Being Shat On From A Great Height: The Short Film

I've checked out every book at the library on documentaries multiple times and despite thinking most of them are filled with theoretical bore and redundant recounts of Nanook of the North, they each have a suspiciously small portion of their pages devoted to the ethics of non-fiction film making which I find very interesting. How and why a subject is portrayed can be a slippery slope. Representation can border on exploitation (as Dave thought of Billy the Kid) or misconstrue "the truth" to fit the director's needs. As every story is taken out of its original context and placed in a newly constructed one, the documentary short Cheeks (2003) about a small New Jersey family defies tactful representation in a semi-exploitive way.

The 20 minute film is structured around a teenaged Jimmy Cheeks who lives with his mentally distraught and eccentric parents Joe and Paula, the former being a "paranoid schizophrenic" and the latter a "manic depressive" who's no stranger to suicide attempts and mental break downs. The moments when Joe is speaking to the camera are ramblings religious incoherencies clearly taken out of context to illustrate his "craziness". Paula came off as heartbreakingly depressed as most shots of her were in a dimly lit room filled with her cigarette smoke as she spoke of her mental instability. The parents were being used to highlight relative normality and sanity of their son who spoke mainly to the camera, half smirking, about his bizarre parents and his way of coping by playing music. There is an overly dramatic and awkward scene of him playing a feverous piano solo. There was too much effort in making this film look and feel tragically poetic; a goal of which they failed. The story was so disjointed and bluntly taken out of context as to leave the viewer with nothing but fragments of supposedly candid and "complex and disturbed family dynamics". The director's statement on the Moxie Films' website begins, "CHEEKS is not out to judge or exploit this unique family situation but to explore the power of a family as a structure and its dynamics under these circumstances" yet how can this film be completely objective in its representation? Is exploring familial structure a completely neutral endeavour? The film makers obviously had to make a judgement on whether the Cheeks were "interesting" enough for film and if they would make a darkly quirky human interest piece that would give a false sense of insight into "complex psyche troubles" of a seemingly average family. With the conflicting video and director's statement I'm not sure what to think about Cheeks other than the directors' poor taste in editing.