Bittersweet Motel
The smudged line between documentary and fiction proved irresistible to blase filmmakers in the 90s, generating numerous “mockumentaries” and finally the superior dramatic entertainment of The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile “reality-based” TV has evolved from home-video melanges to a staged survival drama, with the local dailies fulfilling their own prophecies of the show’s cultural importance by reporting heavily on it as news. In his 1998 cultural critique Life: The Movie, Neal Gabler wondered whether our endless hunger for entertainment was transforming not only our media, our government, and our institutions but also our shared human awareness. “Where we had once measured the movies by life,” he wrote, “we now measured life by how well it satisfied the narrative expectations created by the movies.” That may explain why I found Bittersweet Motel so agreeable, even though I don’t much care for Phish’s fuzzy-headed tunes. These dudes all grew up on the same rock films as I did–Monterey Pop, The Last Waltz, The Kids Are Alright, The Song Remains the Same–and seem eager to supply director Todd Phillips with a verite we’ll all recognize and enjoy.
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But the pivotal project in Phillips’s career was Frat House, an exposé of fraternity hazing. Backed by HBO, he and Gurland persuaded a fraternity at East Carolina University to let them visit from rush week to hell week. But after the filmmakers showed up unexpectedly and found the actives threatening blindfolded pledges with branding, the brothers ran them off campus. Determined to salvage the project, they got permission to go through the pledging process of the Alpha Tau Omega chapter at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. In one scene Phillips crouches in a dog cage while brothers splatter him with hot sauce, tobacco spit, and beer, but his suffering was rewarded: Frat House shared the prize for best documentary at Sundance in 1998.
When a schooled documentarian cites a shticky Bill Murray comedy as a touchstone for realism, the line between life and entertainment is no longer blurred–it’s gone altogether. In some ways Bittersweet Motel, commercial as it may be, fits neatly into Phillips’s worldview. In one of the funnier sequences, he follows Anastasio and company into a gun shop in Spain, where the guitarist strikes a few poses with a Magnum, screaming, “Freeze, motherfucker!” This is one of those “real” moments Phillips savors–but centered in the frame is a guy acting out a scene from a movie. What’s the point of cinema verite if the only verities we know come from cinema?
