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Home , Irony, Mockumentary

Michael Glode

Capstone

Professor Bednar

February 15th 2021

Prospectus: Death to 2020

Introduction:

My research object is the British special that was available on netflix before the conclusion of the year. This special consists of the major events that hit us in the year of 2020 with fictional characters that drive that through each event. What interests me the most is this idea of Mockumentary which seeks to mock the traditional documentary format through waves of and humor. What compels us to want to experience in regards to serious situations? This is what I seek to understand throughout this process. The creators of this Netflix special took a year that no one wants to relive again and added their own comedic twist. This allows the to forget about their preconceptions about the year and delve deeper into how this year came together. The way in which the directors seeked to establish this comedic narrative for the special was through performativity of the characters. Through their quirky names and personas these A-list celebrities were able to become representations of certain stereotypes. These include the traditional Karen Mom who gets all her information from

Facebook message groups and denounces medical doctors. Simplicity is the name of the game within this Mockumentary because there is no development beyond that. This is important because seeking these stereotypes and understanding what they represent will be one

of my biggest challenges. When viewing a medium that includes both real life footage events but fictional characters you get an interesting dynamic which allows for an exaggerated representation of certain groups of people. This is a fairly new Netflix special that was only released a few months ago which means there is very little to no scholarly articles to assist me with analayzing my research object. While this may be troubling I still have each other events within the Mockumentary that have been very problematic for our society so they will have scholarly articles surrounding these events. This includes the presidential election as well as the overarching issue in the special being COVID-19. Many would consider the within the special to be of bad taste because of how recent some of the events are. The bottom line is that comedy is used as a critical social function and I want to explore why this use of humor can bring new perspectives on serious situations. This can be used to break taboos or even hold those in power accountable which both of which can be seen within the special I seek to analyze. This idea of humor being interwoven within our everyday lives is nothing new and there are massive amounts of research dedicated to this. This is important in terms of my research because by understanding the way In which humor plays into this Mockumentary the better I will be to understand the intended message of the creators and how this intended message may affect the public's perception. . Similarly by understanding the specific stereotypes in which many of these jokes are carried out I can have a better interpretation of the narrative journey the creators Intended. Something else of importance is how these stereotypes and other elements of the Mockumentary genre affects the audience's reality. I seek to combine already established discourse surrounding the events depicted within the Netflix Special with the stereotypes presented through each of the characters in hopes to understand how this

Mockumentary affects the public's perceptions of the year that we all have experienced.

Is this Mockumentary effective in delivering the message it intended? Or does the lack of character development hinder that goal of the film?

Literature Review

Mockumentaries

Beyond the scope of as a we can see that this genre pushes past the boundaries of narrative to drive the story in a certain direction for the audience. In

Cristina Formenti’s Expanded Mocku Worlds she presents us with the notion of texts outside of the Mockumentary taking part in the narrative landscape.She gives the texts the name of which help with her concept of transmedial . She directed attention to the

Blair witch project which has websites that presented the three teenangers as real missing person cases as well as a section labeled “aftermath” with things not included with the movie. For my

Mockumentary there was a trailer as well as a couple different movie posters that are specifically made to market the movie to its intended audience which are those of us that have access to a netflix account. This concept of transmedial storytelling will help me understand not only the mass media surrounding this netflix special but also everyone’s own personal experiences of 2020 can a part in their interpretation of the Mockumentary.

Most Mockumentaries which aren’t produced in the horror genre usually have elements of humor or satire as well as mocking of the documentary genre. Richard Wallace also stated that most Mockumentaries seek a specific subject such as a rockstar or a political figure although there are no rock stars in “Death to 2020” There are many jokes made towards political figures including Trump, Biden, as well as some political figures located internationally. The way in which many mockumentaries use humor within their narrative is . For example in Mirranda

Campbell’s article ‘The Mocking Mockumentary and the Ethics of Irony’ she discusses the popular Mockumentary Borat which follows a foreign reporter in America. The main discussion of this Mockumentary by both critics and Campbell was the use of irony and many jokes people would not get. This is unlike the Death to 2020 special because in this special we understand everything within the scope of the film because we lived through it. This raises the question of the role in which humor plays into the effectiveness of the message of the Mockumentary and does humor off a new perspective of a terrible year? This is similar to what Gerd Bayer discusses in his article by saying ”In order to come to an appreciation of the parodistic and hence critical characteristics of mockumentaries, viewers need to be aware of the cinematic traditions that are being mocked” This could be the explanation to why some people didn't understand some of the jokes in Borat and why many people thought this Mockumnetary on 2020 was not necessary because we are already aware of all the events that this special seeks to Mock. Does this mean that the Special is useless? Or are there more interesting takeaways that the filmmakers are seeking to present to the audience?

Documentaries

While it is important to understand Mockumentaries as a genre it is also equally as important to first understand the genre of Documentaries whose visual and narrative tropes are being used in Mockumentaries as a way to Mock. I would describe this similarly to a of a which seeks to mock the original video with uses of Satire and Humor. The specific definition of a documentary is a film or video examining an event or person based on facts.

Obviously before viewing a certain film we more than likely will know what the film is indexed

as weather that be a Documentary, Mockumentary, or any other genre. This is important context information for the audience so they know how to view the film beforehand. For example how I would view Borat which is supposed to make me laugh is different from how I would view something off the National Geographic Channel. Richard Blumenberg in his article on

Documentary Films and the Problem of ‘ made an interesting point regarding

Documentaries saying their attempt for objectivity is never possible in terms of cinema because even in this documentary format you are still cutting and manipulating the footage to fit the narrative you are trying to direct to the audience. Blumenberg also stated that we begin to see that even in the genre of facts the truth can be manipulated. When a film has real life footage this brings emotions to the audience which they might mistake for objectivity and is a film maker's way of showing ‘truth’. Two qualities that he says represent authenticity is ‘legitimacy’ and

‘significance’. In terms of legitimacy he uses examples of seeing something happen so in our case the real world footage can bring legitimacy to a film. In terms of significance we understand this as events being portrayed as important only as long as it is photographed and projected whether in society or mass media. This understanding of documentaries are crucial because this is the genre that Mockumentaries seek to mock so knowing the specific characteristics of documentaries are crucial. This will help me better understand the effects that this mocking has on public perceptions of these events and is the way they film makers set up the film better this way or if it was in a traditional documentary format?

Comedy/Humor/Narrative

One of the more vital ideas used within this Mockumentary style film is the use of comedy and humor. I seek to understand the use of this as a narrative tool within the film. In

Vandaele’s article on Humor mechanisms there are different types of mechanisms including

‘incongruity’ and ‘superiority’. These are described as the reasons why we laugh. Superiority being that our laugh is caused through feelings of superiority while incongruity is the idea that our laugh is caused by “something that violates our mental patterns and expectations.” Which seems like a far more believable theory than that of superiority. This is because it relates more to my own research object in the sense that all the events that occurred within 2020 violated our mental pattern and expectations of what we thought the year was going to be like.

I will also be looking at aspects of narrative within ‘Death to 2020’ through Walter

Fisher's narrative paradigm in which he states that humans are ‘naturally storytelling animals’ and this idea of narrative is a more ‘meaningful form of communication’ especially compared to an argument. This will assist me in my analysis because the narrative within the film isn’t here to argue something with you but rather communicate a series of real events using a series of fictional characters.

As we know each of the characters are but the personas in which they empower is not fiction but reality based on our own society. Understanding this about the characters in the film is crucial because it will help me analyze the film's narrative coherence since the characters are key to how that flows. In Jorg Scweinitz’s section of the book

“Characters in Fictional Worlds'' he describes stereotypes as “unsophisticated and fixed mental images of individuals belonging to a certain group.” This article will be very beneficial when I am looking to analyze the characters within the Mockumentary on how they push forward with the narrative through humor, satire, and performativity of their personas.

Although it is important to note that the extent of the characters development within the mockumentary are these stereotypes and the character names unlike other movies that focus more on the characters story arcs.

Methodology

The specific methodology that I seek to use for my analysis is Rhetorical Research in which I'll be using textual analysis to look at key aspects within the Netflix Mockumentary

“Death to 2020”. I will be specifically looking at the performativity of characters, narrative, and humor within the special to understand the reasoning behind the release of such a controversial film. The reason I say controversial is a lot of the content that the Mockumentary delves upon are all events which many would consider hardships from the year. In my analysis I would like to lay out key characters with obvious stereotypes in which they represent and how these representations affect the message of the special. This is the best course of for methodology because there is a lack of scholarly articles specifically on my research object which can be attributed to the release of this Mockumentary being only a few months ago. It also makes sense because this is a sort of satirical year in review of 2020 and to evaluate the effectiveness of that my method of analysis must explore the film itself. I will explore my research object using theoretical frameworks like Performativity, media framing, and narrative theory. I will be discussing performativity theory because stereotypes within the film are very prevalent and are important to the story’s narrative and how the audience interprets each character. Media framing specifically looks at the thematic coverage that professor Shanto

Iyengar identified as the “linking of events together” compared to episodic which focuses on only one

event and limits your ability to make important connections between events. An example of a connection that can be made when linking two events together is poverty and crime. I will also be exploring the idea of narrative theory specifically within Mockumentary to understand why this

Netflix special is set up the way it is narratively and the impact that has on the perceptions of 2020 because even though we all lived through the same year and experienced many of these events our perception are unique to us.

When choosing my research object I wanted something relevant and something that affected a lot of people which would give me a lot of discourse surrounding this object to analyze. Although the scholarly discourse on my object is lacking the scholarly discourse on the events themselves will be very beneficial. This is why the overarching topic of COVID-19 offers a lot to discuss through the public's perceptions, mass media's influence, and politicians' reactions to such events. This can be done through discourse analysis of related texts surrounding these very real events within the film. This relates to what I discussed above of transmedial storytelling which will help me within my analysis by specifically looking at the discourse surrounding this film and how it aids to drive the narrative. If I was unaware of anything that took place in 2020 are these paratexts (content surrounding the events within the special) crucial to my understanding of the intent of the Mockumnentary?

Work Cited

Expanded Mockuworlds. Mockumentary as a Transmedial ... www.gib.uni- tuebingen.de/own/journal/upload/fc68675ed7fbad99e0610b60e6ef5131.pdf.

Fisher, Walter R. Human Communication as : toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action. University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

Wallace, Richard. “Mockumentary Comedy - Performing Authenticity: Richard Wallace: Palgrave Macmillan.” Performing Authenticity | Richard Wallace | Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319778471.

The Mocking Mockumentary and the Ethics of Irony. digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=taboo.

Hight, Craig (2014). ‘Mockumentary.’ Contemporary Documentary. Eds Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara. Abingdon/New York: Routledge. 26–41. Bishop, R. (2013).Comedy and cultural critique in American film. Edinburgh University Press. Devlin, M. B., Chambers, L. T., & Callison, C. (2011). Targeting : Using comedy or serious movie trailers. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

Beattie, Keith (2008), Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfiction Film and Video, London; New York: Wallflower Press. Bayer, Gerd (2006), ‘Artifice and Artificiality in Mockumentaries’, in Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (eds.), : Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., pp. 164–178. Chapman, Jane (2009), Issues in Contemporary Documentary, Cambridge: Polity Press. (2002), ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’, Television and New Media, 3(3), pp. 255–269. Vandaele, J. (2002). Humor Mechanisms in Film Comedy: Incongruity and Superiority.Poetics Today,23(2), 221–249 Royal, Derek Parker. “Falsifying the Fragments: Narratological Uses of the Mockumentary in 's Husbands and Wives and Sweet and Lowdown.” Post Script 31.2 (2012): 54–66. Print. Davis, Wendy. “The Reality Anatomist: and the Mockumentary Form.” 2012. Screen Education, no. 67, Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), Sept. 2012, pp. 94– 102, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.897111275936646.

BLUMENBERG, RICHARD M. “Documentary Films and the Problem of ‘Truth.’” Journal of the University Film Association, vol. 29, no. 4, 1977, pp. 19–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20687386. Bradbury, Judd D., and Rosanna E. Guadagno. “Documentary Narrative Visualization: Features and Modes of in Narrative Visualization.” Information Visualization, vol. 19, no. 4, Oct. 2020, pp. 339–352,

Eder, Jens, et al. Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media. De Gruyter, 2016.