignore that little fact. We like to stay in our happy little bubble and hope that nothing disturbs it. As far as Herzog is concerned, we like to ignore the truth that is right in front of us, but watching this documentary could have been a form of "ecstatic truth" for you (or anyone else watching it). It brings us out of that bubble of comfort where we all live happily ever after.
ReplyDeleteIt forces us to look at the truth - eventually we will be like them in a sense. Sure, we are just average citizens and not obsessed with fame and beauty, but our lifestyle will soon fade out, too. Things we know now will become something in the past. It's sad to think about, but that's the thing Herzog says about documentaries, they're meant to make you experience something that you would have never been exposed to otherwise.
This documentary sounds like it could also be interesting to associate Plato's allegory of the cave. In a way, the two of them are living in the cave which has become their entire reality. They are aware of the shadow of the outside world but cannot fully understand it. Perhaps this is also a reason that they seem to not understand the conditions in which they are living. Another interesting facet to me is their relationship to Jackie Kennedy. I haven't seen the film so I'm not sure, but was she aware of the state her family is living in?
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